Monaco is easily accessible from Nice – about 1/2h by train. We spent an enjoyable afternoon and evening there, visiting the cactus “exotic” garden, castle, casino and cave. The cave was particularly interesting – it was about 18degC inside (despite winter temperatures outside), and walkways for visitors had been made using explosives and diamond drills! Despite the damage, it was still a lovely cave. Monaco was clean and tidy, and felt almost like a movie set.
France supposedly is the number 1 tourist destination in the world, and certainly it is one of my personal favourites! Besides the pleasure of speaking French, we had the opportunity to eat a lot of good food, and visit really pretty coastal areas, medieval towns, castles and ancient Roman remains.
Our itinerary looked roughly like this:
Marseilles -> Aix En Provence -> Avignon -> Nimes -> Arles -> Tarascon -> (Italy) -> Nice -> Antibes -> (Monaco)
In terms of hotels, it was very much ‘get what you pay for’. We tended to stay in two star places around 40-50 euros per night. Our first hotel in Marseilles was only 37E per night, and it convinced us that the extra 10E or so was really worth it! Hotels were fairly easy to find (well sign posted), though often not too close to transport.
We tried the random approach to finding good restaurants to start with, but this led to a number of disappointments. The solution was to ask our hoteliers for their favourite restaurants – this led to some really great meals 🙂
We had planned to rent a car for some parts of the trip.. however, make sure you learn to drive a manual before attempting this! Autos in France are horribly expensive to rent, so we ended up doing everything by public transport – bit tricky in winter time especially, but we managed. Tourist offices were generally very helpful.
South Korea is a great place to visit. People tend to be very friendly, the alphabet is phonetic, food is good and everything is excitingly foreign! Don’t forget your phrase book though.. English is not widely spoken. This was my 3rd trip to Korea, and it was an opportunity to catch up with Soosun‘s relatives, improve my pitiful Korean and see some interesting areas.
Should you happen to go to Korea with a partner, I would recommend staying in ‘motels’. They are around 30,000-40,000 WON in most places per night, are conveniently located near transport and generally have nice rooms. Despite their reputation as love hotels, they are often more comfortable and cheaper than other alternatives. Don’t be surprised, however, if they don’t ask for your name, and require payment in cash!
Also, visiting the local jim–jil-bung (sauna) is an experience not to miss. They are generally open 24h and provide showers, sauna rooms, hot and cold pools, massage and general sleeping and relaxing areas, as well as funny coloured clothes to wear while you are there 🙂
Some of the fun stuff I did this trip was catching up with friends and relatives, walking around fortresses, going to a hot spring spa, doing a little caving, taking in some amazing scenery and going skiing.
Back to Sydney after a very enjoyable holiday! Soosun and I were away for a bit over a month, and spent time in South Korea, France (Provence, Cote D’Azure), Monaco and Italy (Venice and Padua). The next few posts are going to give a little taste of these places 🙂
Yesterday was Mia’s second wedding. This one was a Hindu, Fiji-Indian, red wedding and quite different to the first, although it had some similarities in terms of having vows and speeches (and yes, the same husband!). The red wedding included a lot of reading by the Pundit (the Hindu minister) in Sanskrit, many prayers with rice and petals held in hands, and various things put in a mango-wood fire. There were also various prayers with coloured powders, stuff to put on the forehead, water, gee, milk and bananas in front of statuettes. Male members of the bride and groom families wore turbans. Food was all vegetarian, but nice, and alcohol was forbidden. We danced a little at the end of the night. All in all, it was a lot of fun 🙂
As the brother of the bride, I had quite a lot to do in terms of prayers and ceremonies. On the Tuesday before, the Pundit visited my place to bless a bundle of clothes and other things for Neeraj (Mia’s husband) with water and a banana leaf. We then went to the Neeraj residence where we did a ceremony for about an hour, with all the ingredients mentioned above. Before the wedding, I was also responsible for making some popped rice – similar to popcorn but made from rice in the husk. I needed to give this to Neeraj and Mia several times from a yellow cloth sling the Pundit wrapped around me during the wedding, as the couple walked around the fire 9 times. Also there were various points where I needed to pour water for foot washing and similar.
To give you more of an idea, here’s some pictures!
Well, after almost four years at EDI (now called CargoWise edi) I am leaving. I finish in the middle of January next year. It has been an interesting time, and I have learnt a lot working with very talented people and from building the framework for a big solution suite (around 4 million lines of C# code). I’ve also had the opportunity to experience the very different joys and pitfalls of product management.
I will be starting at ThoughtWorks (of NUnit, Jim Webber and Martin Fowler fame) in the middle of February in the new year. I’m expecting that there will be a lot of new exciting stuff to learn, and a lot of variety in terms of clients and technologies. ThoughtWorks are strongly XP, do a lot of development on client sites and even have some Rails projects. The people I have met from ThoughtWorks have all been very friendly and I look forward to starting there soon 🙂
Last Saturday, we had a Christmas party at our place. It went really well. Many thanks to Anh and Neeraj for doing such an excellent job with the BBQ.
Today was Mia and Neeraj’s wedding. It went really well, and the newly weds looked awesome 🙂 After so much planning, everything was very smooth. Neeraj and Mia made their vows and danced very nicely and the speeches were all good.
I got to sit at the top table facing all the other guests for the wedding ceremony, as I was doing a reading of a poem. Afterwards, I joined Soosun on the family table for the reception.
After the reception, Mia and Neeraj left for their honeymoon, we went back to Neeraj’s family’s place. We dressed up in our Bangladeshi clothes (many thanks to our flatmate Asif and his family for these!) and ate far too much tasty curry.
A wonderful day was had by all 🙂
Last night was our engagement party! It went really well 🙂
We had it at the Royal Exchange Hotel in Marrickville. The weather was great, and the venue was really nice, and our guests were awesome!
Many thanks to my mum and grandma for the cakes, my family for being so helpful on the night, to Dennis Building for the drinks tab, and to everyone for coming along to celebrate our engagement with us. We had a really great time and I hope everyone else did too 🙂
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