Abu Dhabi - Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my posts from Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates (see part 1 here).

Today was the "big day".  We held the press conference for about 60 reporters - coming from North America, Europe and Asia:

The entrance - including a sign that warns people not to take photos of the top secret info ; )

As I indicated in my previous post, the information presented won't released to the public for another month.  I was able to take a couple of pictures of someone else's presentation, so you can see what it looked like inside:

The press conference went really well, and all of the demos that I had to show on-stage worked perfectly.  I can't wait to see how the press felt about our presentations...but I will have to wait.

The next day, several of us spent the entire day with the journalists.  We planned a day of fun activities, to help them remember this whole event as a very special experience.  And it was.  In my next post, I will describe one of the most fun things I've ever done - driving a real Formula 1 race car on a professional race track.  I'll need some time to pull together pictures and video from the experience.  For now, I will describe some of the other amazing things that I saw in Abu Dhabi...

Next door to the race track, is the famous Ferrari World. This is the largest indoor amusement park in the world. It's huge. I believe it contains over 2 million square feet of space. We drove around the outside of the building, on our way to the race track.

I believe this is a rendering of the building, to give a little perspective

A look at the side of the building, as our bus drives by...

 This is the view from one of the mini race tracks...that's the Ferrari logo on the building

The interior of the park

The only part of the amusement park that's outside (in the 100+ degree heat) is a roller-coaster called Formula Rossa. As with most things in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this is the world's fastest roller coaster. It's pretty scary - you reach a top speed of over 150 miles per hour. They give you goggles to wear, because you're moving so fast.

At the end of the day, I grabbed a taxi and headed into the middle of the actual city of Abu Dhabi.  Among the high-end hotels in-town is the Emirates Palace Hotel (these aren't my pictures, as the photos I took from the taxi didn't turn out too well):

As we were driving through town, I could see this really strange building in the distance - it looked "crooked".  As we got closer, I could see that this was an intentional architectural feature.  The building is called the Capital Gate:

Also, not my picture

The Capital Gate building has an actual "lean" built into it of 18 degrees. This is apparently more than four times that of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It has about 35 floors and I wonder what it's like to work inside that office building??

By now, the sun had set, but I still wanted to see one of the most amazing sights in Abu Dhabi - the Grand Mosque:

A photo of the mosque in the daytime

My actual photo from the night time...it's just a gorgeous structure

The Grand Mosque of Adu Dhabi is actually called the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, for future reference ; ) It's the largest mosque in the United Arab Emirates (and trust me, there are a LOT of them). It's also the 8th largest mosque in the entire world. Once again, it is huge. These pictures don't really help you understand how large this mosque is. To give you an idea, it can accommodate up to 40,000 worshippers. The main prayer hall can handle up to 9,000 people at prayer time!

A much better picture that someone took at night...

The interior - simply gorgeous...reminds me of some of the LDS temples

I visited a local supermarket, to try and check out the local produce and crazy products that you might find here.  My usual stop includes the potato chip aisle.  It's a little hard to see in the picture, but the two flavors are French Cheese and Yogurt and Herbs:

In the produce section, I found an amazing array of spices, available in the open.  The colors and aroma was just fantastic:

The vibrant orage of these two spices isn't justified by my crappy cel phone camera

At the local electronics store, my company had a huge display, right at the entrance.  I felt so proud!

Well, I think that's enough for now.  On the next post, I'll tell you much more about my experience on the race track!!