Dubai Mall

This weekend we visited the Dubai Mall, which opened on Oct 30 with claims of being the world's biggest mall. At this point, probably at least half of the stores still aren't open yet, but we found three very important things at Dubai Mall:

1. This aquarium. Holding some obscene number of fish and a variety of cool sharks, and sporting an underwater tunnel and an interpretive center, this aquarium fulfills all Alicia's aquariumish desires.

2. A KMS store. I use KMS shampoo and conditioner, and until now, havebeen importing it from America via other people's luggage. Unable to get KMS products shipped from Amazon, and unable to find them in-country, and running low on supply, I thought recently that this would be the one thing that forever tied me to America - the one thing which mandates that I not become a fugitive who would be arrested at the airport, needing always to come back at least once every few years to refresh my supply. Well, no longer - the KMS store at Dubai Mall, the blessed, blessed store filled with absolutely nothing but KMS products and glowing the large neon letters "KMS" over the door, eliminates my dependency on coming to America for products. 

3. Book World by Kinokuniya. Magrudy's can officially suck one - we now have Book World. After doing a little Christmas shopping at Magrudy's recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that if I ever wanted to buy a book again, it was going to have to be on Amazon and I was going to have to pay $15 to ship it.  Why? Magrudy's looks like a bookstore, but once you get inside, you realize it doesn't really have anything except some crappy pieces of paper glued together and slapped with a price tag that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. I wandered all over Magrudy's with a 25% off coupon and couldn't find one flipping thing I wanted to buy.  Not so with Book World! Although not quite on the scale of Powell's, Book World offers us the gamut of weird eccentric literature along with old favorites and world classics. I will now be doing all of my book shopping exclusively at Book World.