Well… we woke up in a New Year, but still not in the best of moods from yesterday. We really didn’t know what to do with our day… We didn’t feel like returning to the same places just to see huge lines again, which we were definitely not willing to wait in. What to do, what to do. Well, luckily for us we have our devoted readers! A reader actually rescued our day by suggesting something to do! And now we get to tell you about an awesome day! Now that we have built up all of your expectations… here we go.

So we were suggested to go to Sharjah, which is the Emirate to the East of Dubai. We immediately said “no chance” because we looked online and it took 1.5 hours just to get there. No thank you. Three hours round trip just to see the one suggestion? No way, but what else could we do…? Well, from the first paragraph you can pretty much surmise that we ended up going anyway. Why? Cause we found out that we could take a little ferry that only took 35 minutes, and it left from our own neighbourhood! Perfect. Off we go!

We left walking, which gives us the opportunity to give you another look at the “normal” Dubai, hehe.

The first was a bit weird for us. Is this tower historical? Was it always only a tower, or, like we think, it was part of a wall that was then torn down? You can kind of see where the wall would have been… strange. The other pictures are of a mosque in the area, and then the Grand Souq – Bur Dubai. But we don’t have time to explore that now, the boat leaves soon! We continue walking as the marina is just around the corner. And guess what. The boat has not been running since COVID-19 started… Sweet. What to do, what to do. We can’t really leave you in suspense for this post because of the first paragraph… So we will just cut to it. We went to the bus station which is just around the corner and asked about the bus to Sharjah. Easy enough, very cheap 10 AED (about $3.50), and the attendant told us that the bus leaves every 30 minutes and it takes about 30 minutes to get there from our bus station (Al Ghubaiba). WAY better than the 1.5 hours the internet had told us. So we get the ticket and wait for a few minutes before the bus arrives.

The double decker bus is ours. Everything is written in both Arabic and English, so it’s really easy, and the attendants are all helpful. We wait a few minutes for the driver to stretch his legs, and then we’re allowed on. We got to sit at the front of the second floor, so we saw the entire trip at the very front. 40 minutes. Not a bad ride at all. We filmed it all if anyone is interested in “slow TV”.

And as we’re coming into Sharjah we were treated to this, the King Faisal Mosque. Massive. If we have time we will try to visit it.

But, first thing is first. We will go visit what brought us here in the first place. So we leave the bus station behind and head into Sharjah. I guess we could have just called this post “Sharjah – Day 1” since we have left Dubai and entered our second Emirate.

And look at this! It seems like we came to the right place. This is what greeted us in Sharjah, the Heart of Sharjah as it is called. We’re already happy to have come here, and we haven’t even done anything!

And here we are, what brought us all the way to Sharjah, the Sharjah Art Museum.

It was a nice little Art Museum that was well worth the visit. It had all kinds of works of art from historic, to contemporary, to a section called Art of Resistance, and another called Following the “Beaux-Arts” Tradition. Here we will leave you with only a small handful of representative works, and, as we always say, we will throw more pictures up in due time through our Instagram page.

The most impactful of all of the paintings for us was this one by Bashir Sinwar from Palestine titled Sabra and Shatila. If we remember correctly, it is the only painting in the entire museum that has a seat for you to sit down and take the whole painting in and really think about what you are seeing. As you can clearly see, there is a lot of pain in the painting. We invite you, if you don’t already know, to do a quick internet search on what Sabra and Shatila is, where it happened, and how many people were killed in the massacre.

And with that, we were done! Thanks again for the suggestion, it was great. And we were given a map of the city outlining all of the other museums in Sharjah. It seems like they are the cultural centre of the Emirates, at least that’s what they call themselves, hehe. So to test this out, we head to the next museum, the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. You can already see from this building that it is huge. But, we could have said the same thing about the Sharjah Art Museum, but it didn’t turn out to be that big once inside.

Well, entering we see that it is indeed huge. Let’s start!

The museum is divided into galleries to see different aspects of Islamic civilization. It is sorted both chronologically, but also has wings dedicated to highlights of Islamic civilization. It was huge, so we will do our best to summarize here with a few highlights. Definitely worth the visit (along with the Sharjah Museum of Art) if you ever find yourself in Sharjah or Dubai.

The first part was strictly religious, teaching the visitor about Islam as a whole with highlights about Mecca/Makkah and the Qur’an. These pictures of Makkah were especially interesting as we will not be allowed to enter Makkah and it is a glimpse into the past.

Then it was onto a section detailing accomplishments of Islamic scholars and inventors. This section had a lot of information (really every section of the museum had a lot of information). Here there were works by astronomers, doctors, chemists, mathematicians, inventors, and more. Way too much to properly show here, but, as always, here are some highlights. Many of the inventions were replicated here and could be made to work by pushing a button. An interesting way of showing off this type of information.

Then it was upstairs where the galleries were ordered chronologically to allow the visitor to see the progression of both Islam and the country/region as a whole. This was four whole galleries. You can imagine how much information there actually was. Too much for myself to properly convey here without turning this into a whole book chapter. Again, just a few highlights.

