Visiting friends on a busy sightseeing trip.. a welcome break

Given that I have come back from Asia and had two more sick days (this is starting to sound like a broken record now) the long weekend is a welcome break. Staying at home, trying to do yoga, recovering nicely. 

That means every now and then I get to take a break from work and continue to post about the Europe trip that seems to have happened a long long time ago.. Going down memory lane to retrieve what happened is a good and happy exercise.

The previous post on the series is here..

On day 7 of the trip we went from Interlaken to Paris, but with a 5 hour stop at Basel in Switzerland to meet Boo and family!

Everytime we met she has been saying "if you come to Europe, you better visit!" and we always said "yes" and finally we made it to Europe and to Boo's!

We had a great time. I learned that Arugula can be put in Sambar and given my allergy history and I have never had Arugula before, ate it tentatively. It was tasty and my body did not react to it. So ended up eating a lot of it! 

Then we went on a tour of Basel with Boo doing the tour. She impressed us with her conversational German and we witnessed a lot more of Swiss hospitality while walking on the streets. Swiss seem to be a happy people in general!

Walked across the river to some historic buildings, had ice cream, macaroons and walked back just in time to get packing and to the main train station. Also learned that there was a thing called Bubble waffle! 

I got a great shot while we were on the bridge of the entire group. Placed the 5D on a statue on the bridge and everyone thought it was a bad idea. To top things off, just when we were all about to say "cheese" to the self timer, a tram went behind us at full speed. Was expecting the photo to be a wash.. turned out that the fast moving tram in the background gives us a crisp focus! learnt something that day!

Downtown Basel was quaint and cute.

Saw a beautiful park right next to the parking lot and the kids got to play there for 10-15 minutes.. and we were on our way!

We had a scare just before leaving their house when we saw in the news that all trains to Paris were cancelled because of a strike. Apparently Parisians are famous for striking at the drop of a hat. 

There was a package tour to the Palace of Versailles the next morning and it was imperative we made it to our Paris Air B&B that night. We planned some best and worst case scenarios and decided it was best to go to the train station and take it from there.

We went there to see the big display board flash on time for 19 trains and "cancelled" in red for the one train we were supposed to be on! Mr. Boo told us that we should go and ask the ticket rescheduling folks for options or refunds. There we were told that if we ran to a gate in 5 minutes, there was a trail to Mulhouse ville and from there trains to Paris were still running.. (that place was on the France side of the border). We ran, said bye and were on that train. There was one conductor who spoke English and was very nice. He told us that unfortunately that train was also cancelled.. but if we kept going on the same train to the last stop, there was another train from Stassbaugh (I forget the name) from which a train was still leaving for Paris!

Given we were screwed one way or another and with the tought of having to find accomodation last minute in a place we weren't planning on visiting, we said "okay, it is our turn to have another adventure". So we keep going on the same train.

Finally we got off and found that after 40 minutes there was indeed an almost empty train that was going to Paris. We made it to Paris while watching a glorious sunset across the fields from a high speed train.

We got off at Paris Est station and checked Google maps. The original train was to stop at Gare Du Nord station. Turned out our Air B&B was one street away from this Paris Est station and we kind of made up most of the hour we lost in going through extra trains!

A video that captures Day 7 of the trip!

The Air B&B was nothing like what the website promised. The whole two room place was incredibly small. The restroom including the shower was smaller than the bathroom on an United economy cabin. They must have used some really good fish eye lens to post those pictures of the place for the website. There was a bright side though. There was an amazing balcony as we were in the top floor and you could see up and down Rue de Magenta. 

It took us just an hour to get used to the confines of the apartment. Once we got used to it, the coziness grew on us. We were not exactly tired. We were all excited. It had been a good day.. smiles all around, some excitement, running across train platforms, walking through Parisian pavements in a line dragging our suitcases and finding that the place was alive and kicking at 11PM. 

The next day was going to be interesting.. Driver was supposed to pick us up bright and early outside our Air B&B to take us to Versailles! 

A dinner to remember

The little one and her friend had done a "cook for family" thing during lunch last year and I missed it. They repeated the "cook for family" and this time it was dinner.

