Traveler Stories — page 7

Bali Sunset

I specially arrived at the beach in advance so that I could find a good place before sunset. As a result, I just sat on the sand for about twenty minutes and watched as people gradually gathered by the water. Someone was taking pictures, someone was talking, children were running along the shore, and the locals were quietly going about their business. When the sun began to sink to the horizon, everything around became somehow unrealistically calm. The water reflected orange light, the waves rolled onto the shore one after another, and the palm trees against the sky turned almost into silhouettes. I took some photos, but then I put my phone away. Sometimes you don't want to photograph a place, but just remember it as you saw it for the first time. Bali Sunset Probably, it is for the sake of such evenings that it is worth sometimes traveling far from home.

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24 hours in Dubai - part two

It doesn't matter anymore After two o'clock in the afternoon, I began the stage of the journey, which I usually call "it doesn't matter now." When you realize that there's not much time left, and you haven't seen half of the city yet, planning stops making sense. You can either accept it and go to the airport calmly, or start making decisions that will seem completely insane to you in a few hours. I chose the second option. Therefore, instead of calmly continuing to walk around Dubai, I decided to go to the desert. Desert The logic was ironclad: if you only have one day in the city, you definitely need to be in a place where the city is not visible at all. Perhaps a normal person in such a situation would have chosen the nearest beach or restaurant, but I left normality somewhere near the airport exit. After all, I only came to Dubai for a day, which meant I had to use those days as illogically as possible. Where the city ends The journey took some time. The skyscrapers gradually remained behind, and then disappeared completely. Empty spaces, sand, and sparse trees began to flash by the window. I looked at all this and thought about how strangely Dubai is arranged: until recently, I was standing near the Burj Khalifa among glass towers, shopping malls and thousands of people, and now there is practically nothing around. Just the desert. And for some reason it made me feel calm. Something is happening in the city all the time: cars are driving, people are in a hurry, screens are showing something, buildings are competing with each other in height. Nothing was happening here at all. You could just look out the window and not try to get somewhere else. A desert instead of skyscrapers On the spot, we were offered a ride through the dunes. Of course, I agreed, because the phrase "I only have 24 hours in Dubai" for some reason automatically turns an ordinary person into a person who is ready for anything. The car climbed onto a sand dune, stopped for a second at the very top, and then abruptly went down. At that moment, I realized that I had two pieces of news. A good one is really a lot of fun. The bad news is that I just voluntarily paid to be rolled around the desert for a few minutes like laundry in a washing machine. But when it was over, I was laughing along with the others. Apparently, a person has an amazing ability to quickly forget about fear if everything is beautiful and no one has yet managed to tell you how much it costs to repair a car. The sunset that I didn't want to photograph By evening, the heat began to gradually recede, and we stopped among the dunes. For the first time all day, I saw a real sunset – without the skyscrapers, advertising screens, and people who are sure to be in the frame right when you're about to take a photo. It was just that the sun was slowly sinking behind the sand. I took out my phone, took a few pictures, and put it away almost immediately. Because sometimes photography only gets in the way. You start thinking about how to set up the camera, where to take it from, and then where to put it all, and you completely forget that you actually came here to watch. I sat down right on the sand and was just silent for a while. I managed to see more contrasts in one day than I sometimes get to see in a week: skyscrapers in the morning, old neighborhoods and a bay in the afternoon, and now a desert. And there was still the Dubai evening ahead. The city wakes up in the evening When we returned to the city, it was already about eight o'clock in the evening, and Dubai seemed to have been turned on again. During the day, I was constantly looking for shade, but now the streets were filled with people, restaurants opened terraces, cars streamed along the roads, and skyscrapers lit up with thousands of windows. I went to the Dubai Marina and decided to just walk around aimlessly. After such a day, it was pointless to try to complete another item from the list. If I kept running from one landmark to another, after a few hours I wouldn't remember where I was. Marina turned out to be completely different from the city I saw in the morning. People were walking along the water, someone was sitting in a cafe, yachts were slowly passing along the canal, and high-rise buildings were reflected in the water. For a second, it even seemed to me that I was not looking at the real city, but at the scenery. But then a guy walked by with a bag of food, the kids ran after him, someone was swearing on the phone, and a woman at the next table was trying to take pictures of dinner. And I thought again that it is precisely such ordinary moments that for some reason make the place real. Abu Dhabi in the evening Finally, you can take your time I sat down to dinner and for the first time all day I looked at my watch without alarm. There were still a few hours left, but I didn't want to rush anywhere else. I realized that it is impossible to "see Dubai" in a day. You can only get to know it a little bit – to see it huge and small, modern and old, noisy and almost empty. And, probably, this turned out to be the main discovery of this trip. In the morning, I tried to create the perfect route and constantly thought about how many places I hadn't seen yet. By evening, it didn't matter at all how many ticks there were in front of the attractions. It was already interesting for me to just sit, look at the water and watch the people. Last meeting with Burj Khalifa With a few hours left before the plane, I decided to take another trip to the Burj Khalifa. This time – without a goal, without a list and without the desire to do something. Just to say goodbye to the city. In the morning, she seemed huge and a little unreal to me. Now I looked at her in a completely different way. There was already a whole day behind one building, dozens of kilometers of roads, old streets, a drive along the bay, a market, a desert and an evening walk. I realized that this is why travel cannot be measured by the number of sights seen. You can come to a city for a week and not feel anything, or you can spend one day there and take the whole story with you. What's left after 24 hours I came to Dubai with a very simple task – to see as much as possible in one day. As a result, I didn't see everything I had planned, got lost several times, overheated, tired, spent more money than I had intended, and at some point I stopped realizing what time it was. But perhaps that's why the trip was memorable. During these 24 hours, Dubai has managed to seem to me like a city of the future, an old trading port, a huge tourist area, a desert and just an ordinary city where people go to work, have dinner, walk and hurry about their business. And when I finally boarded the plane, I caught myself thinking that now I want to go back. Just not for 24 hours anymore. Abu Dhabi from an airplane

