Layover in Dubai

Enroute to Italy from Hong Kong to kick off our Europe trip, I decided to intentionaly plan a 17 hour layover in Dubai (…who’d want to do that to themselves!?!?). I went back and forth, but ultimately decided to include it firstly because we’ve never been to Dubai before, so it offered us an opportunity to get a taste of what the popular UAE city had to offer. Secondly (and more important to me), it ended up splitting up our flight time to Italy to roughly 6 hrs for each flight. Having traveled many times on direct 10+ hr flights, I’ve grown to hate long haul flights 😡 , so the break to stretch my legs was appreciated…win, win. 🙂

Our flight to Dubai got in at around 11pm and our connection to Rome was scheduled to leave 5pm the next day. Factoring in hotel check in/out and time to sleep we were left with a very small window of about 5 hours to explore Dubai during the day. Top on the list of things to do was visit Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world. As someone who’s lived in Hong Kong and New York, I don’t normally get excited about big buildings, but given it’s current status and also having the highest public observation desk, it was worth a visit.

Here are pictures from the observation desk: