We're gonna be on TV!

This past Saturday, we hit Universal Studios.

Sorry to say, we were disappointed. The one in Orlando Is better. And the studio tour which I was looking forward to was also disappointing. They didn't show us any of the insides of the sets. All we did was drive around at look at the outsides of buildings.



Oh well. At least got free tickets to sit in the audience of the show America's Funniest Home Videos.

When we went, we got seated close to the front, and most likely we will be in a couple shots. The show airs on March 26th. So we will have to wait and see if we get to be on TV. If you watch the show, we are the couple sitting by ourselves in the middle of the audience. I am wearing a red long sleeve shirt. When the host interviews the winner, we are sitting right behind him.

On another note, Hina's job is at the Stanford University Hospital in Palo Alto which is our next stop. We'll be there at the end of March.

San Diego

In late January, we spent the weekend in San Diego.

What a beautiful city. It's got beaches, mountains, a beautiful Bay, thriving businesses, and great weather.

From what I an see, there is a lot more developement and growth in and around San Diego then around L.A. There are at least 5 new highrise condo complexes going up in downtown alone. If you are thinking about moving to California, San Diego would be a great place to check out.

It's only an hour and a half away from Long Beach, where we are staying. So we drove to San Diego in the morning and our first stop was the world famous San Diego Zoo.

They have some great animals, including, koalas, pandas, and polar bears which are hard to find anywhere else.

Here are some pictures of the beaches of San Diego and the Bay.

And with this beautiful picture, I will say good night!

Being Tourists

So we're in L.A.

So many places to visit and things to see.

So where do you think we went first?
Hollywood?
Beverly Hills?
DisneyLand?
One of the many beaches like Malibu, Venice, Huntington, or Santa Monica?

None of the above.

The first place we went to visit in LA was...

This place is so cool. Everything is made of only Legos. And wait till you see the pictures. These guys can make anything out of legos.

Do not enegage in predatory lending or you will end up like this...

This is a lego recreation of the city of San Francisco. They also had New York City, Southern California, Florida, Washington D.C., and a couple other cities.

Here's me and a full size 8 foot Lego Darth Vader.

Onwards to the Coast

The Grand Canyon was awesome, but it got tiring after a while.

I can sit and watch the waves at the beach go in and out all day long without getting bored. But after watching a rock for more than a few minutes it gets old.

As my friend Peter Manry in Houston told me, "The Grand Canyon takes your breath away. But when you get it back after five minutes, it's time to move on."

And that is exactly what we did. The day after we toured the Grand Canyon, we traveled straight to LA, going over the Hoover Dam, and through Las Vegas.

Here is a picture of the Hoover Dam. I tried hard to get a better one, so you could see the whole thing but from the ground there was just no way.


The day before we witnessed the power of nature. And this day we saw firsthand the power of man. The Hoover Dam stops the Colorado River from flowing freely. If you saw the picture of the river in my earlier post, you might have wondered how such a small river created the Canyon. But before the Dam was built the river was much wilder with a lot more power.

With the Dam blocking the river, man can now control the river as well as create energy from it. Amazing huh?




The thing I liked about the Dam was that it is completely self-funded. It makes enough money to pay for itself so no tax payer money was spent on it. I think we need more projects like that.

Here's an interesting marketing lesson. You have a dam which is nothing more than a large amount of concrete storing water. There is not too much to see here. You walk along the dam, take a few pictures and you are off.

But some marketing genius turned the dam into a huge tourist attraction. This picture to the left is one of the multiple restaurants, gift shops, and parking garages that make money off of tourists. There is also a tour you can take, or you can take a helicopter tour of the thing.

Think about it for a second, a huge piece of concrete as a tourist attraction? A tour of a dam?

This just goes to show you that you can take anything and make it into a money making proposition if you have some creativity.

On our way to LA we passed through Vegas. And along the busiest freeway in town I spotted the following billboard so I just had to pull over and snap a picture. It helped that we were sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, but that's another story.

You know that when real estate schools start renting out billboards along the busiest freeways in major cities that the end of the real estate bubble is coming. This thing has 3-D figures and a neon sign at the top that changes. It must cost them a fortune!

