A pretend kid city in Dubai

The kids had a teacher workday on Thursday so some friends of mine and I piled our kids up and went to Dubai for the day to Kid Zania.  Brittany (from Texas) and her two girls (Jane and Anna's ages) and my friend Nicole (from Chicago) with her three boys (2, 4 & 6) plus Nicole's brother.

Kid Zania is basically a pretend city where kids have to "work" to earn money to spend on fun things.  Jobs that my girls got were painting a mural (and yup, "You can get paid to do *that*??" was uttered by my art loving incredulous Regan), learning to be a mechanic (and it looked like the girls removed a battery (fake) from a car (real) - they might have actually learned something about fixing a car, who knows??) and styling someone's hair.  Jobs we didn't get around to doing were all kinds of things from being a dentist, an ER doctor, firefighter, policeman, working in a bank, washing windows (you got to dangle from the side of  a fake building and everything!), radio & TV studios, newspaper publishing and more.  Brittany's daughter, Audrey, was paid to be a performer in a real show.  There were also things that didn't seem to be working that day (a pilot, working in a grocery store).  Regan was the only one who was laser-focused on the whole earning money thing and thinking through did she really want to spend her money on something.  She was able to buy more stuff at the end with leftover money which made Jane sad, so I think next time Jane will be a little more thoughtful about the save/ spend ratio to keep up with her big sister.

The first thing my girls spent their money on were driving a car.  We literally begged the worker to let them drive without standing in the ridiculous 30 minute line to get a drivers license (which seemed like a really annoying thing to have to do - hmmm, just like real life!).  Meredith shocked me by her first stint behind a wheel and turned into some kind of Formula 1 race car driver.  She was driving circles around a little boy who was quite a bit older than she was (and we didn't see anyone pass anyone else all day - they kids just politely followed each other around the circle).  Meredith kicked back, looked slightly bored and put the pedal to the metal and didn't slow down.  I was so amazed at her calm aggression - didn't expect it at all!  The girls also paid to go to art school (painted a cartoon version of American Gothic), cooking school and made their own pizza at a pizza shop.  We could have gotten milk at a milk factory, coca-cola at a sofa factory and cookies from a cookie factory.  The leftover money bought some coloring books for the drive back.

It sounds all fun and wonderful and we did have a good time.  But there were definitely some bumps in the road.  If the Disney folks ran this, it would be an amazing, amazing experience.  As it is, the workers aren't terribly customer service oriented so we had our share of frustrating experiences.  Standing in line being told it would take "three minutes" when it was really twenty is difficult with nine small kids 7 and under.  And it was just confusing what to do when and where.  A lot of running around and accomplishing less than you think you could if it were a little more efficiently run.  They also have very strict age and height requirements so some things only one of the kids could do and then you'd go somewhere else and only two of them could do it.  It seems there could be a little more overlap on who could do what.  And lastly there were tons of school groups there for field trips - and the kids were all older - like 12ish.  So a wide mix of ages of kids - many of whom were trying to do the same thing.

But overall we did have a really great time.  It turned out being an 11-hour adventure from leaving our house to getting back home (it didn't help that despite the GPS, I got us turned around getting to all three destinations: Kid Zania (which is at the base of the tallest building in the whole world - how difficult can *that* be to find????),  our return meeting spot to get my friend Brittany and her girls back to her car and then from there back home.  Argh - that was frustrating but we did make it back home tired but pleased with a pretty good day.

Even Anna got into the art school action with her friend Gracie

Hard to see in this picture but this is the mural (3-stories!)
that they kids were "paid" to paint.

Making pizzas for lunch.

All lined up and ready for culinary school

Meredith paid to have Regan style her hair (Regan still made more than
what Meredith paid so not sure how this shop makes any money!)

Meredith about to zip past this little boy (his mom is getting a rare shot of him
in the lead during their driving time).  You can also see the line to the right at the "DMV"
to get a drivers license.  We broke a few laws and skipped that headache!