12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness cum Children and Youth Summit Dubai International Conventions and Exhibitions Centre (Part 2)

13 July 2012, Friday

The next day after a quick breakfast, we set off for Ski Dubai at the Emirates Mall. On our way, the coach drove past the Sheik Zayed Palace for us to steal a peek at it on the coach because taking photos in front of the palace was forbidden. One interesting thing was that there were a number of peacocks roaming outside the palace. They were Sheik’s pets presented by India because peacock was his favourite animal.

Soon we were at the door of the Emirates Mall. We headed straight to Ski Dubai, the world’s largest indoor ski resort. Having changed into the skiing clothing and the helmet, I hurried to the entrance which was a glinting ice cave. I touched the brilliant cold ice and smiled. Then I ran to the skiing ground and immediately felt excited at the sight of the manmade snow.

I climbed around the wooden playground and had fun doing the swift toboggan ride on a snaky sliding track.  Also, there were single and duet rings in the sloping ring ride.  The single one would spin speedily when it slid and the duet one’s track was slightly steeper and wave- shaped.  Later on, Dad pulled Adrian and I on the sledge and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.  How interesting!  I also did a bit of snow fight.  Snow was a novel thing to me and I was delighted when leaving the fun place contentedly.

After lunching at the mall and shopping cupcakes for breakfast in an enormous supermarket, Dad and I had a funny experience.  We went into a room which we were mistaken that it was the gents.  It was actually a praying room for Muslims.  While we were curious why people were required to take off their shoes in the gents, we didn’t think it a very good idea and didn’t follow the rule.  Very soon the cleaning person cued us to take off the shoes which made us realise that it was a praying room!

Afterwards, there were some photo stops: a mosque, then Burj Al Arab -- the world’s only seven-star and tallest yacht-shaped hotel, and a small-scale mall which sold Arabic carpets and souvenirs. Then, we rode the monorail running on a high bridge to shot some photos of the amazing and beautiful Palm Island and the giant Atlantis Hotel.  Next, we paid a visit to the Dubai Museum.  The exhibits in the museum were so-so.  But the highlight of the day was to follow.

A short coach ride took us to a pier by the Dubai creek. This was where we rode the famous Dubai water taxi to the spice and gold souks on the opposite bank.  The water taxi was a long wooden boat with two long benches for sitting passengers on both sides.  Interestingly, the helmsman sat in an opening in the middle of the benches.  The ride was smooth and the old district scenery along the creek was refreshing.  Disembarked from the taxi, we visited a spice shop before heading to the gold souk.

The most memorable things were that I saw the world’s biggest gold ring stuffed with diamonds and gems which was not for sale, and I wore an Arabic head wrap in a garment shop.  When I was back to Hong Kong, Mum said that I looked like an Arab in the head wrap but I didn’t think so.  At the end of the day, we found ourselves having bought some chocolate-encased dates and a purple carpet with Arabic elephant patterns and shiny bits on it.  It was an eye-opening day!

14-18 July 2012, Saturday to Wednesday

When the sun arose on the Saturday morning, the learning part of our trip began.  It was the opening of the conference and the summit.  After listening to some speakers in the hall and taking refreshments in the other room, our group marched to the Modesh amusement world under the organiser’s arrangement only to find that the rides charged money and most looked boring.  So we stayed around the free video game stations but we only managed to play a few rounds. I even had no chance to play at all.  The reason was that a Korean boy jumped the line, played the video game and refused to leave.  Finally he hit Jameson in the stomach and the rest is our hidden secret.

An hour later, a fleet of coaches took all the students to start the learning journey.  For the following five days, I had lessons in a spacious college campus and stayed with three classmates in a hotel separated from our parents.  I saw a lot of novel things and learned some new knowledge.  I will recount the best part below.

The second day, after breakfast and the morning drawing class, we set off by a coach for some visit. The visit was not just for the drawing class but almost half of the summit participants.  So off we went in a fleet of 4 to 5 coaches.  I thought that it was quite a scene.

However, the first destination was a bit of a disappointment because it was the Dubai Museum.  The reason was not that the museum was boring but that I already visited it with my Hong Kong group.  My Hong Kong classmates and I felt satisfied though for there was a chance to take photos of animal pictures and specimens in the museum for making our presentation to be given later.

After that the fleet of coaches headed to the Dubai Mall. Boredom was the first thing jumped to mind because my Hong Kong group had also visited it before. But I was proven wrong later. The summit teachers led us to the world famous aquarium inside the mall. It was really exciting to watch the fish, especially the sharks, while walking through the tunnel going beneath the big blue fish bowl. It was quite an experience!

