Thursday, July 26, 2007

Some pictures from the trip

Here are a few pictures from our trip as promised...

Venice - A view from or Gondola



Venice - Another picture of the canals and surrounding buildings taken from the Gondola



Venice - The area across the canal from our hotel


Venice - Apple eyeing icecream outside the restaurent next to our hotel



Delos Island - Mykonos - Greece


Athens - Acropolis


Athens - Acropolis - A view of the city from the top of the hill



Athens - Acropolis - from the bottom of the hill


On board - Apple dancing with dad


On board - Sunset



On board - Apple and Dad watching sunset



Split - Croatia



Lisbon - Portugal - Political campaigning on the streets of Lisbon



Lisbon - Portugal - Tram going through the city.

Monday, July 23, 2007

An eventful trip - Part II - Lost Luggage and Lovely Trip

Continued from previous post..

As the bags started coming in, we looked at each one hopefully. As time passed and we hadn’t spotted even one of our three bags, the reality started sinking in. The last bag on the conveyor killed the last ray of hope that we clung to and we found ourselves in a line for lost luggage. There were about 7-8 people ahead of us so we thought we would be assisted in a few minutes. Well fifteen minutes later the line had not moved even an inch. Yep! We were in Italy! Two hours later we are at the counter giving all the baggage information to the helpful(yeah right!) lady. She looked into her system and said ,
“There is no information about your bags but no problem Sir, you should get them by tomorrow”
“If you don’t know where the bags are how can you be sure that they will arrive tomorrow?”
“No Problem Sir. They usually do arrive the next day”.
“But we leave for a cruise tomorrow. What if we don’t get them by tomorrow?”
“No Problem Sir. We send it to the next port of call “.
She said it so confidently, that one would be inclined to believe her but by this time we knew better. We decided to wait until the next morning to panic and start buying essentials. Reaching the hotel was a task because all the hotel information was in one of the bags we lost. All we remembered was the name of the hotel and the bus stop that we had to get down at. We got down at the right bus stop . It was in the middle of a circle with roads going out in all four directions. We got out of
the bus and stared in all directions. We knew it was a ten minute walk to the hotel so we did not want to head in the wrong direction. Our request for directions was mostly met with shrugs. Finally a gondolier pointed us in the direction of our hotel and we managed to reach it.

Our hotel was located on a canal right in the center of activity. We could get a glimpse of the canal from our room. It was beautiful! That evening we roamed through the streets of Venice. The weather was beautiful, the breeze was soothing, the water was calm. We walked along the canal, took a gondola ride, ate a leisurely Italian dinner. Apple had a ball just running around, chasing the pigeons, looking at the
boats . She would even sing “row , row, row your boat” every time she saw a new boat. She enjoyed the hustle and bustle and loved looking at the water and the boats.
The whole place was so lively and bursting with activity. People walking , boats passing by, hawkers selling their wares, dinners dinning by the canal side. There was a restaurant right next to our hotel. All the tables were outside by the canal, the building only contained the kitchen , storage etc. People sat there and ate leisurely dinner for hours. Every now and then a musician would stop by to entertain the diners.The activity continued late in the night. It was a sharp contrast to my neighbourhood which grows dark and quiet by 9.00 pm and Apple was quite mesmerised by it. In its own way the chaos and noise was very calming.
Apple and I stood at the entrance of our hotel watching all the activity while hubby
frantically called the airlines from our room. Apple who was still on United States time refused to go to the room and had to be dragged upstairs kicking and screaming at midnight.

