Dubai: The World’s Biggest Everything

A stopover in Dubai en-route to India was an obvious choice for us as almost all flights from Europe to Asia go through Dubai. Most flights arrive late in the evening/early morning and the connecting flights leave hours later. We thought it would be much better to spend a couple days gawking at the engineering marvels in Dubai. Since the early 2000’s Dubai has been dumping money into infrastructure and luxury accommodation to attract tourists and has become a city of the world’s biggest/best everything. As an example of how far the country will go to attract tourists you just have to look at the Palm Islands: because the beautiful pristine coastline wasn’t long enough for the amount of tourists, Dubai built the Palm Islands with the first (Palm Jumeirah) adding 78 kilometers of beach to the city and another two islands are in the works. Continue reading

The ‘Two-Week Tourist’ (Poland: Part III – Auschwitz, Zakopane & Krawkow)

If you follow our blog, or know us, you probably understand that we are not your typical ‘two-week tourist’. The ‘two-week tourist’ as we call them, tries to do everything in two weeks; it makes sense, they have two weeks off a year and want to do/see as much as possible in that limited time. They also probably have a daily budget close to ten times ours. For us to try and be that type of tourist in all of the places we have been too (over 112 cities and counting), it would simply be impossible – we would have ran out of money months ago and likely been so exhausted we’d just have flown home. Continue reading