Dubai!!

After a very long plane ride I made it to Dubai!!! So far the trip has been amazing & I have no idea where to start so I'll just start from the beginning. 
I got in to New York and met up with some other trip members for dinner. It was nice getting to know a few people in advance even if it was only for a few hours. We had to rise and shine pretty early and meeting the rest of the group at the airport was a little overwhelming. But everyone seems super friendly and I think we have a good bunch of people. We took Air Emirates to Dubai which I highly recommend. I was really impressed w/ the service we got & even the plane meals weren't too bad. Everyone tried to get some sleep because we had a million things planned for Dubai but the movie selection was tempting so i don't know how much sleep everyone got. We arrived around 8ish, checked in to our rooms, freshened up a little and a group of us met in the lobby to go to the gold souks. We shopped around there for a little bit but everything was pretty expensive so I didn't buy anything. We could have stayed there all day looking at stuff but we had booked tickets for the observation deck at the Burj Khalifa. The Khalifa is the worlds tallest building. I took some pics of the buildings below & they look like a model you would do in architecture class.
After that we jumped back in our cab to head back to the hotel to be picked  up for our desert safari. our cab driver had stayed with us the whole day and kept taking us the long way so we could see evertyhing.  We saw the Sheiks palace and the atlantis hotel. Everything is so clean & they have great buildings to check out. 
We got back to our hotel just in time for the 4x4 drivers to pick us up. About 12 of us ended up going so we had to take 2 cars. It was so fun!! We picked the best driver too. We started toward our destination & had to make one quick stop along the way so the driver could let some of the air out of the tires for better traction on the sand. It was insane how we would literally slide straight down the dune sideways. That was our favorite part. We were out there for about 45 minutes and he let us stop a couple of times to take pictures. One girl in the other car got sick but she was a trooper & got back in! Once the dune bashing was done we headed to e camp where they had a huge BBQ for us along w/ drinks. There were so many cool things to do at the camp and I knew we wouldn't get to all of it so we went straight to the camel rides. So funny! Some of the girls got henna tattoos but since I had already done one before I passed on it. They had a tent where you could try on the traditional dress but it was to hot that we all passed on that too. By the way I don't think i mentioned that the temperature in the desert was a balmy  116 degrees. Once we were all settled down for dinner a whirling dervish performed. I had never seen done and it was so cool. The guy didn't stop spinning once! The food they had for us was really good and there were a lot of choices. After dinner a belly dancer performed and then we al Ed it a night. At that point we had been awake for about 30 hours so needless to say we were all tired. Oh one funny thing that happened was that our 4x4 driver loved one of the girls in our car & he basically proposed to her by the end of the night. We all had a very good laugh about that!
So that was day 1 of the trip. Not sure when I'll get to post this but I wanted to write it out so that I don't forget anything! And if there are typos in this don't think i have bad grammar, I'm typing it on my ipad which isn't the easiest thing to do!