24 hours in a tropical bubble as a desperate attempt to escape winter by Alex Ronan

I'd never heard of Tropical Islands before and didn't know it was a thing, but I'm not surprised given that there are ski slopes in Dubai.

An hour outside of Berlin, Tropical Islands (T.I.) fills an airfield hanger originally built in 1938 for the Nazi Luftwaffe. The Red Army overtook the site in 1945 and the Soviet Air Force stayed until 1992. A Malaysian company purchased the hanger at a steep discount in 2003, after some kind of German cargo-blimp enterprise went bankrupt. T.I. opened a year later.

The scale of T.I. is so impressive and instantly invoked memories of The Truman Show.