holiday cheer

There have been some lovely holiday e-cards and emails with fun pictures from the other AIF fellows circulating on our google group.  Strangely, Neela and I don't have too many pictures together, so instead, Team Kolkata went with good old Microsoft Paint.  Happy holidays!

in blogging, as in life...

I’m going to Bangalore today (!) to visit Lizz (incidentally, also known to me as “LizzShoes”) and was packing last night.  For short plane trips especially, I usually try to pack as little as possible so that I can carry on instead of checking in a bag.  I’d successful gotten everything into one duffle – very much overstuffed, but everything was in there – when I realized: I hadn’t packed my nice pair of shoes.  I had NO ROOM FOR SHOES.  I ended up having to pack another bag.  Damn shoes.

east coast express

I was in Hyderabad for about a week and a half for work and just got back.  I went by train, which took about 30 hours one way.  Yep, that’s right, 30 hours.  Some feelings about this:

• Being on a train for that long kind of feels like purgatory.
• Afterwards, you feel like you’ve lost a day of your life.  Not that you've wasted a day, but more like that it never happened.
• I accumulate more morning eye crust when traveling by train than in any other scenario.  I’m not sure why this is, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the lack of circulation and the perpetually running air conditioning in 3AC train compartments.
• I really like the smell of samosas wafting through a 3AC train compartment’s re-circulated air.