Skiing in the Sizzling Middle East

Dubai skyline

(Zara) After a long, red eye flight from Australia to Abu Dhabi, I woke up in a new hotel room in the Middle East. I opened my curtains for the first time to see where I was – Dubai. The windows were sandblasted and where the skyscrapers ended, a desolate, sandy desert began. It seemed as though the city was placed in a sandbox with no limits. I could see the external view of an unusually tall and wide sloping building. with a person hanging off the side of this shiny metal box cleaning the exterior. Dad told us it was an indoor ski slope, but I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it.

Escaping the 110-degree heat wasn’t very difficult. The Mall of the Emirates, attached to our hotel, has every American store and restaurant imaginable. When you’re not at Shake Shack, Coldstone, or The Cheesecake Factory why not go skiing? The first thing you see when you walk in the mall is a ski slope with a chairlift, real snow and penguins. We quickly and efficiently rented gloves, socks, snow pants, jackets, boots, skis, and helmets to get ready for the 30-degree enclosure. Ski Dubai has two different slopes, one more difficult than the other and a chairlift going through the middle. On the other side is the kid’s playground with snow tubes, penguin encounters, and the luge.

Ski Dubai

When I entered the room an icy blast hit me and it smelled like winter. After we jumped into our skis we headed up on the chairlift, got off at the halfway point to do a test run since we hadn’t skied in a year and took our first run down. From then on we got off at the top, which isn’t really that far up, and raced down the slope more than ten times. Accidentally on our second run we went to the wrong side and went down the “experts only” trail, which wasn’t very hard. There were also a few jumps that we went on and of course Halle still did the jumps even though she hurt her ankle recently in the Great Barrier Reef.

Jolie was the fastest out of everyone and always the first down. If Halle, Maya, dad, and I were on the chairlift together we would pass over Jolie flying down the slope and mom miles behind her. Otherwise dad would think that he saw Jolie below us and yell her name VERY loudly when it really wasn’t her. We kept telling dad that she had a purple helmet and the kid below had a yellow one on so he would claim that he had night blindness and couldn’t see very well. That made us rather concerned considering that the room was very well lit but we all found that hilarious. After our skiing adventures we completed the day with a run down the icy luge that was very bumpy and seemed very dangerous for little kids. My favorite part was the Avalanche Café at the top of the slope where we could get hot chocolates with whipped cream, M&Ms, and marshmallows. Skiing in Dubai was quite an interesting experience and I never would have expected for my fingers to almost freeze off when the weather outside was unbearably hot.

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa