Monday, March 12, 2007

Dude I love your shirt

Well well well guess where I was off to during this past weekend(thats Thursday and Friday in Saudia just in case u didnt know)? The one and only Dubai!
What was i doing in dubai u ask? Why i was getting ready to attend the Dubai Desert Rock Festival, the first day which took place on friday(Mar 9th). One word: AWESOME!

The line-up for the first day was Junkyard Groove, Lauren Harris, Mastodon, In Flames, Stone Sour, The Prodigy, and the one and only Iron Maiden! Of course if u're female the chances of you knowing any of these bands is highly slim, even though given that there were tons of girls at the concert.
But dont worry ladies, all your lame sappy bands were on the second day mainly being Robert Plant, The Bravery, Prime Circle, and Incubus(Ok ill make an exception with incubus).

Anywayz, it was me and four other guys, A and N who were friends in uni and the fourth guy Z who was their friend from Riyadh. We decided to not to take a plane to dubai cuz they were on a tight budget as it is so we made a plan to drive there in A's car which was btw a stylish nifty Saab 93 convertible. Oh yeaaa. A bit cramped but it was alright.
I was the one who made the hotel arrangements. I never realized just how expensive Dubai could be until i started hotel shopping. Cuz the room prices were nutz! Fortunately I booked through a travel agent and he found us a better deal than I could ever find on the net.

We decided to leave early on Thursday morning and after a 5 hours of driving and blaring heavy metal music on the car stereo, we reached the UAE border checkpoint. We could have gotten there sooner if we didnt get stopped along the way by some idiot cop. We werent even speeding or anything. Eventually we had to follow him to some dumb police station in the middle of nowhere where we discovered that him and the police chief of that station were the only two people there!

When we asked the chief why we were stopped he didnt give us an immediate answer. Eventually he made up some excuse about us not respecting police officers on duty, after which he let us go. But we figured out why they stopped us. They were just plain bored outta their skulls.

Anywayz we reached the border checkpoint and after doing the necessary arrangements we were finally allowed into UAE. We still had a good 4 hours drive ahead of us to Dubai. At that point it really didnt look too much different from Saudia (except more cleaner). 4 hours later we finally reached the outskirts of Dubai only to discover that we had just gotten ourselves stuck in a traffic jam on Shiekh Zayed road! Dammnit!

We must hav stayed for like an hour just on that road. At least one of us was having fun. N was busy pointing out all the "muzaas" in the surrounding cars lol. Welcome to dubai ya wierdo.

So we finally got outta the jam but our journey was far from over. We still had to find the damn hotel! The name of of the hotel was the Grand Moov hotel on Moqqarabaat st. in Rigga district. Or at least that was what was written by the travel agent. So after an hour of driving around asking clueless indian taxi drivers ("Gaaraanda mooov hotel? ahh yes u take right turn here*he was pointing left*), I remembered I had a phone number so I gave them a ring. I discovered first of all it's not on Moqqarabat St, its on Rigga street! The dumb travel agent got the address mixed up!

Eventually we found our way to the hotel and were pleasantly surprised to find out that even though its a 3-star hotel, it looked like a 4-star or even 5-star! What a relief. It must have been around midnight that we finally settled in and we decided to go out and eat something. fortunately there were loads of restaurants nearby at walking distance. Some were already closed but a few were opened. We decided to go eat at Nando's, after which we went over and ate some ice cream at Haagen Daz.

The next morning we got up and and got ready. Today was the big day, the day of the concert bwahahaha! We checked out of the hotel and drove our way to the Mall of Emirates. Man that place is freakin huge! We went guitar shopping for a while and then had lunch at the food court over there. Now the time had finally come. We had to make our way to the Dubai Country Club. So we drove there with the roof of A's convertible car drawn back enjoying the great weather.

