Vacation plans

Our little furry samurai ;) Banzaiiiiiiii!!!

After a very very very hectic end of spring and beginning of summer, finally it's time for holidays. Summer holidays for me and Ely are synonymous of some kind of adventure abroad, in search of new vitality for the rest of the year, curiosity to discover a new culture, a new place and - if possible - meet old friends and make new ones. We aren't those kind of travelers who just expect a sunny beach to lie down and rest for 2 weeks or so. We are greedy of enriching ourselves with something different than bare resting. In fact, we usually come back home and we are even more tired than before, but with an unexpected new strength given by the travel that we have just experienced. It's difficult to explain how it makes us feel, but for sure among our readers we will find someone with the same attitude who will understand us perfectly.

Probably I have already written among the lines of the previous posts that this summer we are heading to Japan and we will travel around the japanese islands for about 3 weeks. :)

We have always wanted to travel to Japan, but just recently we have took the final decision to spend our holidays there. I also have a couple of japanese friends in Tokyo, and we will probably meet up while there. We met for the first time when at university we attended the same meeting at french Lille's EDHEC Business School in 1998. It was a great experience at that time to meet students from all over the world and after that we kept in touch until now. It will be great to meet Ayako and Yukiko again.

So, just another full week of work and then we'll fly away! We can't wait!!

If possible, we will post from Japan. Otherwise we will make a recap upon our return back home at the end of August!

Do you have any tips about Japan? We would like to have suggestions from our blog readers who have been there before and have some recommendation for us! Thank you!

Slowly back to normality...

Wow! Almost a month has passed since our last post from Dubai. As all has probably noticed, we didn't have much time and also didn't have many opportunities to make posts from Dubai, mostly because we were always around and internet cafes aren't very common. Moreover internet rates in hotel were very high, and when it was for free...my i-phone didn't work properly and couldn't connect to my mail server...

The holiday was great: we could experience a new culture, a new place to visit and terrific landscapes. It was all much better than what we were expecting. Our hotels were fantastic and at a very reasonable rate we could experience a 5 star treatment.
It was also shocking to pass from the wealthy and futuristic Dubai to the more genuine, but definitely poorer, Sultanate of Oman, in the Musandam Peninsula. The journey to Oman passes through dramatic landscapes of rough colorful rocky mountains that face a light blue clear sea. With up and down, the only-one paved road reaches Khasab, the biggest town of the entire region of Musandam.
We visited the town...
We had a one-day cruise...
and a mountain safari...
Our return back home was hectic. The flight to London went smooth and as expected we spent a half day in London, shopping at Westfield. But that same evening we had problems with Ryanair from Luton (the worst travelling experience ever! Ryanair sucks!!!) and couldn't fly back home. Ely had also a flu, caught days before in Dubai for the extreme temperature difference between air conditioning in the hotels or shopping malls and the outside (averange temperature outside was between 39°C/102°F and 50°C/122°F!!!). So we were in a complete chaos, with half of our baggages on their way to Milan, while we were stuck in London with the other half and the problem to how and when go back home. Ryanair ground crew in Luton has been very rude, not professional and absolutely not helpful at all. We had to find another flight from Gatwick to Innsbruck (Austria) leaving the next morning. So we took a bus (3 hours from Luton to Gatwick South) and we arrived back home only the next day after midday.

The next day I also had a flu and Ely and I were sent to the E.R. of Trento hospital by our family doctor, because they had the doubt we could have been infected by the Swine flu! After an half day in hospital and many many exams, we finally returned back home. It wasn't Swine flu, but a simple cold with fever.

Now we are completely recovered, and back to work.

We are happy to be back home now, with all the comforts that our own house can give...but we also think back of our holiday and at all the fun we had and would raccomend everybody to go to visit Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. It's quite an experience! We can tell!