Salsa - Work - Batacha!

Here I am again thinking about all the pretty gals that i am gonna meet tomorrow :) at the "Drop - in" class of Batacha. I've been doing some dancing since a couple of weeks. Its Salsa time every Tuesdays. The wireless communication course is eating up all my time and the only source of entertainment nowadays are the dance classes. I've learnt quite a bit of Salsa and I am pretty confident with the basic steps.
Although its mainly the LA style the instructors teach a bit of Cuban as well. I am excited to try out Batacha tomorrow. Batacha is again a Latin american street dance originating from the Dominican republic!
Six months in Sweden and not a single Swedish contact. I hope to get one tomorrow!

Birthday Bumps!

Today, on my 24th birthday, I have decided to starting blogging (again) and hope to keep the blog running at least for some time to come. Yesterday night (early morning 12 AM)I had a small get-together with my friends in one of the function rooms in Galleria. This has been my first birthday party where in guest list was multinational (India and Pakistan!). This bday party is special for many happy and not so happy reasons. I am celebrating my first bday out of India and the first bday out of home :( and many more reasons.
The party ended at 1 AM and all the OTHA (Open To Help All) group members were gathered near the galleria entrance for OTHA 1 and OTHA 10 send off. A hitch-hiker couple meet us and wanted a place to stay for the night. OTHA 1 immediately offered them to stay at his place. I wonder how could he trust them in the fist place. I need to check with him now!
All in all was a different experience celebrating bday out of home and a group of (boy) friends.

After 4 months!

Phew.... Finally I am all done mailing application packets to various universities in Europe. Here's the time line of the events that took place in my life in the past 4 months.
Late October, I decide to apply to European universities, after days of research on the internet. Most of the universities ask only for TOEFL scores, so I register for TOEFL exam, the exam date: Nov 23.
Early November, I start making trips to college for recommendation letters and for attestation of the documents. I remember sweating in the heat (Yeah.. its was very hot) running from one block to another, in the college. I managed to get recos from two professors. Even though, all the universities I had planned to apply asked for 2 recos, I wanted one more, which I couldn't get. Moving on I took the TOEFL on Nov 23. The test went on well apart from a few mistakes in the reading and the listening section, mainly because of my lack of concentration (TOEFL is 41/2 hr long test).
In December, I filled out the online applications and sent out a application packet to T.U.Eindhoven as this one didn't ask for TOEFL score. This was my first packet, so took a long time to get it ready after checking and cross checking everything. I got the TOEFL score (overall: 107) on Dec 11. Mailed another two packets to Sweden and Finland (TKK) in the last week of Dec. The Finland packet reached on Dec 31 2008, but the packet to Sweden took another week to reach.
I finished mailing the rest three packets by January 15. These packets were destined to Italy, Spain and Denmark. I had used UPS for all the packets except for the Denmark one. As for the Denmark one I think its still in transit as it is shipped by India Post.
The notary was not punctual to office, he gave me trouble attesting the documents. I had to wait for an hour in the morning in front of his office for 4 days. Hence I had to seal four of the packets in a hurry.
Currently waiting for a confirmation mail from Spain and Denmark and of course anxious about the final results from these universities...

BarCamp Bangalore 07

Barcamp, Bangalore was a new experience, as this was my first unconference (even Google hasn't updated its dictionary about this word!).
The venue has always been IIMB. Me and Trilok reached the venue by around 11:00 AM. There was a parallel event at the same venue, it was Startup Saturday. Trilok decided to attend S.S, I decided to check out the bar camp.
A session on Open social was about to begin. A guy and a gal from Satyam introduced themselves as the presenters. Although the session was boring for me as I was new to Open social, but I made it interesting for me with my bluetooth thing. Poor gal, she was reportedly getting messages on her laptop for a blutooth connection.
It was lunch time and I didn't know to follow the crowd for lunch. I entered a canteen, had lunch (the lunch was really good), and came out. Meanwhile Trilok, who was on the other end of the IIMB campus had lunch in the official canteen for the bar campers. He called me and we decided to meet at point which we both knew (IIMB campus was huge!). Later I found out that I had lunch in the wrong canteen.
We attended few more sessions and headed back home. By the way I mailed that gal the same night about the bluetooth stuff that happened during the session.

The Friday Night

The day of the week for which most of the folks (esp. S/W engineers) live their miserable lives for, no prizes for guessing, its FRIDAY!!!!. We, a bunch of 4 guys, decided to go watch a movie (The Mummy - 3). Contrary to our other Friday outings , this time we decide to book the tickets and thereby watching the movie we initially planned for (this wasn't the case most of the times).

We started from the office pretty early that evening and reached the multiplex (sigma mall) with one and half hour to spare, the time was 8:30 PM. So we decided to checkout a shopping complex (Reliance Timeout), which was few meters away. We parked our two wheelers at the multiplex. As we were about to exit the multiplex, a girl with curly hair, with white T and jeans (don't remember the color!) enjoying her ice cream was sitting on a bench with some of her friends (gals). At first instance she looked like any other hot chick at the mall hanging out with her friends. I was in for a surprise, as I started looking at her, she began to look at me or rather gave me a cold stare. As a conformation, I looked behind me and found out that there was nobody and at that instance there was a flush of adrenaline through my spine. I didn't look at her anymore and kept walking. A few milliseconds passed by and I began to think, what a coward I am, here is the most beautiful chick that has ever stared at me and I am afraid to return the stare. Some more milliseconds passed by. I think the earlier rush of adrenaline had an effect on my brain and it was acting super confident. Finally after a second I looked at her, to my surprise she was still looking at my direction. I thought this is it, I had to approach her. Many thoughts flooded my mind, what if she was looking at something else, what if she did not respond, what if she was with her boy friend.....