The concert started with Junkyard Groove and then Lauren Harris as opening acts. Eventually as the other bands started playing things started getting rowdy with guys moshing like crazy. I was in the crowd near the front and it started getting hectic! I was getting squashed like a bug. People even starting throwing bottles of water and cans of beer up into the air. I must have gotten like 20 cans of beer spilled over my shirt because of that:S
Speaking of beer, what kinda dissapointed me was seeing guys who i KNOW are from saudi guzzling down beer by the bucketloads. Fortunately the guys I was with werent like that.
Eventually Mastodon came up, and then In Flames, followed by Stone Sour and then The Prodigy. Needless to say the crowd went nutz.
Last but not least Iron Maiden came up, the headliners of the concert. The singer was a really nice guy. They finished and left the stage but the crowd kept shouting for more. So they came back and played not one, not two but three extra songs! how about that eh? Up the Irons!

Oh btw. Three different people came up to me and told me they liked my shirt and thought it was awesome. Lol huh? I dont know what was up with that. I was wearing a black t-shirt with the new "Tool 10,000 days" logo which I bought in the states during the summer (Tool is the name of a band, "10,000 days" being their latest album).

23 comments:

Amjad said...

what was I doing on Friday? Oh yeah, I was grading friggin homeworks.. *sigh*

Glad you enjoyed it. The pushing and getting squashed though, lol that's something I don't miss. I'm a one-and-a-half person but I still managed to float off the ground last year when 3 Doors Down started. I had to escape to the back away from crowd, where I was hit on by one of the security guys loool. And the mosh pits! don't get me started on the mosh pits! >= (
So many naked friendly people though hehe... Maybe next year.

Reema said...

wooooow man! i really enjoyed reading about ur trip. it must have been FUN mshallah! didn't u take pics?? it would be lovely to see some of the action.

ROCK ON

Nouph said...

Lol, and u say I turned to a BJ :Pp
~Welcome back and glad you had fun in your road trip with ur T shirt with band names no one knows :Pp

Anonymous said...

7amas mashallah! :D
I've never been to Dubai, I so wanna go :|
oh, and by the way, I don't know these bands! but glad that you had fun! :)

Taqo said...

Dude, I hate your shirt.



just wanted to change it up a bit ;)




*coughsPICScoughs*

Black Orchid said...

i hate you!!!

YES I'M REALLY JEALOUS :(

Missy said...

glad u had a blast ;)

A Walking Coffee Bean said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
A Walking Coffee Bean said...

ra7eel tara wallah al bnaat yefhamoo fe al metal 6ayyeb?
and excuse me NOT all of us are lame and sappy.
:P :P


*****
:D :D COOOOOOOOOOOOL
:( I WUD ONLY DREAM OF GOING
soooo exciting,
:S i envy u right now:P
glad ya all had fun

7ammaaaaaaas
wooohooohwooh!!

pics, pics!
puhleaaaaze

(dubaai rooooooockz)
(lol yeaah and soooo expensive)
hmm nando's, what did ya have?



:D oh ra7eel why cudnt u just take me away from my parents house and i'll run away with u *sighs*

A Walking Coffee Bean said...

:( r7eel, r7eel *nudges*
i have a silly question
wud u aswer me :)?

plz explain to me the "buying tickets" thingy in concerts
*since i Never Went to a concert*

the only tickets i get r cinemas :P
and won robbie williams -dubai concert-showtime arabia thingy

:S

A Walking Coffee Bean said...

incubus lame and sappy?

ren_crow said...

Jojo the juji
uhm yea that security guy was me;) yea the mosh pits are just crazy. Its like, I came all this way to this damn concert so how about letting me pay attention to the music u jackasses!
Well i'm sure grading homeworks is fun for a dhafoora such as yourself:p
a fat dhafoora i mean. See I got it right this time. How many marks do i get for that?

Reema
wow i didnt think anybody would really read all of that but it looks like u did:D
yea i have pics but i probably wont put them on blogger because of some damn problem with my blog that doesnt let me upload pics even if its through some special image hosting site. I'll be uploading the pics into my Facebook profile though.