The only way they can afford this sign is if people are signing up in droves to become loan officers, real estate agents, and appraisers. So it is only a matter of time, that things will turn around. Be careful.

I heard today, that at least 5 condo complexes in Las Vegas have been canceled recently because they could not sell enough units to start building. Along the highways from Arizona to LA we must have seen over 200 billboards for builders and new communities. That's a ton of real estate on sale. Add the fact that rates are going up and foreclosures are at an all time high, and we have a serious market correction coming. Hang on for the ride!

The Grand Canyon

On December the 10th we set out to explore the amazing Grand Canyon.

If you have not gone, you need to go to see this place. It is unbelievable. Just looking at it, it is hard to imagine that it was created by nature.

For those of you who don't know, the Grand Canyon is a huge canyon that was made by the Colorado River over thousands and millions of years. As the snow would melt from the tops of the Colorado Rocky Mountains it would flow down into the Colorado River. The river then winds its way all the way down to the ocean. But along the way, it made it's own path. Over the years, the river would wear away the soil it was traveling over and wash it away creating a canyon.

Words cannot do it justice. And neither can the pictures that we took. Let me share the best ones with you. But you have to see this place for yourself.

There are many ways to see it. You can either stay at the rim and stop along the marked scenic outlooks, you can take a plane or helicopter tour, or you can hike or ride down into the canyon itself.

We only had one day so we decided to take the helicopter tour and stop at some of the lookout points.

Here some our the pictures we took from the helicopter. The picture at the top was taken by us as well.


This is the Colorado River: the culprit behind creating the Canyon.

This is a picture with another Helicopter in the distance. It gives a little perspective about how big the canyon really is.

This is my wife Hina and I taking a tourist photo in front of the helicopter.This picture above is one of me at one of the scenic viewpoints at the rim of the Canyon. Being in a helicopter gives you a bird's eye view but you do not appreciate how large the canyon is until you see it upclose and personal.Do you see the people on the left in the above picture? It's amazing how tiny we are compared to nature.Oops, I forgot to smile in this one :)

Day 2

Day 2 of our journey was another day of driving.

From El Paso we made our way into the start of New Mexico. Originally the plan was to visit Carlsbad Caverns but we left a day late and had to cut something. So my wife decided to cut the trip to see the bats in caves. Oh Well.

From New Mexico, we passed into Arizona and headed north to our next stop - The Grand Canyon.

Arizona is super hot right now, not just for the weather. Real estate prices are jumping and people are moving there in droves. Why? I don't know. It's hot - over 100 degrees in the summer, it's not very pretty - no water or beaches or greenery. Along the freeways, as decorations they have cacti and rocks. In fact rocks are used a lot in outdoor decoration there. Instead of lawns with grass, many homes have rock gardens, which are different kinds of rocks arranged in special formations.

No joke- we even saw a guy in his front year raking his rocks!

Leaving Home

Once we got our car, and loaded it up, it was time to say our goodbyes and hit the road.

From Houston we drove West. 13 hours later we were in El Paso which is the western most city in Texas, and also 15 minutes from the Mexican border.

Being a clutter freak, I didn't want to have a zillion CD's in the car. So I bought one of the new Video Ipods and uploaded all our favorite songs onto it. I think it had like 14 hours of music or something. I had also got an FM transmitter so that we could listen to the Ipod over the car speakers. Technology is pretty cool nowadays.

Our Tomtom GPS navigation system worked beautifully as well. It took us straight to our hotel with no wrong turns or missing directions. 100 times better than mapquest. If you do a lot of driving to new places or addresses you must get one of these. It's the Tomtom300. It'll cost you about $500 online but it was totally worth it.

One of the great thing about it is it will tell you what restaurants are nearby. So whenever we had to go to the bathroom and there weren't any rest stops around, we would look for a McDonald's or similar fast food place. It also has a list of tourist attractions, stores, libraries, universities, gas stations, and many other points of interest.

After we passed San Antonio, there wasn't much to see. Just desert. It's amazing to see so much empty land just sitting there. Miles and miles of nothing. As far as you can see. Living in the city, you assume there are people everywhere. But there aren't. Good thing we had a new car. I wouldn't want to get stuck out there.