Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Dubai Birthday

Well, it was my birthday last weekend and given that last year I spent my birthday in a plane to Sydney, this year was a much better occasion and I celebrated with Niki and the girls and our Dubai friends at a big "brunch".

My birthday you see fell on Friday, and therefore as its the "done thing" in Dubai, we celebrated with a Friday Brunch.

Brunch is where you pay a fixed price and get to eat and drink (including alcohol) as much as you like.  It's definately an occasion to leave the car at home and take a taxi!  All hotels in Dubai offer a Friday Brunch and you can generally find one that meets your price range and you can also take a "non-alcohol" choice as well which reduces the cost of course.  Kids are also offered a discounted price and kids typically under 4 eat and drink free.

This all stems from the Arabic custom of having a Friday meal together with family (much like the Sunday Roast in western cultures) and 90% of all Brunches are buffets.

We went to one of our favourites - Beachcombers at Jumeriah Beach Hotel - in which the food is Thai / Malaysian and we pretty much ate from midday to sunset all the satay sticks, fried rice, roti bread and prawn dumplings you could poke a stick at with an endless supply of Tiger Beer.

Cost was 285 Dirhams a head for full alcohol brunch, 185 for non-alcohol and a token amount for kids.  We had 24 people, of which 3 were kids, 2 were non-paying babies and the rest were adults and it came to about 4500 dirhams.  Now to convert to Aussie Dollars, divide by 3.6 approximately which is about $1,250.  Where else can you feed 24 people for 4 hours with unlimited alcohol in a 5 star location for $50 a head!!

Now my head was a bit fuzzy at the time, but the bill did count how many bottles of Tiger we did order and the final total was 59 beers.  That was from about 6-7 beer drinkers, so we did pretty good!

I tells ya dear readers in Sydney, Dubai is a great place to visit and a great place to celebrate your birthday!!

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