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.
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