Momentary Awe Blog

The posting on the blog will be a bit slow in the next 10 days as I am traveling to China first thing tomorrow morning. If I find myself in an Internet cafe I will try to post some initial impressions. If not, be sure I will have lots of material when I come back. I am particularly looking forward to taking photos in Guilin.

The photo of the week will go on as usual, since I have already scheduled the article for next week. It’s a nice surfing picture I took in South Africa so come back on Monday to have a look!

For more than 4-5 months, close to where I work in Dubai Media City, construction workers have been demolishing 2 buildings that were part of the Dubai Pearl development. Not sure what happened with the plans for this development (out of money maybe?!), but in the last month or so they have again started to advertise the same name, Dubai Pearl, for the same location. However before they start building, they need to finish taking the buildings down first (and it’s not going very fast at the moment).

Here’s a photograph I took yesterday of one of the buildings going down.

Those of you living in Dubai and reading this title, are probably thinking it’s just another day living surrounded by cranes and hi-rise buildings. As most of the world knows, new buildings in Dubai grow like mushrooms after the rain and after a while you’re not even noticing the newly finished ones. Last night however, I noticed these 2 buildings along Sheikh Zayed Road and I thought the tips are actually quite interesting. They kinda remind me of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Here is a photograph of these 2 buildings taken last night at sunset. Also, I have attached a photograph of the Petronas Towers taken a couple of years ago just so you can see the resemblance.

Seeing all the advertising about the latest Batman and the Joker portrayed by Heath Ledger, reminded me of a couple of shots I took last year while being in my home town, Targu-Jiu, in Romania. The circus was in town and the trailers were painted with all sorts of characters making the whole place very colorful. This clown caught my eye and because of the paint looking old and a bit run down, I thought it looked quite scary. Not sure how a little child would react seeing this painting at night…

I have been trying to book my internal flights in China for about 2 weeks now. I finally got an answer from a travel agency and after sending me the prices for the reservations they have also sent a secure link for processing the credit card. However in this form the total transaction amount was not mentioned and after filling in everything, I received a payment confirmation featuring a credit card surcharge of 3.41%. This surcharge was never mentioned in any of the previous emails and while it’s not much, it is very annoying that they just did not say anything. The travel agency in question is greatwalladventure.com and I would not recommend it to anyone after this.

Has anyone else had a similar experience, booking a service and being charged all sorts of hidden costs?