Monday: I hated where I work. Note: where I work, not my job.
Tuesday: I reconciled myself to where I work, because I realised I actually like my job.
Wednesday: Same as above
Thursday: More of the same
Friday: I hated where I work. I realised it's where I was going to spend most of the weekend.
Saturday: Guess where I am, doing anything but work, mostly a lot of hating, and thinking up nasty curses aimed at other people who work where I work.
Sunday: Let's see, but prolly more of the above.

Next week:
Monday or maybe Tuesday: I think I'll stay away from where I work, it might help reduce the nasty thoughts.

I think I may have been wrong. Tuesday needn’t worry. It comes after Monday. On Tuesday, the world seems just a little better.

Or maybe it's the weather.

It started off as the famed beach trek. The 'beach trek' is a couple of days’ hike along the beaches and hills that line part of the western coast of India. You start off from Gokarna (or sometimes further north) and go on south to Kumta (about 25kms down) or Honavar, or further south. Essentially, you climb up a hill or two, stop and admire the sea down below at spots, walk down the hill wherever you see a beach, walk across the beach to the cliffs at its end, climb them, traverse another hill or two, go down to the next beach and so on... you cover quite a few beaches that way:)

It didn't go quite as planned, but it was still a good weekend!

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It was all really a lot more exciting than the description, but the pics should say that well enough!:)

Well, I might get a holiday after all starting in 2 days, or I may not - we're still trying to figure it out. Judging by the way things have been so far - *fingers still crossed*

Anyway - pics from a weekend trip, last month to the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Thekkady, Kerala. The reserve runs a couple of programmes, of which is titled, rather splendidly, The Tiger Trail. the Periyar Reserve is part of Project Tiger and has about 80 of them.

None of those deigned to give us a glimpse though:(

The Tiger Trail itself thought is a lovely programme. They equip you with leech socks (!), guides, and a gunman, guide you on a trek into the forest, set up a camp for you, feed you awesome food, take you on a bamboo raft and then further into the forest, and basically ensure you have a nice time away from civilisation. It's supposed to be rough, and manages to be to some extent:). I got invited by a friend who was planning it with other friends and got my aye in, just in time. They cap the number of people at 5:o

You get to see animals running away from you [we saw bison, wild boar (they look exactly like they do in Asterix comics:)) and sambar deer running away and two elephant families, not running away since we were fairly far from them], pretty flowers, fungii, and a lot of the Periyar reservoir. The reservoir itself makes for an interesting picture - the tree trunks still poke out of the water!

( Picses of fungi, flora, elephants and other animals! )

It’s still a lousy year, but the foodiness has been decent and the reading, for a chnage, has been good. I particularly liked The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet and other stories by Vandana Singh.

I thought the title was brilliant. It’s simplistic yet manages to scream ‘read me’. And read I did.

It’s a collection of short stories, and I liked most of them.

The title story, the one with that fascinating name, was decent. It doesn’t quite live up to its name, but it has rather good characterisation. There’s also a vague-ish story about a mathematician in search of answers, which rambled a bit. But the rest of the stories were pretty good. Like all good short pieces, they are neat and succinct and leave very few loose ends. Plus they're mostly fairly uncomplicated.

If January is any indication of how this year is going to be, I don’t think I want any part of it:(

I’m not saying there isn’t a mix of the happies (new shoes, nice little relay thingy that a bunch of us ran, a lot of long weekends ahead, a promise of company for two mountainous trips which may or may not happen, but at least the thought is there), and the sadnesses but somehow the negatives right now (workplace angsts that are surprisingly unrelated to the R-word, and therefore completely unempathised with by others, cancelled wildlife holidays, ailing family and the ilk) seem to outweigh the positives so much that it’s all really very, very non-happy.

*sighs and whines needily and pathetically for hugs and chocolate:o*

I’ve wanted to go to Shillong for a very long time now. Well I wanted to go when we’d done the family holiday in Assam, and places like Shillong were not as crowded as they are now, and (since that was in May), would have been awesomely cloudy and damp and all:o but that didn't happen. so, when work came up there, I jumped:)

Anyway, finally landed there for a day last week. It’s a nice little town, albeit a little crowded as hill towns tend to be. But it's very pretty and green and full of little waterfalls everywhere and a lake and a botanical garden and flowers.

