Amazing Race

Spoilers? Yes.

Remember last week when I thought that the teams were going to the Atlantis hotel in the Bahamas? Well, guess what, apparently there is an Atlantis hotel in Dubai too! Learn something new everyday. Yep, for this episode they all stay put in Dubai.
First off each team had to choose a briefcase and go to a yacht club. Then one member would row a small rubber boat out to one of the yachts and receive a 'treasure' and then row back to shore. This 'treasure' would give them a clue to help open the briefcase. What they got was a watch and they had to enter the time in as the combination. Unfortunately our favorite team, the Globetrotters, had trouble translating this and they let several teams pass them.
Next up was a choice of tasks. Each team could either put together 12 different hookah pipes or they could go to a money exchange and weigh out exactly $500,000 worth of gold. The hookah pipes took a great deal of detail work. Each team that went there became frustrated.
I would have chosen the gold without any hesitation. You simply divide 500,000 by the current price and put that on the scale. The trick was that the exchange rate changes every minute. This shouldn't have been a huge problem because the fluctuations are small and you wouldn't have to make big changes.
This section was very frustrating for me to watch. One team went there and couldn't figure out the math. So they went off to the hookahs where they could screw up in a different way. One team was smart enough to bring a calculator. A different team, the poker players, breezed through this and took another team along under their wing.
The last task was to go down a long waterslide at the Atlantis. The slide is steep and it passes through a tube that goes through shark filled water. The entire ride might last five seconds and it's completely and utterly safe. Unfortunately for one of this week's teams, it was too scary. The sixth team of the seven remaining featured a girl who just wouldn't go down. Her boyfriend didn't help. He tried to force her down, using actual force. He yelled at her and made her fears even worse. This opened the door for the trailing Globetrotters and they used it to move past them and take the last spot.
I'm trying to have some sympathy for the eliminated team but I really don't. Of all the fears that people have had to overcome on this show, 'waterslides' is by far the wussiest. If you can't close your eyes and spend five seconds on a public attraction you simply don't deserve to win the money.