I’ve been putting in some work on my practice mock-up website, using material from the winter break trip to Dubai. This reminded me that the trip blog still needed a little tweaking here and there – fixing links and photo alignment, covering any gaps in the travel. I’ll be transplanting a few of the entries like this one over here and adding to them, because this work has me remembering the trip in a way I haven’t had time to do since the semester started, and boy, did we see some incredible things – some, like Dubai Mall‘s aquarium, have even made the news since we were there! In this map view, the Burj Khalifa building site is still under construction right next door…

How does an aquarium work in a mall, you may ask? Think of it this way – what if you had to walk through this :

to get to this?

OK, at Dubai Mall it’s more like walk past, but it’s still the first mall that I’ve ever been to that had actual sharks in it. Along with all the stores and a little thing called the Burj Khalifah, there’s a three story aquarium featuring everything from otters to crabs to the people who go diving in the largest tank. An aquarium ticket lets you walk through the main tank’s tunnel and see the rest of the store from inside.