Dubai Expo 2020

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I know, when it comes to blogging, I'm only around two months late for the moment. But slowly we are getting there. After 5 weeks in Europe, and 5 other weeks in Russia, we board the direct plane from St Petersburg to Dubai.



I've been fortunate enough to visit the Expo 1992 in Seville as well as multiple stops in 2010 for the Expo in Shanghai. These were so fun to visit that I couldn't not bring Tanya to Dubai. So this one is easy, it's just a 5 nights stop on our way back home in early March. Tanya has lived in Dubai and I've stopped to count how many time we visited, so the aim was solely about the Expo and having dinner with few friends.



Ideal time to visit an Expo should be five full days. Trust me, if you do so, your feet will hurt big time by the end of the visit! It's all about foot power here! This experience is also a great one to make you realize what you have seen or not seen yet of the world! So my first aim was to visit every single pavilion of countries I haven't visited yet. There are around 40 of those, and as you may guess, most of those are smaller out of the way nations. Meaning also that most of their pavilions are on the small size ones. So yes, I did visit all of those, including Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia, to my opinion the most impressive of all the pavilions is also one of the country I still have to visit with Koweit next door! Interestingly, North Korea was in Shanghai, but they never made their way to Dubai!

Ideally you would need five full days to explore the Expo 2020. We did four days, but not always full ones. Trust me, the feet do hurt at the end of each day. We visited something like 80% of the pavilions. Sadly, we never made it inside Japan or Germany. But we made it inside the Emirates one. That's a funny story. To visit Emirates pavilion, you need to book online, but when I tried, it was already fully book till the end of the Expo, end of March. Slightly disappointed. But once we turn up at the entrance, I just had to give them my Emirates Gold level frequent flyer number to be let in 10 minutes later. It was more gimmicky than anything, but we had fun.



Expo 2020 is also one of the cheapest to visit. The UAE government has been solid pro-active in facilitating the visit for locals. A season pass cost close to nothing. Emirates, them again, just gave us complimentary season passes as we were flying with them, as easy as it gets!



So how does this Expo compare to the other ones. Well...we never queued more than one hour, which is very different from the queues in Seville or Shanghai. But I have to admit most pavilions were less impressive too. This may have been due to the constrain of Covid. Let's not forget that the Expo should have opened in October 2020....and not the full year later as it did happen. All in all, truly fun experience and we cannot wait for the next one! But for now....time to finally get home for few days...before more tourism in our gorgeous South Africa!

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