In this historical photo, Dasha is still a baby, Sanya and Kostya, as I remember now, are watching Spider-Man, but they just can’t figure out how to switch to Russian and that’s why they have such concentrated faces.

We are all flying together to a new country unknown to us. At that time, I had only read a couple of articles about the United Arab Emirates a few times and looked at photos of Dubai, and also scoured Google Maps in search of Irina’s office, which in the end turned out to be in a completely different place.

July 31, 00:27— we landed at Dubai DXB airport and are in a hurry to get our luggage after passport control, which we went through quite quickly.

We go down the escalator, already tired, but happy, the flight was great

After we rested and woke up in the morning at the hotel, this beautiful view of Dubai Marina awaited us in the windows:

View from our first Marriot Dubai Harbor hotel in Dubai Marina

Read what happened next during these nine amazing months on the pages of my blog.