Category Archives: cars

Ski Dubai flyer, ice cube bbq and car-in-a-box

cars, curiosities, Only in Dubai, parking, Welcome to Dubai, what can you do in the desert?

Thanks to two amazing visitors I came across this epic piece of marketing material. It’s from Ski Dubai. Yeah, the world famous place where you can do skiing in the desert. And apparently you can also meet some penguins.

“It only consumes as little energy as an average sized hotel.”

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Just for the records: of course my visitors did NOT go there 🙂

Talking about winter things in Dubai. Ice cubes. On a bbq. Did not really make sense to me but I was sure there must be a good reason why you do this.

“You know, grill is very hot. And flames would come up – so we put ice cubes”. Well, WTF??

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Dubai is the place for luxury cars (which – sometimes – catch fire). And it’s a little sandy, dusty etc. So what would you do when you have to park your Maybach, Rolls Royce or what-have-you in a basement parking for a while? Exactly – it’s easy: put your car into a plastic tent, air-tight with high pressure so that really nothing can come in. Omg.

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Welcome to Dubai

cars, curiosities, Uncategorized, Welcome to Dubai,

So far my experience here with the police was good. Only the procedures are sometimes a little annoying (then again, I dont want to know how annoying they are in Germany…). But now I got surprised a little.

This morning when I was commuting, I had a chat with a colleague about the police, how friendly the Dubai police is as long as you stay calm and relaxed.

Then I got a text message from Dubai police saying I got fined on September 1st and need to pay 200 AED (50Euro). I didn’t really recall doing anything wrong (except for exceeding the speed limit by 20km/h probably…).

Then I checked it on the internet and found that:Inquiry and Payment of Traffic Fines - Google Chrome_2015-09-09_10-44-55

And when paying it, another 10 AED ‘Knowledge Fee’ was added. Knowledge what? Are they teaching me a lesson?

“it’s how they recover their investment on IT”
Well. Thanks. Welcome to Dubai.

Honda Accord

cars, engineering masterpieces, made not in germany, , , ,

So I had this Honda Accord rental. It was okay. A little comfy, cruise control – all good.

What was not at all good, was the bluetooth integration though. I mean – yes – it did have bluetooth. But see for yourself.

Where in the following pic you would think that you can control bluetooth, eh?

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And? Maybe somewhere here?

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Nah. Of course not. Who are you to think that bluetooth could have something to do with audio and the middle radio unit??

Duh, of course it’s there:

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So how are the bluetooth controls? Well, you got 3 buttons. To pair your device, for pausing and to skip to the previous / next track. Thats it.

Fun fact: you could turn off the radio and the middle display reads ‘audio off’ while your speakers are blasting some 50cent beats…

And last but not least: of course you cannot control the audio volume of bluetooth music stream with the radio volume control. So actually your only chance to change the bluetooth music volume is – on  your bluetooth device.