My trip to US of A (Part 3 Concluding)

If you had read my previous posting, you might be wondering, did this girl ever made it through.. Well, the fact that I am writing this blog is a sign that I am doing fine.

There were some red pills that I had to swallow in the middle of my trip.. It completely shook me and now I am staggering back.. I forced myself to think away from my career and enjoy what was offered.. The fall out, I roamed about the city, mostly on my own. It is so much fun to walk into stores like Nordstorm, Macys.. trying to familiarize with the brands.. recalibrate and try to estimate what is expensive and what is not. There is a kick in walking around the city, with a map, at 8.0 PM, temperature 0 - 5 degree celsius. When you have someone to show you around the place, you miss minute details like, do I turn this left or the next. You are forced to read directions from map.. Your understanding of the layout improves.... Maybe the loner in me, jus unleashed herself.. Watever..

The journey back was even more interesting. I was booked on British Airways (Seattle - Heathrow - Bangalore). As luck would have it, there was a problem with luggage scanning machine in terminal 4 of Heathrow and BA pilot strike. Little did I know the madness had just started.
Seattle - Heathrow (BA around 10 hours journey)
Heathrow (9 hours stop over)
Heathrow - Bombay (Jet air 10 hours )
Bombay (2 hours stop over)
Bombay - Bangalore (Jet air 1 hour)
Bangalore (3 hours stop over)
Bangalore - Chennai (Paramount 1 hour)
That totals up to 36 hours of travel straight. Almost 2 dayz.. no shower .. unbrushed teeth.. at the end of the trip I felt like a pig.

Since this was my first trip, I am not complaining (atleast not as much as I should be). The trip till Heathrow was uneventful. I landed in Heathrow around 12 noon terminal 4, and were to board a flight from terminal 3 at 9.10 PM. Only when one takes the shuttle from one terminal to another, does one realize how big the airport is. In terminal 3, airport passenger screen is so detailed. It is kind of embarssing when you are asked to remove your belt, when there are twenty men behind you in a queue. Not that they care. Its just odd. But if this is going to save me from terrorists, so be it.

With nine hours in hand, I hit the duty free shops early. For the first time, I was wondering around a full fledged liquor shop. This seemed so cool. I was looking at brands and associate the percentage alcohol content(hopefully I should be able to make a better decision ;)). I finally decided on two bottles of Chivas regal 15 .. a cool offer buy 2 for 30 pounds. I picked up the two bottles carefully and laid them on the counter. I was asked to produce my boarding pass. The women in counter shook her head and said, I should not be buying them. She went on to explain, I was not going straight into Bangalore and liquor was not allowed as hand luggage in Bombay-Bangalore flight. My heart sank as I gave up my carefully picked up bottles at the counter. Crap!! Dejected I walked out. (Later, in Bombay, I saw people shoving bottles into their check-in luggages)

As I was strolling around the shops, I saw an Indian woman, who was travelling with me from Seattle, and looked like she was going to Bangalore as well. We had a round of self introductions. She was carrying a 2 months old baby and was struggling to cope up, with the journey. For some reason, I began to admire her from the very begining. We went around the shops, got more chocolates and had a quick lunch. Then she said, she worked for Microsoft... I was zapped.. I am so into Linux, that when someone say they work/worked for Microsoft, I react strangely. I have cursed Windows so many times, for so many reasons. Offlate I seem to talk to a lot more people associated with Microsoft.. So many sane people, who work for Microsoft. Surprising ;) ... probably the pay..;). Just kidding. We boarded the plane, came to Bombay, breezed through customs, got our baggage back, checked it in again, boarded a shuttle to domestic airpot and finally boarded the flight to bangalore.We said our good byes and parted, admiring her courage yet again, for taking the tedious journey.

Once in Bangalore, I decided I needed to be home. A friend helped me book a flight to Chennai waited for another 3 hours and finally reached Chennai. Phew.. That was one helluva experience.. I have no regrets what so ever for taking this journey. The Seattle city made it worthwhile.. Amen..

Lost it all..

I tell myself "Things would improve. Things would not change for better on its own. It's you, who would have to steer it for better." But off late I my trust in this is eroding and eroding fast. Every decision that I take has been for worse, sometimes hurting people I love.

Why is it that I take goodness in people for granted.
Why is it that I never seem to learn from my mistakes.
Why is that my rotten luck never leaves me.
Why is it that I always end up as the person, who has to be handled appropriately, when I want to help them..


When I strive to help, make situation better, dream big.... everything just gives in. With no one trust, no one to confide.. Life goes on, yet again..


Note: Please don't try to reach/call/message me and embarrass me more . I would like to be left alone for sometime and trust me I shall come back.

My trip to US of A (part 2)

Yesterday was pretty interesting.. Well I am still severely jet lagged.. I woke up at 3.30 in the morning again, extremely hungry.. We finally left the hotel at around 11.30. The hotel has free drops to many locations and one of them is Seattle center.
I. Our first stop was Seattle space needle center. The building is 500+ feet high. This is a tall thin structure and on top, is a view deck. Below the view is a revolving restaurant. The elevator takes you up to the deck at a speed of 10miles/hour. The elevator is glass fenced allowing people to see outside as they travel up or down. With every passing second up, the view becomes better. From the deck, the view was magnificent, and one can spot all the important places in Seattle downtown, if not with the naked eye, through binoculars. The temperature was pretty low and there was gusty cold winds, that forced us to retrace our steps back to the elevator. Certainly worth a trip.

