Travel

  • My parents are visiting us in Rio de Janeiro this week. Last Saturday, we decided to go on a quick 2 hour boat excursion. The trip begins in Marina de Gloria, and then proceeds toward the other side of the bay to Niteroi. Once we hit Niteroi, we head north to the huge bridge of Niteroi, and then we head on back. It was a very cloudy day which is always a challenge when taking photos.

    Solange and I travelled to Las Vegas to see Elton John and to see the Grand Canyon. I chose to do the bus tour because I wanted to have the whole experience as opposed to the helicopter tours which kind of whiz you in and out. A local also told me that quite a few helicopters had crashed lately.

    We were not disappointed! We had to wake up at 5am, but we got to experience the trek between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. There is nothing between Las Vegas and the Canyon except some very very poor towns. I was really struck at the poverty that these people lived in so close to one of the most luxurious and ostentatious cities on the face of the planet.
    Then once we got to the Canyon, it was truly majestic. Hope you enjoy the photos.

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  • I made the flight reservations for November 25th for 5 people (me, Solange (my wife), Teddy, Jesse, and my mother in law Maria). The reservation was for approximately $1000 a person with US Air. I only fly US Air to Myrtle Beach because I refuse to fly Delta ever again, because Delta ripped me off for $2500 which I already documented on this web site. The price I felt was reasonable.

    After that, the unexpected happenned. My wife is doing quite well in school, and in Brazil if a student is not doing well then they have the option to take an additional set of exams to try to pass the course. That was not necessary in my wife’s case because she is learning her coursework well. But… last week, she had an exam and the professor did not show up for the exam. They were told that he was in the hospital, and that my wife would have to wait a week to take her last exam. I called US Air and they nailed me for $400 but what could I do? So I paid.

    Now, only four of us are travelling (me, Maria, Teddy and Jesse). My wife drove us to the airport to say good bye. When we get to check in they informed us that we were unable to travel since we do not have my wife’s written permission to allow me to travel with the kids. Apparently, they just passed a new law in Brazil in the last two months to stop parents from abducting their children to foreign countries.

    I was bummed but I was more nervous because I was sure that US Air would nail us for fees. We go to the US Air counter, and we argue with them, and guess what? US Air actually changed our ticket to the next day for free! I really don’t know why they didn’t stick it to us because I was fully expecting it.

    We were told that the location to get the documentation for permission to travel was open 24 hours 7 days a week in the center of Rio de Janeiro. So we decided to show up there at midnight, and it was actually a painless process. And it cost us nothing other than the taxi fare to get to the place. Apparently, they didn’t get the memo that they should be trying to screw us because we would pretty much have paid any reasonable fee to allow us to travel.

    The next day, we get to the airport more than 3 hours before the flight took off just to make sure we did not have any more probems. Well there was. I am not sure what happened, but I called my mother in law to get her exact name for the plane reservation and she gave me the wrong name. Unbelievable. She gave me her married name and she had not been married for more than 10 years. I was sweating bullets. Geez. But then US Air came through again. They allowed us to change the name on the reservation to the name on the passport. Again, they did not charge us anything. On top of that, they changed her seat so she was no longer sitting with us. US Air changed it back without charging us anything. Wow! This is different than Delta that tries to actively find angles to screw you.

    Then we finally board the plane and Teddy falls immediately asleep. He slept for 9 hours on the plane! It was a miracle. Jesse only slept for 6 hours but it was awesome.

    I don’t know what it is about international travel but it is now my expectation after having dealt with Delta, that something will go wrong and somehow somewhere, someone will screw you. They know you are just trying to get to your destination, and if they can screw you to make money they will. Delta in my book is of course the king of screwing passengers.

    So we go through immigration and customs, and there was not one problem. Did everyone not get the memo, that it is better to screw people when they are travelling? But then I spoke too quickly.

    The four of us board the plane, and this young stewardess approaches us and inquired whether my two kids had paid for their tickets and therefore could have their own seats. They had and I told her. Shortly before take off, Jesse was in Maria’s arms resting peacefully. The same stewardess came by and told us that the plane could not take off because Jesse was not in his seat with his seat belt buckled. Jesse is just 2 years old. So I relented, and we put Jesse in his seat. Jesse did not like it one bit, and started screaming bloody murder. Maybe the stewardess was happy but I was not. I have travelled with my kids a lot, and no one ever had said anything like this. As matter of fact, if our flight was not almost totally empty there is no way that the stewardesses can make sure that all of the kids that are in laps are not actually ticketed.

