Living it up in London

I am thoroughly enjoying London. Most of my first week here has been spent more or less as I expected - making new friends among the LBS students and going out every night. The group pictured above are actually some of my best friends here - Molly (USA), Trisha (Philippines), Hernan (Peru), Mark (Canada), and yours truly.

The bars here are similar to what you'd see in the US. You go out, chat, and have a few beers. And beer here is mostly cold, contrary to popular belief - I guess it's something that changed a few years ago. So it's a fairly familiar routine for me, but going out every night is wearing me down a little bit.

I'm a little disappointed on my progress with practical matters. I bought some socks, which was a nice baby step. But I still have some loose ends in the US, I don't have an apartment yet in London, and I don't have a bank account. This upcoming week is just going to have to be super-productive!

Adios, America

I've landed safely in London. My final weekend was truly frantic - rushing around to see people on Friday and Saturday, then packing / purging my things on Sunday. I ended up moving with virtually the clothes on my back - two checked bags, one backpack, and one laptop bag. I own nothing more (ok - keep me honest - my house is still for sale).

The way my friends reacted to my departure reminded me very much of when I left for India. Certain people stepped up and wanted to see me more, while others faded away. It's a very good indicator for who will or will not put effort into keeping up a friendship going forward. And this is not a sad note, FYI - this is a happy note, in fact. Most everyone that I expected made an effort to see me, and a couple people who are relatively new friends surprised me with an exceptional effort to spend time with me.

Wow. I mean, what can I say? It made me feel good to feel loved. But it also mires me in melancholy now that I have moved away from some of those great relationships. I'm sure I will form new bonds in London, but they aren't in place yet. They will come, and I will learn to love London. But in the short-term a move is always hard.

My new MacBook Pro arrives

An early step before leaving for business school. I can say without hesitation that this is the nicest piece of hardware that I've ever owned. The new MacBook Pro has only been out for about a week and I've already got it! So much about it is brilliant. Made from a single piece of aluminum in order to save weight and add strength. At brilliant, color-rich screen. A backlit keyboard. A power cord that magnetically attaches. A fast, new, Intel-based processor.

But I didn't buy it for the operating system. I'm a Windows guy. So what I've done seems pretty radical but it was actually very easy. I downloaded the RC version of Windows 7 (basically the beta version of the new version of Windows, which should release in October). Then I downloaded a trial version of VM Ware's Fusion product. And so now I'm running a beta within a trial. The result?


What you're looking at is a little window with Windows 7 in it that's sitting within Mac OS X. I'm running both at the same time, which is great, since the Mac OS is actually a little better at some things like music and pictures. I can blow Windows 7 up to take over the full screen and then toggle back and forth between the operating systems (they can share documents, pictures, etc.). You can even run Windows apps within the Mac OS, in a view called "Unity" that is pretty self-explanatory.

I'm not overly technical, so this is pretty amazing to me. And I'm super-excited to see that everything is working. Whoa.

Update

I've been back in the US for quite a while. About 8 months so far. But I've been traveling a lot lately - 4 weekends away over the course of 5 weeks. This upcoming weekend is in Las Vegas. So I will put up some travel-related posts for those trips.

The big news, of course, is that I'm moving in early August to London. Which means that I'll have to get this blog up and running again. Talk to you again soon.

Last night out

The guys at the office dragged me out for a final happy hour / night on the town yesterday. It was a great way to cap off the year with some fun times all around. We went to this bar called Hint - nothing special, a typical European-looking bar. We were goofing around a lot and telling stories.

One of our guys, Gordon, went over to chat up a girl at a table in the corner. To help him out, I went over to talk to the younger girl (who turned out to be a sister). It turns out that Gordon's girl is a Bollywood actress! Nicolette Bird (see pics). So I finally met someone in Bollywood - I'm surprised that it took so long, but I can finally check it off my list.

I'm all packed up. Some things I wanted to keep had to go anyway (space limits), and I'm over the weight limits - bring on those extra baggage fees! But I guess I'm almost through here. It feels like I was living in the US just a minute ago, and that this year has passed so quickly. The move is going to be a huge shock... it just hasn't hit me yet.

The Taj Mahal

A few weeks ago I was scheduled for another business trip to Delhi. And I thought to myself, "Self, you really need to get yourself down to Agra. Who knows when you'll be in Delhi again?" This was probably my 10th or 15th trip to Delhi. Interestingly, it would be my last! So I was fortunate swing by Agra when I did.

What a journey. It's almost 5 hours each way by car over bad roads (frequent stopping for cows / kids / etc.). That's one of the interesting things about India; all of its sights are nearly inaccessible. I ended up missing my flight back to Bangalore that night. But on the bright side, it allowed me to catch up on some R&R in a hot bath at a 5-star hotel in Delhi.

The Taj is beautiful, sure. But I think the mystique from the story behind it. At a time when most Indian kings took 100 wives, the king who built the Taj took only one. And when she died, he built this memorial to her, and never looked at another woman. The building is completely symmetrical in every aspect, and the interior has tons of semi-precious jewels around the queen's grave. They're all set into the marble to form flowers and vines, it looks wonderful.

Because of its symmetry, the Taj photographs perfectly from every angle. Every picture I took came out like a postcard. It was really hard to pick which ones to post here.

The Wadi Rum desert

I drove off into the desert with my hotel's check-in guy and his buddy. It was a little intimidating to drive off into the middle of nowhere in the Middle East with two strangers. But hey, it paid off. The desert is marked by its complete absence of... well, everything. Nothing living, no movement, no sound, no water. And it's dry. I think there are times in Atlanta that are more hot because of the high humidity, but here you also have to be careful to drink a lot of water.

Brief note on the absence of posts / communication from my side! The internet at my apartment has broken. Since it would take more than a month to get the phone company to fix something, and I had a month left (now a couple weeks), I've had to do without internet. Welcome to India. I will try to squeeze a few posts in before leaving via posts from work.