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Vegetarians eating in Vietnam

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Before I start my post, I must admit that I am not a food blogger. Hence, you may not be treated with culinary adjectives commonly found in a food blog. This post is a continuation to my endeavor to share unique travel and life experiences that could be of value to those reading and sharing these posts.  We were an eclectic group of 10 traveling to Halong Bay, Hanoi, Hoi An and Danang in Vietnam in the first week of May. While there is much to talk about the overall experience of traveling in Vietnam, I choose to restrict my post to places we enjoyed eating and drinking at as vegetarians (not vegans) from India.  Since the group had one member who had religious dietary restrictions (Jain food only), we stuck to the safe bets of Indian restaurants viz. Annam in Hanoi, Sri Spices in Hoi An and India Family in Danang. The idea of this blog is to share places / food other than the above where we found good vegetarian options, besides of course trying the local brands of beer.  1. Beer Stre
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A divers' paradise named Koh Tao

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It all goes fine when all you can hear is your breath and all you can see is a gorgeous blue world!  It was Niki's dream to gift an Open Water Diving Certificate to the kids on their 10th birthday in April 2020. Thanks to COVID, the plan was canned, then pushed to 2021. The second wave hit and once again the plan did not take shape. As a family, we were determined and destined to visit Koh Tao and we did it in August 2022.  We packed an 8-day trip to Bangkok and Koh Tao between 14 - 21 August 2022, making use of the several holidays during that week.  While the major focus of this blog is our diving adventure in Koh Tao, the fun we had in Bangkok over the short time on the first and last day is worth a mention. We packed some serious street shopping, visit to Wat Phra (Sleeping Buddha), an early morning walk to Lumpini Park, and most importantly, a cycling tour with 'Koh Van Kessel'.  The heavy rain on the first day in Bangkok was making me grumpy, each time checking the we
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Location: Ko Tao, Ko Pha-ngan District, Surat Thani, Thailand
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Buni-Buni Pass Trek with family and friends

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Myth 1 - Buni-Buni Pass Trek is an easy to intermediate trek Reality 1 - It is an intermediate to difficult trek Myth 2 - First half of the trek is steep, second half is plain walk Reality 2 - The entire trek is quite tedious with steep climbs Pronounced as Buni-Buni or Bunbuni. Base Location - Barshaini, Himachal Pradesh   Having said the above, our group of sixteen, consisting of 8 year old to 42 year old, comfortably did the 2 nights / 3 days trek to 11500 ft Buni-Buni Pass and enjoyed every bit of it. While researching on which trek to combine with our 10-day trip to Kasol and Tirthan Valley, the most common answer that came up was Kheerganga. Having read several blogs on the way Kheerganga is over-commercialized with hundreds of tents, thousands of people, mostly smokers and party-goers, we collectively chose to steer away from it.  We read some blogs about an offbeat path called Buni-Buni pass, but honestly, not much information was available. That is also my motivation to write
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Location: Kasol, Himachal Pradesh 175105, India
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i love the radio

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yes! i am one of the biggest fans of the radio. how many people do you know have a car music system but no cd's, mp3's or audio cassettes (old school) in their car. i am just one of them. even if i do have cd's in the car, they would be catching dust in the glove compartment, because life's pretty simple for me. if there is one radio station that i am hooked enough to, i need nothing else. when i was in the US, i was hooked on to kiis fm (102.7) in southern california - it plays in LA and OC. many people think that this station is too girly and plays the same songs over and over again. don't matter to me. i would religiously listen to the shows on the way to work, and on the way home in the evening. i would know the rj's, the 8:20 birthday game, some reality-type-fake-tears show on the radio in the morning and the works. they say that if you listen to kiis fm for a couple hours at a stretch, you would have listened to the same songs twice. i was still hooked on.
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wamu's dead

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for a guy who banked only with wamu throughout his 5 yr stay in the US, it was quite saddening to see their website: will US lose its status of a super power? will all countries in the world get badly affected by the crisis in the US? will there be a shift of power in the world? will india be able to sustain the loss of business and the stop of fund inflow? will the financial crisis around the world lead to a world war?  most of the questions above have an answer - 'probably yes'. but we'll have to wait and watch
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new place, new friends - not just yet!

niki complains that i don't look forward to weekends anymore. she thinks that i'm just too unhappy that we don't have friends in bangalore, where we've moved about 2 months ago. i tell her that what she thinks is not completely true. though i confess here that its not completely false either. i hear people say that it is difficult to make new friends after a certain age. by no means am i trying to say that i am getting old, but oldER than i was, for sure. in my case, i don't think age is a problem at all. without giving ourselves time enough in a new city, i cannot be complaining just as yet. since niki and i talk about it atleast a couple times each weekend, we just walked down the memory lane and talked about how we've always been around so many friends wherever we are - at school, at college, in bombay, in the US, at work, etc.  i think the social bug must have got to me in the kind of enviromnemt i grew up. i cannot even remember the number of social groups
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the great bollywood twins story

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i got home after a long day of work and was quite pleasently pleased to see niki watching one of the all time classics (atleast of my time) - kishen kanhaiya. i gladly joined her. while i was watching the movie, i just thought that this movie is probably one of so many movies made in bollywood (i can easily recollect 5) on the theme of twins. the story lines are so similar, so are the plots, the scenes and even the climax. as kids, the twins got seperated due to some untoward circumstances. as they grew up, one of them was in a rich family but being tortured and ill treated by his uncle or step mother or someone similar. the other one had to grow up in a poor family but would be dashing and street smart. however the most interesting part of these twins movies that totally amazes me is the science of reflexology followed by them. till about the interval of the movie, there are sporadic incidences of one of the twins being hurt and the other one feeling the pain. as the story unfolds, th
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