And finally…India wins the cricket World Cup! Having been an ardent cricket follower ever since I can remember, it was sweet joy to sit in a pub in Chengdu, well past midnight and watch Indian cricket’s finest hour in more than two decades. Saturday afternoon presented itself and having decided well in advance that we […]
I am really sorry to those wonderful people in my life whose mails I haven’t responded to yet. Thank you for writing in to me, I have been fairly lax in replying. But I hope you will like my reason. After my previous two disastrous tests, I was determined to improve my scores in the […]
Qingcheng Shan is a famous Taoist temple, but lurking behind it is the disdainfully named Qingcheng Back Mountain. It was a gloomy cloudy day on Wednesday when the university packed all the foreign students into 3 buses for what was to be a day-long trip. Except that none of us that time knew we were […]
Sometime back, Birdy was casually walking in the campus, feeling good after a nice meal, when she saw some birds. Birdy being Birdy being bird-lover, she stopped a while to stare at the birds. I, having little else to do, also stopped. The air was crisp and spring was in the air with the birds […]
Chengdu has a fairly predictable weather pattern – cloudy, cloudy, cloudy, raining, raining, raining, cloudy, raining, cloudy, oops sunshine, back to cloudy… Yesterday, it was all three in one day. It was fairly early in the morning when we set out along with Yoke and Dawei to Longquanyi District in Chengdu to see the peach […]
Are you busy? That’s what the subject of this post means. It’s also what I increasingly find myself asking. Just last month, I had a job. I used to get up at around 6:30AM, have a quick shower before running out for what was at least a 40-minute drive in the car. Despite the early […]
Arabib lives on the same floor as my room. I first met her when she was standing outside the door to her room, talking with a bald young man who looks almost Indian except that he wasn’t Indian – he was from Saudi Arabia. Arabib says she is from Tunisia and introductions follow. She is […]
Sunday was Panday. Panda-seeing day. Yoke and Ian were having this game – the possible permutations of Pandas. Example : pandamonium, or pantastic. And indeed the pandas were pantastic. The Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center is situated around 20km away from Chengdu. There were around 10 of us, including Xiao, a Chinese friend of […]
Wangba is what you call an Internet Cafe here. Yesterday, after a strenuous workout at the gym, we went over to an Internet cafe we saw close by. The place was HUGE. There must have been a 100 machines there. Most of the Chinese I saw at the Internet bar were either playing games or […]