Paris again

Thanks to weird visa rules, Paris was needed to be my port of Entry in Europe before I go to Portugal to interview refinery for the SCP. I had enough time to go to the city centre. I decided to visit Montmartre hill that I missed last time. Thanks Nilan for reminding. This is the hill that was once a work place of great creative minds like Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. I had my suitcase with me so decided not to climb all the way up and sat at a cool location with hill at one side and Paris at the other. I always wanted to draw a sketch in Paris. On the other hand I had Márquez's 'Love at the time of Cholera' in my bag, reading which at that hill would be another dream coming true.

What I ended up doing is to open my bag, took documents I need to read for my SCP and read them on the hill known as Sacred Heart of Paris. Why? Because that is what MBAs do......

South Killington Refinery visit

Things finally started to roll out for SCP. We had couple of telephonic interviews on Friday. And on Monday me and Raymond travelled four hours in train to South Killington, a very small village near York to visit and interview a process engineer in the refinery there. Well that was the first time I saw any refinery from inside. Pretty intimidating structure though we really didn't get a guided tour or even chance to walk around. The interview was pretty helpful.

Pranjal and Raymond are in Paris (probably in night club and drink when I am writing this :) ) right now. Tomorrow they will travel to Malava in Spain to interview a refinery there. Raymond will come back and I will travel to Paris on Friday morning and if everything goes well, then will join Pranjal in Lisbon on Friday evening. Hopefully I will get time to see around Lisbon on week end. We are interviewing on more refinery there. Will be back to Oxford on Monday late night.

It is so interesting that many friends are travelling so much around the world that no city seems to be too far or too foreign.

Here is for the SCP team:

Lets see what this SCP is about...!!!


Hmmm.... doesn't seem that easy.


Holly Molly... get help call a friend, 50-50, any lifeline will do...HELP!!!


umm.. yeah.. whatever.... letz atleast go to Europe... will see about SCP later.

Cotswold

On Saturday, we hired a car, stuffed it with an Indian, a Korean, a Taiwanese and an Iranian along with two umbrellas and four cameras and more importantly a GPS and drove to one more the most naturally beautiful places in England. Cotswold. Cotsworld itself is a huge area of 790 miles includes eye soothing landscapes, sprints, woods, birds and everything naturally beautiful and beautifully naturally. However we managed to visit only couple of limestone housed villages standing there since 14th century. They claim that these are England's most beautiful villages. I can't speak for whole England. But I guess it is true. The place was just lovely. Best place for families to spend a smooth, scenic, peaceful week end.

Loved It.

Ignore the legs... look at the place


Too tall people around


Our man Incheon here organized the trip, thanks to him



Lovely limestome houses row... thatz Incheon, Raymond and Behrad there...





Guess who just decided which holiday home to buy after getting job

Or alternatively checking if they need MBAs to run the canteen......

The snaps here have failed to capture the beauty of the place. Will check if others have good snaps and will upload again if they do.

Yearbook

Incedently, I ended up working for the college yearbook. This is online software, so no time spent on creative layouts and stuff. The work was prettly much limited to selcting and uploading the snaps while being creative within limits. It was great fun to go through the snaps of moments through out the year. Seven of us worked on this. Here are few snaps for yearbook 'staff'

from left, Prashanth, Sirena, Maren, Will, Katy, Alok...

Lazy Week Busy Sunday

The week was spent in regular SCP / VISA / JOB struggle. Nothing remarkable and hence wasn't really willing to update the blog. Spend Saturday resting, watched movie August Rush, which by the way is not as remarkable as many other had said, and was reading Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera'. Enjoyable book. However my stamina of reading the book is hampered. Now I can't finish books over-night... Guess need to work out in this area :)

Nonetheless, first Sunday of August, Friendship day. Here is one old snap of Friendship day where three of us, the roomies, invited the friends in Pune for Dinner. Good Ol days.


So went Punting with remaining MBAs in Oxford. We spent 3 happy hours Punting, eating grapes and drinking Pims. What a great way of spending Sunday Morning. Really had a great time.

Really Enjoying :)

Thatz me and grapes... :-)

And to make the day the perfect, had TT and fantastic Indian dinner at Naveen's house. Me, Sudipto, Sachin and Naveen, just four of us. We had a great talk, ambrosia food cooked by Rashmi, Naveen's wife and one more cool round of talks and dessert. Wow, what a Friendship day Sunday. Couldn't ask for more.

So Guys. Happy Friendship day. Enjoy.

Trinity Term Results

Results came out about 5 mins ago. Being in school was able to collect it very fast. Well, passed in all subjects with between 60-65 in all. Which means I have passed three terms of MBA in plain Vanilla manner without flying colors or falling down....Boring ride.....but glad that it didn't turn in wrong direction either....

Windsor Castle

After a long time! I was planning to update on Friday. But the keyboard of my laptop, that had troubled me multiple times before, had officially gave up after a small accident. So....

Nonetheless, after gruelling boredom of week end aggravated by visa problems for scp work and hence due lack of any activity, I didn't expected the week end to be any better. So out of sheer lack of anything happening, I decided to go to Windsor Castle, a weekend of of Queen. Old pal from John Deere, Hari, benignantly agreed to accompany me. So spent quarter of Sunday waiting for Hari on different train stations (don't ask), quarter in the castle watching King's and Queen's rooms (they have seperate bedrooms - I thought that was my original idea :-( ) quarter watching the movie 'The Dark Night' in Slough (which by the way is a decent movie worth watching) and rest quarter travelling. At least I got a required break, had nice time catching up again with Hari and got couple of snaps to upload here. The next episode of the 'series of unfortunate events' was the camera going all crazy. So half of the snaps have gone bad. Here is what I have got...