Weekend Joys

The past weekend was unusually enjoyable. Asim had come over, Manu (Chhabra) was in town for his Xerox internship and Madhur had planned to come over for the weekend from his internship at LA. We started on Friday evening with a trip to Passage to India. Picked up two DVDs on our way back - Eurotrip & Shanghai Noon. Eurotrip was had some extremely hilarious moments while Shanghai Noon seemed so boring that we decided to stop in the middle!

Saturday, we went to San Francisco and took a tour of Alcatraz - perhaps the world's most famous prison and also the world's most disappointing tourist spot! We were bored right from the beginning. One problem with Americans is that these people lack a history! So they highlight small events in a way to make them seem big. But to people like me, whose country has a history of 5000+ years, some of these seem somewhat trivial :-) My opinion was the Alcatraz is one big hyped-up boring tourist destination. Anyone wishing to see something similar to what we saw in The Rock is highly discouraged from visiting the prison.

Next on the agenda was a San Francisco city tour in a bus with a guide called Tony Love. Boy the man was interesting! The tour guides are distinctly different from the ones back home - we decided that these people have a lot more flair. They try to go out of their way to crack jokes and constantly keep entertaining you. The bus ride was a nice experience. It took us to the golden Gate bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts (no, it ain't a palace!) plus a few other places.

After the tour was over, we lolled around in SFO on Market Street, China Town etc. By evening we decided that we are going to watch a movie. The consensus candidate was The Terminal. Excellent movie - Victor Naborski, a Krakozhian citizen, comes over to the US in search for an autograph of a Jazz artist his father was very fond of. However, while he was in air, a coup happens in his country and a military government takes over. As a result his passport is invalidated and thus he cannot enter the US. Moreover, because of some reasons, he is also not allowed to return to his own country. In short, the only place where he can legally stay is the terminal!! Victor, played by Tom Hanks, is shown to be a really nice hearted person. As it turns out, he waits in the terminal for more than 9 months before he is able to enter the US and get the autograph that was so precious to his father. A really well-made movie. After the movie, we hitched onto the last train back from SFO and reached home. On reaching California Avenue, Asim and I decided we needed to each something. Well, the only place open was a drive-through burger place and we had no cars. So we joined a queue of cars where the only people on foot were Asim and me :-) A very funny situation to be in!

Next day, we decided to visit Muir Woods and the Mystery Spot. Muir Woods is a preserved forest with Giant sequoia trees and Redwoods. Beautiful and serene, the woods were in short awesome! Mystery Spot was also interesting - its a place where gravity is supposedly messed up. You get to see all kinds of weird things with balls rolling up incline to pendulums swinging in strange ways. I thought I was a physics guru :-) But I could not find fault with some of the genuinely amazing experiments that these guys had prepared. After Mystery Spot, I gave a short tour of Stanford to these guys followed by dinner at Cheesecake Factory.

Why can't all weekends be like this :-)