Recently I have started travelling around a bit. My travel pattern is quite weird because I usually go to a country or most of the time city for 1 week duration to attend a conference or something similar and then I spare two days for me to visit the places around. Under this pattern, I have visited Kolkata, Geneve, Istanbul and soon Seoul. Until Istanbul, it was not so exciting because I was a new traveller and had not much idea how to get maximum out of those two days.
The first trip was to Kolkata, during the time I was in India in 2010. I and Sameer aka Shambaji visited IIT Kharagpur to attend a conference and then we used two days to roam Kolkata city. That was the first trip under the series of Two-days-a city. We were not sure how to do the most out of it. What we did was to roam one day on our own to eat the street food, see the neighbourhood that we stayed (Park Street) and have a local feel of the city. The second day we realised, at the end of the day we were just localised in the neighbourhood and did not get a big picture of the city. So second day, we collected some names from the Guest house reception - some names of famous places to visit. Then we hunted for some taxi drivers with the motto "Maximum places - Minimum price". Once we set that trade-off with a taxi driver, we got off. It was fantastic. Just to make sure everything goes good, we did not bargain too hard in order not to spoil the mood of the driver, because he was going to be the guide of the day too!
 |
 |
In the end, it was fantastic and Shambaji was too happy to say "Chal yaar 50 Rupaiye jyada de dete hai.." means "Buddy lets give 50 Rupees more.."
Then next, I visited the Switzerland for a winter school in Zinal, Sion. At the end I planned to visit Geneve again under the scheme of "two-days-a-city". Ultimately there were more attendees of the school like me who also adopted the same scheme hence we merged up.
 |
 |
The tourist office of Geneve was having a lot of good material for the guided tours and we opted one and it was fine. Still I missed some more important places like UN building.
Then, together with my advisor, Paolo, I went to Istanbul. The different element of Istanbul compared to Geneve was its size. Istanbul is world's second most populated city and falls under the category of really large cities. Again, we had a conference there and spared 2 days for tourism. I had a sense that any of the former plans (Taxi or Guided tour) are not going to work for me and we will need some real course to follow to experience the city.
 |
 |
Then, Paolo introduced me to "Lonely Planet" concept. Its a series of Lonely Planet city guides. One day I had a time to do tourism and Paolo was working, so that day Lonely Planet helped me in such a big way that I felt like living that city. The biggest help was zeroing down my choice to buy something for my dear ones. So, the lesson learnt was if you are going to do "two-days-a-city" do buy one of such professional guides even though sometimes they are quite expensive but they do have an edge over most of the tourism literature that you may find elsewhere.
Inspired by that experience, I have already bought the book for Seoul yet another large city next on my list of "Two-Days-a City" series and I am looking forward to it!! If you are also following this kind of travel pattern then try such a book once. Disclaimer: This is not the advertisement of a particular brand of books but this is the suggestion of the concept :D. Ciao!
