Pure Randomness!

Pure Randomness!

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Sorrento: Giant tomatoes, sunsets and oranges

After the picture tour of Rome and eating the best pizza in Naples, Sorrento was our next destination. Running behind a small truck, filled with vegetables, was the first thing I did after I landed in Meta di Sorrento. I had seen a vegetable in the truck which I had not seen earlier, or so I thought. So I landed up in the vegetable shop, puffing and panting, following the truck after running for a kilometer. The lady at the counter told me it is pomodoro, and showed me a smaller tomato, when she realised that I dint understand what a pomodoro is. There I bought the tomato and brought it to our home stay, to my friends' amazement.
My mobile posing with the heirloom tomato
The home stay where we stayed had the best sunset view of all the places during this trip. We took our evening tea, stood, clicked and contemplated at the balcony in silence.
Sunset at Meta

For the visit to the Amalfi Coast we hired a car and drove from Sorrento. I was the designated driver and ended up driving looking straight ahead while others enjoyed the view. The roads were pretty winding and I needed to keep the car on the road without rolling down the hills. Once in a while I ended up looking at the view while driving, to the absolute horror of my friends. They all wanted to drive the car, but after seeing the winding roads and the beautiful view, none of them drove.

Driver has a horrible tan

Driver had her moments too
I had the best hot chocolate at Caffe Positano, the only hot chocolate which can beat that, is my own hot chocolate, for which I will post the recipe later.

Waiting for the hot chocolate

Reflective mood after the hot chocolate

Beautiful view from Positano

Amalfi Coast
I just realised that I do not have a picture capturing the beauty of Amalfi Coast and Wikipedia has a beautiful panoramic picture.
Sunset at Sorrento beach
We had been seeing these oranges hanging on the road side trees for a long time. We had not managed to pluck any oranges as they were always at unreachable heights. After watching the sunset at the Sorrento beach when we were walking back, we again stood around the trees staring at the oranges.
Preets can't reach the orange
After seeing my Iowa State Cyclones sweat shirt, 2 Amercians struck up a conversation with us, telling they were from Iowa. After some time, we asked them to help us get the orange. After jumping up for sometime they shrugged their shoulders and told us that it was not possible. Preeti retorted, "May be you dint try hard enough". After looking around for a minute, one of them lifted up his daughter to the tree and she reached and plucked the orange for us.
This time I try hard enough!
 We left from Sorrento the next day morning with hearts contend with giant tomatoes, delicious hot chocolate, beautiful drive, radiant sunsets and helpful Americans who would try hard enough when pushed.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Stop! I will give you the password!

A friend of mine, who has been following my blog for some time now, complained recently that my blogs have become too girly now a days. Here comes one more girly one. The ones on which he has complained were on cooking, which were not really that girly, considering there are as many male cooks around as there are female ones, or more. But this one is going to a beauty parlour, can it get any more girly? Dedicated to you, Mr.

I go to the beauty parlour once in 6 months. I have established here already earlier that I am an extremely lazy person. Remember, my friends told me not getting my hairy arms waxed is sacrilegious to the very idea of being a woman? But I haven't started doing that yet. But on every fourth visit I decide to do a facial. That is every once in 2 years, see I have done the math for you.

I like the shoulder and upper back massage she gives me. May be next time I will just ask her to continue doing that for the whole one hour. But then she turns me over, starts chanting the name of all the concoctions and starts applying those on my face.
Torture weapon
Then comes the comedo extractor (I figured out the name of that recently). That is when I become the protector of the worst nuclear device. I am the only one with the password which can launch the device. The lady starts torturing me by trying to loop the extractor through my nose walls and lower lips. I grind my teeth and refuse to give the password. Arggghhhhh... She gives me a nasty look and continues. After the ordeal is over, I come out of the room huffing and puffing, when she looks at my upperlip and asks me, "Shall I thread?". Oh no! One more time I need to hold the password in. I am really surprised that that night I don't wake up shouting, "Stop! I will give you the password".

I get out of there swearing and promising myself that I am never ever going to put myself through this torture again, only to come back after 2 years trying to get the password out to those people who want to destroy the world!!

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

And the award goes to.....


It is a funny feeling to get an award for blogging. I have seen a lot of the blogs I follow, having awards they have got posted on their blogs. I always thought of them as professional bloggers. I am just an amateur. I blog for the fun of it, nothing more, nothing less. But then I still got the Versatile Blogger from Malini Rajesh. Thank You so much Malini.
But then, this is kind of a chain award. Bloggers pass on this award to other bloggers. Now the disbeliever and the digger I am, I wanted to figure out who has started this award and how long it has been going on. I went searching in google and the earliest I could reach was May 16th 2010. The blog from which she has got the award had gone defunct and there the trail went cold. So, I decided to just play along.
There are rules too, to be followed for this chain to stay alive.
  1. Nominate 15 Fellow Bloggers
  2. Inform the Bloggers of their nomination
  3. Share 7 random things about yourself
  4. Thank the Blogger who nominated you
  5. Add the Versatile Blog Award picture to your blog post
So here is my list of 10 versatile bloggers, either I consider them versatile or their blog versatile or both.

1. Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen
2. Gayatri of Life. Unordinary
3. Anupama of Easel and Bytes
4. Divya of Easy Cooking
5. Janaki of Sincro Station
6. Priyanka of Slice of Life
7. Shaheen of The Purple Foodie
8. Nehal of Bibliophile
9. Nags of Edible Garden
10. Ria of Ria's collection
too lazy..

I found 10 versatile blogs and 5 of them are exclusive food blogs (versatile in their cooking, though). That must be telling something about me, burppp.

Now comes the hard stuff. 7 random things about me. Huh!
I asked Shyam to tell me 7 random facts about me and the first one went "You are weird" and then "You are straight forward". So I would rather make my own list, he is of no much help here.

1.When I start talking to some one new, sometimes I can go on talking for about 4 minutes before he or she cries, "you are a mallu".
2. When I go to a buffet meal, I first go check out the dessert counter to see how much starters or main course I should eat.
3. I have watched the movie "My cousin Winnie" 58 times.
4. The senior girls in my school used to call me 'half nut' and I still don't know why.
5. My favourite colour is lilac and so is half my wardrobe.
6. I love tattoos and getting tattooed, but... :(
7. I am the laziest person I have ever seen.