Abu Dhabi

Happy belated birthday to Jonna!  We celebrated in your honor all week long.  We hope you had a fun filled birthday.

Last Tuesday, Feb 12^th was a holiday in Qatar.  It was Sport’s Day; a day to promote being active (and decrease obesity).  I support any holiday where we get the day off of work.  We celebrated by sleeping in and going to the beach.  In order to at least say we did something active, we played volleyball, Frisbee, and nerf football (American football, the kind we are too often reminder by the Europeans that you actually play with your hands not your feet).

This past weekend we had a grand time in Abu Dhabi.  Abu Dhabi is located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and is only a 35 minute plane ride away.  The UAE is a country made up of seven emirates each governed by a different emir.  Think of it as seven different states each having a different governor.  Abu Dhabi and Dubai (where we traveled to in December) are two of the seven emirates.  The two towns are only 80 miles away from Dubai.

(Look who learned to use a photo editor.  This is a real blog now!)  We really enjoyed our time in Abu Dhabi.  We were uber tourists and went on the Big Bus Tour.  It was a great overview of what Abu Dhabi has to offer.

The Emirates Palace Hotel is a seven star hotel and cost about $3 Billion to build.

 

 

 

Chris, these are the building from the article you sent Jonathon. 

We toured the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque main prayer room.  This Grand Mosque is the largest mosque outside of Saudi Arabia.  It can hold 40,000 people.  There is a time block in the morning between prayer times when non-Muslims are able to visit.  We had to remove our shoes and I wore Harry Potter’s invisible cloak.    

 

 

 

 

 

Kelsy Potter

Now that we feel settled, we have the travel bug.  We are looking forward to many grand adventures over the next few years.  We are planning our first large trip to Malaysia in April.