We are a family of 3 (2 Adults and a 5-year-old kid) and we recently toured Dubai. I am sharing my dubai traveling experience here, hoping that it could benefit someone like you in the future.

## 1. Pre Planning the Itinerary
We picked the month of November to visit Dubai, because;
- It's the end of summer, hence the heat is somewhat manageable.
- It's the start of travel season, so less crowd at attractions.
- The hotels were cheaper than the peak season rates.

Once the dates are confirmed, next thing was to shortlist the attractions/places that we wanted to visit and then bookmark the places in Google Maps like below.

![Dubai map](/img/dubai-map.png)

Bookmarking places like this helped us in finding a hotel that is closer or at a good distance from all the places we wanted to see. Since ours is a family trip with a kid, we prioritized places that had less adventure. Here's a list of places that we went.

- Day 1: Warner Bros World | Abu Dhabi _(needs at least 5 hours to enjoy)_
- Day 2: Burj Khalifa / Dubai Mall / Aquarium
- Day 3: Desert Safari _(starts at 2:00 PM in the noon and finishes at 9:00 PM in the night)_
- Day 4: Lego Land
- Day 5: Emirates Mall / Miracle Garden / Global Village _(lot of walking to be done. Better to visit after 4 PM, so stay at the mall till evening)_
- Day 6: View at the Palm / Marina walk / Dubai Garden Glow
- Day 7: Dolphin show / Old Dubai

## 2. Booking flight tickets

We booked flight tickets on Emirates airlines. We bought the tickets first because it is needed to get the Dubai visitor visa. Also, make sure to book as early as possible and plan to travel on non weekend days (Tuesday for example), to get a cheaper flight tickets.

And, if you are planning to visit _Yas Island theme parks_, I'd recommend to either plan it at start of the trip / or end of the trip and directly fly to / fly out of Abu Dhabi in Etihad airlines. This way, you will save on taxi charge / travel time in traveling between Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

## 3. Getting a Dubai tourist Visa

Getting the Tourist visa was an online process - no need to visit the Embassy in person. [Just apply online](https://uaevisaonline.ae/eligible-countries/dubai-visa-for-indians/), upload the required documents and your visa will be ready in a day.

The airlines that you booked your flight tickets provides a Visa service for a fee (Emirates does). But I contacted a travel agent in Dubai who helped me to get the visitor visa in one day. The visitor visa is a separate document and not printed on the Passports (unlike the US visas). So I took a print out of the Visa and carried it with me while traveling.

## 4. Booking a Hotel / Stay

When selecting a hotel, I looked for the following criteria:

- _affordable_ - places near the down town area were obviously overpriced. So, I picked a place near the airport and across the Dubai creek, in Wasl district.
- _accessible_ - I planned to use Dubai metro. So I searched for places  that are in walkable distance from a metro station.
- _available_ - I looked for places with south indian restaurants and groceries available nearby. So, I do not need to worry about my breakfast and dinner. Even though the hotel I stayed at provided the continental breakfast, my 5-year-old had his own dietary needs. So, a nearby south Indian hotel was a must for us. This gave us an option to save on the hotel cost, since I could select a room without breakfast option (breakfast was at additional price).

## 5. Flying to Dubai and Immigration

The immigration at Chennai airport was very quick - thanks to the newly opened terminal. There wasn't many questions other than the purpose of visit and duration. The officer checked the documents and then stamped the passport. The rest of the day was non-eventful. Finished security check and waited for our flight to arrive.

Thanks to my kid, we get to board the flight first. Most of the 4-hour journey went in sleeping.

We had a separate queue for passengers with kids at Dubai immigration. The officer did not ask any questions at all - just checked our Visa and passport and let us through. We had one more security check before the baggage claim area.

## 6. Getting a tourist SIM and a mobile data plan

There are two telecom providers in Dubai - Etislat and Du. All tourists are given one free Du sim/passport and a 2GB free data, valid for 24 hours, at the immigration counter. If you wish, you could just purchase a tourist plan from Du and use it.

I personally decided to go with Etislat, since the tourist unlimited data plan seemed to be fine with me. After collecting the baggage, upon exiting to the Metro station, there is an Etislat counter in the airport. I headed to it and got a new connection, that's valid for 30 days. They asked for passport, payment, and I was all set with a new mobile connection within 15 minutes.

I opted for an E-SIM for my new connection. This was because I wanted to have both the Indian SIM and Dubai SIM at the same time, so that I can use Dubai SIM for internet and phone calls, and Indian SIM to receive SMS/OTP messages that will come for the credit card usage/authentication.

Also, WhatsApp calls will not work in Dubai. So, if you plan to use WhatApp calls to talk to relatives back in India, you are out of luck. Either get an international calling plan or use an app Botim to make calls to India.

