My Trips to China and Hongkong

I just concluded my trips to China and Hongkong and it is needless to say that it was amazing!!!! My Hiatus at the Sanghai airport for 10 hours was memorable. Only woke up to mosquito bites and security personnels waking me up on and off to see if I knew when my flight was. Drank water at the airport using their conical paper cups with cold water labelled at 50 degree C and hot water at 75 degree C. Browsed through some airport shops and man they were really expansive. I get cheaper tea bags in Texas Hongkong market than that of the airport. They quoted 200 RMB for a small tea box, which comes to around 35 USD. Left for Nanjing at around 9.30 PM and the funny thing was the flight attendants waited for 2 passengers that were running late. I had an over sized cabin bag(the flight was very tiny rather), so the flight attendant advised me to keep it on the seat. These were some of the good experiences I had. reached Nanjing at 11.30 PM to find 3 enthusiastic students waiting at the airport with my name on a placard. It was heartening, since the airport is about 45 mins from the meeting place. We stayed in a hotel called as Hanyuan Mansion right in the middle of the Nanjing Agricultural University. The hotel was beautiful and palatial. Welcomed at the reception with a nice welcome bag carrying a painting and meeting agenda in neatly arranged files with breakfast, lunch, dinner coupons.
Rooms are great but TV was most primitive. Rooms had no clock!
Breakfast was a mixture of greens(lots of them, with Amaranthus green, green cabbage etc.) and eggs soaked in coffee. Enjoyed breakfast in the hotel. Lunch, dinner was also equally good. We were on a guided tour to Mousolini and 2 other places. Had ice cream made up of green peas, pumpkins. The specialty of the Chinese sweets is that it is not very sweet... Next day browsed through the streets of Nanjing close to the hotel, shopped at a small super store, went on a group dinner, went on street shopping. It was all full of fun...

Hanyuan Mansion Hotel, Nanjing, China, 2012

Creepy feeling about our household items

We have shifted to many places since our marriage and most of the time, we just give away all our house hold items for free and very rarely sell. Now we don't know, since we are going to go away, we thought why not try with some kind of garage sale. So, from Sunday, we have started keeping our stuff in the garage for sale. Since, we both work from home, it is easier for us to be at work and sell the stuff. And to our surprise, we were incredibly successful with our household items this time. We have almost sold everything.
Today my beloved Toyota Corolla was sold, I shed little bit tear for that :(. Now, I can't drive my car anymore. Yesterday our small sofa was sold, in which I occasionally lie down and have morning and evening tea on. Our guest beds with temperapeudic mattresses and washer dryer are sold. We don't use dryer, but how do we wash our clothes for the rest of the time? Don't know. What remains with us is very little. Just a refrigerator (which we can't afford to part till we leave this place), some small office furniture, one bed and some utensils. I can't believe how quickly things are changing!! All that I wanted is change a couple of years back, now all that I see is only change. Sometimes, it becomes overwhelming. There is now no time to sit and think what is happening. To top it all, I am leaving for China and HongKong day after tomorrow with 3 presentations due. Funnily none of them is ready yet. It feels incredibly stressful, but guess what I am completely cool about it. I am even reaching the meeting 1 day later...
Upon my return I have to think about stuff like my next trip, that is due in July to VA followed by my final departure to India. One thing I regret that I did not have any free time during my transition. I would really have loved to go to some country and take a cool break. Sigh, may be next time..

The house sale saga contd...

As the days pass by, we are feeling close to our departure. The house was sold easily, but what we hear now, makes us think, did we do things right? May be we acted in haste.
While working in the garden, we get passerby's attention on and off and one such passer by was one of our neighbors. She came and told us that she sold her house at the rate of $70 per square feet and that makes us selling our house about $15000 cheaper!! This feels really bad although we don't want to break our contract, now we wish we should have been cautious.
Today morning one Vietnamese guy called us to tell that he is willing to pay cash for our asking amount(And our asking amount is $7000 more than our actual settled account). For a minute I was thinking why not we break the contract, but Pramod said no we should honor it. That is it, I always knew I will not break the contract, but the evil thought passed brushed by me. In any case, now the house is sold, and morale of the story is never act in haste - have patience....

Life expectancy and Expectations?!

How are life expectancy and expectations linked? Don't know, suddenly this idea cropped up in my mind, and I decided to blog about it. All will agree with me that expectations are bad. If you have expectations from anyone, then you will have a sad life; on the contrary if you have none, then you will be pleasantly surprised for every little thing that comes out of it and you never expected them. Is this true or not? How hard is it to live a life without expectations. Well not so much really, little bit of practice is all that it takes - really.

Now when I said life becomes sad if you have expectations, lets see how. We go to temples with the expectation that god will do something for us. Many times we do good deeds with the expectations of earning some good karma("punya"). We work hard in the job with the expectation of a promotion or a raise. We give our kids the best education expecting them to be in a certain way. When they don't turn out to be what we expected of them, we go through dis-appointment. We get disappointed with our kids, parents, bosses, sub-ordinates, friends and most importantly with god. We humans have invented god, so that we can just pump in our demands and get them fulfilled. If they are by some probability, then we slip into some blind faith. If the wishes are not fulfilled, then we resort to all kinds of  remedial actions that has no basis behind it.

