5 weeks in Japan

Just a quick update before I leave for the next 5 WEEKS!

I'm heading out this Thurs - 7/26 and my team ("Team Japan" as we like to call ourselves) is stopping in Beijing to see the Great Wall on our way to Tokyo. I'm pretty excited about it - I think we're gonna go to the Si Ma Tai portion of the Wall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simatai

We get to Tokyo Sunday night (7/29) and have a pretty busy 5 weeks of work.
I'll be staying in Tokyo for the first 3 weeks (7/29 - 8/17) and then in Osaka for the last 2 weeks (8/17 - 8/29) and returning to Tokyo for the last 2 days (8/29 - 8/31)

For my first weekend in Japan, I plan to hike up Mt. Fuji via the "night hike" - starting my climb around 9pm to reach the summit in time for the sunrise at 4:30am. Don't worry, I'm not alone - a few of my co-workers are coming with me! After hanging out at the top for a bit and enjoying the sunrise, we'll head back down the mountain and get back to our hotel in Tokyo where I'll probably pass out for the rest of the weekend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt_fuji

Our second weekend in Japan will be spent in Tokyo as it's a long weekend, Oban, and we have 2 days off from work - woohoo!! I'll just be exploring the city, etc.

The third weekend I'll be heading to Osaka early and will probably spend most of my weekend in Kyoto since it's pretty close in distance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto,_Japan

For my fourth and final weekend, I'm flying to Hong Kong to visit my friend Vishnu and hang out in the city.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_kong

I'll be back in Chicago on Sept. 1, just in time to start packing up again to move into my very first condo!

So that's my brief itinerary for the next month or so...I'll try to keep you updated weekly after each of my weekend adventures with pictures and all!

FYI - Japan is 14 hours ahead of CST.

Take care and I'm usually online so keep in touch!
Ambika

Gorgeous Greece! 6/22 - 6/24/07

So this weekend Rafael and I took a side trip to Athens, Greece. 2 days isn't nearly enough time but it gave us a little taste of the area. I definitely wanted to do some sort of cruise to check out the islands, so there was a 1-day cruise available that went to 3 islands in the Saronic Gulf.

Friday, June 22

So tonight we got to the hotel around 10pm from the airport, got ready and headed out to a restaurant called Central – suggested to me by Lily, my co-worker. This restaurant was located in the Kolonaki Square area, but turned out to be closed by the time we got there. Kolonaki Square is a huge shopping area with lots of great designer stores. Good thing we went there late because I probably could’ve spent wayyyy too much money there. We had walked around the area for a while and couldn’t find Central, so finally we asked someone and he told us it was closed. We ended up grabbing something quick to eat at one of the 24-hour cafes nearby. There were still quite a few people out and about around the time we were eating (midnight or so). We thought there would be more to do in the area – bars, nightclubs, etc. but after asking our waitress, we apparently were in the wrong area for that. Most of the places to go out were in Psiri. By the time we finished eating around 1am, Rafael and I were both pretty tired so we just headed back to the hotel since we had to get up around 6am for our day-cruise on Saturday!

Saturday, June 23

Rafael and I took a one-day cruise that we reserved on Key Tours set up by our concierge at the Marriott where we stayed. Because we were only in Athens for the weekend, it was too short of a time period to go very far to many islands. This one-day cruise was perfect because we stayed in the Saronic Gulf area and hit up 3 islands: Poros, Hyrdra, and Aegina. The boat was packed with people of all different cultures and age groups…especially interested to watch was this group of high school kids who were on a summer trip from somewhere in the States. I’ll come back to this in a bit. So the boat had multiple levels inside and outside and because the weather was so great, Rafael and I spent most of our time on the boat on the top level to enjoy the scenery and weather. The first trip took about 2 hours to get to Poros where we were given about 45 minutes to walk around, shop, explore, etc. It was a cute little island (the smallest of the 3) that had a lot of souvenir shops and this beautiful clock tower at the top. The 3 islands we went too had a small community of people which basically made a living off tour groups and vacationers visiting the islands. So we hiked up to the top of Poros to see the clock tower and check out the view of the surrounding area. It was just like what you’d imagine a Greek Island to be, mountainous with narrow stairway paths to get to the various houses on the island. There were very few cars and most people transported items via horse or donkey. Pretty old school but very endearing. It was an extremely hot day and turned out to be a record-breaking HOT weekend in Athens, reaching 105 farenheit on Sunday.

