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Day 239 - 12:30pm
"fabulous, hideous, and the very pinnacle of tackiness - like Vegas after a serious, no-expense-spared, sheik-over" - Sam Wollaston, The Guardian describing the Burj Al Arab
Dubai has, get this, an indoor ski resort, a water park that defies gravity (you slide up the slides, not down them), floating bridges and this, the Burj Al-Arab hotel, the worlds only 7-star hotel (although more are presently being built in various parts of the world). We're not sure what this place offers in order to achieve such a rating (hyperbole anyone) but we'd expect nothing less than the last word in luxury, especially with the cheapest room costing $1,500 a night (if you have a spare $5,000 floating around you could splash out for the most expensive suite). Built in the mid 1990's at a cost of $650 million on a private island 280m into the sea, its design is in the shape of a dhow sail and it was until recently the tallest hotel in the world (its 321m height has only recently been superseded by another Dubai hotel, the 333m Rose Tower). We decided against staying here as we wanted to stay somewhere more central but we did charter a taxi to take us here for a few pictures. We weren't the only ones pointing our camera skywards; as you can see from this picture it's quite the tourist attraction in a city devoid of recognisable monuments. This is a picture of the hotel reflecting in a nearby traffic mirror. For some reason this turned out to be a better picture of the hotel than any of the unobstructed pictures I captured. Suqeim, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. April 8th 2008.
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