Two-Days-a-City

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! 

Dust is settling down in Spain!

The whole experience of coming over abroad and settle here was beautiful and very emotional. The experience can be seen in three different phases. I try to see an analogy between the situation with the sequence of the events when you first time go for a sky diving. The phase one, is the pre-processing step: It is the time until the day of the flight. I would call that part 'Excitement'. I was so happy and excited to come over and start my work because I was taking a very well deserved vacation of 3-4 weeks after finishing some tight deadlines like: Master's Thesis, Google Summer of Codes, PAN-2011 track participation etc. In the excitement you generally don't think the topic which in this case is to "go abroad", in more depth and knowingly you don't let any negative thought come about your adventure because you are just excited. You want to experience it and also you have to stand by your decision. It is same, when you have decided to go for sky diving and you enjoy your decision, thinking that what a great time you are going to have. Then comes the day of flight. On that day the situation seems real and apparently more real on the airport when you see your family bidding you the final goodbye. Remember, you are still in the excitement phase. As soon as you land, you find somebody to pick you up and you chit-chat for a while and then you go to the house. Rarely you find that you have reached the destination and your luggage has not! Yeah, exactly that happened to me and I was told that my luggage will not be available for two more days because on Tuesday Turkish Airlines does not have any flight to Valencia from Istanbul. Murphy's Law. Then you go to home and sleep tight because you are so tired of the journey and Jet-Lag. The very next day starts the phase called 'Nervousness'. You feel nervous because you are in a completely different environment. You see different people around, sometimes it happens they don't speak your language and even worse that they don't understand your language. Somehow the day is spent and gradually you see your over-ambition for the trip. As soon as you reach home back, you are all alone and you don't have internet and a phone to connect to your world. Now what you have is, a photo of your family and some letters from your girlfriend or wife. That's it, this is the night you are going to cry and repent the decision of coming over. All the negative thoughts which were forced underneath will come out. You somehow take hold of yourself and go asleep. This is the moment which is very crucial for one's stay abroad. It feels the same as when, you are in the airplane for sky diving and your other three friends have already dived and now its your turn. You have to deal with that crucial moment and yes it is crucial because you have always a choice of not to dive! I have seen many people returning to the home country in merely some weeks or a couple of months saying it was very bad there and they didn't like it at all. At that time I used to think why would someone do that. Now I realise, it comes under the phase of 'Nervousness'. Actually in the days of phase 2, if someone doesn't think much about going back and try to see the good things around, it would really help. I started crawling over all the plans I had made before coming over and was searching the reasons which really made me excited to come over. I suddenly noticed, doing that makes me comfortable and I liked that feeling. I notice the improvement in the mental comfort day by day and week on week. Now I really like it here. The dust has settled! Now I realise that I have time for all those things which I wanted to do like walking, cooking, spending lot of time on the research problem I am dealing with and much more. Yes I cook my dinner and weekends' lunch as well most of the times. You can see some of the photos here.



Now starts the third phase called 'Thrill'. The moment you dive, in some time you start enjoying your adventure and you are thrilled! Exactly same is the feeling when you convince yourself that I like it here. In this whole process of settlement, I rejoiced my confidence in self and it is an earned confidence and not the granted one because you see how beautifully you have tackled the situation. This experience is great and has taught me a lot for life!