Ski Dubai

For 180 dirham (about $45) I got my ski pass for two hours, a blue one piece snowsuit, ski boots, a pair of about 153 Volkls, disposable socks, and some little black gloves. “Don’t you want poles sir?” asked the young Pakistani man from behind the counter. I shook my head thinking how could I possibly need poles while skiing inside of a giant walk-in freezer. “No thank you,” I replied. With my Detroit Tigers baseball cap on and my Wayfarers I was ready to shred this little pile of ice cubes. “Aren’t you going to want a winter hat?!” screamed my mom. “No mom! Michigan skiing is way colder than the desert.”  “It’s gonna be cold in there,” she rebutted. With complete frustration I muttered, “S**t mom, no.”

I was about to ski inside the world’s biggest indoor ski resort located inside the Mall of Emirates in Dubai. But first I just had to figure out how the hell to get in there. Ahead of me was a big blue sign in Arabic and below it was a small arrow with an English translation, “To Slopes” the sign read pointing toward an escalator. “Sweet,” I thought, “no chairlifts.”

Eventually the winding escalator stopped and I walked through an automatic door and stepped on to… snow. “Holy s**t it’s cold in here,” I thought. In front of me was a huge ski slope that resembled frosted over par 5 dog leg with a curving chairlift hovering about 10 ft. above the ground.

I looked over my shoulder. Behind me was a huge set of windows so that patrons from the mall could peer in and watch the skiers. There, over in the left hand corner stood my mom. Except she wasn’t alone, surrounding her was a group of three or four short little emirate women all dressed in traditional black abayas. Turns out my mom, in usual mom fashion, told all of her co-workers in Dubai about how awesome her son was at skiing. So of course, they all came to watch through the little slit in there robes.

I could just picture her at one of the elementary schools she was working at, sipping on some tea in her office and saying something along the lines, “Oh my son is coming to visit. He’s a coach at Mammoth Mt. You know…California. He’s really good at skiing, blah blah blah blah.” F**k.

Read the rest of the story in this Friday’s printed issue of The Sheet.