The second island that we went to was Hydra. Another cute island very similar to Poros. We had 1 ½ hours here and didn’t really feel like doing much shopping. There was a swimming area here that a lot of people went to and with the day getting hotter by the minute – I ended up there as well. The water was so beautiful that I just had to jump in…and did I! As we walking to the swimming area, I saw the high school kids jumping off the cliff and into the water about 75 feet below. It looked like so much fun and I figured – hey, if these kids can do it why can’t I? Sometimes a good mentality and sometimes not…but that’s me! So first I wanted to check out the temperature of the water to see if it was ridiculously cold, but it felt great considering the weather outside. Rafael just hung out at the restaurant nearby and enjoyed a fruit smoothie while I ventured up to the Cliffside and proceeded to plummet into the water below. I have to admit I was a little scared, but it was an amazing rush! Similar to my skydiving experience several years back but minus the parachute and old guy strapped to my back – haha. So I enjoyed the coolness of the water for a bit and then when Rafael finished his smoothie, I went back to the cliff to jump off again for him to take some pics. I had to have proof that I did it! So off I went again…When I returned to where Rafael was, he just kept shaking his head calling me “Crasy girl”. We joked about how it was higher than I originally thought, and he told me that I’m one of a couple people in our group that would actually do something like that. I think I’m gonna be the “crasy girl” of the audit group. So that was that – and then we had to head back to the boat.

We were on the boat for another hour before reaching Aegina, the third and largest of the islands we visited that day. Aegina is also known for its pistachios. Apparently it’s one of the largest producers/exporters of pistachios in the world. As we reached there during the hottest part of the day (around 4pm), we opted for a bus tour that took us to the Temple of Aphaea and a Monastary that’s not completely finished on the inside but really beautiful. You could see all the pistachio trees while we were driving (don’t worry mom – I got pictures for you!) and I even had some yummy pistachio ice cream later when we reached the Temple of Aphaea. The temple was really amazing!! When you just imagine how old these ruins are and that they were uncovered and still standing…it just takes your breath away. I also love to hear about the mythology behind these places! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Aphaea.

The view from the area was really great too – I coulda hung around there for hours. But of course we didn’t have that much time. We headed to the Monastary and checked out that building. It had really beautiful and intricate woodwork on the doors, chairs, art deco. That was about it for the second stop and then back to the boat. So I made the mistake of spending the entire day outside with no sunscreen and got MAD sunburned. I mean sunburned on my shoulders, chest, arms, and legs! I’ve never been that badly sunburned before. Oh well, live and learn – now I know better. But the cruise in general was really relaxing and beautiful and it definitely made me want to go back and check out the other islands. Apparently only 30% of the Greek Islands are inhabitable, so there weren’t many “sandy beaches” or areas even with trees on them from what we saw in the Saronic Gult. Rafael said that he definitely preferred the Caribbean. I’ll have to check that out next time.

Saturday night – We got back to the hotel around 8pm and prepped to go out for the night. This time we were determined on checking out the night scene so we went out to Psiri. We walked around checking out what restaurants were in the area and settled on this one really cute one. Wish I could remember the name, but it was written all in Greek. It was pretty crowded and most people there seemed to be our age so I figured that it would be a pretty good place. The food was YUMMM. After we filled up on dinner we walked around for a while to check out the scene. By this time it was close to midnight so we figured people would finally be going out. There were some cute bars and a lot of people just sitting outside patio-style in front of them. There was also some pretty decent music, so we went into a couple bars and settled on this one night club that had the best music (in my opinion). It was definitely great people watching, but there’s only so much fun you can have with you’re with 1 other co-worker of the opposite sex. Of course, people thought we were together so it was pretty difficult to meet any new people. Hopefully Japan will be better as there’s a bigger group and mostly girls. So we stayed out till around 3 or 4 and then headed back to the hotel since we’d had a pretty long, exhausting day.

Sunday – June 24
Today our flight left around 4pm so we had some time to sight-see around Athens. Our hotel was in the old center of town, so within walking distance from the Acroplis. So just our luck…the day we decided to go to the Acropolis, it was closed due to a strike. We still walked there and took some pictures from the outside. I wish we coulda gone up, but something to do for the next trip. Today was ESPECIALLY hot!!! On top of that, I was crazy sunburned and exhausted from the previous 2 days of not sleeping. I didn’t make it very long, but we still walked around for a couple hours and saw the Temple of Zeus on the way back. Rafael’s obsessed with Hard Rock Cafes, so if there’s one in the city that we’re in, we HAVE to go there. So we hit up the Hard Rock before making it back to the hotel where I proceeded to pass out for a couple hours before our flight. Rafael went up to the rooftop pool to enjoy the water and I’m sure there was some good eye candy for him there as well. Unfortunately our weekend of fun was over and back we went to Bucharest for our last week of work.

