Today, Simon, Wendy and I woke up at 5:30 am in Abu Dhabi, enjoyed an extensive breakfast buffet in our hotel, then ventured out into the city. We took a taxi to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the largest mosque in the United Arab Emirates, and toured the grounds all morning. The mosque, designed by Syrian architect Yousef Abdelky, was constructed between 1996 and 2007 and covers an area of more than 30 acres. Designed to unite the cultural diversity of the Islamic world, the mosque takes inspiration from Persian, Mughal, Indo-Islamic and Alexandrian mosques. Its archways are quintessentially Moorish and its minarets classically Arab. I found this pluralism of influence to be a welcome change from the rhetoric that we find evermore present in the US media, as it acknowledges the enormous diversity within Islam, while American media lumps the entirety of the religion into a monolithic ideology. Afterwards, we headed back to check out and continued on to the airport. We flew again on Etihad airlines, which we will never do again, and arrived at 8pm to Kathmandu. We were greeted by Parajuli and his staff at the airport, headed to our hotel, and went to sleep.