Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Polished Floor Parking


When we first arrived here we asked people at Church about the best sites to see and one we were told not to miss was the Arab Fund Building.  So Saturday we set off to see this amazing site.  Security was tight and as we drove into the underground parking we were surprised by all the workers directing us to parking and by the highly polished floors.  That was nothing compared with what we were to see in the building.  This was truly a treat of a life time and one very difficult to describe.  The building was a masterpiece of architecture and the furnishings and decorations were Arabic artistry at it's best.  Not only did they bring artisans in from around the Arab world to do the finishing of the building they bought beautiful pieces of Arabic art from as old as 500 AD to the present. 


The front entry was basically glass with huge doors that actually sung with no effort at all. The amazing part is each piece of wood was free floating in the frame of wood separating each piece. As you touched each piece it would move within it's frame. Within the building there were over 4,000,000,000 pieces of wood that are free floating within their frameworks.


There were huge doors throughout the facility all highly decorative and all free swinging.
Even the smoke alarms were camouflaged so there were not noticeable.  This one only seems easy to see because of the quality of the photograph.

Amazing wood ceiling again with loose pieces of wood.  Our tour guide removed one and then struggled to get it back in place.

Our tour guide was fantastic.  He met us at 10 AM and asked us our schedule.  We said we needed to leave at 11:15 AM to which he said I will probably keep you 15 minutes longer.  Four hours later he explained that he usually takes from 1 hour to 2 depending on the interest of the group and he could tell we were very interested in more than just the building and it's contents.  Yes we got much more than we anticipated. We enjoyed learning so much more about the Arab culture.