National Day (Like the 4th of July)

38th National Day Celebrations !

Dec 2nd is UAE 38th National Unity day, The day the 6 of the 7 Sheikdoms in the area came together under 1 constitution to form a government. Bahrain and Quater declined...a year later a smaller area became the 7th and final emerate to become part of the UAE. so it was party day

All day long the streets began to fill with Partygoers..and honking, people decorated their cars with the national colors and pictures of the 3 highest rulers as shown above. Some were quite elaborate!

This barge appeared on the beach in the morning, we thought it was for the Fireworks later, and thousands of others did later in the evening, but that never happened. We think it just washed up. It was too close to the shore to safely shoot fireworks..they ended up being about 1 KM away at the Emerates Palace Hotel. They had Guinness World record staff there to record the " largest display of fireworks ever" . By pure luck we had walked down to that area to take pictures so we had a pretty good view.

The crowds were overwhelming, the streets came to a standstill around 10 pm, Honking, people singing and dancing in the streets, waving flags and tooting horns, it was loud. The Palm trees in the center divider were all lit up, what u cant see in this picture is that the spiky things on the palms had 'moving' lights that shot out from the center to the bottom of the tree, hard to describe, but beautiful to look at

This is a short move of the fireworks and the crowds.

It was a pretty good day, it went on way too long, we went to bed around midnight but the noise, firecrackers and singing and dancing in the streets went on until past 4 am according to Art who got up several times to watch the streets below !