And so we had our first holiday after moving to Abu Dhabi: a two-week getaway. We decided to go to somewhere warmer, of course. Haha – just kidding 🙂 Since we have received the 110% dose of vitamin D this year already we decided to visit, well, home – our parents, relatives and friends in Lithuania.

The journey with Etihad Airways through Germany (Munich) wasn’t as good as planned – we were supposed to go to Riga, land around 6pm where my parents would pick us up and drive to Lithuania (they live close to Latvian border). And yet, the connection in Munich was sooo bad – the 50 minutes allocated wasn’t enough, we were running like a 5k and still couldn’t make it. Needless to say, it got on my nerve quite badly and I ended up in tears – the situation was really pathetic, nobody could help us, we couldn’t find a person who could help us find our luggage for around 2 hours. Eventually we took Lufhansa flight home and landed in Riga…just after midnight. Now my husband has made a case for Etihad Airways to prove that they have been wrong (my husband has totally crushed it in this piece…respect from me (not a dumb analyst)).

Lithuania. We went to bed around 4.30am, just in time to see the sunrise 🙂 And, the rest of the first few days we were just marveling at how green everything is. Amazing how the eye gets used to the environment – here in Abu Dhabi, we do have greenery where we live, but with this much of sun it is just much closer to yellow.

Temperature was around +12-19C during the stay in Lithuania and we saw plenty of rain too. Not that we missed it much, but, fun to see. More fun was waking up in the morning and instead of the usual run in the +32-34 we ran in the +10C in the very first morning – I realized, running in cold weather is worse for muscles as my calves couldn’t recover for 2 days.

Since we flew back from Riga we decided to visit the Baltic Sea too – stay at Jurmala for a few days. Luckily the temperatures rose to +22-25C, so we finally could use the clothes we brought from Abu Dhabi 😛  Yes, we swam in the sea of around +17C. Survived! Apparently our Viking skins after 9 years of living in Denmark are well and alive. As my doctor has once said, “skin has memory”.

Now that we are back in Abu Dhabi we move on with work, sports and different activities. I realize now we are only at the first stage of “winter season” where outdoors really becomes a pleasure, while Nordic Europe is entering the cold and dark period. Holiday is back! It is already apparent more people are showing up on the streets; today we finally saw some more on the beach – even at 6am, the time at which the beach used to belong to us exclusively.  Our friends from Europe are already piling on the “will visit” list while our family is still yet to come visit. We have plenty of space – more than we are used to having in Europe – so hosting a few people shouldn’t be a problem. The thing which I was most happy to come back after holiday is having 2 bathrooms in one flat: needless to say, I take my time and space 🙂

As for the professional advancement, we are still all into blockchain world, and here is the right place to be for that. Dubai strategy suggests it will be all (mostly) blockchain by 2020, one of the first and few to make this bold move. Yesterday we were in the cryptocurrency meetup in Dubai where we met, among others, a guy from Consensys who is working on implementation of the strategy.  I must say, me and Ignas have advanced so much in this field since arriving to Abu Dhabi, that what we heard (questions from audience) made us realize yesterday that we are really on a steep learning curve – and we most likely wouldn’t even have even thought about this had we stayed in Denmark.