II. Second stop was a sci-fi museum and music museum. I am not sci-fi person. If you ignore border line horrible sci-fi movies, the only sci-fi movie that I have seen is Starwars. So a person who is more into sci-fi movies and books would be able to appreciate the place much better. The one thing that interested me here is a video, that talks about how the weird space capsules in movies were made. The molten glass is knead at high temperatures into the interesting shapes, that one sees in movies. What is interesting is:
a. The tools used to cast the glass in different interesting shapes.
b. The final product is extremely small(maximum 1 cubic feet) that are magnified to be shown as huge space shuttle, stars and planets.
The music museum again was something that I could not do justice too. My interest in hip hop, classic or any western music is extremely limited and hence was not able to appreciate the place.

IV. Our next stop was IMAX theater. IMAX theater has been on my list for quite sometime now. There are very few of this kind in India, one of them being Hyderabad. We almost made it to the theater, in a college trip, when a few severely disoriented people wanted to eat hyderabad biriyani, instead of sneaking out of the hotel and catching a show. Sad. I never got over this serious let down. Anyways, the movie that was being shown yesterday was not a 3D picture and hence it is as good as watching an ordinary movie and extremely large screen.

III. The coastline near the Seattle center is interesting. The coastline is riddled with boats some pretty.. some not so pretty. After a couple of minutes here, we headed towards Pike Place market on foot.

IV. The most interesting place in the Pike place market is probably a shop that sells fish. When people buy fish from here, the undressed huge fish certainly weighing a kilo or two is thrown at the customer. The men at the shop and the crowd cheered a woman who bought a fish (dunno wat kind that was). A fish weighing easily two kilos was thrown. She did a decent job catching it mid air and everyone cheered.
Finally we headed back home tired.

My trip to US of A (part 1)

I have never traveled outside India all my life and there was no burning desire to do so. I guess I have missed out on quite a lot. I am starting feel that not pursing higher education was not such a great decision (of course sify was a great place and so is Amazon.com bangalore).

So this is how the 15 days trip started.. I had a visa interview last Friday and was expected to travel this Wednesday (6th Feb). Since my passport took sometime to be delivered, my travel plans where confirmed till 5th Feb. With super efficient support from office, we were able to get forex, tickets (had to go through a confusing itenary) and insurance. I also had to buy loads of warm clothing and shoes, as I have never seen temperatures below 15 degrees Celsius( Weird that here people use Fahrenheit , miles, pounds.. I am so bad at converting all these and cannot comprehend without converting).

So this is how the trip started.. I had a flight to Heathrow airport at 7.00 AM for which u need to start at 3.30 AM ( I know insane). So I met my friend who was traveling along with me at around 4.00 AM. He has traveled before to US of A and was very helpful through out the journey( I wouldn't know stuff like online check in, change the food menu on board to asian vegetarian).

The flight was delayed by one hour. We feared that we might miss our connecting flight in Heathrow. So we finally boarded the flight (Boeing huge aircraft). Seeing an onboard entertainment system, were you can actually stream movies I went berserk. I started watching Shawshank Redemption. But then, they had issues with the system and the movie was interrupted. So I ended up watching friends, two and half brothers.. Food was not very bad.. certainly not great..

We managed to reach Heathrow airport in time for the next flight with around an hour or so in hand. Since it was week day, lot of seats were not occupied. I had the aisle seat and there four seats empty next to me.. I just pushed the hand rests up and slept 8 hours straight to be woken to have food. I survived on orange juices in these flights.

So we finally reached Seattle at around 6PM.. drizzling chilly.. Immigration and baggage collection took about 1 hour or so.. Finally we were out and was picked up by my manager. Being my first time here, number of things hit me hard..
1. Freeways, the traffic is so disciplined. I, for the first time, see people sticking to their lanes and being extremely careful when they had to switch.. If you had to park the other side of the road.. you would have to circle the block.. Because the pavement is always on your side parallel parking seemed lot more easier.
2. Huge and deafening freeways.
3, Seattle is a very scenic place. The night line is marked with skys scrappers and lights blinking everywhere.. beautiful lake.. well maintained footpath awesome!!
4. Cold.. If we had not gotten into the car in another 2 minutes I would have froze.

We decided to grab something on the way and then check into the hotel.. We went to this place called Serious Pie and had some really nice pizzas.. and I had white wine for the first time.. I think it had very little alcohol content. I was not even close to getting on a high. Then we checked into this hotel Marriott spring hill. nice comfortable... good net connection..

I always teased my friends who complained about jet lags. I would try to pull their leg calling them show offs.. Well now I realized what they actually meant. I was wide awake, extremely hungry at 2 AM in the morning (silly me .. I should have slept in the first leg of the flight and stayed awake on the second).. I brewed myself coffee.. (I don't like coffee) for the first time and it turned out to be yuck. I probably dint add enough creamer. We had breakfast at the hotel and booked a cab to my office. Holy lord, the cabs are so expensive.. it takes 12 dollars plus tips to travel a distance of say 3 kms (not converting to miles). Despite serious warnings, that I shouldn't multiply every time I spend into Indian currency.. I cant help wondering how expensive it is... We can't even walk as the weather is so chilly and with strong cold winds..

I had neat morning work and lunch. Post lunch I was seriously jet lagged. Around 3.30 PM local time, my body was at 4 AM felt like a night out. My eyes started drooping.. I caught myself sleeping when typing a word... So left office little early... got dropped by my friend's manager. I had decided to splurge all I could, at dinner. We went to this pizza place called Romeos. I cannot believe I am saying this.. but in a couple of days I might get bored with cheese... I also had red wine(marlot something). By the time we left the place, it was around 8.30. I was little shaky because of the drink. I spoke to a close friend here for about 40 minutes and slept like a baby. But wide awake at 3.30.. Could not stand to be in bed by 4.30, typing this blog for the past one hour...

Lets see how the rest of the journey is..

I have not yet clicked a single photo yet.. so no photos to upload..