My Hongkong Trip

My breakfast at Nanjing airport

On 29th May, I left for Nanjing airport to take up a flight to Hongkong. Nanjing airport is quite small and you have a separate route to enter to the international counter. Realized this after going through the queues of China Eastern airlines. All of the Chinese airports don't flaunt electricity, rather the AC usage is minimal, which I liked very much. The counters leading to international entry was swift, so went to the gate quickly,.managed to have some fruit breakfast at the gate. I was scheduled to have a presentation at CUHK, so worked little bit on my slides at the airport while waiting.

The flight to Hongkong was un-eventful, just 2 hours. Hongkong airport is flanked by mountains and oceans - makes a very pretty view. The immigration was also amazingly easy, just passed like breeze. One thing to note here is, for most of the residents of many different countries; if you are stopping at Hongkong for less than 15 days, then no Visa will be required. I hope India does something similar to boost tourism!

D's apartment complex.

At the airport, one of the students of my good friend D was waiting. In conversation, I came to know that he had come all the way 3 hours back. I felt bad because I could have managed to go by myself. But nevertheless, it was great and enjoyable ride. Reached at the CUHK campus withing 45 minutes. The stay was arranged at the University guest house. My room just overlooked the ocean and mountain. Began to wait for my friend D to arrive. She came at 12.30 PM after completing some of her meetings. It was ecstatic, meeting her after 7 long years!! I have had so many fond memories with her while we were in Blacksburg together, including our cooking sessions, nature walk, writing grants and papers together and facing failure:(. It was a big part of learning experience and growing up together. She was almost like a sister to me. She left for Hongkong, got married, had a job had a family and all was well for her. I was really very happy about it. We hanged around the campus like old times and giggled a bit. But at the same time it was really sad that her father was seriously ill, and she had to leave the next day. D was very effective in hiding her feelings and was in complete control of the situation. We took some pictures in the campus and finally the time came to meet her daughter. She is an adorable 4 and half year old, very cherubic lively kid. Loved her company. Met D's in-laws, they are every bit the Asian parents are. Hanged around and went to the Indian eatery. It was not very pleasant dealing with the agents that drives(read force you) to their crappy small eating joints. Food was OK. We went back home tired by 9 PM. I used to get up at 1 AM every night during my China and Hongkong stay. Listen to Cookoo at 3 Am and enjoy day light at 4 AM onwards. D came to pick me up to her department at 9.30 AM. She is every bit her as I knew 7 years ago. Her office can testify that. Amazingly calm(despite her fathers health), she took me around and we had the scheduled talk at the right time and she had to leave. I can't stop but admire her for her calmness and steadfastness during the difficult hours. She did not forget to fetch lunch for me with nice Indian tea.  To top it all, she also arranged for me return trip to airport. It was really very touching. I wished her father could come out of Coma, but that was just a wish. Came to know that he passed away after few days.....

Photos of Hongkong from my taxi

D and I: Don't look at me, I am dead tired after 5 nights of 0 sleep!

I ventured into the city all by myself on 30th afternoon. Took the subway, and got down at Shatin station. That is a big shopping joint in Hongkong. They have a very big Ikea store there with rooms decorated with delightful furnitures. I went to the other side of the train station and there was another equally bigger mall with a variety of stuff. Browsed along, shopped little bit. It was all nice. On may way back, I had really tough time locating the guest house. I went round and round and had no cell phone. It was difficult to walk because it was getting dark, and there were plenty of mosquitoes biting me around and the terrain was hilly. I was sweating profusely. But somehow managed to reach the guest house and it was end of a memorable trip. Hoping to get there again sometimes soon...

At D's office!

Subway station Hongkong.

At the guest House (Where I stayed)

A nice green house "like" overlooking from my room.

Outside of the science building - CUHK.

Do you Fancy blogging?!

Lately, I see a meteoric rise in number of people willing to blog and successfully blog. While this is a great trend, but what if your blog does not offer anything new? Is it just a waste of web space and resources?

 Lets see what are the contents/types you would like to see in a blog:

1. Someones perspective about anything.
2. A new information.
3. Some interesting stories.
4. Pictures.
5. Compilations.
6. Travel assistance.
7. Ranting etc.

This list goes on and on. Basically people tend to write in a blog about what they feel about a thing, a situation, share information, photograph etc. So, it boils down to sharing new information. But what if someone just copy pastes some random paper abstracts and shares a link through their blog and post it in social media sites? This is one of the behavior irritates me most. I come across this person often through my FB -  who posts links to his blog and you go there and find nothing but the copy pasted abstract of a paper!! If you have nothing new to offer, then don't offer. If all that you want to do is to share the abstract, then just copy paste the link to it from pubmed, don't copy paste the abstract and mis-lead the reader as though it is your own. Another thing annoys me most is, even if you do that, don't flaunt it through social media such as facebook. How can you be proud of a thing that is so discernible? I use to tempt to do that half a decade back and realized a while ago that it is not a great act. So, I dared to write a comment on that person's blog saying this is not a great act. It can be at best be left to your note books, not be flaunted around...

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??!!!!!!!!!