    So the plane finally takes off, and I take Jesse out of his seat and give him to his grandmother again. Jesse is quiet and there is peace in the world. Or so I thought. Next thing I know, the stewardess is back. She is very annoyed that I gave Jesse back to his grandmother. I just figured once the plane took off, that we could return to normal and it was not necessary for Jesse to cry the entire time. I was wrong. She was pissed and not afraid to show it. She started lecturing me about safety and her job, and all kinds of things. Maybe I was tired, or I just didn’t feel like hearing this retard lecture me about how to take care of my kid, but I laughed. It was not intentional but it did happen. This made things worse, and now she told me that we would have to turn around the plane and go back to Charlotte. She was now threatening me. I looked at her and said, “Let’s go back to Charlotte”. She trounced away to bitch to her superiors.

    She was bluffing and I knew it. Was it a good idea to call her bluff? I am not sure, but that’s what I did. Bluffers don’t like to get called, and they don’t like it when you laugh at them either. I really don’t blame US Air for this. The stewardess is one bad apple, and I suspect she has not been working in the hospitality much time, and I also suspect she would better suited working for TSA or other mammoth government agency that enforces a lot of meaningless rules. Maybe the IRS or something like that.

    Finally, we got back to my house in Myrtle Beach. And then I realized that I left my Kindle on the flight from Rio to Charlotte. Darn it. I love my Kindle and I was able to read a few chapters on the plane while the kids slept. I called US Air and the woman was very nice. Almost too nice. But she informed me that they had not found my Kindle. I thought to myself. If I found an Amazon Kindle in the pocket in front of my airline seat, would I actually return it? I think I would, but I also can see how a lot of people wouldn’t. I also think that maybe US Air keeps all of that stuff and then sells it off at auction to make more money. Either way, I am going to buy a new Kindle. In some weird way, I am looking forward to it. I am not going to buy a Kindle Fire nor an Ipad because I love the battery life on the Kindle. I read a lot and I guess that I have to recharge less than once a month. I figure that I never have to recharge my book. so an eBook should behave roughly the same way.

    After all that, it’s nice to be back in the land where I was born and raised. There is no doubt in my mind that airline travel keeps on getting worse. I shudder to think how bad it will be 10 years from now.

    3 Comments on “International Travel With Children”

    1. I am a grandfather who took his son, daughter-in-law and their two little girls, ages 3 and 8, to Botswana and Ghana in Arica last year. We just rented a car at the airport and started driving all over the place. It was a fantastic trip. There are lots of wild animals to see in Botswana.

      Reply

    2. Rob,

      The Brazilian law requiring an official document signed by one of the parents whenever the other one wants to travel with their children by himself or herself (without the spouse) has been in effect for many, many years. I remember doing this already in the ninties. You have been living in Brazil all these years, so it is surprising you don’t know about it.

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    3. I travel with my daughter to Canada at least once a year and always carry a notarized letter from my ex (my daughters mom) giving permission to travel. I get asked for it about every other trip even when coming home.

      Yet when I give them a letter when going on a cruise or something, I believe she has never been asked to see the letter. I think that men are questioned more than woman.

      Reply

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  • A big surprise about China Tours is that they control your schedule from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. And they keep you busy, very busy. Finally, by Day 9 of our trip, they gave us a day off in Shanghai. Some people in our group decided just to stay in their hotel, because they were just tired. We decided to go shopping and see Shanghai with Özgür and Selin Tanriverdi our new friends from Dubai.

    Based on the recommendation of our guide, we walked to Metro City to purchase a new camera for Solange. Her point and shoot camera was slowly breaking, and I decided to spring for a professional SLR type camera during this trip. Metro City is a very different shopping experience than American retail outlets. It is a huge building with four floors of all things electronics. It is like 20 Best Buys all rolled into one. The problem is that it is possible to buy the same camera from over 20 different merchants.

    First off, we had no idea what we wanted as I have little experience with SLR cameras. Fortunately, Özgür is a camera enthusiast, and we finally settled on a Nikon 3000 with a 18mm – 200mm lens. It was no easy task to figure this out because there are so many selections by all the manufacturers. Then we wanted a good price but we had no idea. Finally, we found a place with a great deal, but when they realized we were tourists, the price went up. They wanted another $200 for a warranty. I felt like I had been slimed, like I could not trust these people. So we left and went to another shop where we found the same camera including warranty. Great! But now, they won’t accept my international credit card. In fact, they don’t accept credit cards at all. The price was about 9000 RMB or about US$1400. I had no idea on whether it was a good price but I was positive it was a better price than I could pay in Brazil.

