High Tea at Emirates Palace

After our busy day and late night, we got a slow start on Monday. We walked over to the hotel pool - it's on the 25th floor of the connected building. But that pool got too much sun, so we returned to "my" pool at the apartments. It's on the 8th floor, so it's nearly all in the shade.

After "enjoying" the sauna-like air at the pool, we returned to the apartment to shower and get ready to go to tea. As we left the hotel, we stopped at the concierge to make arrangements for our "desert adventure". We had settled on the early morning camel ride, which we scheduled for the following day.

We took a taxi over to Emirates Palace. The High Tea was "enough for two to share" - but I think we could have used the help of a third person. It began with all this:

Here we are with the spread:

We made a significant dent in these offerings, unaware that the tea included a "chocolate fondant" for each of us. By "chocolate fondant", I mean a chocolate lava cake with edible gold flakes, berries, and a smear of yogurt...of course:

Don't be fooled by the appearance - that is a smear of sour, sour yogurt. Inexplicably. All I can think is that someone saw a picture and decided to replicate the plating with the ingredients at hand.

We were so full after tea that we barely managed to walk around Emirates Palace. While most of the shops sold incredibly expensive, high-end goods, we did find one shop that sold postcards. We decided it was too hot to walk on the Corniche or visit Heritage Village. Instead, we took a taxi back to Al Wahda Mall and picked up groceries to make dinner at home.

Unfortunately, that combination of heat and sugar (and who knows what else) proved the perfect recipe for a migraine. After I got dinner in the oven, I took my medication and crawled into bed, hoping that I had caught it early enough that I would recover in time for our 7:30 a.m. camel ride the following day.