(The strike at the Acropolis)

The last week was actually pretty good. I’d gotten most of my work done and our Director came into town Monday night for a day. We took him out to this Lebanese place we really enjoyed and he loved it! He’s big on the Middle Eastern type food since he lived in Saudi Arabia for 12 years. Paul, our Director, is a pretty interesting/funny guy to talk to. Tuesday was a busy day of wrapping things up and having meetings, etc, but it flew by as did the rest of the week. And by Thursday, we were really ready to get back home. The Affiliate took us out to dinner Thursday night to an Italian place “Trattoria Il Calcio”. It was tooo good! So all in all, I had a really great experience in Romania – the people were awesome, but the only big downside was the amount of smoke I had to deal with. I wish I had taken some more time to wander around the city, but who knows if I’ll maybe go back for something else. I’d also become really good friends with Diana, our PwC person. Hopefully we’ll be able to meet up again at some point, she’s a lot of fun and we definitely plan on keeping in touch.

Monday – July 2, 2007
So now I’m back in Chicago – woohoo!! The plane ride was around 12 hrs with connections, etc but I got a few good hours of sleep in. Saturday I went to the Taste of Chicago with my friend who came up from Dallas, Arnand, and then after a 5-hour nap, I was ready to hit the town! Jet lag got the best of me and I spent most of Sunday sleeping, but now it’s the start of a new week and only 2 days of work J.

Next trip – Japan for 5 weeks…should be interesting!

So far this is what I have planned for those weekends:

On our way to Tokyo, stopping in Beijing to check out the Great Wall

First weekend in Tokyo - Mt. Fuji

Second weekend in Tokyo (long weekend) - possibly go to a music festival and check out the Oban festivities

Third weekend in Osaka - check out the area

Fourth weekend - go to Hong Kong to visit my friend Vishnu

Bucaresti - observations and our weekend

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=vd2ejfo.5acgzy7o&x=0&h=1&y=bxkhrz

So we've been in Bucaresti (how the locals say Bucharest) for about a week now and I've made a couple of observations of the area:

1 - Taxi drivers are apparently crazy EVERYWHERE!! Every single city I've been to so far has taxi drivers that drive crazy! You're almost scared for your life every time you get into one. Unfortunately - taxi is our mode of transportation here so we take at least 4 taxis a day (to and from work and then for dinner). At least once a day we're ALMOST in some type of accident where the taxi driver ends up cursing out the other driver in Romanian....

2 - Romanian people are some of the nicest and most accomodating people I've met outside of the States. In Amsterdam I realized that "the customer is NOT always right" and usually they don't care if you want to tailor your meal or if you request something special. Here, our hotel staff has been extremely polite and the service is great...that's pretty much been my experience everywhere here. Dinners don't take 3 hours like in Amsterdam - only the expected 1 hour here. And our office staff in the Romanian office is ALWAYS polite, helpful and cheerful. It's very refreshing.

3 - However...Romanians also have the most disgusting smoking habit I've seen (not sure if there's a correlation there). Probably about 85% of the people I've seen around have a cigarette in their mouth. Even the taxi drivers smoke while they drive customers around. If you see a smoker - there's ALWAYS a cigarette in his/her mouth...while eating, while driving, while working, etc. It's definitely impossible to go anywhere without coming back wreaking of smoke! Sooo nasty :-(.

OK - so those are a few observations I've made this week...on to this weekends events:

Friday night (6.15.07)

So those of you I've talked to this week know that I've had a little bit of a stressful week. My job's still better than my previous one, but I've gotten a lot more responsibility this time and still don't know much about the company... which adds to the pressure of getting everything done in a few weeks while we're here.

Basically, by Friday - I was in desparate need to shed "work Ambika" and let "fun Ambika" come out and play...

We left work a little early and I hit the gym as usual to work it out and relieve some stress/feel better. Afterwards, I met up with my co-workers Rafael and Sonia (Sonia is our IT Auditor joining us for 2 weeks) for dinner. We were all pretty hungry so we decided on an early dinner tonight. The Marriott has a bunch of great restaurants inside of it so we headed that way to get some grub. Side note - we were supposed to stay at the Marriott but due to some issue with the rates, we would have had to move hotels in the middle of the week. As a result, we decided to stay at the Hilton the whole time. Now after seeing the Marriott - we shoulda stayed there!! it's a really beautiful hotel that's so massive it has over 6 restaurants plus countless shopping stores and even a pharmacy! oh well...live and learn.

