Flight from Amsterdam to Irvine

With lots of clutter and last-minute hiccups I managed to reach Irvine safely. I have to say the experience was very good. I was supposed to reach the house at 8.00pm on Friday but only reached at 12.00 midnight. Matt, my house mate whom I have not met before and known only since few days, remained awake until my arrival. He was so kind to do many things for me before I reached the apartment. Even without me asking him, he had arranged for some light bulb in my room (it did not have a bulb); he arranged for two pillows and a bed sheet and also helped in moving my luggage which was obviously very heavy. Very considerate and nice person I would say (Not just because he had helped me, but also he appears to be). The apartment which I am going to share with Matt has been recently build, so it is a brand new building. It contains a big kitchen, a big bathroom, two medium sized bedrooms and a decent living room. Overall, the locality appears to be great. Various beaches are located only 15 minutes by car. I have not visited any beaches yet but seems to be very beautiful. The campus is also very big with lots of parks and space and also looks very well managed. I will try to include some snaps latter. Over the next week I will have enough time to recover from the travel and lifestyle shock before the start of the semeseter.

During the flight journey, I missed by a slim margin the chance of getting a free ticket for a musical concert at Las Vegas after an in-flight puzzle contest. The passengers in the plane were asked to guess the weight of the plane when it was ready to fly. The following data where provided: weight of totally empty plane (98240 lbs), number of people onboard (136), the quantity of fuel in the tank (5073 gallon) before flying. A ship simulation engineer sitting near me gave the following useful conversions for estimating the final weight of the plane: 2.2 lbs is 1kg, 1 gallon is 4.02 liters (this as wrong, 1 gallon is 3.8 liters) and 1 liter of plane fuel weighs 0.76 kg. I estimated the weight to be 161000 lbs. The winning answer was 163000 lbs and correct answer was 164000 lbs. Anyway the puzzle was exciting. The simulation engineer assumed the average weight of the passenger to be 77 kg. I just walked up and down the flight and guessed that the average weight of the people on board to be 65 kg (as the flight was dominated by non-american women and quite some number of kids)

All through the flight, instead of looking ahead at the things to be done in the future in the university, my mind was replaying various incidents that happened before I left Holland. I wondered many times whether I was insane to make such drastic move of leaving a stable job and a nice company for a totally unknown future. I thought people around would consider that I am a nut to take such eccentric action. I was seeing some kind of strange similarity between me and vijayakanth, who was jumping into bloody politics world.

Also the mind was replaying the final few days at Eindhoven. The final farewell party from my office colleagues with embarrassing number of gifts (which I never expected), the surprising house visit of many friends of mine (steef, dim, alex, akash, milind etc) in the last day before departure for a final adieu, and the last hour intense discussion with vinay (eindhoven housemate).

Europe Yatra 2005

Note: People who do not have sufficient time or patience to read the entire article can atleast read the introduction part. Believe me it will be very interesting !! People who can endure and read beyond the introduction can view the complete picture of the "great" journey around Europe.

Part 1: Introduction:

One word that describes my whole journey around Europe: "splendid !" If you openup a map of europe in front of you and mark the major cities which I travelled it would form almost a small circle and hence we can call this literally as a round trip. The major cities which I travelled with my dear brother and had a peek look include: Paris, Rome, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Actually one could spend his life-time travelling around the world, meeting new people, enjoying new food, seeing great pieces of art works and may be contemplating deeply about things in life. Vacations are like long, well spent weekends.

Only now I realize the importance of travelling. Having lived and worked almost 3 years in Europe, only now I had the courage and wisdom to make a trip around Europe. I wonder why I did not do such long distance travel before. May be because of money reason (I am stingy). Or lack of suitable accompaniment (like cute looking girl). Or the urgency as I will not be in Europe for a long time. Or most probably the laziness (or the inertia), the pre-dominating inhibitor in my life and "any" life. But whosoever exhibiting similar behaviour and is not considering travelling please rethink. If you do not travel you miss manything (like you miss the fun of spending your own hard earned money).

Coming back to the itenary, we roughly spent 3-4 days in each city and one interesting twist in my journey was that I travelled through all kinds of "usual" medium. From Amsterdam to Paris by bus, Paris to Rome by air-plane (very cheap ryan air), Rome to Barcelona by ship (cheaper than by train or flight and I felt like Leonardo travelling in Titanic), and finally from Barcelona to Amsterdam by the usually boring train.I am thinking of making a short trip to Belgium or Germany from Amsterdam by car to make the travel medium list "complete" and fancy to write. I refrained from doing a journey by car because I find that car journey is a heaven to people who sit on the back and who are eating, enjoying and talking but a hell to people who drive and be (mis)guided in the front. People in the back enjoy the beautiful scenary and culinary while the poor people driving in the front are forced to see miles and miles of barren road. What a pity !! I am earnestly waiting to see driver-less car.

Leaving the anger against the car journey aside, I can also call my trip as an educational tour because I spent almost 1 week in the summer school at L'Aquila near Rome, learning about computer architecture and compilers (my curd rice and pickle) from world leading experts like Yale Patt and Josh Fisher. People who do not know about them can think that they are like Brad Pit and Tom Cruise in computer architecture and compilers (only in terms of popularity but intellectually they are thousands of miles ahead perhaps). Educationally only 20 % of the things taught in the summer school was new to me as I work in computer architecture field for almost 3 year. Next year I may focus on compiler courses whose syntax and symbols are totally unknown to me.

This journey was a kind of honeymoon survey trip. As I found which places are interesting to travel and which places are romantic. Any future couples can always consult me before deciding their honeymoon itenary. For example, ideally the best romantic city should be Rome (thats what romantic etymology says), but I did not find it so. Speaking of cities, I felt Paris was majestic, Rome was intelligent, Barcelona was gracefully romantic and Amsterdam was hedonistic. I also felt little bit at home in Spain because Tamil Nadu/India is not new to Spain, as our chess maverick Vishwantan Anand is one of the most popular guy in Spain.

During the entire trip as a matter of policy we decided not to be the regular tourist, who go in huge groups with one non-stop, unintelligible talking guide and another guide controlling the people like herds. Instead we decided to go around on our own, learning from books when necessary and hanging out at a place as long as we want. We also decided to get out of the usual mentality of rapid, blitzkreig tour of seeing as much as you can and as fast as you can. Instead, we selected only few interesting spots in each city and tried to spend more time if it is worth. There is a big difference between SEEING a place and KNOWING about a place. Also it is a crime to spend more time than necessary in worthless place and less time in worthy places. Looking at my description till now, you may think that the trip was a perfect ten and without a bit of flaw. Actually we had few hiccups during the trip, which I will also mention latter as tips not to trip for future travellers.

See you again in Part 2