Ah, the Burj Khalifa. It stands out so much in Dubai due to its sheer height, especially in contrast with the neighbouring buildings. I admit I underestimated the number of visitors somewhat, as I was surprised when the 7PM tickets were sold out by the time my session had started at 5PM, but I’m very glad that I bought the tickets in the morning to secure a trip to the top.
This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!
In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!
A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.
It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.
I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!
In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:
