Wild Wadi Water Park

Hello! For those of you still reading this, I’m almost caught up to present day.  Last Tuesday (the 7^th) was Islamic New Year.  Two days after class, we had a day off.  Already more holiday time than we’d get back in the US.

Oh, I forgot to mention classes earlier.  I’m taking an engineering class, cultural class, and two master’s level classes.  The RIT Dubai campus just started two years ago; currently the age groups are divided into undergraduate freshman, and working-class graduate students.  Because the grad students all have full-time jobs, master’s level classes don’t start until 6 at night.  This is somewhat unfortunate because I end up spending my Mondays and Wednesdays on campus from 9am to 8:00pm.  On the plus side, I only have one class Sunday and Tuesday, from 6-8pm.  (For those of you not paying attention, I mentioned early that the work week goes from Sunday to Thursday).  That means I essentially have a 4 day weekend.

Back to New Year.  We spent the entire day at Wild Wadi water park.  The water park is located right in front of the Burj al Arab, a 7 star hotel shaped like a sail.  I could list out all of the amazing features (such as the fact that it is built on a man-made island and has an aquarium inside), but instead I will just give you the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Al_Arab

We arrived at the water park early, and as the day progressed I kept waiting for mobs of people to swarm to the park because of the nice weather.  Not many people showed up.  As it turns out, 80 degree weather is too cold for the native people to go to a water park.  Which was fine with me because it meant there were no lines.  I actually got sunburn, and more tan than I did after all summer in Rochester.  Even if there were lines, I wouldn’t have minded the wait thanks to the ingenious park designers.  Instead of having long queue lines and flights of stairs to climb up, the queue line was actually a ride of its own.  Riders sit on a tube, and a series of water jets propels them up to the top of the ride.  It is essentially a water slide in reverse, and probably more fun than the ride down.  My last ride up was memorable: I was about halfway up the ride when I reached a water jet and out of nowhere my tube flipped over me.  I proceeded to ride the next 15 feet up butt first with water blasting in my face.  The ride attendants had to shut down the ride and everyone on it (including myself) had to walk up until the next staging point (the ride was split into 3 stages).  Good going Mike.  Other interesting attributes were cleanliness of the park as well as the friendliness of the staff.  Every staff person greeted me as I walked by and as soon as a speck of trash touched the ground, the cleaning crew was there waiting for it.  A last note about the waterpark, there was an area of the park that offered fish pedicures.  Just pay 45 dirhams and you can have your feet slowly consumed by tiny flesh eating fish.  But seriously, the fish are sucker fish and swarms of them gather around your feet to eat the dead skin.  Steve, Allie, and Maddie tried it, they said it was a weird but overall awesome experience.