all part of life

The best way to begin a new year!

Wishing everyone a wonderful 2024!!

Started the year with an allergy attack 30 minutes before midnight and cheered in the new year with a stuffy nose and watery eyes.. my friends made up for this small inconvenience!

It was lights out after coming home. 

The only cure I have for most illenesses these days in hot yoga! So it was good to start the year with Yoga and this has become a routine.

This is before class..

and after class..

You always leave the room wiped out, but happy.. "feeling like a million bucks!".. or after 13 years, adjusted for inflation "feeling like 2.3 million bucks!" 

Before walking into class we all get to pick an Angel card for the year. The idea is to internalize that and see if you can change your behavior.. this years card was "Light" (my wife got Love).. so we are now love and light!.. Hopefully we don't go light on love! See, even an angel card teaches you to put your wife first! 

2023 was not great, but it done. My goal for Yoga attendance is to do at least 200 classes a year which is about 4 times a week given all my travel schedules. 2023 was 218 classes. 

Going to stay more positive in 2024! Blogging defiintely helps me be more positive! 

Wishing you all a healthy 2024!

The 60 day Winter challenge in on at BYSJ! So if you want to challenge yourself this year, please go ahead! Will cheer for you all the way!

An evening in Athens

The previous post in this series is here..

After that Viator tour of the Acropolis followed by a late lunch and a nap, the family informed me that we were going to a very nice place for dinner.. it was a 30 minute walk from our Airbnb towards the old city square. They were all nicely dressed too. I had not recevied the memo! My options in that place were going to be limited. So I coaxed San to go with me to Babaji, the Desi place that had been closed earlier at lunch time.. by saying "you will get good Chai there!". Once in the place, I decided to order a Tandoori roti, dal, rice and yogurt.. and gobbled it up as fast as I could.. the rest of the family was not pleased..but a man with allergies has to take care of himself in such situations! Definitely recommend this place.. Everything I ate was just mouth watering!

We walked to the place (Taverna Klimataria), only to find that it was fully booked for a party. There was live music going on inside as well.

The kids were really disappointed. We decided to quickly find an alternate place to eat. Vegetarian food was not easy to find. However as we walked past the old square there were a few middle eastern guys waving us into a restaurant saying "you vegetarian? we have vegetarian!". Guess we were not the first desis with that hangry look walking past the place!

The food options were limited but we made the most of it! Once something is in the tummy, the family spirits were higher. The food was actually good and we walked around, had some Gelato (Buffalo milk ice cream!) with other snacks, visited an old small Church in the middle of the square and finally walked back to the Airbnb.

A very short video clip! The market and restaurants and walkways are lit beautifully and the old buildings give this a very nice vibe!

Then there was the bitter realization for the kids.. (had saved the screen to remind myself of their protest and yelling)

Promises were made that this would be the last time ever that an alarm was being set for such ungodly hours (their words, not ours). At the time of writing this blog, that promise is already known to be broken on our most recent trip as we had to catch yet another first flight out.. 

We were on the first flight out to Santorini the next morning.. it was goodbye to Athens!

A trip to Greece

The kids are now both in college. We wanted a family trip before they went off, given new schedules. 

So we took two days off post the labor day long weekend and decided to visit Greece. It was a quick trip with tickets on Turkish airlines. San has taken a liking to Turkish airlines after her previous India trip on this airline.. My guess is all those hours of watching Turkish soap operas has had an influence as well. In any case, we flew in and out of SFO to Athens with a stop at Istanbul. Both sets of flights were nice! We actually got vegetarian food pre booked. That helped!

It was a quick trip given the travel time. Two days in Athens, Two days in Santorini and that was it.

Needless to say, there are two opposing points of view in our house. As a child I wanted to see the world but given how we grew up, had to wait for a long time to start traveling. Going to Pallavaram from Mylapore was a vacation trip. Given our kids are growing up way better off, want them to see the world for real, instead of in National Geographic magazine. So we push for all these trips. The kids on the other hand just want to say put in their bedrooms. Sleeping in their "own beds" is something they cherish. Guess college beds are of low quality? The usual feedback is "leave us alone! we just want to relax and rest at home". 

We can be persuasive to say the least. So off we went and packed the trip with non stop activities which invovled a lot of walking on a daily basis to see things on all four days. 

Never got to blog about this trip before given the hectic work schedule that followed right after coming back. Blogging took a break. Given we have already finished our next internaltional trip this week, time to capture what little remains in my memory of that trip in photos, words and videos!

Given the time difference, we pretty much lose a day for traveling in. Once we landed in Athens and got out of the airport, it was almost 8PM. San had done her research and found that a taxi to Syntagma square (where our Air BnB was) would take an hour and the public bus system would take us there for 6 euros a ticket right from the airport. So we walked to the bus stop and took this bus 95, if I remember it right. It took 55 minutes to get to the square. From there we walked with our four carry ons and backpacks (we mandated one carry on per person so there is no waiting at airports, we can all fit in one Uber if necessary.. these are new travel policies that have been implemented and they work for us now!)

We had a nice apartment one block behind the square which had an amazing view of the Acropolis with the night lighting! We pretty much went to bed after the long journey. 

The next morning, we were treated to amazing views from our window!

The girls had booked a "cooking class". I had only vaguely heard about this in passing. So it was a shock to me that the first thing they wanted to attend a full morning class. We were to drop them at 9 AM and pick them up at 1:30 in the afternoon. The place was called "The greek kitchen". We had breakfast in the square on the way at an amazing place called Zoubourlou. The food and service was amazing. Sadly the kids had to rush off to class and San and me packed the rest of the breakfast to go! Strongly recommend this place for an early breakfast. The pancakes they made for me and the hot cocoa were amazing! The family loved the vegetarian pies!

Then the kids walked off to find their place. We tried to use maps to find them so we could get our phone back. Turned out they were already on a walk to the market place with the Chef's to buy the items for the cooking.

We saw a large group of budding chefs including ours and quietly grabbed our phones from them. That is when we realized that the two of us had time to kill by ourselves. My recommendation was to go on a hop on hop off bus tour and we took it. It starts at Syntagma square and has 15 stops on the way. Takes 2 hours and is 20 Euros a person. We sat on the top deck and enjoyed views of all the city sights.

Got myself a new Athens cap! It was already too hot early in the morning!

We did not get off the bus at all. We were going to see some of these places the next day in detail. The headphones they give on the bus didn't have enough volume to understand anything that was being said. So we just watched and took pictures.

At the end of the trip we decided to stop in the old market square in Monastiraki. We also found a pizza and pasta place and had a nice lunch! 

Once the kids had finished their cooking and eating what they cooked (we were not invited, so they got some leftovers packed for San to taste.. it was interesting to see stuff wrapped in grape leaves!). All four of us then went shopping in the square for a short time.

the place is called the Agora flea market.. we loved walking through the shops!

There was a custom T-shirt shop that caught my interest and I got shirt with the Pythogras theorem on it! 

Then it got pretty hot for early September! So we came back to the hotel and got an hours rest before our evening program. 

A video compilation for the first part of day 1..

The good news is that we were all still smiling as we hit the elevator back to the apartment!

Our next action was an all evening to late night tour to the temple of Poseidon. That post follows..