Wow...Taj!

Did you vote? New 7 wonder. They have an official song!!!

My vote is for these

And ofcourse honorary new 7 wonders candidate; Pyramids of Giza

[Ignore Read More link below]

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Coorg Vacation

Last weekend, I was traveling in coffee country with my family. The Coorg is in southern part of Karnataka bordering kerala in one side. Coorgs needs no exaggeration. It is a serene weekend getaway near Bangalore. Out trip was a relaxing summer vacation. Climate was pleasant; it wasn't raining badly. We stayed in a home stay off Gonikoppa town in Coorg district. (Home stays are a novel concept popular in Coorg. We can chose to stay in home of a Coorg family. They will be our host, make our trip more interesting with their insights about coorgs and their lovely food). The Coorgis are known for their hospitality and our host in Hacienda are the best in the breed. Their friendly attitude and home food made our trip much more memorable.

Photos are in picasa web album.

We headed off to Coorg on Thursday early morning. It took nearly five and half hours to reach Balele town. And more than an hour to reach our home stay aka Prasad's Green lands coffee estate. Enquiries with local people about Hacienda didn't help us. Prasad’s Green Lands Estate was more popular among localities than Hacienda. Our mobile phones didn’t have signal (Can’t expect mobile phone companies to network Heavens!! ;)) Thankfully, lot of PCO booths are on the way and our hosts were waiting near the phone to help us all along.

Their home and coffee estate is amazing. Blissful Heaven. It has a small lake inside and a tributary of river Cauvery borders one end of the estate. After a refreshing break, we headed onto Nagerhole National Park. It was raining badly during the jungle safari inside the forest there. Nagerhole is supposed to house tigers, elephants (rogue tuskers) and host of wild animals. But, all we could spot were Sambar Deers, Bisons and Spotted Deers. Luckily on our way back from National Park, we crossed a tusker standing in the side of state highway. Wow! It was standing like a mighty king of jungle. We couldn’t slowdown our car because tuskers are known to be rogue in nature and may topple the vehicles on the road.

Life has a special meaning in serene atmosphere of coffee country. The lush green coffee plantation and the hill is still green in my memories. Our hosts houses lot of pets in their home, dogs, love birds and cute little fishes. The first thing I noticed when entering the estate was the deafening chirping sounds of birds there. Those little rhythms soothes the soul. The next day, we went to picturesque Talacauvery, birthplace of river cauvery and Dubare elephant camp. It was hectic travel on hills for the whole day. Coorg has lot of tourist spots, but almost all of them needs a length travel in hills. The best way to enjoy Coorg is to limit the number of places you want to visit in a day, travel to a spot and relax for the day before returning back to your stay.

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A Vagabond Strolls On - 8

China being a communist state, never had an accounting system in place. The revenue estimates of business houses are approximate version from the data available. The industries are run by government, funded by government and the government measures its efficiency on basis of people's feedback, rather than capitalist idea of profit of the company. Off late, the chinese government has taken steps to account the entire business cycle. The sales tax vouchers are one among them. When we buy a product or utilise a service from an organisation, a company or a local store, we can demand for this sales tax vouchers. These are coupons printed by chinese government available in all shops. The attraction in those vouchers is that it can get your money back. They are more like lotteries; they have a column, in bottom right side corner, masked by silver coating that determines our luck. Either 'Thank you' or 'You are lucky' is written in the masked column. If you are lucky with your voucher, you can get your money back.

In initial days, the government has returned lot of money through these sales tax coupons. The people got attracted by the offers, started demanding "Fai peah" (name of these coupons in chinese). Now the government stopped giving away lot of money, but still those carrot paradigm left in mind of people works; I had seen almost everyone including foreigners demand for it. It has two advantages: It helps people in giving part of their money back. It helps government to know the exact trade volume in every store and shop. This is what I call creativity. Tail piece: I had won five yuan back when I paid my hotel charges. Hurray! Didn't I tell you how lucky I am.

I enjoyed the journey in Singapore Airlines and transit hours in Singapore Airport. Airlines crew members were awesome and friendly. I heard some famous fashion designer has designed their exclusive wardrobe. I remember singapore as an exotic place, will go back there with my family for a vacation. I felt very comfortable in Singapore, as If am back in home. The in-flight entertainment is great, it has on-demand movies, television channels... We missed the transit tour on singapore by 10 minutes. The transit tour is being arranged by SIA if the transit hours are more than five hours. We reached the tour counter just 10 minutes after they closed the gate for that tour batch.