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24 hours in Dubai - Part one

I ended up in Dubai for 24 hours. ​"How much time do I have?" – About a day. "In Dubai?" - Yes. – Well, then I'm lost. Because spending a day in Dubai and not going anywhere is like being in the fridge and deciding that you're going to eat buckwheat exclusively today. The plane arrived early in the morning. I left the airport with a backpack, a phone, and the completely idiotic belief that it was possible to see the city in 24 hours. I didn't know then that Dubai was a city that looked on the map as if all the interesting places were literally in neighboring blocks, but in reality there might be several kilometers of road, an interchange, another interchange, and, apparently, an interchange that was built specifically to You've never been able to get to the previous one. But I didn't have much time, so I decided not to talk about the scale of the city and went straight to the Burj Khalifa. Burj Khalifa ​The first time I saw her was from the car and at first I thought, "Well, tall and tall." But as it got closer, that feeling quickly disappeared. The photos do not convey the size of this structure at all: in the picture you see a skyscraper, but in real life you stand next to it and realize that someone seems to have forgotten to reduce the building before placing it in the real world. I tried to take a normal photo for about five minutes, but each time it turned out the same thing: either the tower was in the frame, or my feet were in the frame. She just couldn't fit the whole thing. At some point, I put my phone away and decided that sometimes it's better to just look through my eyes, rather than trying to immediately turn everything I see into a photo. However, I couldn't enjoy the walk for a long time – it was so hot outside that after a few minutes I began to perceive any shadow as a potential place for permanent residence. Burj Khalifa The walk I overestimated ​On the map, the next point looked very close. The navigator cheerfully informed me: "15 minutes on foot," and I, as a person who is clearly not familiar enough with the climate of Dubai, decided to take a walk. For the first ten minutes, I felt like a real traveler. Five minutes later, I started looking for the nearest air-conditioned room. After about twenty minutes, I began to treat cars with a whole new respect, and after a few minutes I realized that humanity had not spent so much effort on inventing air conditioners in vain. In the end, I hailed a taxi, got in, and when the cold air blew over me, I felt about the same emotions as a man who had just been rescued from the desert. Old Dubai ​It was after that that I found myself in Old Dubai, and the most interesting thing happened here. Until that moment, I was looking at the Dubai that is usually shown on the Internet: glass towers, huge shopping malls, expensive cars, perfectly clean streets and the feeling that the whole city is wiped every morning with a special napkin. And then I turned into small streets, and the scenery seemed to have changed. Narrow aisles, small shops, the smell of spices, old buildings, vendors who are calmly talking to customers, someone is in a hurry somewhere, someone is sitting at the store and just watching what is happening. There was no sense of a giant city of the future that was constantly trying to impress you with its scale. And it was here that I became really interested for the first time. Because I began to realize that Dubai is not just about what it has built over the past decades. It has another side, which is easy to overlook if you spend the entire journey between skyscrapers and shopping malls. Boat across the bay ​There was a bay nearby, and I saw small boats. I didn't have any special plans, so I just boarded one of them. The boat started moving, and after a few minutes I found myself in the middle of the water, looking at two completely different cities at the same time: on the one hand, there were old buildings and small marinas, on the other, modern Dubai was gradually growing, and somewhere far above it all, the Burj Khalifa still towered. Boat across the bay I was sitting there thinking about how strangely first impressions work. In the morning, it seemed to me that Dubai is a city of skyscrapers, where everything should be huge and expensive. And now I was sailing on a small boat along the old bay, and I realized that this simple moment might be more memorable to me than half the places I came here for. That's probably the point of traveling: the most memorable things don't always turn out to be the ones you've marked on the map in advance. Market ​After the boat, I decided to just go wherever I wanted. This is generally my favorite way to travel, because when you have every hour scheduled, you constantly think about the next point, and when there is no route, you can accidentally turn into an alley and discover a place you didn't know anything about. That's how I ended up on the market. I literally went to look, and after a few minutes they offered me sweets, showed me spices and told me something about the goods. At some point, I found myself talking to the seller, even though five minutes ago I wasn't going to buy anything here at all. Of course, I ended up buying something. It is still difficult to explain what exactly it is. When friends ask: – And why did you need it? I answer: — I don't know. And, perhaps, this is the most honest answer that can be given to the question of half of the things bought during travel. 14:00 ​When I finally looked at my watch, it was already two o'clock in the afternoon. And that's when it got a little unsettling. I had less than half a day left, and the list of things I wanted to see hadn't decreased much. The desert, the sea, Dubai at night, the Marina, the observation deck – and about twenty-seven other places that a normal person would never try to cram into one day. I opened the map, looked at the distances, closed the map, opened it again, and even for a second hoped that the distances had somehow decreased during this time. They have not decreased. And then I decided to do what any reasonable person would do in such a situation. Go to the desert. Because if you have ten hours left in Dubai, it's obvious that you need to get even further away from Dubai. It was from that moment on that my relatively calm one-day itinerary finally stopped being calm. But this is already in the second part.

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7 days in Paris: my route around the city

