I love traveling. Every summer, I try to make sure that I leave the country and have some exciting adventures in the country as well. Many of my adventures have been with students, showing them the world; it’s definitely one of the passions of my life. And a lot of those travels have involved my dear friend, Ray. I met Ray about five years ago when we were paired up to lead students together. We’re from the same part of Ohio and we instantly clicked and got along. More than just getting along, we basically discovered that he is the male counterpart to me. We’ve had 4 trips with students together, all around the world. We’ve even taken a solo adventure to Dominican Republic when we decided that we wanted to see what it would be like to travel sans students on a beach “chill” vacation – we discovered chill wasn’t really our thing. So when he announced last year that he was going to move to Abu Dhabi to teach, I was thrilled for him but sad that I was going to be losing my hometown friend for a few years. But it made perfect sense that this summer when there was no traveling with students, my vacation brought me to Abu Dhabi and Ray. We’ve been talking about it all year – it was decided that I would travel to visit Abu Dhabi and Ray for a week, and then Ray and I would go to eastern Europe to visit places that he and I had never seen. I first heard of Abu Dhabi about 10 years ago when my friend Lexi, who lives in England, would come here during the summer months to visit her dad. I’d never heard of Abu Dhabi before that, so when I looked it up on the map, I realized how far away it was and, through research, found out how expensive it was to travel by plane. My brother had also visited here while he was on a ship in the Navy. I knew that it was not going to be an inexpensive trip so I did a lot of research to find my plane tickets and was able to get some that weren’t so bad by booking several one-way tickets. I ended up flying out of Chicago to Abu Dhabi. My flight left Chicago at 4 PM and I arrived in London at 6 AM their time (about an 8.5hr flight). There, I had a four-hour layover before flying to Bahrain. This was six hours and, once I arrived in Bahrain, I had an hour and a half layover before my next hour long flight to Abu Dhabi. In total, my flight and travel took about 24 hours. When I arrived and went through customs to receive my visa, Ray was waiting for me at the airport where he immediately took me on an evening car trip around Abu Dhabi so I could see my first sites here.
The next day Ray took me to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque – Abu Dhabi. It is the third largest mosque in the world.
Construction was started in 1996 and is named after the founder and first president of the United Arab Emirates. It took 12 years to build, has over 1000 columns and 82 domes. The main dome is the largest in the world and, inside the mosque, 41,000 worshipers can gather.
The mosque also hosts the largest silk carpets and the largest chandelier in the world.
While this sounds like it’s very opulent inside of the mosque, it’s actually rather understated and classic looking. We took a tour which allowed us to be in parts of the mosque where other people weren’t. Before we went into the mosque I did have to put an abaya in accordance to Islamic rules; we also had to remove our shoes before entering the mosque. However, this was actually quite nice because it was a very hot day and the marble felt great on my feet.
The time of year that I am visiting is actually Ramadan which means that from sunup to sundown you are not allowed to eat or drink in public. This includes water. So around 7:15 in the evening, thousands of worshipers will head to this mosque to have their final prayer before breaking their fast. On the carpet, you can see the lines that indicate where people are supposed to pray ; you can also see waters stationed on the floors all around for these people after their final prayer of the day.
There also clocks all over the inside of the mosque which indicate the five different times of prayer that people have every day. The times change every day according to the sun.
It was truly a beautiful place to visit and a wonderful start to my trip in Abu Dhabi.
After we left the mosque we headed back toward Ray’s apartment where we went to a mall to have lunch. Since it’s Ramadan and as I mentioned it’s illegal to eat or drink in public, all the malls have food courts that are curtained off so that Westerners may go eat and drink out of sight.
There are so many malls in Abu Dhabi which boast beautiful inside courtyards and loads of expensive boutiques, but really they just remind you of being back home in the US because so many of the stores are the exact same as what we have. Ray had told me before I came during Ramadan that things definitely slow down and are less busy. A lot of Westerners go home or don’t travel here and, throughout the day, Muslims often sleep and don’t come out until after they break fast at 7:15PM. This means that the hours for the malls and stores actually change so that they are open until later in the evening – often until 2 AM. The rest of my first day was pretty chill and I met lots of Ray’s teacher friends. We watched the Euro Cup on TV and, later, we went out to a wine bar to enjoy a nice evening together. It was a great first day full of driving around town and checking out the sites from the comfort of an air-conditioned car : )
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