Da Picturesque Sojourn !

Little earthlings!

Discover Hong Kong - Cramped and Crowded!

Bruce lee and
Bommireddipal-lee

Smooooke on the water, Fire in the sky!

Towering heights...

HK and BVK !

Momma always said, "Life's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you gonna get."

Feature Presentation - Rembrandt's .......
I dunno .... maybe one of those Syndics of the Clothmakers' Guild or let's just say Les cinq célèbres !

Now.. how many of you are jealous ;)

Repulse bay - Am sure it can't be cold shouldered

Sands of time...

Troubled waters... Roger waters ... complete the sequence..

WOW - Windows of the World!

Strange but true - I go all the way from Chennai to Shenzhen to see the Taj Mahal !

Ooooooom!

Taming the merlion...

Signing the treaty of Versailles...

Bonjour, je m'appelle karthimodo!

Leaning tower of pisa and the about-to-lean tower with pizza...

Aloha !

Search for the Triwizard cup...

Now picture that ! Where can you get to see 3 wonders together...

With love,
From the foot of the Abu Simbel

So long and Good bye .... وداعا حسن

So long and thanks for all the vegetables!

When I knew I was coming to China, I was mentally prepared about food, which by the way is one of the most important things in my life! i wondered how I could adjust for 4 months but after coming here it actually isn’t bad. Considering the fact that I used to crib about vegetables at home, I am sure my mom should be the happiest person reading this blog!

Chinese restaurants predominantly have non-vegetarian food and a small part; maybe 3 or 4 dishes are unheard roots and shoots. Some places dun even have the veggies on their menu and you need to specifically tell them what you want.

The past one month has been what I call “Treat-full”, the clients have been very big-hearted taking us to restaurants every week though they have been full-fledged Chinese restaurants (if you have not been following, read the prev para).And the best part was they used to order the veggie food for us, and this was our invariable dishes

Tofu – They say it’s their version of our Paneer but tastes nothing like it. Marinated in some Chinese brown sauce, they are not very inviting to see but don’t taste all that bad.

Tu Dou Da Dou – Nothing but potato and Green beans. One of those dishes which prove the saying “Appearances are often deceptive” and one of my favourites.

Yu Xiang Qie Zi – Eggplant stew in some kinda Chinese sauce. Yes I did manage to eat them, after all it’s an eat or die situation!

Kong Xin Cai – These are underwater plants, typically you could imagine the ones you see in your aquarium or maybe on discovery channel when Ian Wright goes underwater diving. Edible though.

Xiang cai xiao la jiao – That’s parsley and broccoli and other leaves. Oh yeah obviously in sauce.


Bamboo – All we have seen of bamboo is furniture or that stick you principal used to threaten you in school, but here it’s the most delicious dish of all. There are a million varieties of bamboo…spicy, sweet, sour, add all those adjectives you want. By far there’s this dish not sure about the name where the bamboo shoot is sliced into perfect cuboids and marinated in a sweet yellow sauce, mouth-watering isn’t it!

Lotus roots - Their favorite Vegetarian dish.Actually isn't very bad considering the plethora of items we get to eat in a Chinese restaruant.

Salad – I dun even bother to know how it’s called in Chinese, the moment it’s ordered I pounce on it and by the time people get to count the vegetables in it, it’s over….burp!

All through out India, I was envied by my non-vegetarian friends for getting my order first. By the time they get their dishes, I am half way through mine but over here it’s completely ulta pulta. The veggies come at the end after all the other land, sea and air living beings are served.

The Chinese are crazy (I might be drawing criticism and swearing if a Chinese reads this but then this is my view). They literally eat everything except humans though (I have no awareness on Chinese cannibalism), there are provinces where dogs and cats are delicacies let alone snakes and frogs. And they believe animal parts are good for their body just like we say carrots are good for the eyes and lady’s finger(the vegetable) is good for the brain (I never did well in math despite eating lots of them). Yeah they would think we too are crazy fantasizing vegetables will give us good health and brains.

I was talking to one of our Clients about this and some of them were shocking to hear.

• Good for skin - Pigskin, Duck legs & Chicken legs
• Good for liver - goose liver
• Good for eyes - snake blood
• Winter delicacy - hairy crabs

This is where I stopped him, this conversation was brought about at the dinner table and I didn’t want to mess it up.

This is one place where Paul McCartney’s quote doesn’t work – “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

ASITHUM

Sometimes when you think back on situations which were never meant to be the way they really turned out, you wouldn’t believe how many of them you actually come across.

