Exploring Dubai ... (part 1)

Next day, we wake up early to get our breakfast and ready to go. The schedules for today were quite heavy. There are many places we wanted to visit. Luckily, they are all in an area of about 3 square miles, not to bad for walking. To our surprise, it was raining again for 2 consecutive days. It's a very rarity in this country with nothing but scorching sun and desert wind.


 The very first stop is Dubai Museum. It's situated near Port Rashid, at the Al Souk Al Kabir area. This area had been well established for centuries before the modern day. Like any downtown in the U.S, it's quite crowded and rowdy with cars, commercial trucks, buses, pedestrians and of course, the tourists.

 The museum is pretty small in size. I don't think it is bigger than a few hectares. Inside, there are not much artifacts, and they aren't attractive. By the way, the United Arab Emirates is a very young, and newly formed in 1971. There are not much to see in this museum. Its history is dating back roughly about a couple hundred years.

The museum was built like a mini fortress of the Medieval time of a small town, even though it was built very lately over 200 years ago in 1778. In term of defending, I don't see much if at all, dues to its low and poorly constructed walls. The weapons seem to be a mix of ... well Medieval time. There are 3-4 wings, which display antique monuments such as pottery, weapons, tombs, buildings, ship building, and manufacturing of shipping equipment.


In the center of Fahidi Fort lies a spacious yard that is used for displaying models of local boats and bamboo houses with their traditional furniture. It won't take more than a couple of hours to explore this museum.

We left the museum to explore the surrounding area, which filled with small shops, and restaurants. The shops here are very unique. They aren't called shops but trading posts. Once you get inside, they sell things, no trading.

 
We got in a Taxi Cab to get to the famous trading post of all in Dubai called The Gold Souk of Dubai. There are quite many Souks in Dubai depend on what you are looking for; Spice Souk, Incense Souk. Gold Souk is an old trading post, where people gather to sell and buy gold, platinum, silver and other valuable items like rings, watches, and other heirlooms.






Here, one can find all kind of gold necklaces and chains in big rolls. Some are as big as an electrical wire roll. Every shop displays tons of gold merchandises. 

The Gold souk is every woman's paradise. It's basically a gold market but you can also purchase almost anything from clothes to spices here as well. 


 
 It is easy to part with your money just to get that rare cut gold or diamond, a beautiful and fancy looking ring or an old rare expensive watch . The Gold souk is a series of narrow alleys with small shops almost like a maze. Shop attendants approach you from everywhere like a swarm of bees trying to sell their goods.

 


 


Once, you see an item you like, you have to haggle to get the inflated price tags down. In every travel forums, you would find the same advice. However, while you're thinking you haggled and got the best price, but quite false as you can never tell how much is their bottom price for items you have in your hand. In the end, you got so confused, you don't quite appreciate this practice at all. 

 







Things they sell here are 18, 21 and 24 karat gold chains, necklaces, Indian and Middle Eastern clothes, scarfs, silk, suitcases and more. The whole areas are so enclosed and suffocated, so it's pretty hard to spend to much time here.

United Arab Emirates ... an oasis in the Middle East.

Dubai ...

It was a long flight from Tân Sơn Nhất airport to Dubai airport. Dubai airport is pretty fancy but kinda cheap and out of place. There are so much glass and huge posts, which probably were copied from the Roman Empire building designs. The floors are all shiny marble, and the ceilings are all 40-50 feet high.



For some reason, there are only a handful of seats in all the areas. You either have to sit real close to other passengers or find yourself an open floor and lean against the walls.

On one side, all the post were bricks and cement. On the other, all were shiny stainless steal. There wasn't much to show for. The majority languages spoken here are English and Arabic of course.

Once we got to the outside for a taxi cab to our hotel, we saw lines and lines of Mercedes and expensive high end German made vehicles for hire. The Middle Easterners seem to fall in love with Mercedes for some reasons.

Dubai is a large city well known for luxury lifestyles, shopping, with ultramodern architecture and a lively nightlife scene. Right away we could see the rich showing off in their fancy cars and expensive designed clothing.

The weather was most pleasant when we landed here in February. It was never passed 72 and didn't get below 50 in the dessert at night, the whole time we stayed there. They said it only rain here once a year, and it was raining when we were heading to our hotel. What a coincident!

Around the corner, just a few minutes from the airport, we could see the  Burj Khalifa, an 830 meter-tall tower, dominates the skyscraper-filled skyline.












Dubai is a cosmopolitan oasis, a futuristic city that towers over the Arabian Desert. This is a city of superlatives, home to the world’s largest dancing fountain, tallest building the Burj Khalifa, the one and only 7-star hotel the Burj al-Arab, the largest artificial islands the Palm Islands, and the largest natural flower garden the Miracle Garden. It's no wonder, many of the world rich and famous have their vacation homes here.