If our expectations are not met, we all react to it differently and all or most of the emotions linked to it are negative. It may be frustration, disappointment, anger, sadness, depression etc. It is also known that negative emotion impact negatively to your health and overall wellness which may eventually lead to chronic diseases[pubmed]. On the contrary, if you carry out everything that you do, without any expectation and try to do best in what you are doing, you may be pleasantly surprised if something comes out of it. They have an exhilarating effect which is known for all round wellness.
Expectations are also linked to a number of things that does not have a pleasant side effect. If you expect too much from family or friends, they tend to drift away from you. Living without friends and family affects much more negatively than negative emotions.

In India, the competitive exams are a big deal and have wide media coverage. Almost 99% of the time, you will see the toppers will say that they did well, but never expected to top the exams. On the contrary, there will be a lot of aspirants who may have expected to top the list, but never did. So, expectation actually affects the way we perform in our exams also. This is actually revealing for me as I am writing...

 Now looks like good health and longevity, success etc are directly linked with expectation - in an inverse way. The more expectations you have, the lesser success, happiness and longevity you will have. This reminds me of Bhagavad Geeta that stresses on "Karmanye Vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshou kada chana" – You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of actions. How true it is, just perform your duties without expectations and you will live a happy, healthy and meaningful life. Have expectations and your life expectancy will go down...

The home inspection saga!!!!

I am dedicating this whole series of blogs on our one and only home sale experience. Please bear with me! Since this is a very unique experience and quite contrary to the popular belief, I feel like documenting each and every step. If you happen to be a buyer or a seller, this information may be very useful to you. The much awaited home inspection happened on 2nd May 2012. We were pretty nervous because we bought this house without any inspection. We just moved in and never regretted our decision of not inspecting it. Of course it was a brand new house and probably did not need any inspection, but there is no perfect world, and errors do exist. The inspector came with his official attire, very impressive. Entered the house around 8.30 am. The moment he entered, he started the AC, Opened all the water taps, then started the oven with its door open, started the kitchen dispenser, then kitchen exhaust and all other existing exhausts, then fireplace all at once. So to summarize, he began with switching on all the appliances all at once, that had a huge compounding noise effect. For me the most irritating part was the wastage of water. While all these are on and running, he began testing all the windows by opening and closing them, followed by each plug point. Then I noticed he came in with a big torch and started looking at every sq. inch of the house. He was also lifting every rug every paper to see if something is lying beneath. At that point it was almost my morning Zumba class time, so I left. I thanked my lucky star because it was beginning to get to my nerves. I could not stand that noise and the wastage anymore. Pramod is a cool person, so he stayed on. I came back home at about 12 noon and just then he was switching off the appliances he had started about 3 hours back. I was wondering how much water would have flown down the drain in this whole process. Then after few hours, he sends a 21 page PDF document detailing the defects he found in the house. He says kitchen faucet leaking, master toilet flushes slow, master bath has warm water, not hot water, one of the bed rooms plug point has a small scratch about .1 cm in length, and one bulb not functioning in he attic. These were easy for us to fix. We called a plumber, who just adjusted all these in no time and said the kitchen faucet is NOT leaking. One of the major concern raised by the inspector was the roof may have had hail damage, based on some discoloration on a very small area. We also called in a roof specialist, who climbed up and suggest there was no problem with the roof. So, with all these, we are now equipped to move onto the next stage. Today we called the buyer, sat with him and showed all that was marked defective by the inspector and the corrections. Today it finally feels like we have passed a major hurdle. We are all set for this home sale by owner. If nothing on towards happen, we should be closing by June 1st. Incredible isn't it??!!!!!!!!!

Do you need a middleman

I was first introduced to a broker (called a middleman) concept when we moved in to Mumbai. There was this man, who was already attached to an apartment. If you decide to lease that apartment, then you have to inherit that broker (you have no choice) and pay him 2 months rent for a 11 months lease.  In return, the job of the middleman is to prepare the lease document and get it signed by the owner and the renter and collect the witness signatures. It made no sense to me. As I moved on with life, I kept seeing more of these middlemen. There are actually a big network of them. Name any industry, you will find people that serve as a layer between the real producer and the consumer. The real producer does not have access to the consumers, neither does s/he has the resources, expertise to meet the people who would like to use the produce. So, the middleman with his sales mans skills and networking comes into play. Often the middleman makes much more than the hard working producer. As long as it is restricted to this simple one middleman step, it is fine, but you will find often there are a network of middlemen who operate at various levels often making the produce insanely high priced and the consumer finally suffers. Most of the banks have broking business. The well paid stock brokers are middlemen, so also many of the banking and finance jobs that pay very well depends on the so called analysts who work for the brokers. In USA, it is even a bigger business. You will find brokers everywhere. The up side to this is, it generates jobs, but the downside is, it costs a product much more than it should. Walmart costs way cheaper because it has successfully gotten rid of many middlemen, in turn, it is the sole benefitter of  the profits. Well, it is a vicious circle.

Realtor business is a big broker business. Anybody buys or sells a house always goes via agents without giving a second thought. In our own house selling experience, we decided to sell the house by ourselves without an agent. We were warned by friends that it may be insane and a ridiculous choice because you will be overwhelmed with the amount of work you end up doing. But as the things are moving on, we have a completely different opinion about hiring an agent. If you hire an agent, you actually spend a lot more time than you doing the job by yourself. If someone comes to see your house, the agent calls you and asks you to go away atleast 30 minutes before the potential buyers visit your home. They call you only after the buyers have left the scene and this could be easily 30 minutes more. So, in this process for every visit, you spend 1 hour more than the actual visit time. And of course before you leave your house, you also spend some extra time cleaning your mess. But if you sell the house by yourself, you don't have to leave the house!! You just walk them through the house and that is it. With realtors, you don't have direct access to the people who see your house, so you are completely in dark till the realtor calls you back with an offer, where as with direct buying, you can actually talk about the process right away, so there are no delays there. We bought this house through a realtor, and actually we signed a lot more papers than the actual contract papers.

I may be pompous here, but let me give you an example. Our house was listed 10 days back through owners.com and we had a potential buyer by our doorstep on the 4th day of listing. We talked about the price directly and yesterday signed the contract papers. Now the only thing remaining is the inspection. If it gets through, then we are all set. In addition to this buyer, we also have 3 people in waiting list, who are eager to make an offer should this contract fail. Now actually in this housing market, we as owners can choose the buyer, this sounds incredible!! On the other hand, there is another house for sale just one house apart from ours and it is through a realtor. I see that house listed for quite sometimes now and pretty sure that the contract is not signed yet. Coming to the price, they are charging 1 dollar less per sq. ft. than what we are charging. They were a model home and located just in front of the swimming pool and a play park. Now what is the difference? I don't know. So looks like eliminating the middleman has worked really well for us. So sellers of the house, please don't panic and try selling your house by yourself, it will workout well.
Realtors, please don't be angry with me that I am advocating against your job, but honestly, I feel brokerage should be restricted to a skilled profession, that individuals with average intelligence, outreach can't do it by themselves. Professions that are based on ignorance of other people should be eliminated. And this is entirely my opinion...

House for sale

As we are planning to go back to India in July this year, we have put our house on sale over the 8th April 2012 weekend. The site we listed our house is www.owners.com by paying a small fee that lists the home automatically in 24 other sister sites. It took me about 4-5 hours to draft the description of the house. As we always do with our combined projects, we draft, read and get it proofed by each other and finalize it, so this time also we did the same. And we decided to go without an agent this time, so not sure what will happen. Having known all kinds of horror stories from everywhere, we just proceeded. Not to mention, there is another house on sale just one house apart from our house in the same lane just in front of the community pool. So, there seems to be a lot of competition.
After listing, the waiting began. We would go to the site and check how many people have already seen the house and feel happy that people are interested.
On 13th April 2012 morning about 9 AM our door bell rang, I thought may be a courier guy. Opened the door and found a Vietnamese family with a very cute 2 year old at our door step. They had a printout of our advertisement from zillow.com, which unfortunately did not have our phone number. They said, they saw the ad and decided to drop by. Then they said, they would like to see the housee. Then I had to reluctantly let them in, although we had not done any cleaning before that. They saw the house and  I can tell that they liked the house. next thing they said is they will bring their older kids the next day to show the house. It was good sign and we were happy that they liked the place. That same day my friends came over and it was a bit hectic. I had also signed up for the chakra yoga class the next day and we were suppose to take our friends for sight seeing. So, I asked my husband to drop my friends at Dallas aroboratum and come back the next day, so that I can take up my yoga class. Because someone has to be home for the house showing business. After he left, I went to the bank, which is just few blocks away from home. I had few checks lying for quite sometimes to be en-cashed. On my way back, I saw already a vechicle parked on our drive way and the same gentleman is roaming infront of the community center with his kids. I called them in and they saw the house again and apparently liked it. We talked about the price little bit and they came back to us with their price the next day, which was also acceptable by us. Then on Monday he is back with a contract. I can't believe within 10 days of listing our house and without completing any formalities such as MLS listing etc. and in this housing crisis period, we are in a contract. Not sure about what will happen next, but I am very excited with the turn of events. Things are happening so quickly. Unbelievable , must be some past Karma....

By the way, if you want to download the contract form, it is here :

http://www.trec.state.tx.us/formslawscontracts/forms/forms-contracts.asp
Form#20-11 is applicable for signing of the 1-4 Family Residential Contract (our case)