8:00 am on the 28th of September, Grade 11 ITGS students went on a field trip to the United Arab Emirates, specifically Dubai to view the September 2005 Gitex Exhibition. Gitex Exhibition (Gulf Information Technology Exhibition) consists of different IT companies from all over the world who have come to this Exhibition in Dubai to sell their products, in short I could describe Gitex in one word; TECHNOLOGY!

We were all astonished by the size of the exhibition; it was huge and seemed to have endless halls. We got into groups of four or five to walk around the exhibition and get all the information necessary for our ITGS project. Three hours sounded reasonable to us, however we only managed to get into three of the eight halls in the time we had. There were many displays of hardware and software in each hall, and we realized that there were many companies that we have never heard of before. The Gitex exhibition is mainly a show of today’s newest technologies. Each company tried to grab the visitors attention by giving out sweets, catalogs, bags, diaries and even pens and key chains.

Thursday morning was the toughest part of the trip. We had to wake up at by 7:00 a.m. Most of us slept at around 4:00 a.m. and hardly got three hours of sleep. We did surprisingly get up on time and had breakfast at the hostel. We left the hostel and headed to city center before heading to the other part of the Gitex exhibition: Shoppers.

Unfortunately we were trapped in the exhibition traffic again, and had to move from the entrance lane each time we entered it. We tried getting back into the lane four times, but we were forced out of it by the police each time. The only wise decision after all this was to head back to Oman due to lack of time, and that’s what Miss Maxwell decided to do.

It is unfortunate that we couldn’t get into Shoppers (which sells its products at very low prices indeed), but we had to skip it due to the intolerable traffic.
We arrived at school at 7:00 p.m. and that’s when Miss Maxwell finally gave us the bad news we were not hoping for at all: “Your essay is due on Sunday”
But overall the trip was very worthwhile; it was fun but also an amazing experience into the wide field of technology.

Thanks to all who made it possible for us to go on this trip, we hope we will be able to convince you to let us go again…

By: Faisal Al Hinai & Ammar Al Kharusi