First Day in Costa Rica (Nov 19th, 2010)

November 20th, 2010

After our little adventure in Panama City and a near-miss of the flight to Costa Rica, we arrived in San Jose in the late hours of the night. As we landed, our manual driver, aka Omar, became really sick due to lack of sleep from finishing up his work prior to the trip. Once we had our luggage, we made our way to the car rental agencies and asked about prices and car conditions. Eventually we settled on a rental company and they drove us to their offices to get the paper work done.

Some of the people advised us not to drive at night to La Fortuna since we did not know the roads or the language. However, being head strong about our schedule, we rented an automatic transmission 4WD and a GPS system and proceeded to drive to La Fortuna. Pointers on car rental: never rent older model cars. We learned this the hard way, however the car served us well through our trip in Costa Rica.

Trip to Costa Rica and Panama (Nov 18th, 2010)

This post is extremely overdue so I apologize ahead of time.

Towards the end of 2010 I reached a point where I realized that I had not traveled as much as I had always hoped. I had visited a handful of countries and had not experienced much during those visits due to the people that accompanied me. Fate would have it that my realization came around the same time a college friend was planning a trip south of the border. Syed invited me to join him on the trip and with an opportunity like that thrown into your lap, who would have said no. I agreed to travel with him to Costa Rica via Panama. Our trip lacked one more person to make the journey affordable and enjoyable. In our search, I was able to find a close friend of mine who was also looking for a similar adventure. So began my journey to Costa Rica with Omar and Syed.

Vintage Train Ride

        Every year, MTA runs vintage trains and buses in New York City during the holiday season. This year, the vintage train ran on the F and E line from 2nd ave F train stop into Queens. There is at least one bus route in each borough that has vintage buses running during the off-peak day-time hours. For more info check the MTA website during the next holiday season.

        The train cars are really vintage. The cars are manufactured in and around the late 30s. They were in service until the 70s. The cars have all the old components preserved. They have ceiling fans, a lever to open vents, and the seats are the old ones as well. The other amazing old element of the train were the ads. It gave a window into the past and how the society thought about certain things. There were ads encouraging to hit door blockers with purses, or ads showing a kid who was run over by a car and bleeding on the street. The ads also had prices for certain products and it showed how much cheaper things were back in those times. I think that the ads were the most fascinating thing about the whole ride.

Here are some pictures that I hope you will enjoy.

Lunar Eclipse in the North East

So if you didn't hear that there was a lunar eclipse recently that was visible in parts of the United States, you need to crawl out from under that computer screen and get out a bit more. lol I keed I keed.

So the eclipse started around 1:30am EST and lasted for a few hours, reaching its peak at around 3-3:30 am. I was awake for the initial phase and was able to take some clean pictures of it before heading to bed. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

A Visit to the Wired Store

        If you haven’t already heard, Wired has opened a pop-up store over in the NoHo area (Corner of Broadway and 4th st). The concept of the store is to showcase various products that Wired magazine has reviewed in their various issues. So I decided to visit the store a few weeks ago. I got there around 6:30pm on a Tuesday only to find the store closed. On closer inspection, the store is only open from Wednesday to Sunday and closes quite early on weekdays. So if you are thinking of visiting the store, double check the times on their site before going out there.

        It doesn’t take very long to go through the store and see all the gadgets that they have. Some worth mentioning include the uni-motorcyle displayed in their window, touch screen HDTV, and Cisco Telepresence. The sales person was helpful enough to do a demo of the Cisco Telepresence where she made a phone call to someone in LA and we were talking live with them on the TV. The concept is pretty cool and it works with Google TV as well. The other two things to check out are in the back of the first floor. One is this reflection of you on the wall with birds flying above and they swoop down and peck at your shadow until it’s all gone. The other is a piano but if you look above the piano, you will see how hitting a key will generate the sound from an enlarged piano strings. You can see it up-close from the second floor of the store.

NOTE: In the refrigerator in the back of the store and on the second floor, there are free drinks like ginseng tea, so make sure to pick one or more up when you are there.

Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what to expect there:

Long Hiatus

It has been quite a while since I last posted here. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything in terms of traveling. On the contrary, I think I did quite a bit of traveling in these few months. Mainly within NYC, sight seeing and all, but my major international trip was to Panama and Costa Rica towards the end of November, the details of which I will be posting in the next few days so stay tuned.

Summer of Movies

This summer I was able to go out and watch quite a few movies in theaters. Three notable ones were Despicable Me, Toy Story 3, and Inception.

Despicable Me, in my opinion, was a great movie. I was funny, entertaining, and above all it catered to not just the younger audience but the older ones, like myself, as well. The story line is pretty straight forward, one villain trying to outdo another. There is a dark side to the plot but with the introduction of the kids, the movie takes a very light hearted turn, which is always welcome. Without giving away too much about it, I think this is definitely one of the must see movies of the summer.

Toy Story 3 turned out to be your average Toy Story movie. I went in with high expectations having seen 1 and 2. The movie was good and continued the story from where the previous one had left off. There were moments that were funny but overall, for me, the movie did not live up to its expectations. I personally would have waited until it was out on DVD to see it knowing what I know now.

Inception, now that was a whole other story. I had heard great reviews about this movie as you probably already have. The movie lived up to all the hype that I had heard. The plot was great, the casting was also very good, and the special effects were amazing as well. I think the plot was the best part of the movie. The twist in the ending really made us think what really happened and what we could have thought wrong in our assumption of various situations. To this day, we still have discussions about the ending and its effects on the rest of the movie and how it definitely threw a wrench into the perfect explanation that everyone had of the events in the movie, until the final scene. So this movie is also a must-see from this summer.