Onam - 2014

    Manju, a neighbor at Duckpond informed Divya of an onam programme in the area run by the 'Gama' association - Georgia Atlanta Malayalee association. We had mostly not heard well about these associations.We decided to try it out anyway.
    We reached the venue , which was a school,  around 1:30 PM which was when the 'Sadya' was coming to a close. The 'Sadya' was arranged by 'Lekshmi's Kitchen' , the same hotel that took up Anoop Sebastian's new home dinner. We just got paper plates as we were late. As Niya's experience of Onam was the primary motivation for trying this out, we got her a plantain leaf on special request.
We just had rice,sambar,avial,cabbage,samiya payasam and one more other payasam - did not even match the number of items Divya had made single handedly two onams back when we invited Sajan's family and parents over!. To add to that, while we left in the evening, we were so hungry that we took a stop at the Dunkin donuts and everyone was munching in quick. However, the items were tasty.
     While we were finishing up the Sadya, the 'chendamelam' started and Amey clearly enjoys percussion. While we were worried, he would wake up and cry, he was instead shaking his head to the drum beats and enjoying himself.
    Next, we were inside the school auditorium. Various families who were actively involved in the organization of the events were presenting dance/music performance items, mostly by the children. The setup was pretty good with a decent auditorium , nice stage , nice audio system - nice chance for the kids to perform. Performances were mostly nice from the perspective of these being just regular families and not artists per se.
     Amey cried to the extent that I had to leave the auditorium to fresh sunlight and fresh air in the open hall outside. And we would have left early except that Niya was dancing and running around happily with other kids her age.So we stayed till the end and towards the end, there was a single male song performance of 'Sankarabaranam' which was the highlight of the day.
     It was a nice experience on the whole though and most importantly , Niya had a great time!
    

Minnesota trip

     Last tuesday evening, I took a flight to Minnesota on a client visit.  As I entered the airport, the first striking sight was of the lines of iPad pairs at the restaurants in the airport. Then there was the walk-stand conveyor to take you out of the airport. If you have heavy luggage, you stay on the stand side and if you are light, walk on the walk-side of the conveyor. On the whole, the airport looked rich.  As I exited the airport, Josh(colleague) picked up in our rental car.
   We drove over to the hotel and on the way, had the 12 oz NY strip steak at the 'Granite City Food & Brewery' restaurant in Eagan which is the suburb we stayed at. We had some office-centric talk while I had my nice dinner.
   After our work on Wednesday, we went to the 'Yard House' restaurant where I had the grilled korean short rib beef taco and swordfish blackened taco, both of which were nice as were the laid back conversations that David and Aaron offered from the client side.
      It was an early dinner. We still had time. We decided to drive around the Minneapolis downtown which was pretty impressive. I was curious to check out St.Paul which is supposedly the older of the twin cities. St. Paul was not impressive at all of the twin cities. We drove back to Minneapolis downtown and enjoyed the sights yet again.
    On our way back to the hotel, we stopped over at the 'Mall of America' which is one of it's kind and the largest mall in America.  It was huge and impressive. As we had had the dinner already at the 'Yard House' , we decided to help ourselves to a quick dessert. Wednesday evening was pretty good.
   Thursday, 3 PM we were off back to Atlanta and at the airport, I had Sushi from the iPad menus that I had seen two days back while we entered the airport. Minneapolis is 2.45 hours of flight time from Atlanta but is pretty much similar to Atlanta.