The sun set and rose and a new day came. We had the usual drawing class in the morning. I noticed a big thing going on once stepped inside the classroom building. There was a canvas in a long strap lying on the floor. Students were busying painting it. I wondered what it was and didn’t know the answer until in the afternoon when some reporters came. It was for painting the world’s longest banner to make a Guinness World’s Record.

Another big thing of the day was my dad’s visit. I met him when my Hong Kong classmates and I walked into the school hall after the drawing class. We went there for a police dog’s show, which was not really good. Maybe it was because I didn’t understand what was going on. The good about the show was we had additional rest time to relax a bit before the coach drove us back to the hotel. I also made use of the time to show dad around the campus. It was a special day because of dad’s visit.

Time flied and it was finally the last day of the trip. We went to school as usual but there were no classes. We were allowed to do our own drawings and mingle with one another. There was a closing cum prize presentation ceremony at noon where I was given a big surprise when I was announced the second runner-up for my works in the drawing class. My winning works included a drawing of a peaceful scenery done with melted crayons and the other of Dubai’s modern cityscape on a piece of old newspaper.

Leaving the campus, we headed back to the hotel where the parents stayed. After we arrived at the hotel, all the people were fussy packing up the luggage because the 4-wheel drives were waiting for us to whisk us to the desert for some fun. This was the first time my dad and I saw a real desert. It took the fleet of 4-wheel drives almost an hour to reach the hot desert. Once I got off the car, I roamed around the orange sandy land, kicking and throwing the sand. But the most exciting thing came later.  It was the sand surfing in the car.  Our 4-wheel drive speeded crazily across the sand dunes, bumping up and down and making the ladies in the car scream. However, I thought it was great fun and even better than a roller-coaster ride. The day ended with a barbecue meal in a tent site in the middle of the desert.

It was a very worthy trip and I had learnt a lot during the trip. My mind was full of fond memories when waiting for the flight back home even though I was really exhausted for the departure was at around 3 in the morning. I can’t wait for the next summit!

Merry Christmas!

Growing with the Cinnamon Tree

I just finished my piece for the school 45th anniversary writing competition!

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Have you ever seen an array of trees besides the school gate? When I go to school, I love to see the trees, especially the cinnamon tree. It was very small in the beginning, as told by my parents who witnessed the building of the school and the planting of the trees.

When I was in primary one, I was small too, not knowing much around me and going about everything self-centred. Once, I had a tasty lunch at school. Guess what? I was supposed to eat the lunch prepared by Mum, but my brother and I followed some classmates to the canteen and ate a free lunch. I remembered that we had two drumsticks and a cups of pudding. When I went home, I told Mum about the yummy lunch!

There was another laughable thing in primary one. One day in recess, I was joyless because I had two big cupcakes which would take me most of the recess to finish. Just then, my friend passed by and I gave him the bigger one. That was because there were almonds on the smaller one. He took the bigger one and I was happy again!

Promoted to grades three and four, I grew up a bit and was less self-centred. It was at that time when I became aware of the cinnamon tree. It was tall and upright, providing shades with other trees to cool us down once we entered into the campus.

I started to join different extra-curricular activities since my body and mind power became stronger. At grade three, I hiked in the ten kilometres long Little Trailwalker bushwalk held for our principal Mr Cheung who would be retiring soon then. At that time, I also joined the school string orchestra, the Olympic Maths class and the after-class athletics lesson.

But then, in teachers’ eyes, we were still small kids. Maybe for this reason, they gave us many rewards to encourage us. For example, my kind Chinese teacher Miss Wong gave us stickers if we performed well during lesson. She gave me a special sticker which was a pack of red and yellow shrimp chips.

There were two memorable events took place in primary four. The good one was that my brother and I joined the Yip Can Cook Class. We both liked cooking. In the first term, we could only join the easy paper cutting class which was rather boring. After that term, we joined our favourite inter-class activity, Yip Can Cook which we longed to join. Mr Yip taught us how to cook easy and yummy food in English. I recall that he once taught us how to cook curry fish balls and meatballs and spaghetti in the canteen.

However, the bad one was that I got my glasses for the first time. Those months, I could not see clearly when having lessons at school, especially the words projected on the screen by the projector. My glasses had a pair of shiny silver frames made of metal that almost shaped like rectangles. Its plastic sides were dark blue. I chose it by myself and my favourite colours are blue and silver. I felt quite dizzy when wearing the glasses on the first day. But I could see the cinnamon tree more clearly.

