Two Passports And A Dog

We spent the winter in Dubai, the capital of the Emirate of Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates. Towards the end of our stay (more on that later), we finally got out of the city to experience the rest of the emirate and country. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, is a popular day trip from Dubai. Strict inter-emirate COVID firewalls necessitated a bit of planning, but in late January we undertook the 90-minute drive to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the jewel of the emirate and one of the largest mosques in the world. While the UAE is fast becoming sartorially Westernized – I saw many…

Let’s continue catching up. We spent the winter in Dubai. As mentioned prior, short-term housing prices proved this to be a bad idea, but we made the most of it: sunny and 75 for three straight months isn’t a bad weather forecast. (On New Year’s Eve we actually got rain, a rarity causing people to peep out of their apartments to film the downpour on their phones.) Our new apartment backed up to the Burj Khalifa, and our bedroom looked south towards Business Bay. Unlike our first month’s rental, this one actually had chairs on its balcony, where we could sit and watch the sunrise. The Burj is one of…

Oh hi, good to see you again! It’s been a few months since we ran into each other at that Super Target. How are things? Have you been working out? You look great. Hope that ointment worked. As for us, Rachel and Lily and I moved to Dubai in October. My intention was to blog each week, but it looks like I’m about *checks watch* 17 weeks behind. Let’s catch up – I’ll try to make it quick. My company had requested we move to Dubai, as plans to open a new office in London were on hold. Upon arrival, I dutifully re-learned how to put on adult clothes with…

So now we come to a turning point in our European journey. You will of course recall that the ultimate reason Rachel and I were traipsing across this continent was to bide time while my company set up its new office in London. In September I was informed that these plans had been put on hold indefinitely, and could we please move to their current office in Dubai? Rachel and I had many many discussions about this proposal, not a small number of which centered on the fact that dogs can’t fly in cabin into the UAE. Thus, the move necessitated a convoluted 24-hour odyssey, flying from Prague to Istanbul…

Warning: many pictures ahead. View on a slow mobile connection at your own risk. There’s lots of words too, but you can safely tune those out. Sometimes I ramble. Our week in Munich was much too short, but there was an AirBnb reservation in Prague with the Sanders name on it. We underwent a slight measure of panic at the train station when we belatedly looked up entry requirements for the Czech Republic and thought we needed a PCR Test and government entry approval, but we finally spotted the size-2 light-light-grey text on white background entombed at the bottom of the page that read, verbatim, “None of this applies if…

Switching trains is a pain for us; it usually entails hustling through an unfamiliar train station with 100 lbs. of luggage and an athletically-challenged dog, trying to run up and down unlabeled stairs to make a 6-minute connection. But, hallelujah!, there was a direct train from Ljubljana to Munich. I purchased tickets on Trainline.com and we showed up at the train station early on Saturday morning. Easy, right? Not so fast, my friend. We checked the board for the platform assignment, and saw that the “Train Type” notation for our row said “BUS”. Hmm, does that stand for “Business-Class”? When an actual tour bus pulled into the parking lot, quickly…

It’s absolutely a cliché for travel bloggers to have at least one post where they commiserate that travel can be hard, and that day-to-day life on the road isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Maybe this is one of those posts? I don’t know; I haven’t written it yet. You’ll know by the end, I suppose. You will recall that Dubrovnik has no train station, so we left the city on our first plane in three months. We flew to Zagreb, then re-entered the Schengen Zone and crossed into Slovenia by train en route to Ljubljana. Now. Be honest. I know you skipped over pronouncing that word in your head, so…

Travel Maxim #42: No matter where you go, which city you stay in, how many TripAdvisor reviews you read, how many Expedia points you have, how much money you spend, which mode of transportation you take, who your host is, what languages they speak, which side of the train tracks you’re on, what time of day you arrive, what the weather is like, what floor you’re on, which currency you pay with, what time zone you’re in, how close your neighbors are, or how long you’re staying… …there will always be a barking dog. Zagreb had begun to grow on us after two weeks, but it was time to leave.…