The next morning after breakfast , the location of our bags still unknown, we decided to start shopping. We only had a couple of hours before we needed to head to the port. Diapers was first on the list. After asking around we finally found a supermarket called COOP. We knew we needed a lot of diapers since we would be at sea for 6 nights so we wanted to get a huge packet. In the diaper isle we picked up the biggest packet and were trying to figure out what size the diapers were and how many
the packet contained since all information was written in Italian. The packet had the number 16 on it but we thought “wait a minute, that can’t be right?, how can such a huge packet contain only 16 diapers?”. So we asked a few people and they said it contained 16. It turned out that the packet we were looking at contained adult diapers!. No wonder we were getting strange looks from the people we asked earlier!
Fortunately someone pointed that out to us before we bought anything. So with the
acquisition diapers and toiletries we set out to buy clothes. We were in a tourist area not a shopping area really so there were not many clothing shops. However there were a lot of small shops selling T-shirts that said ‘Venezia” , “Italia” or “I love Venice”. Fortunately we both had two pairs of pants in order to save time( and
money) we just bought a bunch of these T-shirts. Apple’s clothes were another thing. We searched and searched and finally found a shop for children’s clothing where we spent 150 euros on 4 clothing sets for which Iwouldn’t even spend $50 back home.
The funniest and most difficult part of the whole exercise was shopping for underwear. It was hard to explain to people what we needed. We finally found the right shop and even there we hit some stumbling blocks. Hubby must have pointed to the general area of his waist while trying to communicate that he needed underwear. The next thing we know the lady brings out a belt! We finally managed to get what we needed and then rushed to the port. While everyone was boarding the ship with huge suitcases, there we were... with a bunch of shopping bags in our hands!

The cruise was great though,we enjoyed the beautiful weather, pigged out on the food , danced to the great music and visited three beautiful ports i.e.Mykonos and Athens in Greece and Split in Croatia. (I promise to post pictures and information about
these places once I get a chance). We must have looked ridiculous roaming the streets of Athens wearing “I love Venice”Tshirts. Thankfully the there is no enmity between these two countries!

Apparently the airline had cancelled our return reservation as well. After a number of phone calls we were able to sort it out. I have to mention that Royal Caribbean made our lives easy by giving us free laundry , free phone calls to the airlines and some other stuff.

On our return to Venice, we found two of the three bags. The third one is still missing. Overall it was a great trip. Now we just have to fight with the airlines to recover some of the money that we ended up spending because of the lost bags. By the time we are through with them, we’d be needing another vacation. This time though we won’t be flying for sure!

Thursday, July 19, 2007

An Eventful trip – Part I – Missed Flight

We are finally back! The trip was both fun-filled and stressful at the same time. It all started at Atlanta airport. We were waiting at the gate to board our flight when my hubby decided to walk to the airline counter to get my daughter’s skymiles account straightened. Forty five minutes later he was still at the counter for something that should have taken five minutes. Since I had a bunch of handbags (thankfully!..you’ll see why) and a toddler with me I could not just get up and go to the counter to see what was going on. So I kept throwing ‘what the heck’ glances towards him and he would ignore some and shoot ‘be patient’ glances back at me. When he finally got back , before I could open my mouth to protest, he told me that our flight to Newark was going to be delayed and as a result we were going to miss the next connection which was to take us to Lisbon. He had spent the past 45 minutes trying to convince the air line to re-route us but since the connecting flight was with a different airline that did not have an office in Atlanta , we had no choice but to go to Newark and then take our chances from there. Which meant we could be stuck in Newark for more than a day…could have missed our cruise and all that. Now we could see the flight sitting at the gate long before it was scheduled to leave so it seemed odd that it wasn’t leaving on time. We were told that the reason it was delayed was due to the fact that the weather was bad in Newark so they had issues with landings and take offs. ‘Great!’ we thought , ‘this means the next flight could also be delayed’. Sure that would have happened if we were waiting at the gate before time for the next one. But this time, it took off on dot! We even saw it on the runway as we were alighting from the first flight!
What ensued in the next couple of hours consisted of two squabbling airlines tossing us from one counter to the other, one floor to the other until hubby finally lost it and yelled at a airline manager. That led to the manager finally taking us to the right counter and making sure that we got re-routed. They were re-routing us on a third airline via Paris instead of Lisbon since that was the only flight available so obviously we were worried about our luggage. It contained everything from diapers to all the nice clothes that I had bought specially for the trip that would be useless back home.
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll make sure that the luggage goes with you”.
“What about the return trip ? Would that reservation be affected?” .
”No. Not at all”.
We believed them, mainly because we wanted to. As we waited for the plane to push off, the pilot announced that we would be slightly delayed because they were waiting on a couple of last minute bags. We smiled with satisfaction!
On reaching Paris we had to go through yet another counter to counter and terminal to terminal run. Anyone who has traveled through CDG airport knows how big and crazy the airport is. We must have walked/run at least a couple of miles with Apple in my arms(during the entire trip she insisted on being picked up only by me) until we finally got our boarding passes for a flight to Venice. “What about our bags?” we asked the lady at the counter . “Don’t worry you’ll get them at Venice”.
On reaching Venice we stood in front of the conveyer belt hoping and praying that our bags have made it in. In spite of all the assurances we had received, there was a nagging feeling that we were not going to see our bags anytime soon.
To be continued....