Primary five was a very exciting year. First, my brother and I were no longer in the same class because my brother, who is hard of hearing, could manage himself in primary five. Second, my school had renewed the facilities. At the assembly on the first day of school, Principal Ms Ho said, “Good morning! Have you students noticed there are air-cons in the covered playground!? There are also some plastic curtains and blue soft lining. most exciting is that the library has transformed into a ‘space station'! Have your first school day great!’

Probably because we had grown bigger, our class teacher Miss Wong treated us like bigger boys and girls too and she liked to joke with us. Sometimes she called some students in a funny way like Little Car and King of Leaving the Seat. Certainly, I had happy moments in primary five.

Now I am a primary six student. I am much bigger and taller. It is like the cinnamon tree which grows bigger day by day. I will leave the school soon but the cinnamon tree will still stay in the school to provide shades for students for many, many years.

12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness cum Children and Youth Summit in Dubai (Part 1)

(P6 is quite busy and I will publish the post in parts)

12 July 2012, Thursday

This summer holiday, I took part in the 12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Giftedness cum the Children and Youth Summit. My dad, Miss Wong, Miss Cheung, seven students and parents from my school took part in it too. The event was held in Dubai, UAE.

On the midnight of the twelve of July, the Hong Kong group including Dad and I boarded an Emirates luxury plane while Grandma saw us off. The air hostesses’ dress was special because there was a white scarf hanging on their hat similar to traditional Islamic dressing. During the comfortable flight, I watched the movie Alvin 3 which was best, the funny Adventure Time, Sherlock Holmes and played the Bejeweled 2 TV game. I also slept for three hours because our trip would start once we arrived there at four a.m. Dubai time. I enjoyed the flight but the in-flight meal was not very delicious.

When we landed at the Dubai International Airport, which have been voted the best airport in the Middle East, we walked through the counters to do the formalities. I noticed a novel sight that the Dubai custom officers wore in white from head to toe. It didn’t look like the usual uniform. Afterwards, we waited for the other Hong Kong group flying a later Cathay Pacific flight. It seemed that we had waited for them for half day long and I was bored to death. The huge airport was off-white with many dozens of wide pillars across the hall. Dad pushed me on a luggage trolley exploring the airport. We stopped by an unusual escalator which ran a long straight way before going up to a train station. I was interested and tried it. When I finished trying it, my classmate Jasen ran into us. He was bored too, so we played a game braking the luggage trolley. Since I sat on big soft luggage cases on the trolley, I called my trolley a luxury car. There were almost no shops around except for the souvenir and fast food shops.

At last, the other group arrived. We met a local guide and left the airport. The outside temperature was not very hot because it was only morning. But it was late afternoon to me since I had spent many hours awaken since the overnight flight. On the way to our first stop, Abu Dhabi which is UAE’s capital city, I was magnetized by the buildings because every building was exceedingly attractive. The buildings which caught my attention most were a twisted skyscraper and a leaning tower. The guide was busy introducing the city to us on the journey.

After a two hours’ drive we arrived at Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, UAE’s largest mosque. The bright sunlight almost blinded me and hot breeze blew to my face when I got off the bus. It was extraordinarily hot as if I were in an oven! The big mosque was pure white with big and small domes decorating its top. On top of the biggest dome, there was a pretty golden moon statue. I stepped in the gorgeous mosque and the inside was cool and shady.

I took off my hat, sunglasses and shoes. As for the ladies, they needed to wear khimars. The first thing I did was going bare-feet to the air-conditioned gents. I walked by a room for Muslims to wash their feet. The gents was not smelly and was the cleanest and most beautiful I had ever seen. There was a vast square in the middle of the mosque under the scorching sun. Then, we walked all the way to the praying hall. At first, I thought the floor must be burning but to my surprise, it was icy cold.

 

 

 

 

In the big splendid air-conditioned hall, I saw large fancy chandeliers hanging from the high celling. Surrounded by ninety nine Arabic phrases on a wall was a bigger phrase. They were the different names of Islam’s god, Allah. On the soft vast green carpet with fancy pattern paved on the colossal floor sat children listening to adults. They had to be Muslims. Then, Dad asked the guide about Islam and he told me that the mosque’s green colour was representing hope, pure white and gold for milk and honey in the heaven. Dad also said that the times shown on the flower-shaped clocks was the daily times for Muslims to pray when visitors were not allowed to enter the mosque. After some photos, we left the beautiful mosque.

