After a quick stop in Israel, I continued on to Abu Dhabi to meet up with my friend Munaf for one of the highlights of the entire trip, the World Cup! As mentioned previously, a group of my friends had originally planned on meeting up with me in Qatar for the World Cup but we messed up on signing up for the ticket lottery on time and couldn’t find tickets. As it got closer, with no good leads on tickets, people dropped out. Except for Munaf, he had faith. Well not really, we had all pretty much given up and we had planned on using that time to check out some other countries in the Middle East instead. Then, at my brother’s wedding one of the groomsmen informed me that his good friend ran tickets for US Soccer and put me in touch with him. He ended up hooking us up with incredible seats to each US game at face value, literally like 3 weeks before it started. It’s been a weird ongoing theme of this trip. Don’t over plan and things tend to just work out, sometimes even better than you could have imagined!
Anyway, we started this trip in Abu Dhabi. We spent our first day there checking out the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which was a really cool museum housing all sorts of artwork ranging from thousands of years old to modern. One of the coolest parts was the actual building housing the museum. The architecture was a work of art in itself. It’s built out over the water with canals flowing underneath it that you can kayak through and an amazing courtyard.
Next we went to the The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. Wow, this place was absolutely mind blowing. It was enormous and we learned a lot of interesting facts about the mosque and all the symbolism behind many of it’s characteristics on the tour we took. The floor of the courtyard in the middle of the mosque is the largest marble mosaic on Earth. The carpet inside the prayer room (which accomodates over 40,000 worshippers) is also the largest carpet on the planet. Additionally, the main room housed 3 massive chandeliers, the largest of which is one of the largest on Earth and weighs in at a cool 12 tons! The also built the mosque with raw materials from all over the world as a symbol of world unity. Something else that was interesting is that the UAE’s former President, Sheikh Zayed, is entombed on the grounds and there is someone stationed there 24/7/365 reciting verses from the Quran. They go through the whole thing roughly every 36 hours and then start over at the beginning.
Another fun little adventure we went on was kayaking through the mangrove forest surrounding the city. It was a bit surreal being out in nature on a boat with the towering skyline in the distance. Munaf also got his paddle caught on one of the mangrove trees and capsized his kayak, which was hilarious. I had just been giving him a hard time about not wanting to bring his phone in the boat. Turns out he was right to leave it on shore 😂. That night we celebrated Thanksgiving in Abu Dhabi, which was a fun new experience. We found out that some of the local hotels were hosting Thanksgiving dinners and so we stuffed our faces at an amazing Thanksgiving buffet. In addition to traditional Thanksgiving foods, they also had Indian and Middle Eastern fare. I’ve decided that biryani should always be part of Thanksgiving dinner going forward, it goes perfectly with the other classic dishes. The following day we departed for Doha and the World Cup. I’m going to hold off talking more about that for the next blog, as I’ve got a lot of stories to share.
After the World Cup we headed back to UAE for Munaf to catch his flight back home and for me to decide where the hell I was going next lol. Our next stop was Dubai, another gorgeous city with some incredible architecture. We had a very long travel day to get there, heading directly to the airport after the US-Iran game, catching a 4 am flight to Kuwait City, had a long layover and finally made it to Dubai around 4 pm the following day. Needless to say, we didn’t do much that day. The next day however, we played golf at The Address Montgomerie golf club, which was amazing. The course was in excellent shape and there were multiple holes with amazing backdrops of the Dubai skyline. We also played with 2 English guys, Andy and Glenn, who were former rugby players on the English national team and they were a whole lot of fun. After our round, they invited us to join them for a beer, which turned into many beers and us eating dinner and hanging out late into the evening with them. They were actually in town for the Dubai Rugby 7s tournament the following day and invited me to come along (Munaf had to catch his flight home). I had no other plans and had never been to a rugby tournament, so of course I was in. The atmosphere at the tournament was awesome, it was basically just a big party with people from all over the world. Rugby 7s is also a great game, it is a very short game and very fast paced. It’s called rugby 7s because there are only 7 players and each half only lasts 7 minutes. Andy and Glenn also taught me a lot about the rules of rugby and strategy, which I didn’t really know anything about. All in all it was a great day and awesome new experience. And the following day it was time to pack up the old suitcase and move along to the next destination, Jordan!
