Close up with a camel

One of the best malls we went to see was the Deira City Centre. It was a 15 minute taxi ride from the Dhow Palace Hotel. It has 300 outlets, which isn't that big for Dubai, but it's very well laid out and very popular with both locals and ex-pats. Did you know that ex-pats make up 80% of the population? We ate dinner on the second night at the food court. There were lots of sales in all the stores for Ramadan, and food outlets were mostly closed during the day, but there were some open for tourists behind black curtains, with a discreet sign saying 'Entrance'. The stores opened at 10am, and some of them stayed open until 1am!

This was a display on one of the three floors. The moving camel was very realistic - but it's as close as I wanted to get to a real one. I took a jacket along to all the malls, for the air conditioning - which was great. Taxis, hotels and shops are all air conditioned, which is great as it's a hot place. A cool change came through as we were leaving.