## 7. Traveling in Dubai using taxi and Metro train

I used Metro trains for most of my traveling. I did not get a Nol card. Instead, I bought tickets every time I needed to travel. Only at Burj Khalifa station, there was a long queue. But in other stations, the ticket counter was usually without queues.  But, if you plan to get a Nol card, you may save a couple of minutes.

For the places that is far from a train station, I used the Taxis and Uber. Taxis are cheaper than Uber and readily available at every metro station exit / popular tourist places. So, it won't be hard to get a Taxi. And, unlike in Chennai / India, the taxi fares are strictly meter/distance based, so you don't need to bargain. Every taxi has the fare amount displayed in a big screen, so you know how much you are going to pay. And, all Taxis accepts credit card payments. In most malls, there's a separate queue for getting the Taxi, and they get crowded in the evening time. So plan accordingly.

## 8. Paying for things in Dubai

Every business accept credit card payments. I enabled international transactions in my Indian credit card before the journey and used the card to make the payments. Since the credit card usage needs OTP authentications, I kept my Indian SIM on my mobile, so I continued to get the OTP messages. I did not need to buy any international roaming from my Indian mobile provides, as there is no charge for receiving SMS message internationally.

That concludes my experience in Dubai as a Indian tourist. Please feel free to share your experience in the comments. And, let me know if I had missed any tip that should be in the above list.

Traveling to Dubai from India as a Tourist - My experience

I have been hosting my [resume online](https://veerasundar.com/resume/) for years. And when recruiters ask me to share my resume, I send them a link to my online resume. But some of them do ask me to share a document version, to which I send them a PDF copy.

Here's the process I follow to export my single page HTML resume to PDF.

## 1. Building your resume with HTML

The first step is to have your resume designed and built. I start with RAW HTML and have the structure built. I also use [Microformats](http://microformats.org/) to tag semantic data. This helps a lot with SEO and other similar tools.

Here's an example `experience` item with microformats defined.

```html
<li class="experience p-experience h-event salesforce">
  <div class="time">
    <p class="dt-end" title="present">Present</p>
    <p class="dt-start" title="April 2016">07/2017</p>
  </div>
  <div class="data">
    <h3 class="summary p-name">Lead Member of Technical Staff</h3>
    <p class="location p-location">
      <img
        class="favicon"
        src="https://www.salesforce.com/etc/designs/sfdc-www/en_in/favicon.ico"
      />
      <a class="h-card" href="https://salesforce.com"
        >Salesforce <br />
        Hyderabad, India & San Francisco, USA</a
      >
    </p>
    <p class="note p-summary">
      Responsible for developing, maintaining, and providing
      technical support for core web components using the
      Lightning Web Components framework. I also took a leading
      role in ensuring accessibility for all components.
    </p>
  </div>
</li>
```
Follow the [h-resume](http://microformats.org/wiki/h-resume) microformat page to find out all relevant tags that you can use.

## 2. Designing the resume with CSS

Once we have the content ready, the next step is to make it look pleasing to the eyes. I use `grid` and `flex` a lot to define my resume layouts. We also need to set the height and width of our page, so when we export / print our resume, things will not be mis-aligned.

In my case, my target page is **A4**, hence I am setting my page's width and height as follows.

```css
@media print, screen and (min-width: 210mm) {
  html,
  body {
    width: 210mm;
    max-width: 210mm;
    height: 297mm;
    max-height: 297mm;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
  }
}
```

Define your styles inside `@media print` so when you try to export to PDF, the styles apply there as well.

## 3. Exporting the HTML resume to PDF

The final step in this process is to export the resume built with HTML and CSS, to a PDF document. Nowadays almost all modern browsers are equipped with **Print to PDF** functionality. Just press `Ctrl + P` (on Windows) and you will get the Print Preview dialog.

![export to PDF](/img/export-to-pdf.png)

Remember when we used `@media print` in our styles? Because of that, the page look as is when you see it in print preview. Now, all you have to do is, select `Print to PDF` and choose the relevant options and click `Print` at the end. Now you will have your HTML resume exported to a PDF document.

How to make your resume with HTML and export it as PDF file

I just wanted to say hi 👋 to the internet, as it's been a very long time since my last post here.

A lot has happened since then. I moved to India, found a home here in Chennai and started working remotely. The initial months of move were very hectic and I had very little time to write anything here. It also took sometime for my 3 year-old to settle in the new place, and he needed lot of attention.

But now that things are settled and kid also started going to school, I am getting this me-time again. And the first thing I wanted to do is bring back this personal blog back to life.

 I hope to share a lot of my learnings in here in the coming posts and I seriously hope to commit to being consistent here.

Onwards.

#life (3)