I was delighted to land in Abu Dhabi. There were no immigration or customs forms to fill out. The bags came out quickly and the driver from the Holiday Inn was waiting with a big sign with my name on it. The airport was modern looking, sparkling, and so clean you could eat off the floors, of course , only if so inclined.
The manager of Holiday Inn told me Abu Dhabi’s goal was to become a global city, the place people thought of first for conferences, exhibits, concerts and travel. The city built one of the world’s largest mosques and one of the most elegant hotels in the world to attract the citizens of the global city. It started its own airline, Eiwad, which for three years in a row has won the “Best First Class” award ,for those of you still searching for the best first class accommodations on an airliner. On my Eiwad flight, the purser announced “Our crew today speaks Arabic, English, Russian, Polish, Korean, and Amharic (Ethiopian) . And to back this up, the crew looked like a United Nations contingent.
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Emirates and while it does not have the opulence of Dubai ( another Emirate) it has its own character. You can check here for more information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi
Today I took a quick tour around the city and was able to photograph the main sites:
The Grand Mosque
The Grand Mosque gets its name for a reason: It's the third-largest mosque in the world (the first two are in Saudi Arabia), and it's got enough marble, gold, and silver to make the Taj Mahal jealous. Seven giant Swarovski crystal chandeliers hang from the ceilings (more than one million crystals were used to create them), where silver looks like fine needlework; a giant Iranian carpet, handmade by hundreds of artisans, stretches from one end of the main prayer hall to the next; and marble with colorful stone and gold makes up the walls and floors. The mosque, which opened in 2008, holds three places in the Guinness Book of World Records: the largest chandelier (10m/33 ft. in diameter and 15m/49 ft. high); the largest carpet 7 sq. m (77 sq. ft.); and the largest dome of its kind (the mosque has 82, but the main one is 32 m/105 ft. in diameter and 70m/230 ft. high). The mosque can accommodate almost 41,000 worshipers at once.
Emirates Palace Hotel
From its golden chandeliers to the golden finials on its rooftop domes and the gold-leafed mosaics on the columns in its lobby, the Emirates Palace literally glows with luxury. The hotel, owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, took more than three years and reportedly more than $3 billion to build, which would make it the most expensively constructed hotel in the world.
The hotel's most modest rooms, each with several enormous plasma screen televisions and a personal butler, start at $773 . A Palace Suite, on the other hand, heavily decorated with silks and gold and silver leaf, and including a living room, dining room and three bedrooms, can run as much as $11,200, a night.
The Marina Mall: the shopping mall to go to see and to be seen and also to shop. The tower attached to the mall has an entrance fee but you can have it returned by showing a receipt from the restaurant or tea room on the top of the tower. I hear tell it is much much cheaper to just pay the entrance fee.
Okay . See if you can read Arabic and identify the name of this local restaurant where I had lunch today.
The Cornish
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