It was extremely cool as I opened all the air-conditioner vents over my head on the coach. By lunchtime, we dined at Burger King with my classmates in the big Marina Mall. Jasen’s dad bought a pair of Adidas shoes because his shoes were melted a bit under the hot sun. It was quite funny because I had never heard such a thing. I only ate a few fries for the reason of my eye inflammation. After lunch, I watched Tom & Jerry at a screen instead of going to the sight-seeing tower behind the mall because there was not much time.

In the afternoon, we said goodbye to the entrance's fountain which spitted water high noisily and headed to the world’s biggest indoor theme park, Ferrari World on Yas Island. On the large Yas island, except the construction of Universal Studio, I first saw nothing but sand and grasses. Finally, I saw the triangular Ferrari World topped with a bright Ferrari red roof was glinting under the shining sun. The immense glass building was surrounded by some verdurous trees.

With excitement, we followed my classmate Adrian who has found information about the kid’s section of Ferrari world. However, we were too high and couldn't play almost all the games. Luckily, we tried Carousel which had Ferraris and motorcycles on the round platform. I thought I could drive there. Although the platform only turned around slowly, making me disappointed, Dad took photos of me pretending I was driving speedy. The motorcycles were more fun.

We also played Junior GP. Before the ride, we watched a brief cartoon about safety in a small room that looked like a pit stop. I sat in the car on the track beside the stands. The car was small and I bumped my head. When the game began, I was on the lead but crashed before going into the tunnel. I pushed my car impatiently. Junior GP was fun except the mishaps before the race: a girl crashed and staffers had to push her all the way back. Also, there was a spoiled boy didn’t want to go. I was angry and moved my body and steering wheel making the car run.

After Junior GP, we strolled around the kids’ section finding rides to play. Dad and I also explored the Family’s section. On our way, we saw the G force in the middle of the park that lifted people up and dropped them down slowly. I thought it was not as exciting as I wished. We played Ferrari remote-control toy cars and Dad took photos of me standing beside some cool old to modern Ferraris. Then, we tried a wind generator. The wind generator was situated in a room producing five levels of wind. There was a control panel on which one had to press the button to go from one level to the next while following the body gestures illustrated on the panel. The fifth level wind was quite strong but the pushing force was not.

There was less than an hour before the time for our visit was up. So the two of us hurried to find rides worth playing. It was mere luck that we bumped into the ride called Speed of Magic. There was a long queue and we had to wait for roughly 20 minutes. When it was our turn, dad thought that it was a roller-coaster. But it was actually a 4-dimensional adventure ride which was much more fun. I found the high speed adventure process fascinating. I had never tried such an exciting thing before.

Speed of Magic

However, the most exciting part was yet to come. On our way out from the Speed of Magic, we came across Miss Wong who cued us to try the main ride of the Thrill section, Fiorano GT Challenge. It was the replica of a Ferrari F430 Spider and used carriages of four individual seats to bring people around the rails. There were the general and advanced rails. Guess which one we tried? The general one.

I was a bit worried and hesitated at first. But there was no time to lose, and my classmate Jameson who was leading the way was shouting to us to give it a try. And I was glad that we did. Dad and I jumped into the seats of the last carriage which was a yellow Spider. There was also the red one. As the roller-coaster swished along the rail, I kept yelling, "Don't ever be like this!" It was great fun!

Before leaving, we viewed the famous world's fastest roller-coaster Formula Rossa. It was madly fast and the rail was really long. The starting section was especially fast, which shot the carriages off like a bullet.

Fiorano GT Challenge

Formula Rossa

The long day did not yet come to an end for we still made a brief visit to the Burj Khalifa afterwards, the world's tallest building. I watched the musical fountain for a bit of time and had dinner with Adrian's family at a restaurant serving Italian and Japanese cuisines in the world’s biggest mall, Dubai Mall. I liked the spaghetti marinated in an orange-colour sauce and the strawberry milkshake best. Dad had fish salami and a special Dubai cucumber drink. I can’t really remember the cucumber drink’s special taste but it was just sour and a bit sweet. I took several pieces of cucumber from different dishes and decorated dad's glass with them on the rim.

Finally, after the meal, we were whisked to the hotel through the road flanked by the brightly lit fabulous skyscrapers which were mostly duplicated in pairs. The city was beautiful but the only regret was that it was still unbearably sultry at night. We arrived at the hotel quite late that night but the sleep was well.