Renting a dune buggy for a desert adventure, bargaining at the open-air market, or cheering on your favorite humped hoofer at the Camel Race Track are some of the most fun things to do in this desert country.


We got to our hotel around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It was about 40 minute taxi ride from the airport. Everything on both sides of the roads were things we had never seen before. We realized that the nomad lives of the desert people were so much different with city lives, but once we got to the city and its suburb, the buildings were the same in any big cities on earth.





We still had plenty of time to get acquainted with the city. It's time to venture outside for a new breath of the desert air.







The hotel we stayed is a mere 20 minute walk to the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, aka Arabian Gulf. On the other side of the horn, is the Gulf Of Oman. In between is the narrowest points of the two bodies of lands is the Strait Of Hormuz. The distance is 29 nautical miles. Iran is just a short swim away.




We later found out that the port we visited is The Port of Dubai, aka The Port of Jebel Ali. There weren't many high end, luxury yachts as other rich ports in the world, but it looked pretty deep. Not much to see here, so we left after a short while.

Lunar New Year 2014 in Vietnam

Once again, we planned to celebrate our Lunar New Year, the year of the the horse 2014 in Vietnam.

This year, the new year came earlier than normal. It fell onto the first week of February, so we had to plan everything way ahead before we could leave our shops right after the Holiday season here in the U.S.







Our in the mall food-court restaurant is always super hectic and busy the last 2 months of the year, the Holiday season.







Every year, this is the most busy and exhausted time due to the Holiday shopping. We have to put in a lot of extra times. The sheer selling volume is always staggering, and it won't slow down much until mid January.



For our travel, I am responsible for all the schedules, booking, and planning.


I started the plan for this trip around late September of 2013, but for one reason after another, it didn't start rolling until late October. By then, to ensure our exact date airfares were getting harder by the days. We lost all the choices for the best airlines in Asia.






The only one left was the newly created Chinese Southern Airline. They were barely in this US to Asia market over a year.





Their domestic flights were well known to be over 80% late all the time.


There were only a few comments on their international flights, and most of which were very broad in term of rating. We had no choice beside taking our last chance with them. It was going to be really tough if anything went wrong because this is a very long flight, over 14 hours.






The only positive thing that tipped the scale on our favor was the airplane for this trip, the brand new A380. It had been in service barely a year prior. To our experiences, this behemoths A380 is very comfortable and pleasant to flight on.






The departure date arrived before we knew it. We were in anguish on these last few days prepare to have everything in place before leaving because this trip would last 45 days.










45 days is a long time away from home. 








To our surprise, the flight was very nice all the way. The crews were well trained professionally. The passengers half of whom looked Chinese but well behaved, and the other half were probably American and English speaking people. The majority of the passengers if not all were very polite despite the worst comment whatever we were reading on those forums.


















The only set back at Guangzhou airport is the poorly maintained at the terminals. The facility looked like it was in need of a major renovation. The air was damp and stank of cigarette smoke. There were smoking rooms in every toilets in the terminals.













There were only a handful of restaurants and coffee shops open but the price was so outrageous. A half litter bottle of Avian water costs $6.50. This is the most expensive water bottle compared to all the tourist areas and airports that we had passed thru in our travel experience.




The flight from Guangzhou to Tan Son Nhat is a bit over 3 hours. We landed around noon under a mild weather. This year, the Lunar New Year came very early about 2 weeks earlier than usual so the temperature was very comfortable with low humidity.





As the years past, we had booked a room in a hotel right in the center of the city, Hotel Oscar. From here we could easily travel by foot and taxi to all the areas in the city within 30 minutes. We walked most of the time.







We noticed right away that the currency had dropped quite a bid in value. Everything is more expensive now than last year, and is a lot more expensive than a few years back. Inflation had been ramped up sharply. The cost of living seemed to be slipping out of grasp.







At the same time, we see more and more high end American coffee shops and restaurants. The 10% richest were still out to enjoy their luxury lifestyles, and the rest were suffering.







Vietnamese people in general believe this year will be a good year economically and financially. The horses are always the fastest runners. And to their disappointment, they would see that things would change for the worse for sure, but only time would tell.



The New Year celebration came and went just exactly the same as the years before without anything new. People took days or weeks off depend on their finance. The rich would take more days off, and to the contrary, the poor would take less or none. To the majority of low income people, they couldn't afford much so 2 or 3 days off was more they could bargain.


We enjoyed to help out family members in preparing for the New Year celebration, but soon it died down, we were heading to the United Arab Emirates. We had planned for this trip a couple months before as the weather was getting pretty hot soon in the desert.

Korea: The last Day in Korea - Nami Island

We left our hotel early in the morning and headed to Namiseom island.

My wife enjoys Korean drama TV series and this is where the famous "Winter Sonata" had been used to film this series.




I am not much of a fan of TV drama series. I had never heard of either, the movie or the set but I went anyways because I love the country and the people.










It took about 20 minutes from our hotel to the train station to Nami by subway.












