Yet another year...Valentine's day is at the corner.
If you are one of those who're away from their valentines( just like me :( ) and wondering what to do then watch 'The notebook'. It's the most romantic movie I have seen so far...It's even better if you've seen it with your special someone before:)
Happy valentine's day!
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It's a pleasant surprise to find that AID India has put a link to my blog on the Indian Ocean concert on their web page to describe "How did you like the concert?"!
:)
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A meek attempt to capture the fun that we had in a day trip to Monterey and Santa Cruz beach!
Santa Cruz beach is usually pretty crowded. As it is just an hour's drive from the bay area it is a preferred weekend get away for most of the folks. Unlike Indian shores nobody enters into the sea water as the pacific waters are too cold! People were just chilling out having a sun bath or playing beach volleyball.
Santa Cruz beach has a lot of joy rides and this is the best way to spend time if you are not in a mood to relax. I took a joy ride called 'double shot' (as seen in the above pic) and it was too good! It takes you up like a rocket and you can view the entire beach. Good fun though Minu will disagree:)
After having lunch at Santa Cruz beach we left for Monterey. The road to Monterey goes through the fields. You'll be surprised but it's a rare sight here. I have traveled quite a bit in US by road and haven't seen much of the fields. I always used to wonder where do these Americans grow their vegetables!
This is the first view of Monterey beach! Isn't that heavenly? The horizon looks like a painting in splendid shades of blue.
We visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium which when compared to National Aquarium of Baltimore is mediocre. It has otters, penguins and the usual stuff. But the coolest thing there was the jelly fish! There were about 15 exhibits of different varieties of jelly fish. Have a look at the pic above and you wouldn't disagree:)
After the aquarium we went to the 17 mile drive and the pebble beach. The pic above was taken when we had just started. Unfortunately we couldn't take any pics of the drive. By far it was the best part of the day! Nothing could have served better as a grand finale to the memorable trip!
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Thanks to Parag that I learned about this awesome Indian Fusion band - Indian Ocean. Back when I was in Calsoft Parag had told me about one of their songs called "bandeh.." during our usual coffee break (I miss that man!). I didn't bother much about it till I listened to their truly amazing song 'Kandisa' after coming to Hopkins. Thanks to Minu for that! After watching Black Friday I became their devotee. So I jumped at the opportunity when I heard about their concert in Hayward on Sat (7/14) organized by AID to raise funds for Right to Information (RTI) movement.
Their performance was truly memorable and they played most of their popular songs such as ma rewa, kandisa, bandeh... Their lyrics are from different (mostly obscure!) Indian languages most of which are based on folklore. Add a touch of Indian classical and percussion (tabla) to catchy lyrics with a lot of acoustic and bass guitar and drumming and you get a fantastic Indian fusion song!
Read the description of the band members on their website. It's really hilarious!
Off Topic:
After the concert on my way back I listened to almost all of their albums that I had in my iPod. It was the best way to spend time in a 4 hr long one way journey! For the record I have traveled in almost all possible public transports here such as VTA,Caltrain,Samtrans,AC transit bay and BART! I can tell from experience that you need a car right from the first month of your stay in the bay area!
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VMware had taken all the interns to a (base) ball game between SF giants (the local team of San Francisco) and LA dodgers. Even though the match was kinda dull and Barry Bonds didn't break the record, the view from the stadium was awesome!
Nevertheless me and Gud boy reverse engineered the rules of base ball:) Now I know why Americans are so crazy about ball games. No matter how the match goes is but hanging out in the stadium is fun!
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Now it's also one of the world's new 7 wonders!
(It's the 8th wonder that I came to know about the news before it became too stale!)
Did you vote for it? I did!
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On US Independence Day I was lazing around at home watching Spanglish when Rajat called up and within no time I was on my way to San Francisco. We did not visit any fancy places but they were no less than spectacular and it’s the company that matters and not the place, isn’t it?
This lake no better than Panshet/Khadakwasla I must say:) It was after this historic lake that the fault is named –
Once upon a time this beach was famous for the world’s largest swimming pool establishment. This structure was destroyed in fire in 1966 and now one can see the ruins. Nothing spectacular about the baths in particular but the beach is at a nice location! In the evening the place looks beautiful.
After a whirlwind tour of all these places I was really tired but in the end it was worth the pain when we saw the fireworks on the bay from Ghirardelli square.
Have a look at the videos of the fireworks here.
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Mayur Bhaiya (one of my many dear cousins) tied the knot on 25th June:) I wish life time of happiness to the married couple...
This is the first important family function that I have missed so far apart from the Diwali gathering. I hope this is NOT the beginning!
Amen
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It was my status message on gtalk for a while and many people asked me about the meaning so here it is!
The 2007 National Cherry Blossom Festival marks the 95th celebration of the original gift of the 3,000 cherry trees from the city of
DC is amazing! During my first visit during the winter break I fell in love with this city. There are so many places to hang out. It is just an hour away from
All the cherry trees are lined up besides the lake which is an awesome sight.Though ideally I should have visited the blossom a couple of days before during the peak period the view was no less than spectacular! We found a couple of trees which had magically survived the cold weather and had retained their bloom.
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by U2...
The first song played on my iPod:)
An interesting entry about the song on Wikipedia is here.
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brisk 15 min journey in the Collegetown shuttle
a walk in the Towson mall. (First time in past three months!)
a slice of delicious pizza
300 (what a movie! I have no words!! 'The future of cinema' - Time)
cheese cake (by Cheesecake factory )
Starbucks coffee
...... Just like heaven!
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Storks had a field day today:)
My sis Tina gave birth to a cute baby girl:)
I can't wait to see my niece!
Sumit pointed out correctly "Is chote se baby ne tere ko "mamu" bana diya":P
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Here is my spring break wish list (it’s different than the TODO list! Always!!)
- sleep
- sleep
- sleep
Cant stress how important this is:)
Hari gave me links to some amazing blogs (mostly techi) all of which turned out to be really good. I came across one Marathi blog today and it’s brilliant! I guess it's time that I should start using technorati!
I wanted to get a couple of books from the library but since there were unavailable I got Harry Potter and half blood prince instead:). Siddharth gave me “The curious incident of the dog in the night time”…
Believe me this serial rocks! I started watching it at the start of the Spring semester and people warned me that it is too addictive. Yeah that’s true. Since I dint wanna waste even a minute to think about what will happen in the next episode I stopped watching it for the good. This break might be a good idea to start watching it again!
This wish is easy to fulfill though!
Have started well on this one by watching a movie a day before the break officially began!
JHU folks are making plans to go for sky diving some where in
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Flashback:
When I was a kid I used to collect cartoon strips of a series called Love is… by Kim Casali. I still have a note book full of these strips in some corner of my room back in
Bought a book by (Robert) Love :P…So geeky!
Slept for the whole day at home… Snow storm warning were issued yesterday night. I left for the lab at 8pm and decided to stay there at night. In the morning when I was about to go for my classes I came to know that JHU is closed due to heavy snowfall! On my way back I could see it was snow every where. It was so beautiful. Had planned to go back and click the pics of JHU campus today but slept for the whole day instead. Seems a large portion of east coast is hit by snow storm. Minu sent some amazing pics. Have a look!
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Holi always reminds me of my good old childhood days when I used to play with colors like anything:)...yesterday I had planned to go to a party 'Rang de' organised at pancards club.
I got up late, rushed to Pune to catch a movie 'Taxi no 9211'. It's a nice movie.John looks amazing and Nana rocks as usual! Ramesh Sippy has produced yet another feel good movie after 'Bluffmaster'. His movies are much like
After the movie we rushed to Pancards. Had a good time there dancing to the tunes of the DJ in the artificial rain. These parties _CANNOT_ match the fun you will have with your friends playing holi at your place. But nowadays since everybody has become busy and time is hard to find one has to search for other options to have a good time and enjoy the festival. I still remember the holi celebrated in my final year with almost 40 boys from my college. We were on
rampage and had a helluva fun:)
Rain dance soaked all the energies and we went to my office to have a shower...Yep.My office has all those facilities.It is much like Google in that respect:) After getting all neat and prim we went to Pizza hut to grab a bite of freshizzas. We chatted for almost 2 hours talked on topics ranging from movies,life, relationships to what not. Felt amazingly good to spend long hours with
friends.
My faithful reader, hope you had a good time too!
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GOA rOcKs!!! have been to this amazing place in Oct with my best pals in college. That's me, Saudamini, Sameer and Abhijeet in the pic.We were goin on the dolphin tour:) 
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