Almost everyone knows when you come to Chengdu, you see panda! But most people wouldn’t have a clue about the history of Chengdu. Chengdu was a place where bronze culture originated, a place where Southern Silk Road started and a place where the earliest paper currency was printed! Chengdu also lies in a center position where you can visit lots of interesting attractions in Sichuan like Jiuzaigou, Er-mei Mountain, etc.

On this trip, I’m in Chengdu to discover Leshan Giant Buddha. The photos above was taken from an apartment I stay in Chengdu. The day scene was taken from bedroom whilst the night scene was taken from the kitchen.

See you guys later!

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To take the GMAT test in Shanghai, you have to go to the Pearson Professional Center which recently moved to the new location at Asia Mansion. When you register for the test, directions to the test center is actually given to you. It’s about 10 minutes walking distance from the People’s Square Metro Station, behind Raffles City in the corner of Hankou road and Zhejiang road. The center is on the 10th floor and there is a banner when you exit the lift. You wouldn’t miss it. [How to go]

On the actual test day, there are some people waiting at the entrance of the test center, an elderly man and an woman probably in their 50s. I was thinking “Wow, these 2 are going to take the GMAT… They probably plan to take the Executive MBA usually meant for top management types”…

As it turned out, they were just the parents of one of the candidates. OMG… it’s like parents sending their kid to school for exams and I almost thought they are going to sit in together with their daughter!

Dad: Is everything alright?
Mom: Remember to relax… don’t be nervous
Dad: Call us when you have finished, we’ll pick you up.

I feel like in an elementary school. Oh common baby… you are taking the GMAT for MBA for god’s sake. But then again, the candidate looked really young. My guess is that she is probably in her mid 20s, with just one or two years of work experience. Doubt she can contribute much to her MBA class.

The test center was very strict and please take note that personal items including rings and bracelets have to be removed and placed in the lockers as well. I felt it was a little overboard? Phones, wallets, watches etc… I can probably understand but rings and bracelets too?? They probably worried that people will engrave some information on the rings and cheat in the test

Our palms were scanned before we are allowed into the test area. The whole experience was pretty nerve-racking. I was pretty confident of my abilities in the Quantitative Section where math problems are tested. It was the Verbal Section that was giving me headaches, especially the Sentence Correction part. I spent a lot of time on some of the tough questions and ended up with little time left for the last few questions. Had no choice but to guess intelligently. By the time I finished the last question in the test, I was feeling pretty down. This is my first take and I felt that I would probably score only 640 at best. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my unofficial score is 690. Now all that is left is to wait for the official score with my Essay ratings.

As for the preparation, I spend about one month studying for the GMAT. I practiced on the GMATPrep mock test that can be downloaded freely from the website www.mba.com. I tried the mock test without any preparation at all, just to get a hang of the GMAT format. The first 2 times, I only managed to score 600 and I realized that my Verbal Section was pretty weak. I spend about 2 weeks to brush up on the grammar stuff and other parts of the Verbal Section. Took the mock test again and scored 640. I figured that if I spend the remaining 2 weeks studying hard, I could stand a chance of scoring 680. In the final week of study, I read somewhere that many questions can be found in GMAT forums in the web. Solutions to the questions are discussed as well. 2 GMAT forums that I found very useful are www.gmatclub.com and www.beatthegmat.com. Eric Bahn’s GMAT flashcards are pretty helpful as well. You can find them in www.beatthegmat.com. I only knew about the flashcards one day before the actual test date. Darn! Wished I had discovered them earlier.

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A lot of people are talking about how the financial crisis is affecting China. But today, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day, a trip to Ikea would have you think otherwise. The place is jam packed. The food section is doing very well. In fact, so well that the cashiers can’t seem to stop collecting money. Inside, it gets worst. Too many people pushing empty trolleys… if you are only buying some bulbs and body lotion, use the bag, not the trolleys!! And if you are going to use the trolley, please try not to stop in the middle of the aisle to make a phone call!

Out on the streets, there are so many “movable stalls” side by side selling roses and teddy bears. In fact, these stalls are just bicycles loaded with flowers and banquet of cute tiny bears. Not sure how much they cost but they are probably not cheap. When you ask them how much the roses cost, they will asked you back how many of them do you want!

I have seen people selling these kind of teddy bears before last year at Valentine’s day. Did not see any one carrying one of these huge teddy bears though. The stall owners will probably stow them away in some corner after today, dust them clean next year and sell them again.

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7 years of hard work and efforts, the multi-million dollar modernist architecture unveiled for 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is now an eyesore. The blaze renderes the 31 story structure unuseable, as the titamium alloy and zinc of the outer structure was burnt!

With 159m height, the building designed by 2 reknown Architect, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, house a 1500-seat theater, a large ballroom, digital cinemas, recording studios, exhibition facilities, and a 5-star hotel operated by Mandarin Oriental. Koolhaas and Scheeren won the contract in December 2002. Since then, they were plagued by the usual quarrel about the design and spending. The construction started in 2004 and was expected to be completed in May 2009. It’s original proposal was to open to public for events/entertainment and can be used for filming.