The path-for-blind in streets of Xi'an caught my attention. These are part of pedesterian platform with a special tile pattern. Any blind person can walk around the city with ease, by sticking to this lane and following the tile pattern. These pathways are not even present in most of the so-called developed western countries. China and Xi'an rocks man! I love the place and infrastructure.

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I had fallen in love again!

Hang on...

I had fallen in love with this amazing city Xi'an. Infrastructure and climate is beyond my wildest imagination for any Chinese city. Few photos here.

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Noodle for thought!

During our stay in Xi'an, we went to a restaurant that serves mangolian hotpot. If you don't know what's a hotpot is, please click on this link. The restaurant has a special menu. Fresh noodles made in unique style just before your eyes. Videos and photos are here.

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Learnin' chinese

I am enjoying life @ moment in Xi'an. This city is great. I will write about my travel accounts in this city little later. Wait for my future post. I had an exciting learning lesson in writing chinese, simplified chinese from my friends here. We had a long walk in cold winter, talking about the city. We were enjoying learning chinese along with special pineapple pizzas of this city. The lunch was at Ding Ding Shah. This hotel serves a special food similar to thin slices of Dosa (especially like Neer dosas in Karnataka). The side dishes with that food made it an interesting lunch. I love food here in this city.

Photos are here. click on the link to see the photos.

Learning chinese

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Bangalore Air show

At 12 noon, my dear fren and me decided to go for this show. A flurry of phone calls followed to plan the trip. In mid of official working day, I was in my bike to Forum to get tickets. Tickets were sold out by then! Then the next option was to check in the canara bank outlets for tickets. And it was a blisterring hot day here in Bangalore. My friend called me up while I was in mid of traffic to say that tickets were sold out in bank outlets too. Ooops! But there was a silver lining. She found out from her network that there are chances to get tickets in the venue. We decided to take a chance and took that long trip to Yelahanka aerodrame from this end of the city. After all this ordeal, we got tickets finally. And the show is worth all this troubles!

The show started with ballet and maneuvres by Tejas, the light combat aircraft. The IJT that was supposed to follow the line met a minor accident after its tire burst off in runway. Both pilot and fight were safe. Sukhoi, Hanas, Vikas had stolen the hearts with their cute maneuvres. The best was waiting for us then. It was synchronous aerobatics by nine aircrafts of Surya Kiran team of Indian Air Force. They painted the sky with Indian tricolor. Amazing show indeed!

A report on Air Show in Metblog Bangalore is here :
http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/02/metal_birds_in_air.phtml

Photo credits: Metblogs Bangalore.
My mobile camera isn't that swift operating gizmo, So I am using the photos from metblog post.
(Discalimer: Posting the photos from metblog without getting written permission from them. It is not for commercial purposes and intended to share with my blogosphere)

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Nandhi Hills!

Me and my friend ventured into exploring Nandhi Hills early morning today. We left Bangalore by five in morning. When we started in bike, the climate was normal and an absolute clear sky above us. Barely thirty minutes on the road, we were covered by dense fog with minimum visibility. Wow, thats amazing part of the trip! We were in bike for two hours in that dense fog, strolling very slowly and taking 'chai' break a couple of times. Nandhi hills is a weekend outing spot near Bangalore. I had been to this place earlier also, but this trip was amazing and the best. Nandhi hills has some fort, guest house, bull temple and few restaurants on the top. The place has many trails and the walkpath is designed like a maze. The maze is best explored in your own creative way. Just walk on whatever way you feel like and believe me, Nandhi Hills trails will give you a very different impressions on your different visits.

I have uploaded few selected snaps from the trip on my flickr. Here is the slideshow.

Yesterday, we were having dinner in a north indian restaurant (Queen's) in church street near MG Road. The restaurant has a great ambience, designed like those old mud houses with terracota symbols. Our serving of paneer tikka had this decorated lamp made out of tomato skin. It looked very cute and was resembling those halloween symbols!

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New Year 2007!

Happy New Year dear folks!

Hope you guys had a rocking start on this new year! We went to Hogenakkal yesterday. It was a nice, relaxing and memorable trip. And then we were hanging out till midnight to welcome the new year. Sad that all bars and restaurants in Bangalore were ordered to close at 10.30 PM, well before midnight. Cafe coffee day outlets were open till midnight. And as I heard MG road and brigade roads were flooded with people yesterday night. Yo, Bangalore rocks on new year!

Few photos here

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Guntur!

It was my best friend's marriage in Guntur on Thursday. We felt odd before going to Guntur for travelling without knowing their language. I thought it will be one more under-developed Andhra village as seen in Telegu movies. Now I had to change my idea. Guntur is a well developed municipal corporation. It was looking more like tier 2 cities (salem, Trichy...) in Tamilnadu.