The two seventh graders had planned this over a week. They cooked for four plus hours yesterday and we were treated to an amazing dinner. 

The macaroons were just amazing and they made the tomato soup just for me because the butternut squash soup had some ingredients that were on my allergy list.

Every dish was made with so much care and served with precision and love! 

We thoroughly enjoyed the food and the effort put into this by the kids. I had happy tears, when I saw the tomato soup and their reason for it..

Time...

Today I happened to be waiting for my classmates for lunch. Was meeting these guys after two years. I had a good 15-20 minutes to while away. So I wandered to the beach in Sivaji park at Dadar West and stood on the view point.

There were a group of crows and a solitary pidgeon who were flying in to the wave front and picking things up to eat. 

Captured the waves and crowd in time lapse.. 

and the crows in slow motion.

also took a few Panorama shots with the iPhone

Then my buddies showed up... and time lapse, slow motion, freeze frames were all put into a different context! 

When you are with friends, time doesn't mean anything!

Once in a pink moon

This blog and my facebook account for that matter has had a "Separation of Work and personal life" policy that was maintained a lot better than the separation of Church and State policy by our government.

There were reasons for that! Very valid reasons.

Although many of my co-workers follow my travelog or see pictures in it,  they sent me comments to my gmail id rather than post comments on the site. Well, everyone has their own policy.

As for facebook, an incident two years ago prompted me to defriend 140 people in a single day and reduce my "friends" list from 200+ to 60. Why?

My then boss left my company and moved to St. Louis. As it so happened my sister relocated from New Jersey to St. Louis as well the same week and I had made plans to visit my sister for her son's first birthday function which tradition requires a maternal uncle be present. My brother was in India and I was the only maternal uncle within flying distance.... and I made the mistake of posting a comment on my ex-boss's facebook account saying "See you next week in St. Louis!". It was a harmless comment, as all I wanted to do was to say hi to him in the new surroundings.

It so happened that this was picked up by the rest of the workforce that was already deeply upset by his move to St. Louis.. what with him being the founder of our workplace and all.. as a message that I was going to join his new workplace. The rumor mill starts flying and folks give me the "et tu brutus" look for a couple of days. By the time someone was kind enough to tell me what was going on, yours truly had "had enough".

Cancelled the St. Louis plan, addressed the folks and kept going. Hindsight being better than 20/20, should have gone on that trip. That was a long time ago and it is water under the bridge.

Why bring all that up now?

Well once in a pink moon, it is okay to break that separation and post something about work. After driving to the same parking lot for the fifteenth year one gets used to the routine. Have gone to work by mistake in a trance so many times on a saturday when I was supposed to go somewhere in that general direction, find myself in an empty parking lot and have come back home. Have spent more time in the fab at work in terms of total time spent in any location in my entire life.

Seriously, kid you not. Have lived in many different homes as part of childhood, dorms in college, apartments as a bachelor, five different residential addresses over the last 10 years .. but one place that anchored me was the fab.

That place is expected to be closed in the very near future! Tempted to go on a rant about our current public policies, the fate of American manufacturing and R&D, etc. etc. but will refrain. That is another post for another day. We all know there is not much silicon left in silicon valley. There is going to be even less after this fab closes! Sad thing is over the last 18 months, started liking Austin and all those trips there, the wonderful folks there and another "fab" in Austin and that too gets the locks soon.

It is heartbreaking to see this happen and we still have to go through the motions of a person who has to perform his last rites while still being alive but that is part of the job at this point.

This blog has been an open letter of sorts to the world on happenings in our life and if anything warrants a post, this does!

A lot of things need to be done at work, at home, on the road. The mind is in pieces even after sleeping at 1, waking up at 5 and doing Yoga bright and early on a Saturday morning.  Have a lot of good leads and potential opportunities and am confident of getting jobs. Just need to know inside that "I am not settling" for anything but going for something that brings back those goosebumps on a day to day basis!

Now that most of those folks that were "defriended" (if that is what Facebook calls them) are not going to be co-workers in a short time, time to add them all back on facebook!

Last time, wrote them a note at work saying "My apologies for taking you off my friend list!". That from a guy who writes an open blog!

Now, it is just a post announcing to folks that they are going to get requests from me.. and they can send me one too..