    But they didn’t accept international credit cards. In fact, they wanted cash. So they ordered a young man to take me out of the building and to get cash at an ATM. The problem is that the ATM had a ceiling of 2000 RMB per day. It was quite the experience but I was able to max out 3 ATM cards and get 6000 RMB, plus I had 1000 in my wallet. So I bring back 7000 RMB and count it out for them. Note: All the money would not fit in my wallet because they only come in 100 RMB notes. But I am still 2000 short. So they finally relent, and they allow me to put the final 2000 on my credit card. So it took us over 3 hours to buy the camera, but now it was time for sight seeing.

    A friend of mine told me to visit the top of the Grand Hyatt which is over 100 stories tall. We were also told to avoid the Shanghai Metro by our guide, so we took a taxi. Problem was that the taxi did not know where it was. We left, and got another taxi and we got there. The elevator was amazing. I think it was going faster than 20 meters per second. We arrived on the 88th floor of the building in less than 30 seconds.

    We took a bunch of photos, and we looked at the map. This was a map that Selin had from a guide book she had purchased in Dubai. Based on the map and our previous bad experience with Shanghai taxis, we decided to take the subway to People Square on of the ritziest areas of Shanghai. Contrary to what our guide told us, there was no problem navigating the Shanghai subway. In fact it was easy. Everything seemed like it was new and all the signs were both in English and Chinese. After a short while, we arrive in People Square.

    After 9 days with China Tours, Selin, Özgür and Solange were all wanting to eat something other than Chinese food. So we went to the McDonald’s in People Square. I went out on the street and bought some of the street food which was totally delicious although it was embarrassing since I knew the name of the food in Chinese, but not how much to pay. I brought my food back to the McDonalds and it was a great meal for everyone.

    Then we decided to go back to the hotel. We checked the map, and we figured we had to walk about 3-4 blocks. We walked and walked, and the hotel was not there! We gave the address of the hotel to more than 10 people and no one knew where our hotel was located. We hopped into two taxis, and neither one knew our hotel. I am sure that the language barrier was a problem but we were totally lost in Shanghai, a city of 33M people.

    All we knew was that we could walk from Metro City to our hotel, but Metro City was not on the map. We knew where we were, but we had no idea where we were going. Finally, we decided to go in the subway and find Metro City via the subway. We hit the subway around 7 pm on a Tuesday evening – rush hour. The subway in Shanghai is huge. There are large rivers of people going in various directions. With the help of Özgür and good signs, we found the right train going in the right direction. We were about 8 stops away but we finally

    2 Comments on “Lost In Shanghai”

    1. :)) Rob, I’m having a “deja vu” right now :)) God, that map had literally become a part of my body that day- an extension of my right hand maybe 🙂 I think, not finding “Ramada Hotel” on that street caused me psychological damage for I can’t help noticing all the Ramada Hotels wherever I go now!
      The snapshots are beautiful- even the ones we were caught without knowing. That was really some day where we put our survivals instincts to the test and it was a real pleasure to experience and finally pass it with you guys 🙂 By the way, we were really craving for something “not Chinese” to eat…I guess our hamburger picture with Ozgur when we were fantasizing about biting a huge burger on a poster (how pathetic!!!) tells it all 🙂 That McDonald’s meal – or shall we say the long and rich dinner- was one of the tastier we had in a long while.
      Thanks again for your company and all the work you’ve put into this blog entry.

      Reply

    2. Hi Selin:

      I was intrigued to see you are from Dubai and were visiting in Shanghai when the blog entry Lost in Shanghai was entered. I have been trying to find a US citizen who I think was in Shanghai teaching english maybe (city of 33 million? Wow!)and latest word is that he is living in Dubai. Haven’t been able to locate him. Of course I have no access to local phone records and can’t see online either…anyway would you like to help find this guy? His name is Leo Moore. Full name Leonanous A. Moore and he was a lawyer in Georgia, USA until 2009. I am just trying to find out his address. Thanks.

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  • As part of our package with China Tours, we went to four different artistic shows in four different cities. Below is a quick list of the shows and the cities.

