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Showing posts from November, 2010

Expressions!

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From all the lovely ladies at Simmons who I love and shall miss so much, I received:

NY and NJ and Chocolate

I went to New York again. But little I have to say this time. I landed to run around shops on Black Friday. Saturday morning I had hot chocolate with marshmallows melting in them at the Max Brenner with Roomie (my roommate for two years and wingie for the next two years of my IITian life). She was sweet enough to book us a table there where people stand in every inch of space for the smell of chocolate. We then went to Jersey Gardens (New Jersey) for shopping. So I crossed state, bought some stuff and got them all to Boston. Now I need to figure out how to pack everything. And that's all there is for my NY trip. Highlights: 1. I got to meet Roomie 2. I got to have chocolate 3. I got some nice cheap boots that I know will not last but nevertheless I love them 4. We drove and I always thought that traffic sucks in Manhattan when I walked it, but it wasn't bad at all 5. Ivo and I got the same sweater

Beacon Hill and Thanksgiving

After my wonderful teaching experience and a great rating for a presentation in one of my classes the Thanksgiving break was up. Wednesday through Monday was my break. On Wednesday we (Ivo and I) walked again. We walked Beacon Hill. It was so freaking cold that we froze over and had to stop at every starbucks we found. But it was beautiful. Boston is a weird city. It's all college stuff everywhere and like a little town in between the college stuff. We saw places owned by some of the prominent Bostoners of the 1800s. It's all cute and nice. Like living out of the old times. All the architecture was 18th and 19th century. Some houses had so many creepers on them and there were hidden gardens too. Thursday was Thanksgiving. We (my Chinese undergrad friend, Ivo and I) had lunch at the school for Thanksgiving and we have Turkey and corn bread and mash potates with new people. It was all in my Chinese friend's dorm's living room. After that we went with another Chinese fr

I Teach!

MIT conducts every year a little (actually a really huge) event called Splash (and one over the spring called Spark). During Splash, any grad/undergrad student can sign up to teach anything, absolutely anything. And who are the students? Middle school and high school students from all over, anywhere. It is up to the teacher to keep the students engages because there are walk-in seminars happening all the time and one could just walk out of a class into these seminars. So what has it got to do with me? I TAUGHT !!! What? (well it was supposed to come off as "what did I teach?", but if you read it as "waht? I don't believe you!" I won't hold it against you.) so I taught 5 classes of 3 courses. Introduction to Telugu: language and alphabet (2 classes) Incredible India: a crash course on Indian culture (2 classes) Blog Your Way: Blogging 101 (1 class) How was it? AWESOME! What did I learn about myself? That I know more about Telugu than I thought and my handwri

Charlie and his Town

So Ivo got a book from a friend about walking tours in Boston. It had a lot of tours but there was one part of town we have never ever been to: Charles Town. The freedom trail we walked was supposed to end in Charles Town but we stopped at the River Charles that day and we completed the trail now. We started by taking a ferry from Long Wharf to Navy Yard, reading the book all along. Walked around the Navy Yard and the USS Constitution, reading up the history. We then went up to the Bunker Hill Monument (on Beacon Hill, Bunker Hill is somewhere around) with the statue of William Prescott. We saw the Harvard Mall where Harvard and another guy decided to name this place Cambridge and start a great college which later on came into being named Harvard (except he didn't live to see it). We also ran into a little pub where all great leaders met to talk about politics and the Red Coats and somebody's house and somebody else's garden and the City Square and the little Harvard stree

Manhattan

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The whole trip to New York felt like a vacation you take when you are working and not a student, like working-people-taking-vacation. I woke up on Thursday morning to run to a meeting for a project, followed by another meeting for another project followed by a rush to the bus station to catch a bus to NY. See what I mean by working-people-taking-vacation? The journey to and fro sucks. Because Megabus sucks. I took my laptop with me just so I could use the wifi on Megabus to and fro and work on some stuff I needed to get done over the weekend and not really wanting to work during the weekend. Ultimately, I just carried 3 extra kgs of load to and fro with no use for it except a brief half hour to check mails check weather and register for courses at IIMC. But Manhattan rocks. My tour of New York started right from where I got off the bus. Madison Square and Times Square! The next day began with a little walk around the Fina ncial District: The New York Stock Exchange, The Bull and The Wa