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I also managed to squeeze in a trip to Cherrapunji. It’s known to be one of the wettest places on earth, but it’s rather dry this time of the year.
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The road en route is pretty though probably much greener during the rains.
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The place to be is at these awesome cliffs. During the monsoons, the water falls all the way down these cliffs into a river at the bottom of the valley:o
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There’s spelunking to be done too. The state of Meghalaya has a 1000+ caves. The Mawsmai cave at Cherapunji is just one of them. It’s all lit up inside, a nice yellow light that makes the whole picture look very Alan Lee-ish.
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And what I loved the most...

Enroute to Shillong falls Umiam Lake, also known as Barapani. When I was a kid I'd read Lila Majumdar's Barapani, about a little boy who lives with his mother and his granduncle in a small village in the hills. his ftaher is a forester in the western himalayas I think. It was a lovely story and full of these nature facts kind of things – all about trees and animals and a picnic at a forest department thingy where they’re taught all about forest fires, and all through the story the kids keep eating! The name comes from the granduncle wishing to go down to Barapani for something. I’m not entirely sure whether it had a symbolic meaning or not, but the book was really, really good.

So I was pretty excited to actually see the lake. It’s amazingly beautiful, and as the wikimapia link shows, it’s HUGE!

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I spent a day in Kolkata last month. Not long enough to have any real fun but just about long enough to eat egg rolls at a street corner, desserts at Flury’s, work(!), and squeeze in a joyride on a tram!

Kolkata is one of the few cities that still has trams. They run on very limited routes now, though, and in a lot of places, while you have the tracks on the road, the service has been discontinued. It took a bunch of phone calls to Mumbai (old Kolkata hands residing there), a few random conversations with taxi drivers, hotel staff, random passengers on the metro, a little badgering of the people at work – till we finally found a small tramable section between the workplace and the airport. It was a ten minute stretch, no more, but ooh so much fun! It’s ridiculously economical too!

Kolkata itself was awesome as ever.

( Tram pics! )
And then sometime later last month, I hopped over to Guwahati. Been there before and had only a day, so didn’t do much, apart from stop and stare at the Brahmaputra a bit.

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And just so we get the Mighty aspect of this river clear, here's how it looks like from the sky

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I did actually have other stuff to post - pics from tram ride in Kolkata, rivers pics from Assam, and some nice pics of a marathon trail

But I’m too lazy for the accompanying ‘prose’, so here goes instead...

Every November or thereabouts Bangalore turns a nice pinkish purplish shade for a few weeks, because of the Tabebuia avellanedae. One of the best places to catch that is the ole favourite run site - Cubbon Park. I hopped over a little later than the usual morning run time and just before the Sunday morning traffic time and managed to get a few pics…

( clicky for the pwettiness )

... with big beanbags to sit and read on:o

I have after all these years finally figured out what I should have wanted to be when I grew up, while growing up.

I should have wanted to host travel plus food shows on TV. I can travel, and I can say nice things some times... especially about places that somebody else is paying me to eat in. And I can rate restaurants out of 10 too.

And I'm sure I can say stuff like I love Belgian whatevers or the world is my osyter, blah blah or recite extempore poems about obscure highway towns or just sit back and eat and let the finished plates do the talking

*sighs over lost opportunity*

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now – pics from a monsoon trek to Tadiyandamol in Coorg way back in August, but then I seem to have spent most of the last few weeks hopping all over the western part of the country, and not on holiday. This resulted in solemn resolutions on holidays, and peace and calm and the like, but that’s about all:)

Back to the pics...

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The workplace has moved to boondocks from central location close to lots of eating and shopping. I am still sulking.

As part of the we must cover every eating joint within a walkable distance of the workplace, at least twice, and in case of the cheesecake place at least five times (once for each flavour), before the workplace moves away from this awesome foodie and shopper-friendly location in heart of city to the back of the urban woods exercise, India Coffee House has been covered twice.

Primarily, for the sake of the masala dosas. Awesomeness. Thin, crisp, good stuffing, and if you’re an optimist, you could always consider the lack of the sambar a plus, since it prevents them serving you some brown watery liquid.

The ICH menu is a work of art. It's a single sheet of A4 size paper, with a nice typewriten list of items. part of the aesthetic appeal lies in the right hand price column, which looks like a relic of bygone days. No complaints here at all:)

Among other words guaranteed to make one jump for joy are ‘potato finger chips’. Potato finger chips, note, not Fries. Now, we're talking good ole finger chips here, not fries. These are those fat, thick, pieces of potato, dripping in oil, sprinkled with some indiscernible combination of spices and / or black salt, served with unbranded vegetable ketchup, purchased wholesale. The ones in which the taste of the potato actually survives because it’s so thick. This is of course completely unrelated to those golden-yellow slender thingies that get sprinkled only with a teensy measure of white salt and are served with all the oil gently patted away, and accompanied by a Re.1 pouch of branded tomato ketchup. Good enough, but not the same:o

The arghness though, and there invariably is one, is that these potato finger chips on the menu, on all two recent occasions, have stayed solely on the menu. Each attempt at ordering is met with a firm Not there!

