No Business Like Show Business

Some highlights from my visit to the Wax Museum at Hollywood, LA....

Best Train Ride Ever

I was in Europe with a colleague, working with some customers and we got the rare opportunity to travel from Switzerland to Austria by train. The initial plan was to take a flight, but my CEO, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana suggested that we take the train and enjoy the scenery along the way. Boy oh boy, wasn’t he right about that?

Starting from Zurich, the train runs several hundred kilometers parallel with the Alps, until it turns South at Salzburg to finally cross the magnificent mountain range to reach the city of Graz, our destination. We had to make two connections along the way and the trip took almost 10 hours, but it totally was worth it and we enjoyed every minute of the journey. A couple of days later, we again crossed the Alps by train, this time to get to the city of Vienna.

I just downloaded all the pictures from my camera to the computer and apparently I have taken several hundred photographs along the way. I have a hard time picking the best of them, and therefore I’m just going to upload a few random photographs here…

Among Stars and Planets

From my visit to NASA Ames Research Center:

It's a great place to revise your old lessons on sun, moon, earth and the other planets. If you ever visit this place, check out the cool 3D visual model of the solar system they have on the giant screen. It is controlled by a Wi-Fi operated joystick. They sometimes let the visitors operate the model for a while. I was among the lucky few :)

A Different Experience...

Last week, I got the opportunity to visit yet another interesting part of the world – the Middle East. I have been to the Dubai airport before, while on my way to United States. But transits don’t count, right? So last week I visited the city of Amman, the capital of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. I was there for a whole week. It was not the trip I expected, but in a really good way.

Let’s start with the weather. I was expecting the weather to be burning hot with tons of scorching sunlight. It turns out the weather over there is actually better and far more comfortable compared to the usual weather in Colombo. The temperature is almost as same as in Colombo (around 30 degrees Celsius) but the humidity is nearly 0. So it’s actually very comfy. And during the nights the temperature would drop to something around 18 degrees Celsius resulting in some very cold nights and mornings. I also learnt that they have the usual four seasons over there at Jordan. They even get some snow showers during the winter. Who knew?

The city of Amman is indeed one of the largest, most developed and beautiful cities I’ve ever been to. It’s very clean and tidy for a capital of a country. I was kind of surprised to not see much pedestrians walking around the town. But the roads are always full of vehicles all the time (even at midnight). So I guess pretty much everyone owns a vehicle. I also got to see quite a number of Ferraris and Porches storming the highways. I also realized that travel costs are actually very low in Amman. You can get a taxi anywhere and travel about 4 km for 0.75 Dinars (~ 1 USD).

Amman is also full of great hotels, restaurants, cafes and various shops. Truly great place for tourism I should say. Somewhere close to down town they have a street called the ‘Rainbow Street’. The street full of night clubs, restaurants, coffee shops and book shops is a great place to go and get something to eat and chill down for a while. They also have these huge shopping malls at Amman– larger than any mall I’ve ever been to. If you ever get to the city of Amman please make some time to go and visit the Mecca mall or the City mall.

Something has to be mentioned about the people of Jordan too. They are really nice and friendly. People at Amman are always full of smiles and have nothing but nice things to say. During my short stay I was even offered a couple of lunches and one great dinner.

Unfortunately for me I didn’t actually get anytime to go and visit the real tourist hotspots in Jordan, like the city of Petra or the Dead Sea. But then again, it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.