Could You Smell the Burning Plastic?

Hi, it's your favourite (hopefully) Shopaholic abroad.

I'm still in Dubai and made it to the Dubai Mall last night. It's 20 km from my hotel, but thankfully taxis are very cheap here so you can concentrate your budget on the actual shopping. By the time I arrived back at the hotel, my arms were literally sore from carrying around my bags and my legs were tired from having walked kilometres (!) in there. Here's the bags:

 ...and here's the booty. Stuff from Bath & Body Works (I'd been really excited to set foot into that store after hearing all the US Youtubers I'm subscribed to rave about it, but to be honest the packaging looks very cheap and the smell beats any Lush store. Not in a good way), a striped shirt from Banana Republic that I'm already wearing today, bright red corduroy trousers from Gap, a denim skirt with belt and a really nice lime green top from John by John Rocha (Dublin memories!) from Debenhams and nailpolishes (3 for 2, Barry M) from Boots.

This is where the taxis drop you off (and it's not that easy to find the pick-up spots which are nowhere near)

The sheer size of that mall is hard to describe, but the fact that there are about 1200 shops might give you an idea. Naive me used to think that our Designer Outlet in Parndorf had gotten huge, but it is a little village corner shop in comparison. You can spend days (yes, plural) in there and still not have discovered everything. The floors are so shiny and spotless you could eat off them and the AC is actually a pleasant temperatures that doesn't require 10 extra layers.

Just to make it a bit more OTT still, they've added a huge skating rink as well. Just because, you know, you want to go skating in a desert state, obviously:

There's also Dubai Aquarium which is located at Dubai Mall and shoppers get a free sneak peek "from the other side". Again, Vienna's Haus des Meeres is a little goldfish bowl in comparison:

There are many interesting features to discover, such as this "curtain" of butterfly stencils:

If it weren't for the many traditionally clad shoppers and the fact that everything is written both in English and Arabic, this mall could be in any country. Then again, not really: