Apple Strudel and Poisonous Waters - a travel memoir

I  wouldn't call myself a world traveler, but I have seen quite a few cities.  I've been to three of the seven continents.  Does the United Arab Emirates belong to Africa or Asia?  Maybe I've stood on four continents.  I remember Dubai quite vividly, it was the first time I walked out in public with visible sweat on my t-shirt and not just under the arms, but everywhere.  I had never experienced forty five degrees centigrade  either and I grew up on the east coast of Africa where our teachers were rated by how many times they booked the air conditioned AV theatre.  I loved Dubai.  My son was five when we visited; it was a mommy and son trip, a three day stop over on our way back from a five week visit to Uganda.  

The corporate apartments we stayed at had a roof top pool.  I'm picky when it comes to pools, not so much about the quality of the water, more about the temperature.  I need my swim water to be warm.  The pool was simple; shallow end, deep end, rectangle, smallish, with a round children's pool attached to it.   What turned it into a Hyatt quality pool however, was the temperature.  I haven't swam at the Hyatt often enough to actually know what their pool temperatures are like, but I imagine a five star hotel having a five star pool, and a five star pool being warm enough for me to spend several hours in without my lips turning shades of blue.  And this pool at The Pearl Residences in Dubai was a five star pool.

Tristan and I spent the whole Tuesday in that pool; small, warm and empty, not of water, but of people.  I love being the only one in a pool, I can imagine it to be the private pool in my home, and I don't need to worry about other people peeing in it.  We played the wackiest games:  the wall separating the regular and the children's pool was coated with poisonous waters, we had to cross over without being infected.  Tristan and I still have an inside joke about poisonous waters.  

We lunched at the Hyatt Market Cafe that Tuesday, the real Hyatt.  The Market Cafe is an open concept restaurant where you can pick just about any kind of food, serve yourself, pay, and continue on to your table all the while pretending that  you're staying at the Hyatt.  The any kind of food that you've picked doesn't taste like any kind of food.  Any kind of food hasn't been cooked by chefs trained at Les Roches School in Switzerland, and I'm pretty sure that the chefs at this Hyatt were trained just there.  

Being Austrian, I'm familiar with good apple strudel.  In fact my Omi used to make the best Apfel Strudel on the planet.   Her hand made pastry had just the right amount of moisture and thickness, and the filling was a love marriage of warm apples and topfen, an Austrian fresh cheese, the luxury version of what is commonly known as cottage cheese.  With this comparison in mind, a strudel that I taste anywhere outside of Omi's kitchen leaves  behind a very blah attitude.  Not so on this warm, Hyatt, Tuesday afternoon though.  The strudel here took me by surprise.  The pastry had no crisp to it, not like the usual restaurant mistaken puff pastry strudels.  I so often want to scream "Strudel is not a puff pastry!"  I don't though, civility takes over and I smile over my inward exacerbations.  The chef in the Hyatt kitchens knew exactly what he was doing when he made this strudel.  He was as it happens Austrian, and I'm assuming had trained in some fancy germanic hotel school, but his strudel expertise could only have come from his grandma's kitchen, because it was just the way an Austrian home made strudel should be.  He even added almond slivers in the apple filling, the touch that left me convulsing with delight.

Our detour into the laps of luxury continued on through the obligatory drive to the five hundred metre radius of the Burj Al Arab.  I don't think anyone visits Dubai without at least one glance at the Burj Al Arab. It established Dubai's reputation for breaking records:  the second tallest hotel in the world, and the supposedly only hotel in the world to be awarded seven stars.  It gloats from its very own artificial island in the Persian Gulf.  Only those with a spare fifty dollar bill are granted privileges to cross the bridge that connects her majesty to the mainland.  After a lunch at the Hyatt and a taxi ride around Dubai, I remained one of the under privileged and contented myself with a few snap shots on Jumeirah beach to prove to the rest of the world and my future self that I had in fact seen the Burj Al Arab. 

  A  tour of the seven star hotel wouldn't have fit in to our agenda anyhow, we needed to get back to our poisonous waters, and so we found ourselves being driven through Dubai's quickly spreading carpet of condominiums back to The Pearl Residences.  With tummies full and bodies heated Tristan and I changed back into our swim wear, caught a short elevator ride up to the pool, and splashed into where we would spend the rest of the afternoon soaking in our glorious sun.  

Cities don't leave their impression with architecture, style or even people.  At least not on me.  I've learned that the only one responsible for making sure I've been impressed upon is me.  Take what the city offers and build an imprint that will survive all time.  I took Dubai with its marvellous heat, found a little pool and a piece of strudel, and had one of the best holidays ever.