Vacation

This is longest break since I started working, that is almost more than a decade back. Exactly 10 days starting from last X'mas day of the last decade to the 3rd day of new decade.
Half of it was spent on a round trip & the other half @home
Round trip: Bangalore - Gulbarga - Hyderabad - Gulbarga - Bangalore

@Gulbarga:
Cousins wedding; bumped into some relatives after a gap of a decade & a half

@Hyderabad:

• Sisters kiddo is the cutest & the most happening 'thing' in our family right now. She is the apple of the eye & literally like an apple herself. Spent time there and bought a lot of goodies for my niece.
• Caught up with almost all 'chaddi-dosts'
• Village visit for a day. Activities included swim in the open well, field visit, fabulous lunch made with all indigenous ingredients, game of cricket & volleyball, lot of chit-chat & to top it up all I got a chance to exercise my culinary skills for dinner. Needless to say that the hosts and the other guests were very impressed.

Some select pics below

	One of the two oxen that are put to use on the fields. I was told that tractors are hired on a shared basis primarily for ploughing and oxen for clearing the weeds
	Home, sweet home. Was able to capture the nests
	Captured having fresh 'chana'
	Testing the water before the leap
	The first lap

@Gulbarga:

• Visit to the most popular spot in Gulbarga right now - the Sharana Basaveshwara park - that overlooks the Basaveshwara temple and the lake; had the local delicacies - cut mirchi, ragada & Bholenath ice creams & milk shakes
• Amazing food for lunch at my grandmothers place. She is almost 75 but cooks for everybody at home (joint family) on wooden pyre & copper utensils and without doubt the best cook I've ever come across.
• Spent the remaining time dozing off (almost 5 hrs at a stretch)

@Bangalore

• Sneaked to office on one of the days for more than half a day; to catch up with some chums and monitor the assignments given to my team.
• Blogging a lot. Never thought that I'll end up spending so much time blogging. It has kind of become addictive & a background thread always is alive to sniff if anything happening around can make it my next blog :)
• Gained a lot of experience farming on the popular facebook game farmville; believe it or not, the current status of my farm figures in my to-do list. I'm not into computer-gaming big time, but this has got me hooked on. The last time this happened was when I and my B-School mates used to spend sleepless nights strategizing each others downfall over the 'age of empires' game in the computer lab.
• Almost got lost in the Spar hypermarket. After experiencing the freshness and innocence of a hamlet just a few days back, the unabashed urban exhibitionism in the hypermarket did not go well with me.
• Stepped into almost all the well known niche women's dress centers in and around Jayanagar and Banashankari 2nd Stage; learnt a lot of related vocab - chikaan, patiala, leggings. The visits were spread over a weeks time which helped my wife revamp her wardrobe & I ended up spending a fortune.
• And not to forget all the miscellaneous activities like hairdo for my kiddo, visit to my aunts place, house-cleaning activities, visit to the temple on 'vaikunta ekadashi', eclipse & the new years day

Come Monday, back to the rut again :(