travel – Page 4 – Pertinent Observations

Flaneuring with a baby

Soon after we got married, the wife and I figured out that we like to travel differently. She likes to go and hang out in hotels, getting room service and maybe even watching TV, and not doing much. I’m much more of an active traveller, wanting to explore places, walk around, eat in random places, etc.

Our disagreements on how to travel have reached such a level that on a couple of trips, we actually split up, with her staying at the hotel and me roaming alone. However, roaming a city alone is not so much fun, so I’m trying to recruit a partner for that. And rather than “searching all over town while holding a baby in my arms” (a Kannada proverb), I want to train the (not so proverbial) baby!

Today was the first such day of “training”, and we are in Munich. The wife had some work here today and tomorrow, and this was a great opportunity for the daughter and I to flaneur by ourselves (ok she doesn’t have a say in this!).

So day one went off quite well, though I sometimes think I gave in a bit too much to her interests. The walk through the old town of Munich (around Marienplatz) lasted not more than an hour before we were in the gardens – first briefly at the Hofgarten and then later at the Englischer Garten (English Garden, which is larger than both Hyde Park and Central Park) where we went cycling.

To be honest, the walk around Marienplatz was a bit of a bore even for me. The place is full of fashion outlets, and there isn’t much to “do”. It also didn’t help matters that we were walking around on full stomachs – we had eaten massive dinners last night, and even though we woke up late and had a small breakfast, we weren’t hungry (I made the mistake of going to a chain coffee shop for breakfast. The coffee was atrocious and the food also unspectacular).

One of the keys to effective flaneuring (to borrow a word from Nassim Taleb) is the willingness to try out interesting food and drink you come across on the way. This means travelling on a light enough stomach, so that you can eat whatever you want without constraint. The full stomach thanks to the bad breakfast this morning meant that we couldn’t partake in any of the interesting looking foods on offer, thus significantly diminishing our experience.

Another necessary condition for good flaneuring is the availability of good public transport – sometimes you can just get bored of the place you are in and want a change of scenery. At other times, you’ll want to be at a specific place that is too far away to walk to. In both situations, availability of dense public transport network (and low marginal cost of travel – such as a day travel card) can really help.

Through the morning, though, whenever Berry saw a bicycle, she would scream “bike-u bike-u” (she’s got this very Kannada habit of ending every noun in “u”. So car-u, pant-u, dog-u etc) and demand to sit on it. So when we got near the English Gardens (where I’d heard it’s good to bike), I had the problem of trying to find a bike rental store.

We walked around till we encountered a public WiFi hotspot (Munich has lots of those!), where I found the addresses of a few cycle rental shops. And one was right at the edge of the English Gardens, and I had to take the U-bahn (underground metro) to get there. It was an extremely peaceful ride (I pride myself on adjusting myself easily to public transport in new cities), though we had to change trains.

We borrowed an electric bike with a child seat from MUC Bike. It’s like a normal cycle except there’s a Lithium ion battery backup, to give you that extra power in case you’re tired. And we went round the park, watching ducks in several places, and playing on the swing (Berry only). The cycle returned, and a quick beer and pretzel later, we were on our way back to the hotel!

Overall I think it went well. There is one noticeable area of improvement- food. I need to optimise for both of us, and we sometimes have different food preferences, and I end up making poor choices. Like I asked for rice with today’s lunch even though there were already potatoes in the dish (since Berry likes rice). As it happened, she wasn’t so hungry and we ended throwing the rice!

The plan for tomorrow is to go see the Deutsches Museum. Let’s see how that goes!

Hill Climbing in real life

Fifteen years back, I enrolled for a course on Artificial Intelligence as part of my B.Tech. programme at IIT Madras. It was well before stuff like “machine learning” and “data science” became big, and the course was mostly devoted to heuristics. Incidentally, that term, we had to pick between this course and one on Artificial Neural Networks (I guess nowadays that one is more popular given the hype about Deep Learning?), which meant that I didn’t learn about neural networks until last year or so.

A little googling tells me that Deepak Khemani, who taught us AI in 2002, has put up his lectures online, as part of the NPTEL programme. The first one is here:

In fact, the whole course is available here.

Anyways, one of the classes of problems we dealt with in the course was “search”. Basically, how does a computer “search” for the solution to a problem within a large “search space”?

