Trip to Ho Chi Minh – Vietnam

Recently I have had a chance to visit Ho Chi Minh City inVietnam. The city, also known as Saigon City, offered much entertainment and tourism spot for me to be discovered during my short two days vacation. I did spend two nights and two days at the city from April 26th until 28th.

In summary, I arrived at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Thrusday 19.40 and headed to a hotel called Saigon Sports 3 hotel in District 1 (nice and affordable hotel with kind staff). The first night in Ho Chi Minh city was used to explore narrow streets and restaurant near the hotel I stayed. I was surprised with so many foreign tourist enjoying the restaurant and shops in the district.

The first day of my trip was filled with exploring the Ho Chi Minh City, my travel itinerary at that day was :

-Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Art
-Ho Chi Minh City Museum
- Dong Khoi Street
- People Committee Hall
- Notre Dame Cathedral
- Central Post Office
-Reunification Palace
-War Remnant Museum
- Binh Tay Market
- Ben Thanh Market

It took the whole day to visit those entire recommended place. You can see some of the sceneries from those places in the gallery section of this post. The places are a good spot of photography, both of you or the building and scenery.

The War Remnant museum is surely a place to respect the casualties of war. It exhibits various information – mostly photographs – of the Vietnam war victim, both Soldier and peasant, both Vietnam and USA. There were a lot of uncensored photographs of how the Vietnam War was very devastating and scary, really a tragedy for humankind. What we can learn from this museum is that peace is really a gift. For those of us who lives in peace, we should be very grateful for that.

The second day of my visit was used to explore Chu Chi tunnel, 1.5 hours from District 1 inHo Chi Minh city. The Chu Chi tunnel is a network of underground tunnel used as a base for Viet Con to attack, defense, live, and survive during the Vietnam War. Chu Chi Tunnel offered me the introduction to tunnel network, trap used to lured enemy soldier, how the Viet Con lives during the war, and even how the gun is shot. You can also see the surrounding of Chu Chi tunnel in the gallery.

After visiting Chu Chi tunnel, I went to Ben Than market to buy other souvenier and the concluded the day, also the vacation, with a travel back to Tan Son Nhat airport to head back to Jakarta, Indonesia.

I will need a lot of words and pages to describe how great the vacation was. However, I’ve posted a lot of picture to let you see and have a glimpse of feel on how Ho Chi Minh city is a worthy tourism travel destination.

IHI Corporation – Factory Study Tour

IHI Corporation Factory

Last December 9^th I went to IHI Coorporation, Yokohama Factory. The factory is located at 1 Shin-Nakahara-Cho, Ishogu-ku, Yokohama, 235-8501, Japan.  It took almost two hours by bus from Ookayama to the factory. The website address is : http://www.ihi.co.jp/index-e.html.

IHI Corporation is a company that provide design, manufacture, assembly, installation, test operation, and after sales service for various major products such as space development, jet engines, electronic and control, and even battleship. The factory was established in the year 1964 with total site area of 870,000 m² with total number of employee as high as 2,934 employees for fiscal year 2008. The company itself was founded in the year 1853 under government ownership.

This factory study tour gave us chance to visit some parts of the factory which are Corporate Research and Development Building, Nuclear & Chemical Component Works building, and Machinery Works building. The weather was a little bit raining but the IHI provided us umbrella, helmet, and safety vest. We were divided into two groups. The first group went to a display building by walking. And the second group went to R&D fluid technology research building.

I was in the first group where we went to a display building first. In this building we saw display/example of some tools produced by IHI. The first thing we saw was equipment called Advance Cruise-Assist Highway System. This equipment is real time 3 dimensional object detection camera used on roadside to indentify and recognize moving object on the crosswalk or crossing the intersection. We got an explanation and demonstration of how it worked from a person from IHI Corp.

After that, we went to Machinery works building. In this building we saw three smart robot prototypes to be used in industrial plant. The first one was a robot that had an ability to recognize and identify a size, shape, and position of an object based on image shot by camera. The second one was a half humanoid shape robot that can move on any surface. The third robot was an extension arm for human to weigh heavy object. These robots will be very useful in future production process in a plant.

After that, we went to R&D building, fluid research department. Unfortunately because there was a high confidential research was conducted, we couldn’t explore the whole building. We only got an explanation about the department and saw some example of their research product. From the explanation, I knew that this department was strongly related to my field study, civil engineering. This department provide civil engineer important data analysis of a building characteristic due to fluid behavior to the building such as wind and sea wave.

The last building we visited was the nuclear & chemical woks building. This building produce GTL Reactor to be used in nuclear reactor power plant. We saw the production process how to make the tower from steel sheet shape until become that cylindrical shape tower. There were many types of heavy equipment in the building. That was my first time ever seeing very high capacity compression machine. I used to saw a small capacity of compression machine in my lab to test concrete compressive strength.

After finished visiting those building, we went to the conference room and had “question and answer” session. The factory study tour was ended by taking photos of all participants in front of lobby in reception building. It was a really interesting FST.

(taken from my Factory Study Tour report x_x)