And finally, the final exhibit was titled Sacred Words, Timeless Calligraphy. It was an exhibit of amazing calligraphy from the Qur’an Collection of Hamid Jafar. We have noticed that in this region of the Middle East (we can’t speak for the entirety of the Middle East) it is very important to display beautiful works of the Qur’an. Most museums we have been to have at least a section about the Qur’an where they show various examples of the Holy Book.

And with that, we were done the museum. Let me tell you, we were pretty tired at this point. We didn’t get back to the hotel until very, very late, and we didn’t sleep that late as we wanted to get out and get going. But, can we really just give up now and go back to the hotel? We’re so far from home, who knows if we will ever be able to come back to Sharjah. With that mentality, we walked around Sharjah a little until we came to the…

Sharjah Fort. In we go. The fort was not very big, but that’s fine by us. It was still jam packed with information about the start of Sharjah. This was the oldest building in Sharjah, and, at one point it had even started to get demolished when the ruler of Sharjah had to rush home from his studies in Egypt to ensure the survival of this historic fort. Maybe this explains the destroyed walls beside the towers in Dubai? The continuous struggle between the preservation of “living” history and modern development.

Again, some quick highlights. We feel like we’re not doing these places justice with all they had to show, but realistically each of these museums could easily have a post to themselves. Just way too much information.

One of the most interesting “non-historical” things we saw were these bags of dates on the floor. This is Al Medbasa, where they would make dibs (date molasses). The weight of the dates themselves would allow for the compression of the dates further below, squeezing out the molasses. Then the floors were designed in such a way to allow for the molasses to move down away from the bags and into a jar for collection. This was very important for desert people as it was necessary for energy and many other things, especially in times where food was maybe not so abundant. Super interesting and ingenious.

Well… as you can see it has become pretty dark while we were in there.

But, we made a little “mistake”. In quotation marks because it’s not actually a mistake, but could be seen as one. We bought a more expensive ticket to the fort to be able to go to other museums with the same ticket in the old historic part of the city. But, we say mistake because it is late and we are tired. And on top of that we will leave Dubai tomorrow, so we won’t be able to use the ticket any other time (the ticket is good for a few days). So, we rush to the next museum.

Next up? The Sharjah Heritage Museum. Another nice and small museum. It was great. As the name would imply, it showed the history of Sharjah and its inhabitants, along with all of the Emirates. It showed traditions, clothing, music, food, and their history. Again, we ask how we are supposed to show all of that to you quickly here. We hope that you can read some of the explanations in these pictures as that was the most interesting part of the museum, learning. And by that you can also tell why it is so late. My partner tries to read almost everything he sees at a museum. There weren’t others in this museum… but in others we pretty much get lapped as he patiently reads almost all of the signs. Or maybe he is just a slow reader… could be that as well, hehe.

And finally, our last museum (because they closed as soon as we left this one), Bait Al Naboodah, the house of a pearling merchant. Another nice museum, and this is probably the smallest of them all. That’s good because when we entered the woman working the front desk looked at us, looked at the clock, looked at us, and said “you realize we close in 15 minutes?” Challenge accepted. In we go.

It was mainly a museum showing the typical living arrangements of people during the pearling boom in this area, along with many, many facts about pearling. A nice way to end our run of museums today. What a packed day we had. Crazy that we woke up without a clue as to what we would end up doing today!

But, that’s not all. We walked back towards the bus station along the Corniche just enjoying the sights and sounds. Very peaceful. Crazy to think that just a little bit down the road there is the hustle and bustle of Dubai.

And then we made it to the bus station, but walked past it to look at the Souq Al Jubail. There was a hypermarket, of course, and then there was a fish and meat market.

SO MANY THINGS. In the fish market they had everything that was freshly caught. Who knows how far they have to go to catch all of these huge fish, but there was a lot. One thing that made us a bit sad was seeing shark for sale. They just had the whole shark there ready to be bought. Then you could take your purchase to the end of the market where they would clean and prepare your fish for you.

Beside the fish market was the meat market. They had signs that the meat came from all over the world. We saw signs for Pakistan, Australia, and India. They had full sheep there as well, ready for you to purchase. Both were pretty full. No one talked to us in the fish market, but in the meat market the vendors tried to get us to buy some meat. Not possible for us.

Back to the bus station, back to Dubai, and you would think we would be done… but no. It is 10 pm by the time we make it back to Dubai, but we decide to check out the Souq at night. It is much busier than the picture we showed at the beginning of this post from this morning. Makes sense as the temperature drops quite a bit in the evening.

But the nicest part of this walk was walking by the Dubai Creek. By the time we got up here many stores were closed already and the crowds were thinning out. Our cue to leave.

So we walk back to our hotel (we were pretty close) get some food and call it a night. What a difference between today and yesterday. At least we started off the New Year well! Goodnight from Dubai!