Once upon a time, one adventurous Polish girl met a tall dark stranger… The rest is history 🙂
My parents were both lawyers and, as it often happens in such circumstances, I was expected to follow the same path. Not that I had much against it. I pictured myself in an Ally McBeal-ish setup: smart, charming and extremely successful litigator, living my life in designer suits and obscenely high heels. Fast forward to 2005 and there I was: breezing through lectures, making all-the-right friends, sipping glasses of fancy wine at posh parties thrown by wannabe litigators. All was going well and according to the plan. And then, all of a sudden, I caught a travel bug.
I still remember my very first trip abroad.
It was February 2006 and as I set my foot on a plane for the very first time, I felt the rush of excitement that was soon to become so familiar to me. Needless to say, I loved it. The sun, the beach, the palm trees… even the annoyingly pushy souvenir sellers. When I came back to the gloomy wet reality of Polish winter, something began to shift in me. I became more adventurous. Within the next 4 years, I’ve been on a plane too many times to count, shamelessly spending my parents’ hard-earned lawyer money 🙂
Somewhere along the way, following a painful breakup with my high school sweetheart, I met Khaled.
I’ve never been that girl who allows random strangers to chat her up online, “Hi beautiful.”, “How are you?”, “Send me your pictures!”. Ugh, thanks but no thanks. Khaled took me by surprise, hitting one of my soft spots at the time: music. I would have never refused a conversation with someone passionate about the same artists and genres as me. We chatted the nights away, soon discovering that we have a lot more in common than just music taste. One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was inviting this likeminded stranger to my family home, for Christmas (that’s what we would call “embracing the Christmas spirit!”). That took our relationship to a whole new level. The rest is history. We got married 2 years later and instead of settling in a law firm in my hometown, I found myself moving to the Middle East, Qatar to be precise. I’ve never lost my love to travel, and Khaled became my partner in crime.
We traveled a lot as a couple, but when we started a family, everything changed.
Nobody prepared us for how different and challenging traveling with small children can be! I guess now it’s time for another confession: I’m a Google addict. I’ll google anything to make my life easier and I tend to gullibly trust everything I find online. Bad, I know. I decided to embrace the challenge of planning my trips with children. With uncle Google’s assistance, I started searching for resources that were supposed to help me not to lose my mind in the process. This is where the trouble began. I was not able to find a comprehensive source of what I was looking for. Most websites I came across catered either to super-rich travelers with extremely well-behaved kids (not me!), or extreme budget travelers carrying their kids around in a backpack next to a weekly supply of toilet paper (impressive, but again, not me!).
That’s how the idea of this blog was born.
But it didn’t end here. As I wrote, I was also trying to follow my audience’s questions and include things that my readers were most interested in. As a result, what started as a travel blog has soon evolved into a everything-about-Qatar blog, with bits of travel & lifestyle thrown in for good measure.
Happy reading! I hope you’re here to stay! 🙂