Trip to Orissa.. Day 4

Nothing was planned for the day so in the morning we decided to go to the Nandan Kanan Zoo. Its around 15 Kms from the place where we are staying in Bhubaneshwar. Nandan Kanan is well known because it’s the only place in India where breading of white tigers is done (this was told to us by the guide). The place was just like any other zoo that I have seen. It was sad to see animals in cages. The great thing about the zoo is that each animal in the zoo has been given a name, like one pair of tigers was called Madan and Mohan.

After the zoo we traveled to the other side of the city to a place called Dhauli. It is the place where king Ashoka adopted Buddhism after seeing the destruction caused due to the battle of Kalinga. There was nothing much to see at Dhauli other than the Buddhist monument depicting king Ashoka’s transformation from a king to a follower of Buddha. Interestingly it is also the place where some part of the bollywood movie Asoka was shot.

I spent the rest of the evening attending my friends wedding reception. Tomorrow plans are of visiting the Lingaraj temple in the city. It is a very old temple of lord Shiva. More about the temple in my next post. Tomorrow also happens to be my last day in Orissa, I will be leaving by the 3:30 Pm train…

Note: I had typed this on the 7th but was unable to post it.

Trip to Orissa.. Day 3

Today we had planned of visiting the Sun temple at Konark and the Jagnnath temple at Puri. At the end of the day we did manage to visit both the places. Both places are about 50 Kms away from Bhubaneshwar. We left bhubaneshwar a bit late in the morning, so we couldn’t visit the Puri beach which is supposedly very famous and always crowded.

Konark is a great place to visit if you want to see some great architecture. We had hired a guide who explained the architecture to us. There are lot of sculptures around the temple which reminded me of Khajurao and the Kamasutra. Our guide was not shy of explaining the poses and the meaning of the sculptures. One sad thing about the monument is its slowly eroding away. Our guide explained that it’s mainly because of the iron content in the stones that are used for building the temple. Since the temple is close to the sea the salt in the air causes the iron the rust and the stones erode slowly.

After Konark we headed to a small beach on our way to Puri. It was just like any other beach, white sand, lots of water but very few people. We headed to Puri and reached there in about 30 mins.

Puri is a really crowded place, well you can expect that regarding the fact that thousands of people visit the place every day. We were not allowed to carry cameras or cell phones inside the temple grounds. The Puri temple is surrounded by around 25 to 30 small temples. It takes around a hour to visit all the temples. The temple provides lunch to all pilgrims as prasad. Its called the Maha Prasad. We ha that at around 4:30 in the evening and then went for a walk to see all the temples. By the time we left the temple it was already getting dark so we dropped the plan of visiting the beach. We reached Bhubaneshwar at 8:30 and I am lazing around in the room since then. Plans for tomorrow are not finalized. We may go to visit some more temples in the city.

Trip to Orissa.. Day 2

The day began with me sitting in the waiting are of the CSI Airport Mumbai. That is where my last post had ended, so let me continue. I had to spend almost 5 hours on the airport, waiting for my flight. I almost fell asleep a couple of times while sitting. I guess I had not mentioned this earlier but I have never travelled by plane before this.

The plane was supposed to takeoff at 10:25 AM, but as with most of the flights and trains in India it was delayed by 1 hour. Well to summarize my first flying experience, really liked the view while takeoffs and landings, food was good and the air hostesses were really old. This was the only disappointing thing about flying by Indian Airlines. The flight reached Raipur, Chattisgar in about 1 hour 45 mins and then halted there for 40 mins. From Raipur it took us 45 mins to reach Bhubaneshwar.

After reaching the lodge it was time for lunch. Since I was already full with the food that I had had in the plane I chose to eat some snacks. Orissa like Bengal is known for its sweets and I thought of trying some sweet dish. I ordered the “Steam Cake”, had no idea what to expect but found it similar to a dish made in Goa, its called “Kharvs”. No time to explain about Kharvas now. After lunch I slept for a couple of hours and by the time I got up it was time to leave for my team mates baarat. Good thing is nobody forced me to dance (I cant dance). The food at the wedding was great. There were so many dishes that I had not tried earlier, and finally I had my favourite dessert, ice cream.. Yummy..

New dishes tried today – Dahi wada dum aloo, Steam cake and Rohu (Fish) fry

PS: Attached pictures of the plane that I travelled in and my team mates baarat.

Tomorrow I will be visiting the Puri temple and the Sun temple at Konark. Snaps will be uploaded on my picasa web album as soon as possible…

Trip to Orissa.. Day 1

The preparations for the trip began on the 4th of December early in the morning when I started packing for my 5 day trip to Orissa. The ocassion for the trip is my teammates (ex-teammates) wedding. In the evening after completing my work in office me and my other colleague left office in hope of catching the company shuttle to Aund (a location in Pune). We had planned of catching a bus to Mumbai from Aund since we have to catch our flight to Orissa from Mumbai airport. Unfortunately we missed the shuttle but fortunately got tickets to a volvo that was leavng for Mumbai from the Pune station area.

