It’s been over a month since I last posted. The problem is that I am working more now. What am I doing? Writing, writing and more writing. That leaves me with much less time — and brainpower — to write about our travels and play time. Not that I am complaining. I am glad to have some work.  But, I will try to do better on the blog posts.

We went to Abu Dhabi in April: a time in Europe when the weather is still quite cold everywhere, and in Warsaw when there are way too many grey days.

Abu Dhabi is the largest of the United Arab Emirates member states and it is also the name of the second largest city in the UAE (after Dubai). Upon our arrival, the first thing we noticed was all the development. These are the cities of the future, with Abu Dhabi planned as recently as the 1970s. We are watching buildings go up daily in Warsaw south of the city, but this is an entirely different game!

I knew that Dubai had a large number of expats. In fact, we have friends moving from Warsaw to Dubai just this month. What surprised me though was the size of the expat population. In Abu Dhabi, 80% are expat workers.

As we always do when visiting a place, we found the highest viewpoint. You really don’t have a sense of a place until you view it from above.

Here you can get a peek at the sand, the water and some construction at the edge of the city.

This is the Emirates Palace, marketed as a seven star hotel. No, we didn’t stay here:)

We also went to see the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, which was pretty incredible. It can hold more than 40,000 worshippers.

It was a short four days, with two six hour flights on either side so for the rest of the trip we did what we do so infrequently when we travel…

…we took some time to relax.

I know there were more things to do and see. And, I had wanted to visit an old friend living in Dubai, but we all just needed some time off in the sun. Plus we really couldn’t get Miss H far from the pool!