One of the simplest heuristic is what has come to be known as “hill climbing” (too lazy to look through all of Khemani’s lectures and find where he’s spoken about this). I love computer science because a lot of computer scientists like to describe ideas in terms of intuitive metaphors. Hill climbing is definitely one such!

Let me explain it from the point of view of my weekend vacation in Edinburgh. One of my friends who had lived there a long time back recommended that I hike up this volcanic hill in the city called “Arthur’s Peak“.

On Saturday evening, I left my wife and daughter and wife’s parents (who I had travelled with) in our AirBnB and walked across town (some 3-4 km) to reach Holyrood Palace, from where Arthur’s Seat became visible. This is what I saw:

Basically, what you see is the side of a hill, and if you see closely, there are people walking up the sides. So what you guess is that you need to make your way to the bottom of the hill and then just climb.

But then you make your way to the base of the hill and see several paths leading up. Which one do you take? You take the path that seems steepest, believing that’s the one that will take you to the top quickest. And so you take a step along that path. And then see which direction to go to climb up steepest. Take another step. Rinse. Repeat. Until you reach a point where you can no longer find a way up. Hopefully that’s the peak.

Most of the time, you are likely to end up on the top of a smaller rock. In any case, this is the hill climbing algorithm.

So back to my story. I reached the base of the hill and set off on the steepest marked path.

I puffed and panted, but I kept going. It was rather windy that day, and it was threatening to rain. I held my folded umbrella and camera tight, and went on. I got beautiful views of Edinburgh city, and captured some of them on camera. And after a while, I got tired, and decided to call my wife using Facetime.

In any case, it appeared that I had a long way to go, given the rocks that went upwards just to my left (I was using a modified version of hill climbing in that I used only marked paths. As I was to rediscover the following day, I have a fear of heights). And I told that to my wife. And then suddenly the climb got easier. And before I knew it I was descending. And soon enough I was at the bottom all over again!

And then I saw the peak. Basically what I had been climbing all along was not the main hill at all! It was a “side hill”, which I later learnt is called the “Salisbury Crags”. I got down to the middle of the two hills, and stared at the valley there. I realised that was a “saddle point”, and hungry and tired and not wanting to get soaked in rain, I made my way out, hailed a cab and went home.

I wasn’t done yet. Determined to climb the “real peak”, I returned the next morning. Again I walked all the way to the base of the hill, and started my climb at the saddle point. It was a tough climb – while there were rough steps in some places, in others there was none. I kept climbing a few steps at a time, taking short breaks.

One such break happened to be too long, though, and gave me enough time to look down and feel scared. For a long time now I’ve had a massive fear of heights. Panic hit. I was afraid of going too close to the edge and falling off the hill. I decided to play it safe and turn back.

I came down and walked across the valley you see in the last picture above. Energised, I had another go. From what was possibly a relatively easier direction. But I was too tired. And I had to get back to the apartment and check out that morning. So I gave up once again.

I still have unfinished business in Edinburgh!

Paris or Parrys Corner?

We arrived in Paris Gare Du Nord a couple of hours back by Izy train from Brussels (this is a new low-cost service introduced by Thalys, and that deserves its own blogpost).

I don’t know whether it’s something specific about Gare Du Nord, or if I feel this way about all Terminus railway stations, but it had this feeling of Chennai Central to it. This feeling was complete with the smell of urine just outside the station.

We walked to the left, as our online research had told us that there were some South Indian restaurants there, and we were seeking some comfort food. Saravana Bhavan first came into view. A little further was Hotel Sangeetha, and we ate there (I have better memories of Sangeetha than Saravana Bhavan from my times in Chennai. The decision today was well-founded).

After having finished our dinner at Sangeetha (food and coffee were brilliant, far better than at Saravana Bhavan in Amsterdam where we ate 3 days ago. Dinner was made better by the discovery that a couple of waiters there spoke Kannada), we decided to walk to La Chapelle metro station to catch a train to our hotel.

Having been in Europe for over 3 months now, the walk from Sangeetha to La Chapelle seemed like anything but Europe. The road was dirty in parts, with water flowing next to the pavements at some places (making us lift our rolling suitcase every few metres). That was not the only thing that reminded us of Chennai, though.

Saravana Bhavan and Sangeetha were only two in the long line of Tamilesque establishments on that road (Rue du Frauborg Saint Denis). There was an Annachi, a Muniyandi Vilas and at least two outlets that served Dindigul Thalapakattu Biryani!