The journey lasted for around four hours and all the while we were totally confused about the exact location of the Mumbai domestic airport. We finally managed to reach the airport at around 1:00 AM in the morning.

Right now I am writing this post while sitting in the airport waiting area. My flight to Orissa is scheduled to leave at 10:30 AM, and I have no clue what I am going to do for the next 5 hours. May be i'll spend the time reading a book, or may be play a game on my PSP or may be watch a movie on my laptop :P. Guess I have lots of options to kill time, just hoping that I dont fall asleep while sitting here (I haven't slept the whole night :( )

One interesting thing about this airport is that there are 5 WiFi access points here (Kingfisher, Indian, Airtel, Tata Indicom and EZCOMM). Only the airtel connection is free but the credentials are sent by SMS to a cell number after registering the mobile number. I tried registering my phone but the SMS has still not reached me :(.

Hope I get to write a post tomorrow from Orissa. For now I am waiting for my flight and the SMS from airtel.

PS: Pictures attached are of the Chatrapati Shivaji international airport, Mumbai.

Worst travel experience

Here I am writing this post live from the shittiest bus that I have travelled by till date, and since lady luck has totally deserted me I have the worst seat in the bus. Well the bus is Krishna Varun and I am travelling from Pune to Goa, sitting on rightmost corner seat of the last row. There is no leg room, I can’t push the seat back, and once the seat next to me is occupied I won’t be able to move. This is by far my worst travel experience to Goa and I can't blame anyone else for this because I waited till the last moment to book the ticket, even when I knew that there would be rush because of the public holiday on 2nd october. Wait a second, may be I can blame someone, the guy who sold me the ticket. That *$%@ (insert the bad word of your choice) told me that he was giving me a seat on the second last row. Also this guy had told me that tickets of another bus that I preferred were over, whereas I found from my friends that the tickets for that bus were being sold upto 15 mins before that bus left pune.

The bus has just left pune, now lets hope I reach home in one piece. Home seems to be really far away. 12 hours away...

P.S. I have safely reached home and posting this entry from my home PC

Disturbia & Chuk De India

I am writing this post after taking a loooong break from blogging. The reason for my absence was work and exams which I am glad to say are over. Well this weekend I happened to watch 2 movies one was Chuk De India and the other Disturbia. Both the movies were great and if you like watching Hindi and English movies then you should not miss either. I guess most people out there have seen Chuk De India, atleast most people from my office have seen it twice. I was one of the few people who missed to watch it earlier, the good thing was that i didn't have to wait in a long queue to get the tickets and I got good comfortable seats.

Chuk De India is a story of a Hockey player turned Coach of the Indian womens world championship hockey team aka Shaharukh Khan, and his team of girls that has been selected from all corners of India. The movie basically shows how the coach tries to teach the girls to play together as a team and motivates them to win the world championship. The movie also touches upon the fact that cricket is given way too much publicity in India and sports such as Hockey is neglected to a great extent. I particularly liked the fights between the girls and the Haryanvi dialogs of the actor that played Komal Chautala. Its a must watch movie for any cricket fan who is disappointed by the Indian cricket teams performance in England and wants to turn a womens hockey fan.

The main reason I went to see Disturbia was that it had got a 7.5 rating on IMDB and I didn't have much to do on Sunday. The movie is a thriller which revolves around a boy who has been sentenced to a house arrest for 3 months for punching his teacher in the face. The story takes a turn when our hero finds out that one of his neighbor is a serial killer who kills women and preserves their bodies in the basement. I was told by a friend that Disturbia is similar to the movie The Rear Window. I found the movie as thrilling as Vacancy, although Vacancy was a better movie and had much less actors. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes to watch thrillers and who liked Vacancy or The Rear Window (Which I haven't seen).

P.S. I have around 6 posts that I had started but never managed to complete. Hope to publish them soon :P

Barcamp Pune 3

After attending the BlogCamp at Pune last month it was time for me to attend my first BarCamp being held at Pune. According to Wikipedia BarCamp is "an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols." For those who are still wondering what Barcamp is, It is a unconference where people discuss and present on technical topics. The BarCamp 3 was held at PSPL Pune's Erendwana center. Altough around 250 people had registered on the wiki I guess around 150 of them actually attended the event. I was especially looking forward to attend the sessions by Abdul Qabiz but unfortunately he was unable to attend the event.

There were some interesting talks like the one by Sudarshan where he used simulations to explain about the complexity found in nature. I also liked the session conducted by Devendra Laulkar on Rapid prototyping using PyQT.

In general all the sessions were gud and the event was organized very well. Unlike the BlogCamp this time the WiFi was working and that helped me in updating the Avast virus definition on my laptop. The only disappointing part was the food. Well most of the people found the food to be good but it was a stone crushing experience for me. I found one stone in the bhaji and a piece of plastic in the rice. Considering that the food in PSPL is famous for it's insect and worm content I was lucky to just find an inanimate piece of plastic.

Well it was definately worth the time and effort spent on attending the event. I am eagerly waiting for the next BarCamp Pune, but hope that the next time the quality of food is not the same...