Malfoofa
Lol thats the fun about wearing t-shirts of bands no one knows. People automatically think you're cool!:p

Euphoria
U should take a trip there sometime, its really nice. I think we had too much fun:p

Taqo
No, i know u love it;)
*coughs*Facebook*coughs*

Black Orchid
*hands u a cookie from dubai* Aww thats ok, cheer up katkoota lol. Next time i go to dubai i'll make sure to get u a whole box of cookies!:p

missy
me too:)

hebz
Lol too much coffee today? Yea well most of u are, so i'm just assuming from the majority. Yea it was great and i think i had some kind of steak sandwich. It would have been nicer if it hadnt been mini sized:|
Aww sure i'll take u away and we can run away together. I mean after all its only like 5 years in jail right? No big deal:p
Look up at my response to Reema about the pics.

When do u NOT have a silly question for me? I bet u think i'm like Dr. Phil or something.
Lol no no im just kidding. Well for buying tickets, theres two ways, either u go to the stores or areas where they're selling them and buy it straight from them, or u do what alot of ppl do (especially if there's no other way) which is to order them online from special ticketing websites. U need one of those international credit cards like Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American Express to do that. Then they mail u the ticket after a certain time period.
Lol but i dont think u'll be doing any of that anytime soon so dont worry about it.
No i said those bands are lame and sappy with incubus being an exception.

Geek in Pink said...

Lucky you, i've always wanted to attend a concert. Going to a concert and a comedy club, those two are on my to-do before i drop dead list.
Glad you had fun and your shirt does sound cool, i love tools too! very handy when you need to fix stuff :P

Anonymous said...

FALLAAAAAAAA!!!
i so wanted to go!!

oh and yes do post some pics if u took any =D!

i know stone sour =D...

Gloomy said...

It seems that you had lots of fun :P
Lol at those people ;)

Grungey said...

OMG!! i was there!!! i loved everything but the crazy people man it was packed.
okay so you had the Tshirt, i had backstage pass baby!!! now you tell me who kicks ass!! lol

if only u updated we wouldve met and you wouldnt need me posting any pictures of my Wal-Mart shopping spree!

eshda3wa said...

wanasaaaaaa
sounds like an awsome time
i would have given up anything to see iron maiden
ok well maybe not anything
hmmm actually i wouldnt have given much at all
but i still would have loved to see em!!

god i hate ppl that throw stuff for no good reason and not knoing where they land stupid idiots!!

glad u enjoyed urself!!!

ren_crow said...

geek in pink
Yes very handy indeed;) Well theres always stuff happening in dubai. I think theres a shakira concert coming up in the next couple of months.

rawr
Yes me know stone sour too:p Well like ive said above i'll try but ill be putting the pics on my Facebook profile.

gloomy
hey hey gloomster! Yea it was mucho fun. Those ppl were crazy!

grungey
Say Whaaaaaaaat??! U were there?? AAAgghHH! Yea i should have updated about it. Then we could have met up or something. Dammnit i hate it when this happens. And u got the backstage pass too. Lucky girl. So did u meet any of the bands?

Eshda3wa
Lol well i dunno they were pretty good. They even had this guy dressed up as an 8 foot Eddie walking on the stage for a while(Eddie is the name of that zombie on all of the covers of their albums, just in case u were wondering). Definitely worth seeing.
Well what can I say. If theres any place ull see more crazy ppl its at a rock/metal concert!

SwaRwaR said...

woow it seems much of fun dude :P
can i borrow ur t-shirt :P
so , y didn`t u snap pix ?!!
but Fun :P

Reema said...

hi nice man,

do u mind putting a link to ur facebook page here?i hope that i'm not annoyin u:)

lotsa thankssss

Reema said...

hi nice man,

do u mind putting a link to ur facebook page here?i hope that i'm not annoyin u:)

lotsa thankssss

Anonymous said...

Dude have a beer.

daddies little cuttie said...

>.< some1 seemed to have so much fun :D loool taqoo