And it was not just the restaurants. There was a “Thangamaligai” (jewellery) store. There were barbershops. There was Ganesha Sweets. And there were shops that went by names such as “SP Traders” that looked just like shops in India do! The resemblance was uncanny.

During the course of our walk, we even passed a couple of bars, and the smell emanating from them reminded us more of the shady bars in India (not Chennai, though, since liquor sale there is tightly controlled) than any bar we’ve seen in Europe.

I understand that there’s a significant Indian-origin (and Sri Lankan Tamil origin) population in France, but the number of Tamil-esque establishments next to the Railway Station completely astounds me. That they’re clustered together is no surprise. That this cluster is right next to the city’s main railway station is. And the fact that the station is so similar to Chennai Central doesn’t help matters!

Until we got out of our Metro at Place du Clichy (to get to our hotel), it seemed more like we were in Parrys Corner than in Paris!

PS: Put recommendations on things to do here, etc. Please leave comments.

The land above the tracks

Almost exactly a year ago, we were on our way from Vienna to Budapest and ended up reading the Vienna Hauptbahnhof Railway Station some three hours early. It had been snowing that morning in Vienna (it was April 1st, and supposed to be spring), and not wanting to go anywhere in that shit weather, we simply got to the railway station. It didn’t help matters that our train (which was coming from Munich) had been delayed by a further hour.

We were not short of options for entertainment in at the railway station, though. In fact, it hardly looked like a railway station, and looked more like a mall – for there were no tracks to be seen anywhere. We spent the four hour wait shopping at the mall (it was just before Easter, so there were some good deals) and having breakfast and lunch at what could be considered to be the mall food court. And when it was time for our train to arrive, we simply took one of the escalators that went down from the mall, which deposited us at our platform.

Each platform had its own escalator going down from the mall, which had been built on top of the railway tracks. It can be considered that the entire Vienna Hbf station was built on the “first floor”, making use of the land above the railway tracks. Land that would otherwise be wasted was being put to good use by building commercial space, which apart from generating revenues for the Austrian Railways, also made life significantly better for passengers such as us who happened to reach the station insanely early.

This is a possible source of revenues that Indian Railways would do well to consider, especially in large cities. The Railways sit on large swathes of land above and around the rail tracks, especially at stations (where such tracks diverge). Currently, the quality of experience in Indian railway stations is rather poor. If a swanky mall (and maybe other commercial space) were to come up above the tracks, it could completely transform the railway experience.

There will be considerable investment required, of course, but given the quality of real estate on which most Indian railway stations sit, it is quite likely that private developers can be found who will be willing to invest in constructing these “railway station malls” in return for a share of subsequent rent realisation. There is serious possibility for a win-win here.

As the Vienna Hbf website puts it,

The BahnhofCity Wien Hauptbahnhof features 90 shops and restaurants occupying 20,000 m² of floor space. A fresh food market, textile shops, bakeries and cafés are designed to make BahnhofCity a meeting place. During the week, it will be opened until 21:00 and many shops will also open on Sundays. Excellent public transport links and 600 parking spaces complement the offer.

An idea well worth considering for the Indian Railway Ministry.

Al-Andalus

If you were to visit Granada, in the South of Spain, you might believe that the Reconquista never happened. Granada was the last Islamic kingdom in al-Andalus (the Muslim name for their Caliphate in Spain) to fall, with Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, uttering his last sigh in 1492.

The Moor’s Last Sigh. Source: Wikimedia Commons

While the Reconquista and subsequent Inquisition succeeded in pretty much wiping Islam and Judaism off the Spanish map, the town of Granada seems to be making a conscious attempt to reclaim its Islamic past.

The town’s most famous monument, Alhambra (was about to type “the Alhambra” but realised that would be a redundancy since “Al” is Arabic for “the”) is from Islamic times, despite a King Carlos (V) constructing his own palace right in the middle of the complex. After Christian occupation, the town withered, going from a capital city to a neglected provincial town.

With its most glorious time having come during Islamic times, it is no surprise that the town seeks to look back to that part of its past. For example, the Vishwaroopam font is ubiquitous in signboards across town, with even public buses using an Arabesque font to write “Granada”. Then, Shawarma restaurants dot the city, and unlike in Barcelona (where most “Turkish” stalls are run by Pakistanis), these are mostly run by Turks.

