Bowling night

I have found that bowling is very worthwhile use of time. The advantages outweigh the expense of time, effort and money by far.
1. It's a good sport, exhilarating, not too tough, not too easy.
2. It's a great way to make friends. People in bowling leagues are generally very friendly and helpful.
3. It's good exercise for people like me to who hate going to the gym.

So, last night, I went to a bowling alley and bowled with a bowling league. It's mid-season though, I'll have to fit in as a replacement bowler for some team though.
As expected, I met some great people, friendly, helpful and fun! I bowled 193, 136, 136. Not bad for a 120-odd-average-not-bowled-in-a-league-for-4-years guy, eh?

Times change

How does one compare the life in different countries when the world keeps changing so fast?
Yesterday I subscribed to a set of Asian channels here on my UK cable service. When I was in US this was not an option. Now I gotta think, is it cos UK (and Germany also, I watched Zee Cinema in Stuttgart also) is close to India or because there have been considerable advances in the cable TV arena?
Be that as it may, for now I am enjoying my Zee Cinema and Zee music immensely. Hindi movies are so much easier to watch with parallel activities, English movies and TV shows demand too much involvement. The fact that I can enjoy Zee while living in England, brings life that much closer to perfection! :)

Queue up!

In western countries, everything is done using queues. Even if you want a sandwich, you gotta get in line. But the good point in that is that once you are at the head of the queue you can take your own sweet time choosing which cheese and which lettuce you want in your sandwich and nobody taps on your shoulder to say, “Move it on buddy, it’s a sandwich, not the love of your life. Hurry up!”

 

In search for the perfect phone

Keeping up with my tradition of changing my cellphone every 6 months has never been very easy, but especially tough now that I own the i-mate K-Jam which has practically everything. Recently though, I came across the new model being launched by HTC (the OEM of K-Jam), it's called HTC P3300 and has everything that K-Jam has plus GPS, better camera and 3G etc. So, now I am waiting for it to come out, which will be next month.

Bus Travel

It is interesting how interaction between people in public changes in different countries. In Germany, I have actually gone up to the train driver and asked him, in my broken German, about my destination, and got decent, useful responses. The same is possible in India, you may go to a bus driver but be prepared for any kind of response from useful to useless to indifferent.
In England, people actually thank the bus driver when they are getting off the bus. I thought that was only the case when travelling by the company bus, but even in public buses people do that and the driver actually responds to each one with something like thanks or bye.
The driver stops the bus only at a stop where he sees someone waiting for the bus. If you want to get down you press the Stop button before your stop and he'll stop there. This morning, twice it happened that the guy at the stop shook his head in the negative before the bus driver could slow down, meaning that he was not waiting for the bus. Very small occurrence but made me smile!

The Fun of being a Veggie

I can't help comparing England to Germany all the time. Most comparisons are favourable to England, from my point of view, of course!
Here they have a green V on products that says "Suitable for vegetarians". In Germany, I had trouble explaining to people what is a vegetarian...lol. True the language was a problem but they have a different concept of vegetarianism there. The first people asked after I told them I was a veggie was, "Can you eat fish?" and the next one, "What about eggs?" and so on. So I decided to adopt Phoebe's line (ref. American TV show "Friends") - "Nothing with a face!". That worked pretty well!

To Blog or Not to Blog

Why blog? Why send those random thoughts to air? Are they so important? Who wants to even hear what I am thinking? Well, the answer is simple - if I have time to write, someone, somewhere will have time to read.