We decided on Cupola - one of the nicer, more expensive restaurants in the hotel that was recommended by both our fellow co-workers that were here the weekend before as well as our PwC translater, Diana, that's been extremely helpful in recommending places to eat and things to do while we're here. Well, they were right about recommending it. Since we had gotten there around 7:30, we were the only ones in the restaurant for a while...kinda nice. Every part of the meal was fantastic! from the bread to my caesar salad and grilled chicken with sauteed veggies. yummm! Well, we were done around 9:30 or so and wanted to head to a bar for a couple drinks and to check out the local scene since Bucaresti isn't much of a "tourist" city. Apparently bars/clubs are spread out throughout the city, so there isn't just one area to go to and hang out for the night. I asked the Marriott concierge where he recommended for us to go. For some reason Rafael wanted to hit up an Irish Pub (in Romania? not sure why)...so there were 2 options. The concierge put us in a cab and sent us on our way to the Dubliner. kinda dive-y but nice cause it was definitely a local pub. of course - everyone there was smoking, so i'm sure my lungs are nice and black by now - yuck! we chilled and talked/joked around for a while and did some people watching, but by midnight we all were ready to call it a night. Sonia isn't much of a party-girl and I think we all just wanted our beds and to sleep in on Saturday.

(at the Dubliner)

Saturday - 6.16.07:

We met up around 11am (slept in until 9am today - woohoo!) to head over to the Parliament and the Village Museum for our day's excursions. This weekend is more chill because 1 - there isn't a whole lot of stuff to see and 2 - Greece is gonna be crazy and I'm gonna get very little sleep next weekend. So the Parliament is the 4th largest building (usable space) in the world. It's a huge square and is the #1 largest building in terms of mass (The heaviest building in the world is made of 1 million m³ (35.3 million cu ft) of marble from Transylvania and 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze. The building also features 3,500 metric tons of crystal glass and 900,000 m³ (31.7 million cu ft) of wood. It measures 270 m by 240 m (885 ft by 787 ft), 86 m (282 ft) high, and extends 92 m (300 ft) below ground.) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament

It was truly an amazing building!! Really extravagent and beautiful on the inside even though you can't really tell from the outside. It's definitely more of a palace than a government building.

- this was on the floor of the Parliament and is a "map" of the bldg

oh - another side note.....i don't know what the deal is with us and taxis - but here's a funny story. so in the morning we went to catch a cab outside of the hotel. Rafael sees a taxi driver that we'd used before so he goes straight for the guy cause he liked him. Sonia and I weren't really sure what he was doing cause there were 3 other taxi's right in front of the building. but whatever. so the guy takes us to the Parliament, but on the way over there he's speaking to Rafael in broken English/Romanian (which apparently is fairly close to Spanish since they both have Latin backgrounds). So him and Rafael and talking and the guy is suggesting that we go to the Village Museum later that day after the Parliament. Rafael informed him that we were planning to do that afterwards so the taxi driver says he'll wait for us at the Parliament since it's only 1 hour and then take us to the Museum after. Now - at this point Rafael looks and me and I said "you know I'm gonna say NO"...I definitely didn't like the sound of that, but the guy just kept talking to Rafael. So he drops us off and Rafael thought that it would be too difficult for us to catch a taxi from the Parliament and tells the guy to wait for us. I'm really unhappy about this, but Rafael's gonna pay the guy so it's up to him. After our tour, the driver takes us to the Village Museum and offers to wait again. This time, Rafael said "no" and the guy wanted 100 RON for his time/driving. Rafael wasn't expecting to pay more than 60 (which is about 30 USD), so they had to bargain and argue about the price. Obviously - I knew that was going to happen, but not my problem!

OK - so we get to the Village Museum and Sonia wanted some lunch since she doesn't eat breakfast. Rafael and I weren't hungry but I offered to stop somewhere first and get something for her to eat. I know i wouldn't have been able to enjoy anything if I was hungry. But we followed Rafael inside since he had already gotten his ticket (are you noticing a pattern here?) and just got a soda each to hold us over and deal w/the heat...it was HOT today!