There is even a nod to the Gypsy/Roma influence to the city in the markets, which distinctly reminded me of Jaisalmer (that the city is built next to a hill contributed to this comparison). The most common class of items in the market was leather goods, and it was also possible to buy FabIndia style kurtas and harem pants in some stalls (of course we stayed far away from them). Of course, there is a massive Granada Cathedral (built on the site of an old Mosque – this is a recurring theme in Andalusia), but it was clear which period in history this city’s pride lies in.

It was a rather unusual itinerary that we chose for this trip (a kind of parallelogram starting from Granada, successively moving to Còrdoba, Sevilla and Malaga), but it was almost as if we had planned our trip to places in decreasing order of Islamic influence (to an extent).

Còrdoba, for example, is known for its Mesquita, or Mosque-Cathedral, and the Mosque’s arches are a recurring theme through the city. It was less easy there (compared to Granada) to find Arab/Turkish food, and “Califa”, where we had dinner, was actually a a hardcore Spanish restaurant with a Matador theme.

It was Semana Santa (Holy Week) by the time we got to Sevilla and we were greeted by massive processions celebrating the week of Jesus Christ’s death (more on that in another post). During the three days we spent there, it was easy to forget that this had once been an Islamic city (long lines and after effects of excess walking in Granada and Còrdoba meant we skipped the Alcazar). As a fairly religious (the number of men in suits on Palm Sunday wasn’t funny) regional capital, it seemed as if the city had completely gotten over its Islamic past, and now presented itself to us as a completely Christian city! It is possible, though, that parts of Sevilla we didn’t visit still have a nod to the Islamic past.

Malaga retained more of its Islamic past, though. The Reconquista there again happened fairly late, just before Granada, and the most spectacular monuments are the Islamic fort and castle (Alcazaba and Gibralforo). We had two meals at Arab restaurants (one good, one bad). The city was littered with “Arab baths”. Motifs from the Còrdoba Mesquita were common across the city.

And most delightfully for us, the Islamic influence in the city included stalls selling Patatas Asadas (known as “Kumpir” in Turkish), which we had been familiar with from our trip to Turkey five years ago. That sorted my dinner on two evenings in Malaga!

Airline pricing is strange

While planning our holiday to al-Andalus during my wife’s Easter break (starting later this week), we explored different options for flights from different destinations in al-Andalus to Barcelona before we confirmed our itinerary.

As it turned out, it was cheapest (by a long way) to take a flight back from Malaga to Barcelona on Good Friday (meaning we were “wasting” three days of Priyanka’s vacation – which we were okay with), and so we’ve booked that.

Now, Vueling (Iberia’s low cost version where we’ve booked our tickets) sends me an email offering credits of €40 per passenger if we could change our flight from Friday to Saturday (one day later). In other words, it turns out now that the demand for Friday flights is so much more than that for the Saturday flight that Vueling is willing to refund more than half the fare we’ve paid so that we can make the change!

I don’t know what kind of models Vueling uses to predict demand but it seems to me now that their forecasts at the time we made our booking (3 weeks back) were a long way off – that they significantly underestimated their demand for Friday and overestimated demand for Saturday! If this is due to an unexpected bulk booking I wouldn’t blame them, else they have some explaining to do!

And “special occasions” such as long weekends, and especially festivals such as Good Friday, are a bitch when it comes to modelling, since you might need to hard code some presets for this, since normal demand patterns will be upset for the entire period surrounding that.

PS: Super excited about the upcoming holiday. We’re starting off touristy, with a day each in Granada and Cordoba. Then some days in Sevilla and some in Malaga. If you have any recommendations of things to do/see/eat in these places, please let me know! Thanks in advance.

Watching the Clasico in a bar

No, this post doesn’t have to do with the current El Clasico between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. When I’d watched the previous Clasico on March 22nd I’d formed a blog post in my head but I never got down to writing it (combination of travel and NED and enjoying my holiday) so I thought this is a good time to put it down.

On that occasion I was in Barcelona and briefly toyed with the idea of going to watch the game at the Camp Nou. That idea was quickly shelved given that tickets were going for about €500 each. Then there was hope that the game would be telecast on local TV (like the Barcelona-Ajax game I had watched at the Camp Nou was), but that wasn’t to be. The only option was to watch it at a pub.

While there were several bouts of NED due to which I had decided I won’t see that game, when Maxime, my wife’s flatmate, went out, I couldn’t help but join him. The first task was to find a suitable pub, especially given that it was a Sunday.

