Penultimateness

Webster's Dictionary define's the word "penultimate" as next to last...or second last. WOAH stellar opening right there! kidding I only know that world from OAC English.
Bear with me, its 1am here, I'm leaving tomorrow, and my room is piled high with clothes and shopping bags that are supposed to be packed away. Can you believe it's been a month?

I'm kind of sad, I mean, for the blog. Not going to lie, the blog kind of inspired me to have MORE fun on my trip or be faced with boring blogositis. But now what? will the blog continue? the misadventures of Amanda? who knows...
Oh hai mom and dad! today for my going away feast, we went to *drumroll* Emirates Palace.
Palm trees. I will miss their presence in comparison to naked maple trees when I get home.
Did I mention the palace is ridonculous?
That's a shiny-ass marble floor! don't slip!
The gorgeous ceiling.

The dinner was amazing, on our own little gazebo on the beach. The pictures are all out of order but run with me on this. Dessert! om nom nom
I ordered the "mixed grill" and I said to myself, weird, the way it's written it sounds like its all going to come on one skewer. no, can't be, how could they fit it all on one skewer?!
on a SWORD that's how! jesus, there were a lot of animals on that sword. I exclaimed at the table "I'm ALWAYS gonna eat with a sword!" and then i tried to eat rice with it and it fell and my parents told me to put it away. :( aww they're no fun.

I got henna done the other day. Henna isn't just an Indian custom, Arabian brides also get it done for weddings and such. And I thought why not me? why. not. me.


Henna looks kinda gross and muddy at first. The girl did a really pretty job I think. Then it starts to dry and flake off. This is also when I decided. OMG A CHILI'S LETS GO TO CHILIS WE DON'T HAVE THEM IN CANADA! and then i flaked all over my seasoned fries. It was a bad choice. But also, i'm glad we don't have Chili's in Canada...what is wrong with you American's? human stomachs are not built for such gargantuan proportions you freaks.

Here's a close up...yeah it looks kinda gross but the end product well...here's what it looks like now...I thought I'd blog about it because it might be faded by the time I get home. But here is me and my new friend Camille the Camel. The stain starts off bright orange, and then get's darker. Now its like a really dark brown...but...I wash my hands quite often (as every wise traveller should) so...it'll be gone soon.

Anyway, I considered some kind of montage or homage to my whole trip but, I'll do that tomorrow as my last entry, as I am still doing some last minute things all day tomorrow. Instead, I thought I'd do that thing that's floating around Facebook...not the "Little Miss Perfect" picture or whatever crap...Who does that?!? *shifty eyes*....no, I'm talking about the 25 Random Thing List. But Instead, it'll be 25 Random things about my trip that I never spoke about in my blog. And they're the best things...it's the little things that count. :)

25 Random Things About Amanda's Awesome Arabian Adventure...in Alliteration. (boo yeah I had to)

1. That bandaid on my knee in the first blog? I don't know how I got that, I reached down to scratch my knee and felt something wet and was bleeding. And now it's a scar. a permanent souvenir! yay?

2. I changed my hair colour on this trip.

3. I ate mcdonalds at the Dubai airport. I had to...I wasn't sure what I could trust. And who can't say no to McNuggets. WHO I ASK YOU??!?

4. Red Bull + Water + Pepto Bismol will cure just about anything.

5. I have about 20 little videos of this trip that I will one day string together.

6. In my wallet, I have Canadian dollars, US dollars, British pounds, Euros, Indian Rupees and UAE Dirhams. and a lot of it is change. eff.

7. When we visited Al Ain and drove half an hour to get to the top of that mountain, there were stray cats up there and I felt bad for them. But HOW did they get up the mountain?

8. At Atlantis, in the giant fish tank, there is a whale in there they found up washed up on the beach and the marine biologists decided to give him a home in the tank.

9. In the picture of the crayfish, I was petting them, and the guy told me not to touch them too hard--because they were mating.

10. In our Atlantis hotel room, at the end of the day they had turn down service before bed where they came in, fluffed your pillow, turned down your sheets so you could get into bed, and put a little mat on the floor.

11. The women in full abayas with only their eyes showing also wore them in the pools and on the water slides.

12. On the plane to Amsterdam, the woman next to me was playing Soduku in Arabic.

13. In Goa, guys from other parts of India come to Goa to look at tourists on the beach.

14. In India, the British guys in the pictures got really weird at the end of the night and me and my cousin had to bail on them completely and ran off looking for a cab--and we were warned to make sure that the cab we chose was a 'real' cab...who knows were we could have ended up.

15. My cousin had a Star laser pointer that you could use to point at stars in the sky. I'm not kidding. Instead we used it to freak out a lot of Indian people. and lizards.

16. At my uncle's party, my cousin's cigarette touched a giant bug and it exploded all over her. bahaha.

17. In Amsterdam I paid $16 CDN for a croissant and a diet coke and didn't realize until, well, now. Totally worth it.

18. A lot of the movies I've watched here are censored and all the kissing scenes are taken out. Today I watched Win a Date with Tad Hamilton and it had zero kisses in it. wtf.

19. Dubai is building the world's largest theme park. It's twice as big as Disneyworld and includes a Warner Bros theme park, a Universal Studies, a Legoland, AND a Sixflags all in one. Construction has been stopped because of the financial crisis.

20. The condo my parents are living in right now has 5 bathrooms.

21. In the UAE, when you go over the speed limit, an alarm chimes in your car as a warning- but everyone ignores it.

22. I stole a whole dried lemon from the spice market and I just remembered its still in my backpack...

23. Every public place like a mall, hotel, and even gas stations have prayer rooms. Gas stations have little mini-mosques built next to them because you just never know where you'll be when you're called to prayer.

24. Toilet paper is a luxury I will no longer take for granted.

25. BEST. TRIP. EVER.