The building was clad in Titanium Zinc alloy, which was introduced to China in 1999, a material that would allow the building to rust with dignity and to endure the passage of time better than other conventional metal Zinc. It’s ideal for high quality architectural cladding of roofs and facades. There’s some debates in Youtube and Twitter about why this building did not collapse.

Image by OMA Architect

From Time Magazine, May 2004:

“Detractors cite the $730 million CCTV project as the ultimate example of the Chinese regime’s tendency to plunder state coffers to glorify its own iron authority and say Koolhaas is an opportunist taking advantage of the country’s unique combination of state power and state capital to realize his own artistic ambitions. Ian Buruma, a writer who is a friend of Koolhaas, wondered aloud in the Guardian, a British newspaper, how the world would have reacted if an architect of Koolhaas’ stature had in the 1970s designed a TV station for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

But Koolhaas, 59, who was one of the first Western architects to study and write about China’s urban explosion, revels in such intellectual tussles. CCTV, he insists, like the mainland itself, ‘is in mutation’ and the building represents an effort to complement the state-owned company’s desire to keep pace with the times. CCTV’s current headquarters is completely closed to the public. Koolhaas’ design, in contrast, includes a public ‘media park’ in and around the base of the building intended to foster more interaction between commissars and the masses. ‘We are engaged,’ he says, ‘with an effort to support within [China's] current situation the forces that we think are progressive and well-intentioned… We’ve given them a building that will allow them to mutate.’”

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A fire has destroyed the annex of CCTV new headquaters in Beijing an hour ago. I was chatting with a friend based in Beijing and he told me CCTV was on fire. At the same time, I was in Twitter and Micro bloggers from Twitter are reporting the news. Not only did Twitter get the news before mainstream media, it seems as if it got the news before emergency services. I read it was cause by unregulated Chinese New Year fireworks. According to Reuters, the destroyed building housed the Mandarin Oriental hotel in eastern Beijing, which was supposed to open in 2009.

You can read the news here: CNN, Reuters, Asia-Pacific News, and Xinhuanet.

Photos: Link
Videos: Link, Link

Twitter Updates:

Follow me on Twitter!

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The last time I boarded AirAsia XL promo from Hangzhou to Kuala Lumpur was January last year when we visited my parents-in-law in Malaysia.

With 5 flights a week, AirAsia is the first airline in the Southeast Asia region to provide a non-stop service flight to Hangzhou. They now fly to Australia, Uk, India and very soon to Japan. I was on a 737 (economy class) and it must have been the tightest seat pitch I have ever experienced!

This time, the new aircraft was equipped with in-flight entertainment systems in all seats. This include touch-screen system with lots of entertainment content as well as cool applications, including games, interactive moving map, shopping and in-seat chatting system.

Chatting is free, but you need a small fee to access other entertainment services.

An USB port is also available at each seat for games controllers, or power charging your personal electronic devices. It is said that AirAsia will be the first airline in Asia to deploy OnAir mobile communications services. This will enable passengers to use their mobile phones and BlackBerry-type devices to send and receive SMS messages, emails, and to make and receive mobile phone calls in flight.

The flight back last week was an 5 hour evening flight. I only manage to get an hour nap

I actually don’t prefer AirAsia for long haul.

AirAsia always portrayed itself as having a better, friendlier and prettier cabin crew than other 5 star airlines. But that’s not what I see from Kuala Lumpur to Hangzhou flight. They are inattentive and despite the call light being on for 20 mins, no crew came to attend to you.

The last time I traveled a midnight flight with AirAsia X, there are times when they off the lights for passengers to sleep. All of a suddent, I was awaken by the noisy cabin crews from the back of the curtain beside the emergency exit. They chit-chat and giggled so LOUD that someone had to come up and ask them to lower their voice.

This time, the same flight, same cabin crew… chit chat, chit chat…CHIT CHAT…. so LOUD.  And the other thing is, there’s only 1 Chinese-speaking crew on board. I can heard some crews say “Sorry, I don’t speak Chinese!“, walk away and ignore the Chinese passengers, leaving them with lots of question marks. There was one incident that really surprised me. When the passengers were boarding the air craft and looking for their seats, an air steward was blocking the path of a little chinese girl. She politely said “Excuse me” but the air steward gave her a glance and ignored her. Again she politely asked him to let her through but there was no response. It wasn’t until I stared at him that he let her pass. Does this award winning Airline train their crew this way?

Thank God that I never witness any behaviour like the one below despite the service at AirAsia X.

The coolest cabin crew from one of the airline in China.

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You can now browse my blog on your mobile device. It should automatically be detected and you should see a nice and clean mobilized version of this blog. I have used Nokia E71, iphone and itouch and it looks fine. If your view is wonky on your device, please get your browser details here and leave a comment along with your phone brand and model.

You can download the plugin here.

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I love having potluck and BBQ with my family and relatives when I’m back. We had a mini family gathering during Chinese New Year, and I ate untill I was about to burst! My mouth was still watering while croping this photo!

We spend the whole week visiting relatives, eating lots of cookies and cakes, lots of Chinese foods, giving hong baos, parties, chit-chat with family and watching movies.

Chicken, vege and fruit salads.

Marinated lambs…

Calamari…

Grilled mushrooms…

We were chit chatting and the food end up like this:

…and busy trimming these overcooked chicken wings…

There’s no beef because he says so:

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