Podcast: Play in new window | Download (46.3MB)

You always feel like you’re getting short-changed when you’re only in a country for a day or two.  We had only 17 hours to spend in Dubai, but I’m surprised how much we got to see and do.  We wandered two gigantic malls, went snow skiing, walked the base of the world’s tallest building, road around the city on a tour bus, and of course we ate at McDonald’s for lunch!

Most of the menu in Dubai’s McDonald’s was the normal fare;  the stuff that wasn’t was almost exclusively vegetarian.  We tried the Veggie Burger, spring rolls, and a McPuff!  I could have trimmed this video down a little more — it’s one of the longer McDonald’s videos we’ve made — but there are a couple funny moments that I just didn’t want to cut out.  (Plus there’s a bit of background on that whole Orbitz fiasco thing we went through.  I forgot that by this point, we still weren’t sure if we were going to get reimbursed for our new plane tickets; we eventually did!)

At the end of September, we went through a huge fiasco with Orbitz that completely changed our travel plans.  Months before, we had purchased tickets to fly from Moscow to Bangkok by way of Sri Lanka.  The day before our flight, we learned that it had been rescheduled and we’d already missed it.  Fortunately, we managed to iron everything out with Orbitz, but not before we had to purchase a second set of airline tickets at the last minute.  Our new flight plan included a 17-hour layover in Dubai.

I never expected to travel to the United Arab Emirates and the only thing I knew about Dubai was that it was the most “Westernized” of the cities in the Middle East.  We had zero time to research, but I was still excited.  If nothing else, I’d get to see the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formally the Burj Dubai!)

(more…)