- some cute kids at the Village Museum

We walked around for a bit...basically this "museum" is an outdoor park-like atmosphere that has models of old villages depending on which region you're in: Transylvania, Moldova, etc. It just shows the differences between regions back in the day and how their daily life was. It was really cute but between the heat and the fact that we were all ready for some food, we didn't stay too long.

There weren't too many taxis around the area so we walked a little and caught one off the street. We had gotten this "in your pocket" book on Bucharest so based on the list of restaurants listed in there, Sonia wanted to check out this "Tex Mex" place called Amigos. We showed the taxi driver the street address and info and turns out he was a newby and didn't really know his way around town yet. He had to call his boss twice and even pulled over to ask a fellow taxi driver how to get there. Kind of a mess - and I think we drove all around town to go somewhere that was maybe 10-15 min. away from where we were. Luckily we don't have to pay for taxis and they're pretty cheap - but another adventure...oh wait! not done w/the adventure yet. So we finally get to Amigos and it's around 3pm. This book said that the restaurant was open from noon to 1am, but failed to mention hours during the day that they'd be closed. At 3pm when we get there, the sign on the door says it'll open at 5pm. soooo - we ask the taxi driver to just take us back to the hilton (we were all a little frustrated by then). He said "no"....haha - the taxi driver doesn't speak English and I'm not exactly sure what the confustion was, but he called on some guy who had just parked his car across the street to try to translate for us. Just our luck, but the guy happened to be one of the owners/General Manager of Amigos! When he realized we had gone there for lunch, he said "don't worry - we won't let you leave hungry...c'mon in and we'll fix you something". His English was great and he was soo nice to us. He was having a staff meeting, but opened the restaurant for us and had a waitress serve us, etc. The food wasn't too bad either. Tasted like something you'd get in the States. Turns out the guy lived in the States for 30 years (LA, Vegas, and Ft. Lauderdale) and then moved back to Bucharest about 10 years ago. Really great guy - Viorel Mihailescu. If anyone's ever in Bucharest, you should check it out. It's on of 2 "tex mex" places in the city and i've heard the other one isn't that great. He just opened the restaurant a few months ago and mainly gets his business from Ex-Pats and a few tourists/visitors. So he told us that he has a DJ at night and asked that we stop by later. As they were soo great about serving us when they were technically closed, I thought it only right to go back and support him.

- we all needed a good Corona after our crazy day of Taxis.

After lunch, we headed back to the hotel for some R&R and "quiet time" as I like to call it. Basically - I need some space from my coworkers! I mean, there's only so much time you can spend w/people. We agreed to meet for dinner around 9:30pm...when we all met up and walked around the area to see what's close, we realized that none of us were hungry! we'd eaten such a late lunch that it hadn't even digested by dinner time. We found a nearby restaurant of locals and ended up just ordering dessert for our meal :-). I had this crepe w/chocolate (nutella) and vanilla ice cream - yum!!! Rafael had some ice cream and Sonia had some donut-type thing. we were all pretty satisfied and then decided to hit up Amigos to see our new friend and have a few drinks. Apparently there was a pretty big party there from the American Embassy (40-50 ppl) and some of them hung around afterwards. The margaritas were yum! we hung out for a while and chatted up w/the owner and one of the managers. they were both really nice and gave us their card if we ever had problems with anything or needed anything. The owner, Viorel, also told us a few places to check out but Rafael wanted to check out this Coyote Cafe that sounded like it was a Live Band place. When we got there it was pretty lame and was just disgustingly filled with smoke. At that point, I just couldn't take it anymore!! I had to leave and I didn't even want to go anywhere else. I was pretty disappointed because Viorel told us about this club called Planters that was supposed to be pretty good and I just didn't want to be around all the smoke anymore so we went back to the hotel.

All this smoke is really getting to me. I woke up Sunday morning and felt like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes - it was disgusting. Unfortunately, the only way to get around it is if just stay in my hotel room for the next 2 weeks - which definitely isn't going to happen!

Sunday - 6.17.07

Today was kinda "do your own thing day". Sonia and I felt like watching a movie so we went to the local Bucaresti Mall and did a little shopping (turned out to be window shopping cause everything was so expensive!) and then watched Fantastic Four. Not great, but not bad since I had low expectations. That was pretty much my day today...unfortunately I have to do some work today, so nothing exciting. Rafael has a late night ahead of him as he's heading to a local sports bar to watch 2 football (soccer) games starting at 10pm.

Check out the link above for my Bucharest pics. I only posted a couple on this site. Next weekend - Greece!