Dubai or not Dubai, that is (Lilly's) question

(Now updated with photos and a pun in the title, which was previously boring)

Right, enough of my musings about Dubai - which are to remind myself of first impressions as much as anything. What did we actually get up to?

Dubai Mall is, if not the world's biggest, as close as I care to get, but has a few good places to eat, an ice rink, the afore-mentioned cinema and best of all an aquarium - starting with one huge tank, rammed with sealife, and featuring the world's biggest (the Dubai theme) single plate of aquarium glass.

And lots of smaller tanks with some good stuff. A definite Top 5 Aquaria contender (but behind Lisbon at least). Atlantis, out on the Palm, has a smaller but much denser aquarium, and is probably too small for its main attraction, a whale shark that "swam in" while they were building it.
Back to Dubai Mall (as we seemed to do every day) for an evening fountain display to rival the Bellagio, and mad rides and games at Sega World. You'll have to ask Lilly how much she enjoyed/was terrified by the spinning game she went on.

We also spent a few hours at Wild Wadi waterpark, which was surprisingly fun - you sit in your rubber ring while water propels you up, down and around, and you try to simultaneously protect your bum, head and feet from getting bruised. More fun than it sounds, and there's also one giant slide sans rubber ring where at one point you seem to take off. "Just keep your arms and legs crossed and your chin tucked in," they say. This is not the easiest thing to concentrate on when you're wondering how long you'll be airborne and how much it will hurt when you land.
Also: a couple of good lunches in nice resort hotel settings (think plenty of clear blue pools); pre-dinner drinks in a 63rd-storey bar; a desert safari, charging up and down dunes in time to watch the sun set (slightly sabotaged by clouds) and traditional desert meal and desert dessert; the 38th National Day parade, which was ill-attended but quite funny(unintentionally); an outlet mall for Lilly to balance her desire to shop against her need to carry everything she bought for the next 6 months; and a bar with the worst business model ever (dragged there by Lilly because Paris Hilton was once spotted there) - free entry, and it's Ladies' Night so 3 free drink vouchers for Lilly and Jag, which they somehow converted to a bottle of champagne for them and a drink for me that was never charged for. We left having paid for one drink between us. I like to think of this as a little microcosm of Dubai. Well, this and the "This is Dubai" float in the National Day parade:

Note the skier on top of the building that houses the indoor ski slope in the Mall of Emirates!