Our fourth day in Abu Dhabi saw us heading to the grand mosque! We had heard that it was gorgeous and knew it would be an awesome mosque to tour with mom and dad!
The Sheikh Zayed Mosque was constructed between 1996 and 2007 when it was finished. It is a stunning and amazing example of Islamic architecture and was a project started by the late president of the UAE that would unite the different facets of Islamic culture. It is absolutely breathtaking.
We drove up to the Mosque early in the morning and everyone was blown away just by the outside of the structure.
We drove up to the Mosque early in the morning and everyone was blown away just by the outside of the structure.
Mom and I got our scarves on and heads covered and we separated from the guys to go in through the women's entrance and met them on the inside.
From there we walked around just taking it all in. The walls of the mosque are decorated and it looks like piped icing on a cake. The effect is just awesome!
We walked in, took our shoes off and were met with these gorgeous tiled portions of the wall. The detail is crazy! Definitely a lot of Persian influence in the design of the Mosque.
The Mosque and grounds are HUGE- taking up about 30 acres of land so we walked a lot just around the outside of the Mosque itself.
We made our way around and to the main men's prayer hall. I'm not joking when I say every inch of this place is decorated. There were small domes all throughout the hall and the inside center of the domes were all beautiful!
The entry...
And we made it into the entrance. It was breath taking!
The Sheikh Zayed Mosque is home to the worlds largest hand made carpet! It is a gorgeous example of a Persian carpet and the colors were so vibrant! It is massive-- its 60,570 sq ft and took 1200 to 1300 carpet knotters two years to create. There are 2,268,000,000 knots in the carpet so the detail is absolutely incredible!
We continued walking around taking it all in and then headed back outside and just as we got our shoes back on the sky opened up! It absolutely poured down rain! For people who haven't seen more rain than just one or two sprinkles over the past seven months, we were in heaven! The crowd all piled in under the cover of the outside of the mosque and waited it out a little bit. It slowed down a bit and we headed to our car (but not before I turned my face to the sky and let the raindrops hit my skin!) and the call to prayer started just as we walked. It was beautiful to listen to at the Mosque and a cool ending to our tour.
After the mosque we headed out to the mall to grab a quick bite to eat and just walk around. The malls in the Middle East are a lot different than the ones in the states-- there is so much to do and so much money is dumped into the malls for entertainment since it gets so hot in the summer and everyone flocks inside to air conditioning. So we had a bite of lunch and Stella got to live out every little kids dream in a giant candy store when we let her pick anything she wanted (within reason, obviously...lol). Even the grown ups got a little wide eyed with all the yummy treats!
After the mosque we headed out to the mall to grab a quick bite to eat and just walk around. The malls in the Middle East are a lot different than the ones in the states-- there is so much to do and so much money is dumped into the malls for entertainment since it gets so hot in the summer and everyone flocks inside to air conditioning. So we had a bite of lunch and Stella got to live out every little kids dream in a giant candy store when we let her pick anything she wanted (within reason, obviously...lol). Even the grown ups got a little wide eyed with all the yummy treats!
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