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

The daily grind..

WARNING!... a rant about nothing... read only if you have nothing better to do..

Last few days have been extremely busy…. too many thoughts crowding my mind and then being purged without landing on the blog mainly because my time and mind has been occupied by a host of other things. So I finally decided to blog about those things. So here it is... the daily grind that I fail to escape……

Selling the house:
Like I mentioned in an earlier post,we are trying to sell our current house. From the time we put it on the market we have the additional task of keeping it spotless. This is particularly difficult when you have a toddler who’s favorite activity is taking things out of their arranged spaces and throwing them all over the house. So every night after Apple is in her bed we spring into action(no people, not that kind of action!) to clean up the mess. Also,when prospective buyers call, we have to drop everything we are doing and leave the house , toddler in tow. Since its hot outside we mostly find ourselves at the mall or in some sort of store and end up helping the economy!.

Building a house:
After carefully thinking about every aspect of each of houses that we saw, we rejected each one of them for some reason or the other. We finally signed up for a new construction .. ..without giving it too much thought. After all, when has thinking led to good decisions? Anyway now we are saddled with the additional tasks of trips to the site,decisions,phone calls to the agent etc.

Apple:
My sweet little baby who thinks that mommy and daddy were put on the earth to entertain her! “Stand up mommy “, “Come here mommy”, “Stay right here mommy” …...she commands her poor mother. Well, she’s quite capable of entertaining herself but that would mean broken stuff, crayon marks on the freshly painted walls, juice spilled on the newly installed carpet……you get the picture.!

Apple’s Allergy Test:
This week she had her allergy test only to discover that she’s allergic to sesame seeds(as suspected) in addition to nuts. I fear that there are other things that she might be allergic to in addition to the things we already know. That’s why I’m extremely nervous about our up coming trip.

Dieting:
“I need to loose some weight” … that is an on going lament but this time I really do… … so that I can pig out on our up coming Mediterranean cruise and still fit into pre pregnancy swimwear and cool clothes! Now you might say, dieting is easy, don’t eat! No effort required there!Wrong! Yours truly has to follow a diet plan which means looking for or cooking certain foods for myself in addition to feeding a family that
includes a fussy eater(no not my baby .. guess again!), a young sibling and a little monster who refuses to eat anything.

Work:
Something I pretend to do during office hours between trying to stay awake and reading blogs! Need to tie some loose ends(or at least pretend to)before I go on the much needed vacation.

Getting ready for vacation:
This has never been harder. With the destinations being a bunch of foreign countries and us travelling with a toddler with food allergies, there is a lot to shop and pack. The airline weight limit and our limited ability to carry a toddler(yes, she will insist on being carried when our hands are full with bags) and the entire luggage does not make it any easier. Never before have I been so nervous about a vacation!

But I’m ready…. ready as can be…to bask in the sun, to relax( as much as a toddler would allow), to visit amazing places, to catch up with my reading, to stuff myself with the never ending supply of food to come back refreshed. I promise to share pictures, stories and memories with y’all. Adios for now!