I knew May was going to be a whirlwind between work trips and my Mom coming to visit London & Paris. Now that it's June, things have settled down a little bit.
The quick highlights, which include a lot of near disasters involving missing or late tickets for events:
1) I dropped my Mom and step-Dad at the Chelsea Flower Show on Saturday and its been a blur of sightseeing since. All of the events I bought tickets for, these were the earliest.
More coming soon, gotta run.
Below is Day 3 from my India Trip, as part of my one post a day diary from the 2wks spent in India.
See my other India posts: Day 1 | Day 2
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Wednesday, July 9th
Slept like a baby after probably only 3/4 hours of sleep the night we arrived (couldn't sleep in the car to or back from Agra- the craziness of the driving made it almost impossible to fall asleep, even after a day of walking around in the hot, humid weather), and had toast and tea for breakfast. Got on the hotel's PC in the lobby and checked email, Twtter, Facebook, and chatted with a Rochester friend.
We re-grouped in the hotel restaurant to plan out the rest of the day and prioritize what we wanted to do over the next four days, museums, shopping, spas, etc. And here I sit in the Amatria Spa getting a pedicure. Yes, you heard me correctly, I've officially entered Metrosexual Land.
To top it off, it's a full spa treatment-- manicure, pedicure, and massage. I never had a real professional massage before so I'm looking forward to that part. I never thought that I was a spa person (I'm still not sure that I am yet) but I did the full spa trifecta for a few reasons:
The rest of the day was shopping (Mattias and I were on this trip with six or seven other women) and of course, the guys snuck over to the small bar in the plaza for a little Kingfisher time. Later that night, after grabbing a Pizza Hut pre-dinner snack--don't ask me why, it's greasy and dirty but good-- we went out for drinks, someplace in Delhi, and I'm almost positive that we were the only non-Indians there-- and almost the only ones dancing too.
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Now playing: Chicago Public Radio - #362: Got You Pegged
Below is Day 2 from my India Trip, as part of my one post a day diary from the 2wks spent in India.
See Day 1 for an introduction to the trip and as always, the entry below was written during the trip so I haven't edited the text except where absolutely necessary, it's my thoughts and observations as they happened during the trip.
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Tuesday, July 8th
Checking in from the 2nd day of India. We stayed at an Islam cultural center Monday night after landing in Delhi. The flight through Helsinki was smooth and mostly non-eventful.
[ Sat next to an Indian gentleman and his university-aged daughter on the Heathrow to Helsinki flight. An extremely nice guy who asked me about my India trip and explained exactly why he was going back-- it's a heartfelt story.
Having moved to the UK about thirty years ago and putting all of his children through school and dental university (yes, I think it was two sons who were already dentists and the daughter who was traveling with him was currently in dental school) as an accountant, he was now using the money that he typically put aside for his own children to start a primary and secondary school in his hometown...]
After three hours of sleep we woke up at 4:30 (was supposed to be 5:39-- not sure how that happened but it meant having a headache and my contacts in for an extra hour or so that I didn't need) for a 6am departure to Agra, where the Taj Mahal and Fort Agra are located.
Now that it was light out, the abject poverty was depressingly obvious. It reminded me of the summer that I spent in Guadalajara, Mexico, when I was in college.
The same amount of squalor but probably on an even grander scale.
Three quick cultural observations from the trip so far:
My two-week India trip, visiting the cities of Delhi, Leh, and Varanasi, was about three weeks ago but it's taken some time to organize all of my photos and thoughts. I'm now ready to publish my diary & notes from the trip, along with a few photos sprinkled in, and will post a single day of the trip over the next two weeks.
Please keep in mind that I wrote my diary off an on during the trip via my smartphone and I'm posting the entries without much editing, so take the grammatical mistakes with a grain of salt and remember that I wrote this almost three weeks ago.
Check back everyday for the next day of the trip and make sure to post your comments as well.
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Monday, July 7th
Started off the trip w/ little sleep, which seems to be my MO for air travel these days-- I tend to sleep more for work trips b/c I have less to pack and thus procrastinate less-- but I digress. Bed at 2:30, alarm at 4, and then crammed some mango into my mouth before rushing to Liverpool St. No, I hadn't called a cab b/c I 'm thrifty and figured I could make the bus/train combo work.
[I had actually spent time plotting out the trip to Heathrow since the flight was at 7:30 and the tube won’t open early enough. According to TFL, I could catch the 205 at 4:47 to reach Paddington by 5:20 for the 5:25 Heathrow Express and arriving at Heathrow by 5:45. Nothing like a great plan but as in business, it all comes down to execution. So with my new rollee bag and my trusty duffel bag on top, I rushed down Brick Lane and picked my way to Liverpool St. And I actually wasn't too late.]
My watch said 4:51 and it's a little fast but I no way of knowing if the 205 had already cruised by or not-- time for Plan B. That meant hoping there was a taxi outside Liverpool St.
Not only were there several cabs but the cabbie convinced me that the fare to Paddington and the 40pound Heathrow Express would be only about 5pounds cheaper than just taking the taxi all the way to Heathrow directly. Less stress for 5pounds more, sign me up.
And if this good luck wasn't enough, it got even better as I chatted with the cab driver. He gave me some tips on good Indian food around Brick Lane (he said it wasn't all played out there as I suggested it might be per some of my reading) and told me there was a really good place in Picadelly Circus, complete with an Indian band and fire torches on the wall. More than that, he explained the difference to me between European Indian food and regular Indian food (the latter being the more authentic, traditionally vegetarian and latter being, o course, packed with meat as British like). To make the point, he told me that the British export Chicken Tikka to Western hotels in India because the Europeans want it but that kind of Indian food doesn't exist natively on the subcontinent.
But cooler than that, the cabbie was a techie and more specifically, a Nokia phone tester-- how does it get better than this, I get to have a techie nerd discussion on the way to Heathrow, debating the merits of the iPhone versus the Nokia N95. And though he was obviously biased, he convinced me (again, as he had with taking the cab all the way to Heathrow instead of just to Paddington) that I ought to pause on purchasing the iPhone when I get back.
He told me all of the cool things that he can do wit the N95 that I'm seriously thinking about going that way:
And the guy was a Slingbox user too, how random and how cool. I've never met as many interesting cab drivers as I have in London, probably because the job of a cab driver in London is well paid.
The guy convinced me of the N95 so I gave him my card and told him that I'd like to keep up with him so he said he'd send me some links. He knew TechCrunchUK and Engadget but suggested AllAboutSymbian.com since I was in Europe now and in Symbian Know Nokia country.
It's hard to describe the almost bottom-less powder that we had for all three days of the Utah Ski Trip. I joked about needing a snorkel but it wasn't that far off.
This photo sums up the trip nicely, it was amazing, truly epic.
2/16/08 UPDATE: Didn't want to link to all 300 photos so here are a few via a photo Facebook album.
I've posted before about Collins' book, Good to Great, (and who hasn't honestly, the thing has been on the NYT bestseller list for a long time), and this quote below led me to back to Collins' mantra of getting the right people on the bus:
Here's a definition of leadership that has stuck with me: Leaders are "people who leave their footprints in their areas of passion." (HBS Working Knowledge)
Sounds very similar to the Five Patterns book I posted on a couple of weeks ago.
And I'm back from the Labor Day road trip, 1700 miles in ~28hrs. Here are a few photo highlights, or the only crappy shots that turned out from my camera phone. Remember, though, driving across Kansas isn't usually a highlight unless you stop to see the world's largest prairie dog. Maybe next time.
Currently Playing: Talib Kweli - Lonely People (on repeat w/ the Bose headphones rockin')
