Explorer of Experiences

The Schonbrunn Palace at night Vienna, the capital of Austria rests on Europe's longest river, the Danube, a river whose color changes from blue to yellow to muddy brown. Wien (German for Vienna) is a city that's rich with imperial history, where art and creativity flourish. It grabs top spot on the best-cities-to-live-in survey. Naturally then, I came to expect a lot from my trip to Vienna after spending an enthralling four days in Amsterdam and Belgium.  I landed at Vienna International Airport by KLM at 11.30PM. While the airport wasn't stunning, my mind wandered to figuring out the most economical way to get to my hotel, Courtyard by Marriott Vienna Schoenbrunn . But the airport had signs only in German (seriously???), so going by the pictorial icons I figured out the fastest way to get to the city center was the City Airport Train (CAT); a 19 euro fee for a 15 minute hassle-free ride (it's cheaper to buy return tickets). What was a pain was using the a...

If you've read my piece called 'Mumbai's Training Glory', you'll better understand where I'm coming from. I wrote this is in August of 2011. My wrath with Mumbai continued, and I wrote on about it but this time I  thought it would be interesting to chronicle my average day for my readers. So go on, read it...your time starts now! That life in Mumbai is a struggle, is probably something you’ve heard way too often. Well it is true, oh so true. But mind you, I’m only part complaining. It’s bad, but you do feel a sense of pride at the end of the day for having lived through it. The city makes you hard. The city makes you strong. The city makes you a survivor. But this is not just another write up of my life in Mumbai. This is the story of my daily travails of getting to work from home and back each day. And I promise, each journey has been nothing short of eventful, to say the least! From my home to the gate is a 7 minute walk. I then cross the road an...

I wrote this post a year into my transition in Mumbai (circa September 2010). My tryst with trains in the city continued till June 2013. I have since left Mumbai and looking back at this post, I pity my past self. Haha! If you have no stories to share from myriad train journeys in Mumbai then, I dare-say, your tryst with this city is incomplete. There is no evading those trains and also no denying their inevitability. Whether running at leopard-speed or crawling at snail-speed on the rat and litter-infested tracks, trains truly are and as popular parlance would have it, the ‘lifelines of Mumbai’. Long distance road travel in this busy and over-populated city is frustrating and utterly time-hogging, leaving the host of commuters with a rather sensible, economical, quick and preferable option of train travel. Sit in a train compartment and you will quickly notice how welcoming this mode of transport is to people across different strata of society. Affluent and chicly...