22.2 - Beach, Burj Al Arab and swimming

This was one short night. Due to our long discussion and catch-up session last night, got only about 6h of sleep. Oh well :)

Camping over at Jaana's place. She is sharing a nice big apartment with another co-worker. View is quite beautiful, could see the sea and Burj Al-Arab from living room balcony only IF the visibility would be better. At least the sun still shines in this town, not like in Bangkok.

More apple cake for breakfast and off to the beach we go. It was a nice walk through local neighbourhood. Dust is everywhere around here - Dubai is a total desert city. Only green patches are by hotels or public parks, and in the parks they have an entrance fee by the way.

Layed on the beach and got the first sun overdose :) We must have been in the sun for about 1.5 hours or so. I guess I did not do a very good job with applying sunscreen :) I got finger marks on my back and my legs are burned :D But it was so nice to feel the heat, themperature must be close to 30C here - so incredibly wonderful!

Visited Mercato which is famous Renaissance-themed shopping mall, it featured all the wonderful shops like GAP, Laura Ashley and Laura Ashley Home, Promode, Virgin records and so on.

Getting back from Mercato was a bit of a hassle. It is located on one of the main roads here - Jumeirah road. Hassle was because of the bus traffic here, it is very anti-touristy since you can't buy tickets in the bus, you need the buscard, which I did not have :( After 45 minutes of trying to get on a bus, me and one other lady (from Kazhastan) ended up catching a cab to get down the road. Stopped by Burj Al-Arab Hotel - trademark of Dubai. As Wikitravel writes it is famed for being the first seven-star hotel in the world (technically a five star deluxe hotel), this striking sail-shaped building is a symbol of Dubai and one of the most opulent hotels in the world.

By the hotel there is Madinat center - I'd name it a little Venice :) It has canals between the houses where gondolas take people around. There are lots of little shops and restaurants and the whole place is quite nice. Since no-one is allowed to go to the Burj Al-Arab hotel area then from Medinat center one gets a beautiful view :)

In the evening Jaana took me along to the swim practices that she joins here once in a while - that was fun :) The coach is from UK, former swimmer, and trains about 30 master swimmers here. Quick warmup and then 25-125m splits with various speeds, last bit was 2x100 all out. So basically, quite intense training. Whole practice lasted an hour. Dragged ourselves back home and were soo happy to go straight to bed.

Thank you all for the numerous birthday wishes :)

I'm in DUBAI !!!

I made it! Got out of Munich just fine, flight went fine and all was pretty good. Until the customs. Oh this one was a headache and lots of standing in line. It is more difficult to get into Dubai than it was getting into US 10 years ago. Seriously it is quite bad. I was asked all kinds of strange questions about cigarettes and the like (don't ask). Once I got out of the customs I was ready for some serious drinking - it was bad.

Instead, Jaana was at the airport greeting me with a rose :D for my birthday, how sweet! Later she treated me with apple pie and now, 2 hours after heavy chatting, life is beautiful again. I think I'd be darn miserable in a hotel room at the moment - so thank you Jaana!

And the visa has arrived

I have got the visa now :) It is pink and all :D

Stopover in Munich was nice - 14h beauty sleep took care of my sleep deprivation very nicely. Now to breakfast and then back to airport and off to Dubai I go!

(dea is dancing.... and singing in the shower :-P)

Stopover in Munich

I have no clue what the deal with the visa is. For now the the flight has been rescheduled and postponed for 24 hours - meaning, I get to spend the night in Munich :) I'm staying in a beautiful village close to the airport. It is total spring here, temperature outside is +5C, sun is shining and the birds are singing so loud that one can't hear his/her own thoughts. It is nice here.

Airport is wonderful as well, wireless does cost and is quite expensive, but at least it is available in quite big part of the airport (as I discovered by accident).

News about the visa is that it will be approved tomorrow morning at 7:30, my flight leaves at 14:25 so there should be plenty of time to get the documents across and figured out. My friend in Dubai has pulled quite many strings and gotten things stirred up quite a bit as I understand. Will hear the full story once I get there - all efforts are much appreciated!

Sleepless night is doing it's trick and I'm falling asleep as I'm typing here so I'll just go to sleep. More updated tomorrow. Tadaa!

Unplanned take-off in less than 9 hours

Long story short - Air Baltic has apparently very very strict regulations on letting passengers on the plane and I did not qualify :D Basically the magical visa printout was a stopper (Kaisa, they did not accept your version! Can you believe this??) and here I am in Riga airport waiting for my flight to Munich via Stockholm. From Munich I have hopes to get to Dubai by tomorrow evening.

Uh traveling is fun as always, sitting in airports is not, but adrenaline kicks rock :D

All this precious free time I got now and here are the results:

Top 50 funny computer quotes work e-mail reading pays off well, perhaps should connect to Yammer as well, probably more goodies are waiting there :)

I have already watched 3 episodes of Californication, 8 more to go. I have a selection on movies to choose from: up in the air, the cove, the reader, state of play, seraphine, moon, public enemies, disgrace, bright star

I learned that there was a pearl market collapse around 1930's, year 1966 oil was found in Dubai - and after this the world was never the same :) 1971 Britain left the Persian Gulf and 1973 Dubai joined the other emirates in United Arab Emirates. Today the area has become known for its ambitious building projects or artificial islands and tallest ever buildings and biggest malls and so on.

My task list has numerous rows about training plans, competition guides to complete and e-mails to reply to.. so back to being productive I go :) Will try to keep you updated on my doings!

Oh and just a note about Riga airport - it is a horrible horrible place to be. First of all it is kinda cold in here, it is small, not very clean, here are no eating places (except this one pizza place which provides items that does not qualify for food) and all the smokers use toilets for smoking as there seems to be no separate area for them :( A horrible horrible place to be (well, right next to Hanoi airport I guess). At least they got wireless! It's not for free, but it is cheap.. and it works well.

As one of my friend's status message read: take a chill pill and relax!

Planned take-off in less than 3 hours

Status update:
- it is snowing heavily outside at the moment, blizzard warning is up
- I have no visa to enter Dubai
- the person who needs to arrange me a visa is stuck in Brisbane (yes in Australia) for all I know

I was assured that all will be ok... so I try not to panic :)

I guess the biggest challenge will be getting on the plane from Riga as apparently they do check visas already there. Oh well, will see what happens :D Not to worry.

The worst case scenario is that I will be stuck in Dubai airport for couple of days I guess :) Simply waiting for my friend to get the visa arranged :D Fun huh? It will be an interesting trip... and I will call it a success if I get into Dubai before my birthday :)

I'll try to keep you all up to date via tweets at least (they are displayed on the right hand side on my blog as well)

Leaving the day after tomorrow

The bad news are:
a) I still have no visa :)
b) I have not even started to think about all the necessary preparations like packing/money exchange or anything of that sort... I really hope I can figure out in time where I keep my passport :)

The good news are:
a) My friend who I'm going to visit promised to arrange the visa for me by tomorrow - it should arrive to my e-mail during the day
... and that was the only good news I got :D

Ok, well I can think of few other positive aspects, for an example the temperatures while I'm there:



No complaints :)