packmeto.com

The Old City of Dubrovnik itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is worth exploring even without its association to the Game of Thrones. Explore the historic city of Split on this Game of Thrones tour that takes you inside Diocletian’s Palace, the private mansion of the Roman emperor Diocletian and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Alcazar of Seville was used for scenes in Season 5 of Game of Thrones where the Royal Palace stood in for Sunspear, the capital of Dorne and its Water Gardens. Other locations in and near Seville featured in the Game of Thrones include the bullring of Osuna standing in for Danzak’s Pit in Meereen city in season 5 and the Atarazanas (Royal Shipyards) which were used to recreate the crypts of the Red Fortress in season 7.

Today Alberta has becoming a hotbed for paleontology (you can even take a free Dinosaur 101 class from the University of Alberta! ). Within its walls are over 160,000 fossils with specimens from the Alberta badlands, nearby Dinosaur Provincial Park and the Devil’s Coulee Dinosaur Egg site. Another one of my favourite galleries is their “Grounds for Discovery” which detail the background story of how some of the museum’s most significant fossils came to be discovered in Alberta through industrial. The Dinosaur Trail is a scenic 48 km loop through the Alberta badlands that runs along the Red Deer River.

Shah Jahan, who also built the Taj Mahal, is responsible for much of what we see today in the Agra Fort. At the end of his life, the Shah was imprisoned by his son within the fort and it is rumoured that Shah Jahan died in the Musamman Burj which overlooks the Taj Mahal. Pro tip: to see the actual octagonal pavilion from the outside like in the photo above, be sure to walk to the end of the Diwan-I-Khas which overlooks the outer fort walls and this pavilion. We went to the Agra Fort after visiting the Taj Mahal because we only had the day in Agra.

While the Atomic Bomb Dome is easily the most identifiable symbol of Hiroshima, it sits within the Peace Memorial Park at the centre of Hiroshima. Within the Peace Memorial Park is also the Peace Memorial Museum which documents the atomic bombing through a series of displays and videos. It covers the bombing from what life was like in Hiroshima before and the development of the bomb to the immediate aftermath and long term impact of the bombing to messages of peace and nuclear disarmament in the future. Along with all the sadness was a message of hope and peace – that humanity would learn from the destruction of Hiroshima (and the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945) so that atomic bombs would never be used again in combat.