Roses in Dubai

Matthew was only able to stay for one day here in Abu Dhabi, as they were only stopping in coming from a two week holiday in Europe, and he now had to go back to work.
As it turns out, our kids had no school on Wednesday due to Student Conferences, so Misuzu and I packed all the children in the car and went to Dubai Mall.

We started out with lunch at the Rainforest Café, a restaurant just next to the Dubai Aquarium. It was very well done with very real looking animals all around the restaurant.

Ashley wasn't too happy when the animals started to move and make sounds, and when the lightning show was on - she pretended to sleep!
But all in all food was good and it was quite a cool experience!

After lunch it was time for the highlight of the day - KidZania! Normally I leave the kids to their own in there, but since the Rose kids were not big enough, us adults had to come along too..! Yay...

We sorted out some KidZania passports for Linnea and Lucas, as they are rather frequent visitors:

Luckily there wasn't many people at all, so no big queues. The kids tried a lot of different things, starting with being pilots at Emirates:

Then police officers - "One, two - Yes Sir!!!" (Apparently this was Luca's favourite part!)

They went to Waitrose, working as cashiers, and pretending to be customers.

They all made themselves a drink at the bottle plant:

 
It was actually quite fun to be with the kids inside KidZania for a change, to see what they actually get up to in there. My kids have their favourite stations, but we also managed to convince them to try new things. Still we didn't do it all, by far - there is just so much to try!
Lucas did some race driving:

They mixed up some perfume at the perfume factory, or as Luca called it "Potion!".

They got to make yummy cookies in the cookie factory:

They were also firemen, got to both dress the part, go on the slide when the alarm went and ride the fire truck all around KidZania!

They learned about cocoa, sugar canes and the chocolate making process at the Kinder Chocolate factory:

Mmmmmmmmmmm!

We managed to spend quite a few hours at KidZania, so we had to go for dinner as well before we hit the road to go back to Abu Dhabi again. We decided to go to one of the restaurants at the Burj Khalifa side of the mall, so we could see the dancing fountains.

It was a long day in Dubai, and we came home rather late but with five very tired and happy children!