New York, New York

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A new header and a new theme! One hand in the air for the big city, Street lights, big dreams all looking pretty, no place in the World that can compare, Put your lighters in the air, everybody say yeah come on, come, yeah, New York!!!! Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York!!! These streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York

To do, To Blog

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After all the blogging I do, I always have more to blog about. I am living life faster, everyday ! Here are a list of things to blog about ... Books: Unaccustomed Earth Interpreter of Maladies Breathless in Bombay (when I finish) Movies: Amelie My Sister's Keeper (already blogged on another site) NY I Love You (But I think I'll get a different perspective after going to NY this weekend :P ) The Day I Became a Woman Rajneeti Tum Milo To Sahi Veronica Mars (it's actually a series) Random things: Like Boston and NY have a lot of rats Like I am not worried about traveling by T after dark anymore because it gets dark by 4.30 now Like how the fact that i finally know what day light savings is and how freaked out I got about it :P Like how I had a discussion with a blogger who believes I am a different "type" and the weekend awakening conversation was not expected out of me and how I reacted very violently to it. (ah well, may be I won't blog about it). Like how I ca

Dream On

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In one of my courses last week, we had a guest lecture. The guest was this wonderful woman who in her 50s decided to start a nonprofit organization to help women to come away from violent homes. During the course of her lecture, she made us write our "Dream Proposal". Your dream proposal consisted of the your biggest dream, steps and goals to reach it and the estimated cost of the first step to reach the dream.The dream could be a picture including your life, you home, your car, the color of your curtains and so on. As I put pen to paper I tried to recollect my dreams. The first time I dreamed of doing something was when I was in class 3. I wanted to be the first Indian woman in space and when I was about 10 years old, Kalpana Chawla beat me to it so I tore up all my newspaper cuttings of articles about space, nasa research, meteor showers, etc and gave up that dream. The first time I put pen on paper and wrote down a pictorial life style dream was about 9 years ago, in cla

Weekend Awakening!

"You'll find it very different." "Excuse me?" "Once you have been here, India will be very different." "Different?" "It won't be like this. Once you get used to this, it's so, so different." "I like it back home!" (stone faced) This was the conversation that ensued after I told someone that I am an exchange student and that I have been here for 2 months and I am going back in a month (precisely a month actually). What kind of a conversation is that? He could have said he likes it here, he could have asked where I feel better, he could have. But how can he tell me I am not going to like my country? Because I have had a "life changing" experience staying here !? Duh! Just to clarify. I did not have a life changing experience here. And I like my country. I like London too. But I like my country more. I know it has limitations. I know it has it's issues. But I like my country. And I don't think that e

Of Picasso, Paneer and Halloween

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Some how, I seemed to have missed the post on Halloween weekend. Oh well because there was nothing to it. I was supposed to go to NY and meet my undergrad friends (one being bard). But it got cancelled in the last minute! After my extremely eventful Thursday, I spent a quite Friday cleaning. This is the first I ever used a vacuum cleaner. :) I always thought vacuum was spelled as vaccuum. Is it not? Is it American vs British or am I plain wrong ? (don't Google it). So, on Saturday, the bard , who's researching in Tufts, and I decided to spend the day around Tufts and Harvard and we did. We went to the Harvard Art Museum and saw so many paintings, I barely remember any at all. In fact, I remember only one. It was a Picasso painting . It was amazing and it stuck in my memory. It was funny actually. I was standing in front of it and I was like what the hell? What's so great about it? And I moved away. I just happened to turn around and then it caught it. It's not beautifu

Socializing, yet not

On September 25th, I killed Orkut! Sorry Google, you got the wrong one in! On November 1st, I started Twitter! Sorry Google, I only Buzz on Gtalk (which the Buzz steals)! I haven't connected my Twitter to the Blogger (yes, I haven't migrated to wordpress yet). Shall do so if it picks up after a while.