The world around us

When it comes to travel plans, one of our main agenda’s is to travel to Europe, to places like Prague, Rome, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Dublin, and I have been browsing through rates at Easytobook.com, a site that has some really great deals. I have spent some time in London but have not traveled to Europe, while my husband has traveled extensively across the continent. His favorite destination is Germany and Switzerland where he has traveled and spent several years.

When it comes to finding accommodation in Prague, it is best to book in advance, since it is a high demand destination, with huge number of tourists traveling there each year. Lately, the biggest rush of tourists is to spots which are featured in movies. Cities who are targeting movie makers in the quest to increase tourist traffic have proved to be following the smartest marketing approach.

The weekend is a great time to recuperate from the hectic work week, but this time it’s been a super hectic week without even working. We’ve been out most of the time that we’ve been out and we’re tired of eating out, especially after today’s lunch at Thai Wok (I think that’s what it was called) at the Deira City Center. In no way was the food anything even close to Thai food, which we eat quite often, so we were really disappointed after the food there.

We’re finding that ordering in is a major drawback from where we live, since there are very few restaurants nearby and the one’s that are there, do no deliver food. In contrast, our apartment in Bombay was so well situated that we could order in a variety of cuisines or go out and find at least 5-7 different types of food within walking distance. That is something that we’re really missing and had not anticipated at all. Do hope we will be able to find some places to deliver food at home nearby, especially Thai food.

The new trend in education that is really catching on is to go in for a professional course of study at the undergraduate level itself. For the longest time, getting a good education meant that you majored in liberal arts and then specialized course of study only at the graduate level, but in the past few years this is being radically challenged and altered by professionals who are getting a more focused education at places such as Brown Career College, where you can get set to start working immediately after completing.

The workplace is moving very fast these days and as professionals one has to be able to keep up with it or else lose out in the race. More and more professionals are going in for technical degrees which are more likely to lead to higher and faster career growth than in the regular run of things. Most organizations value this kind of qualification much more than a general qualification and will give more weight to these candidates than to others.

I downloaded a new anti virus for my laptop a couple of days back, this time switching from McAfee to Grisoft’s AVG. I’ve been hearing about AVG’s anti virus for quite some time, but never got around to downloading it, even the free version, which is said to be pretty good as well. I paid for McAfee’s anti virus suite and found it to be quite alright, but not that great. While their product was good, their service especially for South East Asia was quite bad.

I downloaded AVG’s anti virus from Download.com, and since I was on a downloading spree, I downloaded an Adobe Album starter as well to organize and clean up my pictures. I have a ton of new pictures on my computer, with my 275 pictures of the wedding along with about 200 that the official wedding photographer took on one of the functions.

I’ve been back a week now and still am to start working again. It’s been a rather hectic week with my in-laws here and we’ve been out most of the time, so working during this past week really wasn’t an option, but hope to start out working regularly from next week on. By the time I start up again, it would have been over a month that I have been on a break. This year seems to be all about starting and stopping, with my not being able to work for more than 2-3 months at a stretch for some reason or the other. It’s almost the end of the year now, it it’ll be interesting to see how the new year pans out. I’m hoping to get on a regular routine of some sorts, since I like to have a pattern on which I plan out my work week, which has not been possible this year.