Pisa and Florence.

Well my latest trip was to Pisa and Florence. Finally Italy baby!!!!! Have wanted to go the country since the day I landed and must say it was no way disappointing. But the journey to Charleroi was an ordeal. Had to battle some cold wind, snow, delayed bus and a bus which refused to start and get moving once it reached.

Land at Pisa airport and luck finally changed. Got out of the plane had some warmth. Mind you not warm by a summer standard, but warm as in not low single digits. Also the forecast had predicted snow and rain. So that is why I say the luck finally changed.

We headed straight to the famous Leaning Tower from the airport. Had some pizza for lunch and learnt something very interesting. Till a few years back it was frowned upon to eat pizza for lunch in Italy. If there is some community in the world which is as passionate about its food as Indians then they are Italians.

After food clicked a lot of photos of the square on which the tower was. There is not much more to see in Pisa. But I must say, the town looks very similar to an Indian town. But was easily one of the most beautiful squares I have visited so far.



From there we headed to Florence. Upon reaching Florence we had dinner and rested. Next day morning we walked towards the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. The ‘P’arty boy kept insisting that you will be amazed by walking out of a small street and seeing this huge structure. And he was so right. Walked out of a small street, and out of nowhere this huge structure pops up. It just feels so out of place, which became even more evident from the Piazzale Michelangelo ( a high point in the town which gives a good view of the town). It is so much bigger than the surrounding.



From there we headed Uffizi Gallery. I am not a museum kind of a person, so did not enjoy this so much. But the view of the town from one particular window was perfect. The brilliant part about most of the European towns/ cities I have visited is the there is always a river/ stream flowing right through it and they have some of the most beautiful bridges over them. Florence was no different.



We could also climb the dome of the basilica. The view from the top was breath taking. Also since it the highest part of the town, the sun had a direct view. We sat on the sun and enjoyed the view from there. Very peaceful and warm :).



Now for the nit picking part of the trip. The food for as good as it was, it was also equally pricy. I would say same rate as Leuven for a meal. I was expecting it to be a tad cheaper as was the case from my previous trip to the Canary Islands.

But over all a wonderful trip with a wonderful group of people. Let me exploration of Europe continue.

Violence News it is

Has news reporting become all about reporting violence. The top 3 headlines on today's news were all on violence all as a result stupid govt policies. What can we do about it?

Adios great bowlers

Well this is a small report of what is happening in world cricket. A lot of people have already written about it and yet i had to write about it because i am seriously dis-heartened by what i saw. In a recent ODI between India and SL there were 800+ runs scored. To a few people it might have been great cricket. But to me it was utterly disgusting. Cricket to me is a contest between bat and ball. But the t20 format and certain ODIs on flat dead track is so boring. It has become a contest to see who can hit the ball harder and longer. Cricket to me is a beautiful where a reverse swinger from a Waqar and Wasim is bending into the batsman foot and a really talented batsman like Tendi or Lara digging it out. That makes for super viewing. If this is how cricket is going to be played i am sure in the near future if I am given the responsibility to lead a side, I would play 11 batsmen. And hope that 10 of them can turn their arm (one keeper). Not bowl those amazing in-swinging yoker or a nice drifting leg-spin. But just turn their arm. Coz anyway the batting side is going to score at 8-9 an over. I would atleast be confident that I will be able to chase down that target with 11 batsman on my side. Adios great bowlers of yesterday. The likes of you the world might never see again. They say proof of the pudding lies in its taste. Just look at world cricket and how many great bowlers do you see. There are a lot of good bowlers, but no great bowlers. Most teams till the recent past did have great bowlers. So there you have the pudding and the taste also.

Brush with Belgian Royalty

Well it happen a few weeks back that the Princess of Belgium visited our lab. And I had an opportunity of seeing a real life Princess LIVE. This is the first time in my life that I have seen royalty in such close quarters. I know it looks very lame for me to blog about this, but lets face I was super excited the day it happened. So I just wanted to share my excitement with a few ppl who read this blog. Here are a couple of photos from the visit. I am barely visible on them, but I am in the same frame as Royalty. How many of you can lay claim top it ;). Click on the photo to enlarge them and then have a look :).

The Finale

When on trip you tend to a remember a lot of things. But if it ends on a bad note it has a very bad after taste. If we think back we generally first think about that one point, irrespective of how good the rest of the trip was. But luckily for us this was not the case. In-fact, if anything it ended on a very tasty note :).

We were driving back to Leuven from Neuschwanstein Castle, we decided to stop at Stuttgart. Since Germany in general has a higher population of Sri Lankan Tamil folks than Belgium, we dropped into a restaurant of theirs. And the food was bloody hell tasty. But sadly for everyone other than me I can truly say that the food made them cry. They had something called Chilly Parotta. It was a kind of dish where you will find some parotta in-between green chillies :). But other wise the food was damn good.

To reach Stuttgart we had a brief stop at the Foggensee Lake. It was a very tranquil lake. We managed to see only one more family other than us the few minutes we spent there. But from what i saw, it looks like a very popular summer lake, where you can have a nice relaxed swim.

The drive up to the lake was relatively more relaxed/not filled with arguments. I guess all of us had a huge 'HANG OVER' of the fairy tale land called the Neuschwanstein Castle. The sight of the castle it self was breath taking (Before we left Leuven, Dr. H wanted to see a landscape where there would be layers of Green, autumn colours and snow in the horizon. I would say we got to see atleast 2/3 of that.) At some-point in our life we all would have read about this very typical European castle hanging over a cliff covered with snow. We were refueling our fuel guzzler when we saw this sight. We had left the castle come down hill and stopped to refuel. The sight of this was breathtaking. If I had even an ounce of poetic skills (which i do not) in me, it was an ideal setting to write one.If you can see the castle in the center of the picture, we had come down from that very place. It was snowing there. On some level i was keeping my fingers crossed to meet my Cinderella there. The setting was perfect for it. That was the first time that i had experienced snow fall where i could actually see the flacks properly. It did not snow in Leuven 2 years back, and last winter i was back home.

The inside of the castle some how did not impress me as much as the Mysore Palace in terms of grandeur. But what impressed my was the well known German efficiency. The Q system was beautifully divided into 3 Qs. One for the present tour group and 2 previous ones. All leading to the same place, but for different langg. I can just imagine the chaos which would have existed in India for that kind of a system.
And o yea being a foodie, i cant forget to mention one more small point. We had some amazing sweet bondas at the castle. It was so cold and the hot bondas were like a heaven sent food in this already heaven like place.

p.s. Had loads of fun in the trip, hope to repeat something like this again sometime in the future. And a million thanks to the drivers and the other guys who were part of this trip. Hope to many more like this with you guys. And yea next time is going to be the BMW 7 series or the BMW X5.

pss: The whole blog is in reverse chronological order. Just some expt I am trying.

day 2

Well day 2 started of on a much better note. As i had mentioned earlier the hostel where we parked our car and rested, allowed us to freshen up a bit. We then went for some nice cakes and coffee. A few of them had amazing sandwichs. But my aversion to bread kept me away from it. Even after 2.5 years in europe i still struggle to eat a slice of bread. I really dont know why :(.

Anyway after the breakfast we went for a short hike up the falls in Triberg. The falls over there is supposed to be the largest waterfalls in Germany. But it is not single large drop, but a cascade of continuous drops. It was a nice 1hr we spent there. Next was some shopping. We went to buy the cuckoo clock. This place is the origin of the cuckoo clock and they had some amazing collection of clock. We also got a few other souvenirs from the place.

Next we all went to have some authentic German meal. I must say the cheese pasta i had was very nice. It was extremely feeling as well. It was just some goat cheese which was made like noodles and oven backed. It does not sound great, but tasted very cool. This was served to us by a waitress who was dressed up in a very typical style for that region. The food which others had also i suppose were good ;).

Then we made a way to one of many "worlds largest cuckoo clock". I really dont know how many of the worlds largest can be there. But every street claims to have one. All I can say about this one is "it was interesting".



We then started driving towards Fussen. This was the place of our next over night stay. The drive started by taking us back into the town and then once the perimeter of the town had passed, we came upon some amazing landscape. To our luck, it was also snowing ever so lightly.



What we saw next I did not expect. We passed through a canopy of trees, and we came across a landscape which was white. The road was twisting and turning a bit. But some amazing driving by our driver kept us safe.



We stopped for a lot of photos in the place and it was extremely beautiful.

The next stop was lake Titisee. Nestled inbetween a few hills an amazingly relaxing place. This is where we had our coffee break and some amazing black forest. Mind you by this time we were still running late to reach Fussen. But lessons from the previous night were learnt and we called up the hostel saying we would be late. They gave us the codes to enter the building late in the eve and a few more instruction. All the details were noted as there was no way we were going to repeat the mistake.



After this it was a non-stop drive to Radolfzell. This was a place where a friend of one of our drivers stayed. He was a wonderful person. It was his thale deepavali, we we had got him a huge black forest cake. It was really big, but tasted twice as good as it was big. It was really silly of us not to take a photo of the cake, so sorry readers no photos of what i would describe as sluuuuuurp.

Then there was a driver change. Mr. Youth took over from Gym Boy. I was sitting on the back seat and there was serious argument about life and what it means to stay in a foreign country. In the mean time there was huge snow storm kind of a situation on the road. We oblivious to that fact were debating away in a loud and boisterous fashion. But Mr. Youth really drove amazingly well in teh condiotion. Given that it was his first snow drive my respect to him. We did get to fussen safe and sound. The hostel keepers were still there and we all hit the sac as we were really tried from the "no sleep i tell u no sleep" situation the previous night.

The next section would cover about the castle and drive back, with a stop over for some very good food in Stuttgart.

Deepavali 2009

Well deepvali 2009 will be a very special one for a few of us. A few of us from IMEC planned to spend the deepaveli weekend at Triberg. It is a place is the black forest region of Germany. The trip started of a grand not. On Friday we went to pick up the rented car. We haev booked for BMW 3 series or a Merc C Class. We landed at the rental place and it so happened that they had run out of both the cars. So we got an upgrade to a Volvo XC 70. We all set of from IMEC at 530. But by the time we left Leuven it was 630 pm. We had told the hostel ppl at Triberg that we would enter the place by 11:30 pm max. But since we left 1 hour later than the scheduled time, we all got to Triberg only at 00:30. And the hostel was closed. We tried looking for places around, but for some strange reason there was not a single free room in all of Triberg. (FYI Triberg is one of the popular tourist places in the black forest region). So not finding a room was very surprising. The temperature had started to drop in the region. We all decided to put on the winter gear we had taken and go to sleep in the after parking in the parking lot of the hostel. Since we were 5 young men, we decided to keep the windows open, so we dont dies from lack of oxygen. It started to get seriously cold at about 4. All of us could barely sleep, due to the cold and lack of any kind of space to stretch. The next day morning we requested the hostel ppl to let us freshen up. He said we could brush our teeth and answer our morning calls but nothing more. There is a popular saying in tamil which is "Deepavali deepvali-ku dhan kulipeya" meaning "do u take a shower only once every deepvali. In my case, it was one of the few days where i could not take a shower. The deepavali of 2009, will be a special one for hte guys i went on the trip with. More detail of the trip and photo will follow shortly. But in the mean time photo of the car we traveled in.