I would more appropriately call it a Acidentally SITuational HUMor… it just happens, excites and vanishes. I have experienced so many of them in the past one year but I seldom remember any, thanks to my overgrown cranial tissues which seems to be toiling for something totally incomprehensible.

Let alone the “heavy-word” talk, and I think back, I can share some of those situations…

I work in the IT industry and there’s something called the “Issue-Log” which is updated with the issue status worked upon by the offshore team and the same is updated by the onsite team during their working hours. It was a typical situation when the clients had to do some testing for the code we had developed. They had to produce some test cases and check if everything is alright. We opened the issue log to check if they had done it. The update was “Sorry. Norbert can’t reproduce! Will take some more time.” We didn’t work for the rest of the day!

It was a heated discussion about some business process between the clients and our team onsite. The meeting was long and everyone was tired, as always there was no conclusion. The chair person of the meeting was trying to get things done and deciding on the deadlines. In all the commotion, she uttered “Come on, At least se (i) x!” There was awe and silence!

We had done some important work and the user was very happy. He very casually told us that he would take us out for lunch sometime when we were free. We told him we would prefer pizza just to play around, nothing was serious. The next day, it was about 10:30 in the morning, he storms into the room with a huge vegan pizza with vegetables and colorful peppers and cheese and mayonnaise and all. We were addled for a moment of having to eat a huge pizza just after breakfast and just before lunch, but who cares …. Mouth-watering, hogging, burping!

There was this one time when my friend and I had to go to Trivandrum, Kerela to attend a friend’s wedding. We got out of the railway station and were looking for an auto, all that we knew was that our friend had booked us a place to stay and we had a worn piece of paper with the address. There was this taxi person who identified us as strangers and came forward to help us. He greeted us with a smile and asked us to show the address, we did and he took us to his taxi. He was very friendly and cheerful but the moment we stepped into his taxi, he started “Saar, this blace is simblly daaangerous. Yesterday the bolice came and arrested some ladies. Be gareful!” All along, he was saying things like this and made us chickens!

Another one of Kerela’s incidents… It was early in the morning at around 6:00 and I was taking a morning walk. There was this fly-over which I was walking on, when I noticed a skinny guy pushing a cart load of filled water cans uphill. I decided to help him out, he gladly agreed and we pushed it to the top. The downhill part was easy, I told him goodbye and carried on…but he insisted me to sit on the cart and we could rocket down (yes…rocket’s do come down). I didn’t want to disappoint him and by the fact that I am born lazy, I agreed and sat in his cart. Seconds after I sat, we realized that the brake lever had failed! I still am not sure how we stopped, but we did, and I was still in one piece!

Life is amazing…just like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get!

KaM-YoU-nI-cA-tIoN

Blue blistering barnacles.. I am not even able to spell that right. Just a week of gesticulation and am already forgetting to spell words!!

It’s amazing how people just don’t understand what someone wants. It’s been a typical monkey-behaviour in the past week in Shanghai. In India, though we have different languages we can still talk in English and most people would understand, or maybe hindi in the north is comprehendible to all. Am talking about public places like Shopping malls and transport. But people here are completely clueless about what we need.

Taxis and buses are completely out-of-touch with any other foreign language and at shopping malls, maybe 4 out of 14 counters may have an attendee who knows a bit of English(very lil believe me). In the past week, I have realized my inbuilt ability of gesticulating to people and get what I want. This could be typical of me, ‘coz am not very much bothered about what people might think if I do something funny. People who are very conscious about their behavior would be out of place here. Below are some of the funny experiences…

To get a potato peeler, I literally had to get a potato and act as if I am peeling it to make the market girl understand what I wanted.(ha-ha.. market girl)

To get a rope for drying clothes, I had to do the cowboy thing to swing the rope and draw something closer but that didn’t work and then I had to show them how I dry clothes on ropes and finally got it.

The best part which happens everyday is to find out if it’s vegetarian or not. We have to show them a chicken (paak-pak) and a fish and a cow and what not.

If it’s a big shopping center or a super market there are name-boards in English which shouldn’t be a problem but then every product has a whole lot of Chinese on it and very little English. Something like the “Conditions apply” case… everything in Chinese is BIG and there’s a small part written in English.

And the funniest part of kamyounication is with the Taxi drivers. They keep talking to you in Chinese and any other language you talk in, they don’t have a clue. We learnt a few Chinese words, at least the directions and for a week kept giving the drivers the wrong words for the right directions and we used to screech halt and use the signs to communicate better….phew I got it right this time!

It’s funny, it’s necessary, it’s nice to communicate… just like how would say ‘I would like to buy a Ham-burger’.