All big retailer groups like Future group, Subhisikasha, Trinethra have chain of stores around the town

Guntur is famous for red chillies and Tobacco. The cigars here aren't looking like our poor-breed-indian-cigars 'Beedi'. It was more like cuban cigars, long and big, could not be even held in mouth. Later I learnt that Guntur's virginia tobacco is of world standard. Wow!

Delhi public school has a branch in Guntur. Man! DPS is like one big happening in education sector, they have 100 odd branches in 17 nations all around the world. I doubt whether I have seen enough DPS in Tamilnadu before!

The town is surrounded by villages based on agrarian economy- Paddy, chillies, tobacco....

Except for telegu name boards, I could see similarities to my native place in the city. It was more like travelling back again to my town and native village.

Thayir sadam and morru mulagai rocks dude! (Curd rice in combination with chilly)

In lighter sense, the place is full of cinemas dude. All tamil movies are running here, but dubbed version. The movies which fared poor in tamilnadu are all sensational hits here dude (atleast they claim so in their posters). Kovai brothers has become pokkiri brothers, vallavan has become vallava. I saw posters of Thimiru, Alai, Em-mahan.... the kollywood fellows has found a convinent market in Andhra for all masala and crappy tamil movies :)

Marriage went very well, well organised. There was a live webcast through yahoo messenger for this function(Dunno how many seen it!). Marriage hall was air-conditioned centrally (That saves the poor bride and bride groom from sweating and souring hot climate outside). Few photos here

I saw this art work in our guest house there. Liked it! This picture depicts some celestial girl rambha or menaka seducing the saint vishwamitra!

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Shivanasamudram Trip

I went to Shivansamudram and Talakad on the saturday with Dream A Dream friends. It is a trip arranged by DaD for computer team members. It was a fun trip and the falls in shivanasamudram is awesome. We had coracle ride and bath in mighty cauvery river in Talakad. Photos here.

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Random rambles

My weekend was a mixed bag. I had tried out few new restaurants with my friends and went to fun world/star city/water world. I was in office even on weekends :( definitely not for work but for catching up with frens :)

Teased taste buds in two new restaurants: the Rendezvous and the Umerkot in koramangala. The Rendezvous is an european restaurant, had steaks and pizza on last saturday. Those guys played it safe by making it a bar cum restaurant. The menu includes lot of known and unknown euro dishes. The ambinence in Umerkot takes you to the mughalai time frame, it has a niche wine bar too with various vintage classics. Had briyani in this, defnitely worth a shot. I would classify it best, in par with the Hyderbadi House briyanis. The Hyderbadi House become a regular for all my friends here. Bangalore offers a wide range of restaurants that improves the quality of living. If you happen to stay in Bangalore, definitely try your hand in these three restaurants.

We were planning for a trip to the Chunchi Falls in kanakapura road, 75 kms off the city. We couldn't made it up in the end. The saturday nights in the city become more crowded. The pubs here are overflowing with techies. The population of fairer sex seems to be ever in rise in pubs and salsa classes :) Guys, time for you to wake up and match with the freaky girls of the city.

The fun world isn't that fun. The bowling alley in the star city is the only worthy spot in the whole environment. The other rides and swimming pool side rides are not upto the mark. My trip to wonderla in the past was the real spoiler, couldn't stop comparing these rides with lavish facility in wonderla. Few photos from the trip are below.

I try to list down the reasons.

• I love this city because,
• quality of living is high compared to other places
• people run with attitude to enjoy, which has to be welcomed
• city got affinity towards adventure sports and weekend outings
• city got some nice outing spots for day outing and helluva lot of trek spots
• I hate this city because,
• there is a big local inflation in the prices
• people are misusing the unlimited freedom
• city can spoil you, if you aren't principle centred
• traffic sucks at times!

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Wonderla Weekend!

I and my friends were in Wonderla this weekend. This theme park near Bangalore has both dry rides and water rides. The usual suspects in theme parks viz. wave pool, twisters, splash cars... catches attention easily. The new and risky ones like techno jump, Insanity are few uncomfortable rides, but give the enough adrenaline rush :)

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Weekend on Rocks!

On sunday, me and my friends went on an adventure outing at Ramnagaram near Bangalore. The program was organised by Thimmaya adventure academy. Event had rock climbing, obstacle river crossing and river rafting. check out the action on photos below:

 

[+] September 11. In remembrance of all those lost lifes on this fateful day and in the war followed this. September 11 is clouded with pains, tears and a lot of controversies. John's account on what happened to him on september11, 2001 is the best one ever I had read regarding this. Link

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