The sole reason we stopped in Abu Dhabi was to see the Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque, although we were on a tour of the Gulf States, so it made sense to visit the capital of the United Arab Emirates, anyway.

The mosque is on the road into the city from the airport, and you can’t miss it, so we decided to stop there even before going to our hotel. I wish we had spent more time there that night, but we were tired, and to get in we would have had to go through the visitors’ center and presumably into the mosque, which I didn’t feel like doing and preferred to tour in the daytime. We went back the next morning for a full tour of the mosque.

The mosque can accommodate up to 40,000 worshippers, has four minarets, more than 80 domes and 1,000 pillars holding it all up. The interior has elements from Turkey, Morocco and the Taj Mahal exhibited in marble, gold, semi-precious stones, crystals and ceramics. It hosts the world’s largest Persian carpet, which took 2.000 artisans two years to complete, and seven gold-plated crystal chandeliers. (Summary from Lonely Planet’s “Oman, UAE & Arabian Peninsula”)