Day 5, December 27: Miracles, Butterflies, and Towers

This day was filled with visits to essentially four locations: (1) the Dubai Miracle Garden, (2) the Dubai Butterfly Garden, (3) the Museum of the Future, and (4) the Dubai Mall and Burj Khalifa.

The Dubai Miracle Garden is a wonder indeed. It is an attraction of flowers, plants, and grasses arranged in a variety of attractive garden sculptures. Most of the flowers were of the same variety -- Morning Glories. Still, in their array of colors, shapes and arrangements, they did not fail to delight the eye. Interestingly enough, although they were decidedly real, they did not emit a strong floral aroma, nor did they attract many insects of the flying variety: bees, butterflies, wasps, etc. Insects you would definitely see visiting a large collection of flowers back in Atlanta. It was not clear to us whether the flowers were cultivated to have a low level of aroma or whether there just were/are not a lot of insects in Dubai, period. (Patrise made a point of saying at the end of our cruise two days ago, that she had observed we encountered almost no insects: no gnats, no flies, no mosquitoes. Odd and surreal almost to the point of disconcerting.)

At any rate, here are some photos of the Dubai Miracle Garden excursion this morning.

We felt fortunate to get an early start in the Miracle Garden, outdoors, before the heat of the day came upon us and before the hordes of tourists descended upon us. Upon leaving the Miracle Garden, we took a short bus ride to the Dubai Butterfly Garden. The Butterfly Garden is a fully enclosed attraction and for some reason, it receives noticeably fewer visitors. So this was also a very pleasant visit for us.

There are butterflies of several species, as you would imagine. However, the dominant species was this one, Morpho peleides. Its wings appear brownish with distinctive eyes in the middle of their wings. But when they flap those wings open, they emit a blue, almost iridescent blue, on the top surface of their wings.

Here then are photos of morpho peliedes and some of its two-winged cousins.

The Butterfly Garden visit was brief, about 45 minutes from exiting our bus to being back on the bus. The same can also be said of our next stop, a very brief visit to the Museum of the Future. The reasons for the brevity were (a) it was never one of our planned sites to visit; you have to make reservations one to two months in advance; and (2), we were stopping only to fit in a picture opportunity. Patrise did not even get off of the bus for this one. So here are a few pictures Doug took during this brief stop.

After dropping our fellow travelers off at the hotel, the tour bus and our guide carried me and Patrise to the Dubai Mall. The Dubai Mall is the largest mall in the middle east. It is like Phipps Plaza only on steroids. It appears larger than the Mall of America and it has everybody whose anybody's stores. The Mall is where the entrance to the Burj Khalifa (aka, BK) is situated. Marshall (guide) had been unable to get tickets for the Burj visit earlier, but he was working the phones today in hopes of doing so. While he worked, we had a lovely quiet meal at a restaurant in the center of the mall. We could have stood in a line for 2-3 hours to get tickets, then another 2-3 hours to make it through a visit of the building. However, Marshall wanted to get us premiere tickets that gave priority access to the entire Burj Khalifa experience: priority placement in the lines to take the elevators up; in our case, access to the 148th floor, the top floor visitors can experience; complimentary drinks and snacks on the 148th floor; then priority access to the elevators to descend to the 124th floor and then back to the ground level. Even though we didn't have to wait three hours for the premiere ticket time, I was glad we had the priority experience. I honestly would not have had the patience to go through the experience otherwise.

Patrise felt really bad about our priority access experience, almost as though she wanted to apologize for not waiting as long. Normally, I would have identified with the bourgeoisie, but not today, not for this experience. We both noted that going through and to the top floor of the Burj Khalifa -- the tallest building in the world -- was very similar to our February 2024 experience of going through and to the top of Taipei 101, in Taiwan, which was the tallest building until the BK was constructed. So now, a few Burj photos to round out the day:

By the way, a little fun fact, the word "burj" (pronounced "burrzsh") is an Arabic word meaning "tower".

After we left the tower, we traveled back to the hotel and had food delivered to the room from our favorite Lebanese restaurant. I worked on the blog and crashed at 9 p.m.

Tomorrow Kite Beach and a desert safari!