Siiighhh...no fair:(

Friends are people who accompany you to the cobbler when your footwear falls apart and you don’t keep alternate footwear at work, so that you have support when you stand one-legged, methinks :o. No one at work would accompany me to the cobbler's today.:(

If corporate HR has a one on one session with you - a fairly peaceful, 2-way 25 minute conversation on the reasons for the much higher dissatisfaction (as compared to the other cities / divisions, since dissatisfaction always rife) among your colleagues (and you, but it’s so much easier to operate in a collective than get individualistic when you’re trying to discuss cribs subtly), and at the end of it you are thanked in a slightly surprised tone for your frankness, is it good or bad?

I might have mentioned it in the past - I love cheesecake (the desserts and other food albums in facebook, et al consist predominantly of pics of cheesecakes in various places:)). It’s often a toss up between chocolate brownies and cheesecake but while you get brownies nearly anywhere (although of varying quality), cheesecakes are an entirely different story.

I usually start jumping the moment I see cheesecake on the menu, but more often than not, they don’t quite meet expectation - there’s the rather awful orange cheesecake at Sweet Chariot, and then the Irish Cream cheesecake at Ice n Spice which does not have an Irish Cream flavour but does taste like a vanilla mousse with chocolate swirls on top. Infinitea and Daily Bread have decent enough cheesecakes but from what I recall nothing to go screaming to town over.

But one keeps trying, so when we went out for lunch to a place we hadn’t tried before, and saw cheesecakes in the display, and since fellow cheesecake aficionados were around, there was some collective jumping.

I’m glad to proclaim that one bite into the kiwi cheesecake at La Patisserie off St. Mark’s Road and the world was suddenly a better place to live in.


( Yumminess )

This is one of the few places where the crust melts in your mouth, and it has just the right amount of sweetness and flavour. There’s that teensy layer of cake in the middle of the topping which adds an awesome touch, because the topping has soaked it through. And the topping itself just melts in your mouth too. It’s a little too sweet and so the kiwi flavour gets slightly overrun but that’s actually okay.

The rest of their food (predominantly sandwiches, pizzas, quiches and pies) is very nice too It’s one of those tiny places with a wood flooring and hacky chairs, and all white patterned cutlery, an open view to the side street it’s in. And they serve you flavoured water… the water jugs are stuffed with mint leaves and lemons. The other desserts are nice too, there was a chocolate thingy that was quite yummy.




But the cheesecakes remain to die for.

Hopscotch lines. I haven’t seen them in ages but didn’t realise it of course, until now. It started with a bunch of kids at the climbing wall in the stadium trying to warm up by jumping on and off a step continuously. They got a little antsy about doing it, so some us relatively ancienter ones decided very virtuously to encourage them a bit (I think it rubs off from the coaches and trainers there). Pointed out that it was very simple really... just like hopscotch.

Turns out they didn’t know hopscotch. It could be a guy thing of course, so checked with some of the female kids. Turns out they don’t know hopscotch either.

Saddening:o

It's flowering season for the gulmohar! Yippee!

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I had to send some papers to Chennai. Nothing massively urgent, but I ended up couriering them anyway. I’d ideally have preferred to post it because the courier companies get all antsy about delivering out of city limits and you need someone to be available to sign for receipt.

But then I realised I didn’t have stamps. And I don’t know where the nearest post office is - nearest to home or work. A little discussion at the workplace did jig the memory a bit, and I now remember a post office near home. I vaguely recollect one somewhere near the workplace also but I can’t quite place it (I’m horribly afraid now that it might be just two buildings away).

But I still don’t remember seeing a post box either near the workplace or anywhere near home, and now I think about it, I can’t remember seeing a post box recently anywhere in Bangalore.

I am now contemplating wallowing in nostalgia over the one red and the bigger green (for parcels or some other such different thing?) post boxes that used to stand near the old house in Delhi.

I got me a new phone last week. It’s one of those terribly pretty looking slim and sleek bar ones with all the usual fun stuff.

And I’m proud to say that an entire week went by before I dropped it for the firstest time ever. Face down too, right onto the still plastic film covered screen. It slipped out of the equally slim and sleek and terribly pretty pouch I picked up for it. Exactly one week! The second fall happened today, although within pouch.

Life is clearly back to normal.:o