The last 2 years have made themselves felt. Already at the beginning of 2023, I really wanted to go to the sea. Preparations for the trip to Abu Dhabi began in winter. The first thing to do was to choose a location for a vacation. And Aviasales and ChatGPT helped me with this.
Recommendation of the month: Netology – an educational platform for teaching modern in-demand professions in the areas of Marketing, Business and Management, Design and UX, Programming, Analytics and Data Science, EdTech, B2B. Over 10 years of work, they have trained more than 60,000 specialists.
- Preparing for the trip
- Border control in Yerevan
- Flight and case at Abu Dhabi airport
- A week in Abu Dhabi
- Advantages of Abu Dhabi
- Disadvantages of Abu Dhabi
- Conclusion
Preparing for the trip
For several days in a row, I have been looking at countries where it is relatively cheap to fly from Yerevan, and where a “complicated” visa would not be required to travel.
Thailand fell off first, because the flight there was quite expensive. Then Turkey disappeared, because in the second half of autumn the sea there is already quite cold, and we went purposefully to swim in warm water.
After a couple of weeks of monitoring flights and recreation conditions, three countries remained on the shortlist of locations: Cyprus, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
I have rejected Cyprus because it now requires a paid visa, the documents for which must be submitted in advance. And at the same time, there is a chance that they will not give you a visa, and tickets are purchased six months before the trip and may simply burn out as a result. Israel and the UAE became the finalists.
Then it was ChatGPT’s turn.
I questioned the robot in detail about each of these countries, which helpfully delivered information to me from all over the Internet. Starting with which city is the best place to relax in November, and ending with information about taxis, attractions and food prices.
Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi and Dubai were in the final. In each of these cities, I looked at the hotels, entered the prices for 7 days’ accommodation in the table, including food, visits to various entertainment venues, public transport and plane flights from Yerevan. So Dubai fell off as the most expensive option.
Sanya and I have been choosing between Israel and the Emirates for quite a long time. As history later showed, we were damn lucky to choose the final destination.
Before that, we also went to local travel agencies and found out how much an all-inclusive trip to the sea would cost. We were given a price tag that started at $2,000 for two for a week. Therefore, we decided to go on our own.
Four Yerevan-Abu Dhabi (round trip) tickets were purchased for 180 euros through the Wizz Air website. As far as I understood, it turned out to be quite budget-friendly.
The hotel was booked from the first to the 8th of November via Booking.com . The most important thing for us was to have it located closer to the beach, because the main purpose of the trip was to swim in the warm sea. Seven nights on the eighteenth floor of a comfortable hotel cost us 420 dollars for two.
In general, the plan compiled using ChatGPT looked something like this:
Border control in Yerevan
We got from Gyumri to Yerevan via a local carrier – GG. A small minivan. They take people from the center of Gyumri and take them to the center of Yerevan for 2 hours. It costs about 5 or 10 dollars.
A border crossing quest was waiting for me at the Yerevan airport. After all, I am currently in the process of obtaining a residence permit, and my period of stay in the country has already been expired (due to red tape). In a good way, it was necessary to pay a fine of $ 125.
We had online registration. I told the border guard everything as it is: that I have already received a social card of Armenia, registered as an individual entrepreneur, collected and submitted documents for a residence permit, and now I am just waiting for the decision of the state authorities.
The border guard said that I would have to wait a bit, left his office and went to call someone. About 10 minutes later, another airport employee approached him, they talked about something, and wished me all the best on my vacation in the Emirates.
Flight and case at Abu Dhabi Airport
An interesting observation: this time I had no headache on the plane, my blood pressure did not rise, and in general I felt fine. Two quiet years in Armenia have clearly had a positive effect on my health.
We spent most of the way above the clouds, so there was little to see through the porthole. They were mostly desert landscapes, hills and mountains.
But when they began to descend over the Persian Gulf, I did not look up from the window at all. At first, I looked at the hundreds of ships queuing to enter the bay. And then I admired the landscapes of the Emirates.
Everything is as convenient as possible at the airport: it is clear where to go and what to do. By the way, as we later learned, it was the first day of operation of the renovated Abu Dhabi airport.
In the United Arab Emirates, border control is divided into two types:
- For those who arrive in the country for the first time, there is a standard counter with a border guard.
- And if you have already been to the Emirates, just attach your passport to a special terminal and go through without any questions.
There are quite a lot of checkpoints, so the queue moves quickly. However, it turned out that there are several smart female tourists from Russia in our queue.
As it turned out later, a large group of Russian women, seeing a long queue, split in half and stood in several queues. As soon as they approached the control point in one of the queues, the aunts from the other queues rushed to “their own” in this queue.
Naturally, this caused outrage among those who stood behind this group of tourists. Airport security officers immediately appeared and began to find out what had happened, interviewing both the aunts themselves and other people from the queue.
At first, the cunning aunts generally wanted to be thrown out of the queue, but they began to be indignant, and the airport staff did not want to make a scandal. Therefore, first of all, people with children were taken out of the queue and sent to a separate window.
Half of the aunts were still taken to another queue, and they apologized to the rest of the tourists, handed out bottles of cool water to everyone, and began to reduce the queue from two ends, periodically sending people to other border control windows.
As a result, we started being late to the hotel based on our own schedule. In addition to this, it is also not