There is an interesting hierarchy of local businesses in Barcelona. Most Spanish-run supermarkets, for example, are closed on that day, though the Pakistani-run places (which are interestingly plentiful in the city) are open 24×7. A large number of Spanish-run bars are closed on Sundays, too, while the Chinese bars (again plentiful) are open all day.

Given that it was the Clasico and it was not broadcast on terrestrial television, there was no surprise that bars were full. Seating-only bars were thus out of question. And some of the standing-allowed places were choc-a-bloc. Finally it was this Chinese bar near the Entença station that Maxime and I went to.

The place was full, like most other bars in Barcelona that night, but there was some standing room with a view of one of the televisions. A sign at the entrance greeted us saying that each person was expected to order at least one beer for €2 (normal price for a beer in such a bar is €1,80). Estrella thus Dammed, it was time for the game.

I don’t remember much of that game, but the atmosphere in the bar was far from the kind I’d seen elsewhere. The crowd was partisan, of course, with anyone who wanted to support Real Madrid doing so silently (remember that this is a politically charged fixture, especially given renewed calls for Catalan secession). Loud cheers accompanied the Barcelona goals. The Madrid goal was met with silence, as you might expect (and people stepping out for a smoke). People stepping in and out created another problem – it was a rather cold spring evening, and every time the door opened it let in rather cold wind and disturbed the thermal balance of the bar!

There were a couple of other noteworthy sidelines on the evening. The first was how hard the bar staff worked. Expecting it to be a big night, they had pressed in extra staff, with possibly the entire family of the people who ran the bar involved. Children who looked as young as ten or twelve hurriedly ferried dishes from the kitchen to the tables (there were a few tables, which I’m assuming were pre-booked). Service was overall top notch, with our €2 beers arriving within two minutes despite the massive crowd at the bar. Considering that some bars were shut (given it was a Sunday), it was incredible how hard this one worked to make most of a good Barcelona night.

And then there were these guys at the slot machines. Like most other cheap bars in Europe, this one too had a couple of slot machines and they were all occupied, by people who couldn’t care less about what was going on around them, and whose only worry in life was to bet against the house. It could have been yet another night at the bar for them, except that the beer cost them twenty cents extra.

PS: I got distracted by the Manchester City – Liverpool game and hence took much longer to finish this post. I started writing it as soon as El Clasico started.

Palani

I was reading Shoba Narayan’s excellent piece in MintOnSunday about the Palani temple when I was reminded of my own trip there back when I was a kid, so thought I should write about it.

The memories are extremely hazy, for I was a really small boy back then (I don’t even remember how old I was). It was a strict pilgrimage, consisting of two overnight bus journeys, and the only purpose of the trip was to visit the Palani temple.

There was some religious context to it. Apparently my parents had visited the temple some time before I was born, and had promised to return had some condition been satisfied. I don’t remember the exact condition (though the fact that I’m named Karthik has something to do with this, I know) but apparently it had been satisfied, and so off we went to fulfil the “harke”.

I remember taking a Tamil Nadu State Transport bus. I don’t think I was old enough for them to take a ticket for me, so I didn’t get my own seat. But then my father spoke to some people across the aisle and found that they were scheduled to get off at Krishnagiri, after which we crossed over to the three-seater, and I remember sleeping across my parents’ laps.

We reached Palani in the morning and checked into some random hotel. I don’t remember much of what happened there. I remember going to the temple sometime during the day. There was a cable car, if I’m not wrong, to go up. I don’t remember if we took it.

Shoba’s piece is about the Prasad at the Palani temple, but I don’t remember any of it. All I remember is going to some vibhuti (sacred ash) shop there to buy some vibhuti. And I remember the shopkeeper telling us that whatever we bought, we would only get half of it after the pooja was done. Finally my parents, after some deliberation, settling on buying one (largish) packet of vibhuti. I remember taking home half of that, and it satisfying our vibhuti needs for several years after that.

As I said right up front, this is one of my least memorable trips from my childhood. All I remember is the bus. The shady hotel. The steep flight of stairs to get to the temple (Shoba writes about that, too). The cable car. And the half packet of vibhuti. I have no clue what we ate. I think there were people there in Palani who spoke Kannada, but I’m not so sure. And I remember taking another overnight bus back (this one being empty enough that I could sleep across my parents’ laps for the full journey).