When I was planning a week in Paris, everything looked perfect in my head: coffee and a croissant in the morning, museums and walks in the afternoon, and a glass of wine in the evening with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Of course, reality quickly made its adjustments. But my experience has shown more than once that expectations and reality are not the same thing. During the week, I managed to get lost, get wet in the rain, come to the closed door of the restaurant and choose the wrong subway line several times. But it seems that it is precisely because of these small failures that I remember Paris as the present. Day 1. Exploring Paris and the first failure On the first day, I decided not to overload the sights. I left my suitcase, left the hotel, and just went for a walk. The first point of the route was the Seine embankment. From there, I walked to Notre Dame, looked at the Isle de la Cité, and then headed towards the Latin Quarter. And it was here that the first failure occurred. After the trip, I naturally got hungry, and instead of choosing a normal cafe, I sat down in the first place near the tourist street. As a result, I got an expensive, but cold and tasteless omelet. But in the evening I bought a baguette, cheese and fruit and had a simple dinner. It turned out much tastier and much more Parisian than my expensive lunch. Day 2. Louvre, Tuileries and 20,000 steps The Louvre Museum was scheduled for the second day. I naively thought that I would spend two or three hours there. As a result, I came out almost five hours later with the feeling that my brain was no longer able to perceive art. After leaving the Louvre, I walked through the Tuileries Garden to the Place de la Concorde, and then decided to walk to the Arc de Triomphe. It turned out to be a mistake))) By the evening, the phone showed more than 20 thousand steps, my legs officially refused to cooperate, and the new shoes, of course, rubbed my heel. I had to find a pharmacy and buy patches. The romance of Paris at that time looked something like this: I was sitting on a bench, taping my leg and eating chocolate from the nearest supermarket. When the lights on the Champs-Elysees came on in the evening, the good mood finally returned. Day 3. Montmartre and the rain that "should not have been" I completely reserved the third day for Montmartre. In the morning I went up to the Sacré Coeur Basilica, looked at the city from above and went to wander through the small streets. It was the Paris I had imagined before the trip: old houses, small cafes, artists, stairs, balconies, and random beautiful courtyards. And then it started to rain. The umbrella was left in the room, of course, because it was sunny in the morning. 10 minutes later, I was already standing under the tiny awning of the store, along with several other equally optimistic people. As a result, I bought the most tourist umbrella in Paris, which broke down two days later. After the rain, I still made it to the Place des Tertres, and in the evening I found a small bistro away from the busiest streets. I ordered onion soup and decided that wet jeans could be considered part of the French experience. Day 4. Eiffel Tower and the Subway War The fourth day is the Eiffel Tower. I specially came in the morning to see her without the evening crowd. Then I walked along the Champ de Mars, reached the Trocadero and sat for a long time with coffee, just looking at the tower. After lunch, I decided to take the subway to another area. And this is where my personal war with Parisian transport began. It turns out that I got on the wrong side, and noticed it after a few stops, got off, moved to another platform, then for some reason I got the wrong direction again. At one point, my route on my phone looked like I had specifically decided to explore underground Paris. The trip, which was supposed to take twenty minutes, stretched for almost an hour. But in the evening I returned to the Eiffel Tower. When the lights turned on, all my transportation misery instantly ceased to matter. Day 5. Croissants, Mare and a closed cafe On the fifth day, I decided to arrange the most peaceful morning for myself. I found a bakery, bought a fresh croissant and coffee, and went for a walk around the Marais. I really liked this area: here you can walk for hours without a specific purpose, go into small shops, look at the windows and periodically stop for coffee. The main gastronomic point of the day was supposed to be the cafe, which I had saved at home. I specially set the route so that I could be next to him for lunch. Came. Closed. It turned out that the establishment was not working that day. Of course, it did not occur to me to check the schedule in advance. In the end, I bought a sandwich and ate it on the first bench I saw. And suddenly it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable dinners of the entire trip: the usual Parisian life is around, someone is walking the dog, someone is reading, someone is in a hurry to work. No specially created atmosphere, just a city. Day 6. Versailles and the fatigue of beauty On the sixth day, I decided to get out of the center and go to Versailles. The palace is really impressive, but by this point I had already realized an important thing: even beauty can get tired. After the halls, paintings, gold, and endless photographs, I went out into the gardens and realized that what I most wanted was not cultural experiences, but just to sit down. Of course, I also forgot to have a proper breakfast before the trip. That's why I looked around Versailles for about half of it with one thought: "Where can I eat here?" There were no plans for the evening. I returned to Paris, went to the supermarket, bought ready-made food and had dinner in my room. And you know what? After six days of restaurants and cafes, this dinner seemed almost perfect. Day 7. Paris without a plan I purposely left the last day empty. No tickets. No mandatory museums. There is no timetable by the minute. I went out to the Seine again, bought coffee, went to several bookstores, walked the streets for a long time and returned to places that I liked in the early days. And that's when I realized that my best day in Paris turned out to be a day without a route. During the week, I saw the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Marais, Versailles and dozens of beautiful streets. But for some reason I remember not only them. I remember the broken umbrella. Patches after 20 thousand steps. A closed cafe, for which I walked half the city. A trip in the wrong direction by subway. Dinner from the supermarket and that unfortunate omelet on the first day. That's probably how travel should be. Because the ideal route can be saved in notes. And the real trip starts exactly at the moment when something doesn't go according to plan.

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