Hello,
It is a rather odd time for me to write the Sydney Story at 8 AM on Sunday morning - but if I don't do it now I will never get a chance again. So here it comes...
The past few weeks post PR has been quite interesting. Amongst other things I was able to buy a cell phone on post paid connection. Got a Samsung Galaxy - SII, supposedly the latest in Androids. The first week of of SII was quite intimidating. On the positive side, of course there are many many cool features. I am finally now into the "app" scene and don't feel left out at work when people discuss - Oh I have THAT app to do THIS. The best feature that is unique to Samsung compared to many other phones including the Iphone is the SWYPE technology. SWYPE is where you don't have to punch the letters on the phone, you just slide your finger around the letters you need to type. It has "intelligence" built to figure out the right word even if you made some rather vague swipes. The best part is when I swipe my last name it suggests both "Natarajan" and "Natarajhan". Wonder where it picked it up from!! Nandhitha and I are now officially fans of the "Angry Bird". In fact Nandhitha taught me a few tricks (which she has learnt playing on my friend's phones in the past). It is sooo addictive that it has made a serious impact to my reading habit in the train. On the negative side, one most annoying thing is not being able to close an application easily. Until I learnt a few tricks I had so many applications running which obviously drains out the battery pretty quickly.
Last week we had a visitor from Salem. An exporter who started life from a pretty low point and kept growing up. He doesn't speak English - can read slowly adding one alphabet after the other. He is out here down under all alone doing "market study" of what sells in this country. Apparently he can export pretty much anything from India and he does a lot of business in Malaysia so far. With a few contacts here and there he managed to spend a few weeks here in Melbourne and Sydney going around Indian shops. In Sydney I took him around a few suburbs which has a decent Indian population. He immediately "made friends" with one of the store owners where he spent a lot of time understanding the business here. Truly enterprising!!!
Here's the grand finale for this week. We had a bowling championship as part of the sports club we are part of. Uma and I were on the same team and I was the "captain" of the team as well. My first memory of bowling goes back to Genting Highlands - back in '89. Still remember rolling a ball that I could not even lift. After that I've had a lot of opportunities in Bangalore and in US. Haven't had many chances after we came to Australia. Am pretty sure the committee wanted to encourage "new comers" and hence made me a captain because nobody has ever seen me bowl. In the past I remember averaging about 80 points. Yesterday I averaged at 110 in 3 games. By my standards - not bad at all. :-) Guess what - our team came runners up against 12 other teams. We were in fact leading the pack in every round by a good margin. In the final round some of our key strikers got exhausted. Nevertheless it was good team work where everybody pitched in to keep the scores at a steady rate. It was quite a close competition in the finals across 3 teams with score differences in single digits. Had dinner at 1 AM at a Pakistani/Indian restaurant in Granville. Apparently they are open till 2 AM every day. Very unique by Sydney standards.
Oki doki. Have a good rest of the weekend and have a great week ahead.
C