Ramzan walking in Jakarta

Ever since I stopped being vegetarian in 2011, I’ve started indulging in the so-called “Ramzan walks”. The concept is as it states – basically a bunch of you go to this Muslim dominated area where special stalls are set up so that people breaking the fast can indulge. Food at such stalls is generally of a very high quality, so you have a large number of non-fasters, which includes a large number of non-Muslims also indulging.

I somehow missed going on one such last year, but have done so in 2011 and 2012 (in Bangalore, in Frazer Town) and 2013 in Mumbai (Mohammed Ali Road), and generally enjoyed them.

And this time was going to be different, and special, since this is the first time ever I’m in a Muslim-majority country during Ramzan. Though I’m basically stuck in this hotel with access to little else but two adjacent malls, I got lucky in that one of these two malls decided to have a food festival to celebrate Ramzan. I wasn’t able to go the last two days since I was meeting people for dinner (one of the said dinner counterparties was vegetarian and the other(s) demanded a more formal setting), but made amends today.

So the open courtyard of this mall called La Piazza (in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta) has a large number of stalls set up. You have these cash counters where you pay up and get a prepaid smart card. Once this is obtained you can walk up to any counter and buy food from there upon swiping the said card. An excellent and efficient system to ensure fast processing, keep track of revenues (from the point of view of the organisers) and offer a hassle-free experience for customers.

The big challenge, of course, was the lack of knowledge of the language. While Bahasa uses the Roman script (because of which you are able to “read” stuff), almost no one here speaks any English, so trying to figure out what was what, and what to eat was a huge challenge.

We started with the safe option of the Chicken Satay (I had figured out through Rosetta stoning over the last few days that Ayam is Chicken), which is something we were already aware of. It was absolutely excellent. Next we decided to get a “rice item”. I saw someone at the adjacent table eating something and decided to hunt for that specific thing. I finally found it – “Nasi Bebek Madura” (Nasi is rice; Bebek is duck and Madura is an island off Java). It was extremely spicy but the leftover Satay sauce tempered matters.

We followed this up with a meat-based “kaDubu” equivalent, which was excellent once again, and rounded things off with a local dessert (a lot of random things poured over crushed ice), which was quite nice, too.

This food festival goes on for another week, so if you’re going to be near Kelapa Gading, you should surely attend. The organisation is top-notch. I already mentioned about the simplified payment dynamics. Apart from this, sufficient tables have been set up (both sitting and standing types) all over the place, and there are people cleaning the tables and floors at regular intervals. The variety in food is astounding and just the atmosphere itself is something worth taking in!

Now I’m jealous of the wife since she has an opportunity to continue experiencing this for a few days more!

Jakarta: General Notes

I’ve been in Jakarta for about two days now (not counting the weekend trip to Yogyakarta) and I’m not particularly impressed. My main problem with the city is that it is not walkable – roads are so wide and traffic so fast-moving that they are impossible to cross; there are absolutely no pavements to walk on (forcing you to take shelter from parked cars while walking) and there are no zebra crossings at all in some places!

A side effect of this unwalkable-ness is that it is impossible for you to explore – I haven’t seen any bus stops or buses nearby, too. So if I’ve to go somewhere it has to be by taxi, and with a purpose. This has led to my not going out anywhere at all, save for two malls that are close to my hotel and which can be reached without crossing any major roads (though you need to walk through a shady-looking alley to get there).

In some ways this city is like Gurgaon on steroids – massive roads, massive malls, massive traffic jams and massive freeways. To its credit the city is quite clean (much cleaner than any Indian city I’ve been to) and there is a functioning and efficient taxi system, so you can get around if there’s someplace you want to get around to.

But if you just want to spend some time here, “take in the city”, have a look around and so on, it is surely not the place.

The other day the wife and I were having a conversation on where we want to live, and one thing we agreed upon is that we want to live in a place where the commute doesn’t drive your life. Of course, rather ironically, the only time that has been true for me was in Gurgaon in 2008-09, when I had a commute which took less than 20 minutes at any point of time, because of which I didn’t have to base my schedule on when traffic would be smooth. A later visit to Gurgaon has shown that this is not true of Gurgaon any more (the same 20 minute commute from 2009 took 40 minutes on a rather empty Saturday morning in 2014).

I think I’m too much of a sucker for walking and public transport to be able to survive in a place like Jakarta.