Without Dai our tour guide, we would never figure this out.










The train station looks just like any commercial building without the sign. It's small and have so many window bill boards in Korean. The signage indicates nothing in particular. It said: Speed Mate with a little image that looked more like a boat than a train engine head.









There were not too many passengers here this early hours. We found out later that this was one of the many stations through the journey.












The train picked up and dropped off many more passenger along the way.












The ground was very much covered with snow and ice. The weather was still bitterly cold. But the train was very new and modern and of course with free super fast WiFi.








All the young passengers seemed to be busy and focused on their smart phones or tablets, either reading, web surfing, or text messaging. Nobody bothered anybody, and no conversation was taken place.










All the older passengers seemed to have at least one or two toddlers with them. It seemed they had to supervise their grand children while the parents were at work.











Every stations that the train stopped, there were some toy and children stuffs vendors pushing their small carts on board.









They attracted the children with all the toys and stuffs, therefore, the children were nagging the grand parents to buy for them.












It's a tug of wars between the vendors, the kids and the grand parents. And soon, they would hop off to the next station, then jumped onto others after.

I killed my time by observing this, and it left me totally flabbergasted.

After about an hour and thirty minutes, I could see a big town on the horizon. We decided to come off to explore this area a little, since we carried T-Money Card (a form of prepaid public transportation), we can hop on and hop off where we wish along the way.







All we need to do is coming back here on time for the next train which is about 40 minutes later. We figured we had at least 30 minutes to check it out, not too much time neither too little.











There are a lot more Christians in Korea than I had anticipated. I could count quite many churches along the way, every few miles or so.











During the winter, Korean farmers grow their vegetables inside. I found a large number of indoor farms because the ground outside was covered almost completely with ice.










All the rivers and streams we passed by were almost frozen.












We finally got to Gapyeong Stations around 11 o'clock. We could get to Nami boat dock by bus or by taxi. With taxi, we didn't have to wait.








There were 2 ferries to take passengers back and forth. These ferries are very large and flat to accommodate a few hundreds at a time. Passengers could stay inside or outside on the rails of the ferries, but the wind chill cut thru the heaviest clothing so most decided to stay inside.









It took about 20 minutes to get across the lagoon, and Nami here we came.













The island itself is not too big with a lot of movie sets but we got here at the wrong time.








The ground was muddy and wet. Snow and ice were melting away made it so dirty to mill about.



















The trees and flowers were in hibernated states, and everything else had been covered by solid ice.

The only animals were found in large number were the squirrels. They were so bold that you could pretty much hand-feed them.





The only thing that saved this trip was the Koren Multiple Ethnic Musical Instrument Museum on the island. We spent a good couple hours here.

Overall, winter is not the right time to visit this tiny island. And if you are not a fan of Korean Drama TV series, then there isn't much for you to see here.













It might be considered a waste of time to some because it takes at least half a day travel back and forth.






 There is a food court in the center of the island that offers different type of foods but it's a bit pricy due to the extra cost of transportation.


















We got back to the city in the afternoon. We had only tonight for the final visit of the night market.


We found an unknown underground market between train stations near Seoul. Vendor built stalls along the corridors between stations. They sold everything from children clothes to trendy fashion winter coats.













There were pastry shops and coffee shops mixed in. A few fruit stands here and there as well as small table tops filled with sweet candies and cookies.






All in all, you would certainly stumble onto a market of all sizes while walking around in Seoul.















We didn't buy much but we did had a real good time window shopping here.










We decided to visit the other end of Namdaemun Market this evening. This market is so huge we couldn't finish a complete round last time. To night, we would spend the entire evening here.









This side of the market is so lively with rows and rows of shops on both sides of the narrow streets. There are so many things sold here that we couldn't keep up with.










Food vendors on push cart were everywhere. Most of the food they sold here were light snacks. I noticed that the snacks here looked very similar to Chinese's, and they did taste like Chinese food as well.










We found a vendor that sold Chinese snacks here. The snacks taste a hundred percent like Chinese donuts that being offered in any Chinese restaurants in the U.S.










Soon right after sunset, more and more push carts arrived, and came with them, a large crowd.









There were so many people in heavy winter clothing walking in groups of 2-3 or more. I wonder how this place looks during the summer time when the weather is more pleasant.










We walked and walked for hours on end, and never visited the same street twice to tell you how huge this market is.












We got back to our hotel around 11pm. We didn't realize that we had spent almost 7 hours walking around in this Namdaemun Market.












We paid and said goodbye to our tour guide. We were strangers to begin the trip, but now after spending a whole week together everyday.






We bonded a friendship that was hard to say farewell from. But every good things had got to have an end.



















We had to pack up and leave early tomorrow morning for Incheon airport which is about an hour of train riding from here.














Looking back, it was a long trip away from home.We had left home 42 days ago. It's time to get home. I've missed my own bed already.