DJStroky

This place is very unique and remote. The first thing that caught my attention is that this island is part of UTC +14:00 timezone, the earliest in the world! Reading up on this place on Wikipedia, it looks like a bunch of nuclear bombs were tested here back in the 50s and 60s. Hopefully it’s ok now. However, this island along with the rest of the nation of Kiribati may be underwater soon due to global warming. I figured I better try to visit here while I have a chance.

Montreal is a very fun city. I went there on business, but there was a lot more to do during the evenings. Each day I rented a Bixi and rode around town. I happened to be there during the summer which probably made for a much funner trip. Bicycling felt amazing in the warmth, there was this music festival with 5 or so stages that had taken over 3 major downtown parks, and the sunsets were amazing. Getting around town was so easy with the Bixi or Metro. I even took an express bus to and from the airport. Way fun town.

Honestly, for all the hype about this place, I was disappointed. The first thing that ticked me off was that it is a little hard to get to using mass transit (an important issue for me). I took a cab from Mall of the Emirates station and asked my cab driver to take me to the monorail station on the mainland. He told me that it wasn’t open and instead drove me out to Atlantis. Well, he was wrong the station on the mainland was open and I paid probably an extra 15 Dirhams more than I should’ve for this taxi ride.

By the time I got onto the monorail at Atlantis it was already getting dark so I couldn’t really see anything. The monorail was also really slow and wobbly compared to Dubai Metro. When I had gotten to the Gateway station I decided I had seen enough and took a taxi back to Mall of the Emirates station to take the metro back.

Now I totally agree that the Palm is an engineering wonder of the world. However the scale of it is a little hard to consume unless you’re looking at it from an airplane or a really tall skyscraper from the Dubai Marina. When you’re driving along the trunk it feels like a slower version of Sheikh Zayed road except less magnificent – even more so on the monorail.