Quincy Market - Boston

I was at the Quincy Market in Boston on Saturday. I must admit that it is the most liveliest place that i have seen in the US so far. The market has open air restaurants, wonderful shops for all wallet sizes, street performers who are awesome. I rate it better than Times Square, NY too.

Things that impressed me the best

1) The old world charm

2) A performer who was using buckets and vessels to play his drum beats.

3) The vegetable market.

I used to go by train to school for a couple of years. Near the railway station is a vegetable markets where the vendors would shout out loud with their offer prices for the vegetables. We would go there on Sundays to buy vegetables and bargain with the vendors till the point of the vendor getting wild enough to kill us. It would be a 2 hour exercise to search, pick, bargain and buy vegetables. The vegetable market reminded me of the Ambattur railway station market in Chennai. It was awesome.

 

Innovative Names in US

 

1) That’s not where i go for my hair cut

2) I don’t know what kind of hair cut they give

No more comments from me :) More photos to follow :)

The Great Indian Life

I was initially planning to write my goof ups in a sequence. Now i am breaking the sequence after this weekend.

This weekend has been damn adventurous. I had rented a nice house alright but it was totally empty without even a chair to sit. So, i decided to pick up a small sofa cum bed for the living room and a bed for me to sleep in.

So, the great idea was to go to IKEA to pick up these furniture. For those who do not know IKEA, its a wonderful shop for buying anything you want to setup a house or an office. Its cheap, they have everything you want and it is an adventure. If you are ever in the US, you should visit an IKEA store for sure. The added advantage of visiting IKEA is you can skip your gym for a day or if you don’t go to the gym, you get a good day’s exercise totally against your will and you have nobody to sue.

So, IKEA basically lets you go and get all the furniture (apart from other things) you want. You identify all the furniture you want and note down the Aisle and the Bin where you would find the furniture. When you go to the Aisle and Bin, you see boxes of furniture components. You can pick all the components, get it home, assemble it with the tools and instructions that you find in the box. Thankfully a very nice friend offered to help me and so i manage to sleep on a bed now.

Before i came to the US, i had no clue what components you need to set up a bed. I found that i need the Bed Base (which consists of a headboard, footboard and the side bars), the bed slate or the box spring and the mattress. I identified these items and a sofa cum bed, brought them home.

We initially assembled the sofa as per instructions and when we were about to finish we figured that we assembled it wrong and the way we had done it, the sofa would not open up into a bed. Great! we thought and we reassembled it and it was all set.

The next adventure was the bed itself. We assembled the bed frame only to figure out the bed slates and the mattress were of a smaller size while the base was larger. It looked like we had brought the larger bed frames than i wanted. Feeling lazy to disassemble the frame, we decided to go and get the bed slates and the mattress of a larger size. Once back in IKEA, we found that it was indeed the bed frame that was wrong. The head board and foot board were of the “Queen” size while the side frames were of “Full” size. Essentially, this meant that if we changed the slates and the mattress, they weren’t going fit ie. they would be longer than the frame.

Now, this was no fault of ours since the bed frames were packed together. IKEA had goofed up in their packaging. So the bed slates, the mattress and the new bed frames were taken back home. Then we re-assembled the entire bed and heaved a sigh of relief.

It was not over yet, we had ripped off the packaging of the bed frames we brought earlier, so, we were worried if they would take the frames back. But thankfully they accepted the package back. Basically, the IKEA adventure took almost the entire day

All of Sunday, i was pressing all my clothes. I have never pressed my clothes in my life. Twice a week the laundry guy would come home pick up the clothes , press them and bring them back. So forget pressing, i have not even taken the clothes to the laundry ever.  Wow, pressing those machine washed crumpled clothes is not funny at all.

The weekend reminded me of the royal life in India. It was so easy. I want a bed and sofa in my house, i go, choose and they are brought home and kept where i want them. I never go out but the clothes went out and came back pressed. Wow!!! what on freakin’ earth am i doing in the US?

New Orleans

New Orleans was quite uneventful. I stayed in a very old hotel in the French Quarter area. The hotel was a minute away from the famous Bourbon Street. But no point. This was an official visit with the vice president of sales, a 40 plus gentleman, accompanying me. I had no choice but to behave decent. Well, would it have been any different if i were alone? Probably not. Any different if any of my friends were with me? Probably yes.

New Orleans has a convention center which is about 1.5 miles long. The event that i had to attend was organized here. The interesting part is the sessions were scheduled in hall D, exhibition in hall I, food in hall C. So, if you were at the exhibition hall and you had to go for lunch, you would have to walk about a mile before you reached the lunch spot and if you had to come back to the exhibition hall after lunch, you are hungry again by the time you reach the exhibition hall you are hungry all over again.

Food in New Orleans was very close to the Indian food. Nice and Spicy. Though being a vegetarian did not help me much, whatever i got was nice and tasty.

Go around the city and you can still feel the effect of Katrina in the city. Lots of ruined buildings. Apparently, some business houses never returned to the city. It was sad. Well, it looked like India in some ways. The constructions were very different from other parts of the US. They looked very Indian to me though. Unfortunately did not have a camera to capture these pictures.

When i was leaving New Orleans to Atlanta, i had to do something that i had vowed never to do in my life. Unpack my luggage at the airport and shuffle things around. I always thought i would pay the extra cost for carrying extra luggage and get away with it. The amount they charged for 2 pounds extra in New Orleans was so exorbitant that ran from the counter to unpack and shuffle my things around to get the weight down in my check in luggage.

Then a relaxing flight to Atlanta….

Travel Horror Continues

So, stranded in London for 3 hours and i took the next available flight to Chicago. As expected this time, reached Chicago late and missed the connection to New Orleans. The worst came after that, there were no more flights to New Orleans that day.

They gave me a hotel accommodation and a ticket to the flight to New Orleans next evening at 9 PM. So, I lug around with all my luggage and try to find the Hilton hotel. It is when i stepped in to the open, i realized how bad it is going to be. It was freezing cold and i had no winter clothes.

Thankfully Hilton was right across the terminal gate but the cold was good enough to almost get my fingers frozen like frozen fries. The next good news was that i had to vacate the hotel at 1 in the afternoon and my flight at 9. I thought about 8 god-knows-what-to-do hours. Did not feel any good with that cold weather. So i did what i could do best, got a couple of drinks at the restaurant, had my dinner and hit the sack.

The next morning i found that there was a flight to New Orleans. But the time i found that out was about an hour before the flight. Here is the deal the ticketing executive gave me

“There are 2 flights to New Orleans in the morning. One at 10 and the other at 1. I will book you in on the flight at 10 but you may or may not be confirmed. If you are not confirmed, you will have to take the next flight but your luggage would be sent in the first flight. You can go to New Orleans and pick it up.”

I thought long and hard for half-a-minute and the cold weather outside made the choice. I bought the ticket. The next thing the ticketing executive had to say was “you got 10 minutes to go and get your luggage for check in”. Whew…this country was killing me. I ran (well, i actually did) and walked as fast as i can to check out and get my luggage. It took exactly 15 minutes for me to bring the luggage and 15 minutes to catch attention of the executive who blocked the ticket for me.

Thankfully she checked in my luggage and even better my ticket had been confirmed by the time i reached the gate. That was the first best thing to have happened since i left Chennai and it seriously felt good.

That's one of the remarkable things about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse. – Calvin :)