    Show City
    Kung Fu Show Beijing
    Ancient Dynasty         Xian
    Light Show Yangshuo
    Acrobat Show Shanghai

    Kung Fu Show When I first heard about this, I had thought it would be a Kung Fu demonstration which I thought might be entertaining. However, it was quite different. The Kung Fu Show was actually a small play set to music and dance. The sound system in the theatre was awesome and the music truly floated through your ears. The play was about a young boy that wanted to become a Kung Fu master. He learns the ways, but he loses his focus because he falls in love with a beautiful woman. Ultimately, he finds his way back and becomes a master. The dance moves are quite elaborate and physically difficult. They are running and spinning through the air doing marvelous things. Many thought this was the best show of the tour. The one problem with this show was that photography was specifically prohibited and they made an announcement before the show began. So no pictures. 🙁

    Ancient Dynasty This show was very elaborate and spectacular but in a very different way. The show endeavors to give us a flavor of how music, art and dance were during the times of ancient dynasty. Again, the sound system and lighting was fantastic. The costumes were amazing. More importantly than that, there were close to 200 people participating in the show. Because they were all running around changing costumes, it felt more like 400. They also had a few music scenes which really gave a nice feeling for Chinese music and the stark differences from the commercialized western approach to music.

    Solange deserves a lot of credit because they allowed photo, and she stood up the entire time, so she could take as many photos as possible. We have the best photos from this show.

    The Light Show The Light Show was by far the most ambitious project and expensive production. The concept and the production was done by the same guy that did the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics. The light show takes place in a large outdoor theatre overlooking a very large lakes with numerous large stone mountains as a back drop. The entire area is flooded with light including the mountains themselves.

    Rather than a couple of hundred people, this shows has close to five hundred, again all in costume with multiple costume changes. It was quite dramatic, but this show fell short because it was quite confusing. There is a story line, but it is not clear how it all holds together. On top of that, since the story is being told over such a large area, it is hard sometimes to see what is happening. And it is harder still to take good photographs. My wife, always the steady hand, did her best, and those are the photos, you see in the slide show.

    Acrobat Show If you have not seen the Chinese acrobats, they are certainly worth seeing. They have been travelling throughout the US, and I had the pleasure to see them twice in Myrtle Beach. The show is full of mind boggling acts that defy gravity or how you thought the human body can stretch. Some of the highlights are when they do acrobats on bicycles and they have five motorcycles simultaneously running in a large steel cage.

    Unfortunately, we did not take many photos of this show. Before entering the show, we asked the guide whether photos were OK, and he answered affirmatively. When we got to the theatre, we had great seats and immediately starting snapping away. Shortly after, I woman from the theatre came and rudely hit my arm when I was taking a shot. I thought I was blocking someone’s view, so I tried to be more careful. But then she same and hit my arm again, and had a very stern look on her face. Despite our guide’s approval, it was clear that this woman was not. She reminded me of a rule Nazi, but I didn’t want to let this Nazi ruin a good show, so we stopped taking photos. It was a great show, but we only have a handful of photos from the beginning. Oh well, guess you will have to go see it yourself.

    One comment on “The Chinese Arts and Culture”

    1. Well, we were the ones sitting next to Cheng’s family most of the time during these
      shows. i remember those moments that we were looking each other saying that how can they do this. Also that same lady tried to stop us taking picture, but we managed to catch 6 7 pictures, haha. They are in Facebook China Tour 2011 group. Regards Ozgur & Selin

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  • One of the must-see sights in China is the Terracotta Warriors. It is really an almost unbelievable story. Way back, well over 2000 years ago, the first emperor of China make the most elaborate tomb in the history of time. The tomb itself was the size of a small city covering many square miles. He decided to protect his soul in the afterlife, that he wanted to be surrounded by an army of his best servants. So he put all of his people to work to create life size replicas of his army.

    Flash forward to 1974, and researchers were speculating that there must be untold treasures in this city size tomb of gold, art, and other valuables. They did not find that, but they found close to 8000 life size warriors, chariots, horses and so on. Although the discovery happened over 35 years ago, they are still working to unearth many of the warriors. It is a pain staking process because they must be careful not to break the warriors when excavating and then they must restore what time has damaged.

    It really made me wonder what it was like to be a Chinese Emperor. I really marvel at someone that decides to build a city just for his tomb. Maybe they were going through a recession and it was his way of stimulating the economy and putting the people back to work. On the other hand, the same guy that did all of this was also the one that made the Great Wall of China. No doubt about it, that this guy (Qin Shi Huang) thought really big. If you look carefully at the warriors, each face is different. The amount of time to do this project must have been stunning.

    I also learned a lot about photography. The lighting is not very good, and then on top, you need to zoom to get close to the warriors. This is really pushing the limit of what a point and click camera can do. Some of the photos are blurry because you need a perfectly steady hand or the picture will distort. Solange bought a new expensive camera and maybe that will take better pictures in tough conditions like this. Anyway, I still think that the photos give a pretty good flavor of what the Terracotta Army looks like in Xian, China.

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