Showing posts with label Aquarium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aquarium. Show all posts

Sunday, 22 May 2016

3 States

You might have read Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States or must have seen the movie. Just like it has 2 states, I have got one more in addition. All credit goes to my lead, he added a state to my business trip in the last and hence it became 3 states. Yes, this time it was not a tourism trip, but a Business trip. I covered 3 states in 4 days. Every night I used to travel from one state to another. Still I was able to add just 1 more state in my US traveled states list. Rest 2 states were already covered in previous trips. I started from Chicago on a nice Sunday morning and reached first city: Atlanta in Georgia State. When I moved from Airport to Hotel, I understood, it was a blue land and I should be careful out here. I had only one day to roam around and explore the city, but I spent that day with my family. Morning to evening, I was on the phone. Finally in evening I came out and explored the city. The major attraction of Atlanta is its Georgia Aquarium; it’s the largest not only in America but in Western Hemisphere. I have already seen Shedd Aquarium of Chicago, so I wasn’t much interested into that and also I didn’t have that much time to explore it completely. Hence I visited The Coca Cola factory, it was a nice experience. It’s a guided tour with a complimentary welcome drink followed by tasting several flavors of coke all over the world.

It was quite late by this time, everything else was closed. There is a Centennial Olympic Park also in downtown, but some music event was going on inside. Next I visited Walmart to buy a belt as I didn’t have any and I can’t go to office without that. After such a long day, I took a cab towards hotel. I was hell tired so the best thing to relax was to take a hot shower. Now it was around 9 PM, I was worried that I may not get any good meal. Fortunately there were many restaurants around the corner and they were open. So I had Mexican dinner and then joined the daily office sync up call.


Next Morning, I checked out of hotel and took a cab to Atlanta branch office. My office contact lady was all prepared; she showed me entire office and was ready with complete documentation of the branch. I did not had space to carry such a big file, so I left it. She promised me to send it via courier, which I never received but its fine. I had soft copy of most of the details. They also had my name display on their TV which was a nice gesture, liked it. Once office work was over, I moved back in downtown. Atlanta’s another attraction is CNN Headquarters, although it’s not that cool, kind of ok. I completed that and finally moved towards airport. I took a flight towards Philadelphia; if you are thinking that day is over, wait. Next, I took a rental car from Phily to Wyomissing. It was just 2 hour drive but tough as I was seriously tired. As soon as I reached hotel, I watched movie for some time and slept. I guess, I have to watch screen for some time to make me sleep.

Monday, 4 May 2015

This is just a Beginning

Shedd Aquarium
It’s been some time now that I have been to a trip. I was waiting for the spring and now when its here, I am ready to roll, ready to explore all corners of the USA. Recently, I got the opportunity to visit 3rd most populous city of US-Chicago. I believe this is just a beginning of my US trips, now Spring is up and I have started visiting places.

Star with Stars
We have been planning for this trip from sometime and suddenly on a sunny day, I got ping from a friend asking for Chicago Trip. I said “are u serious, I am definitely in.” Soon, 5 people were finalized and we booked a car, yes it was a road trip. First trip in US and that too a road one, isn’t that’s aaaaawesome.
Lookin @ Chicago
There were 5 guys-2 boys and 3 girls, so we were somehow able to accommodate in a single Toyota Camry taking in account physique of people with us. We started around 4 AM from Minneapolis and reached Chicago around 11 AM. First we visited a place called as Willis Tower (one of the tallest Skyscraper, it was the tallest in the world for at least 25 years), also known as Sears Tower. It is a 108 story building and provides a good view of Chicago Downtown. We bought Chicago City passes from Sears which allows us to visit 5 major attractions of Chicago. Some of the attractions have choices in them. Once we had a sky view of Willis, we moved on to our next attraction Shedd Aquarium. It’s really a biiig aquarium and has all kinds of fishes, too many fishes. At one point of time, you may feel all are just fishes and you may start ignoring them. But I must say, some of them are really worth watching like sea horses, penguins, whales, some weird kind of fishes which doesn’t even look like a fish.


Live baby fish
Driving from early morning and visiting 2 spots all of us were exhausted, so we thought of going to our reserved hotel-Quality Inn and get fresh. One of our friend wanted to have Indian dinner, unfortunately we ended up having a completely different food at Devon Street. All of us were hungry like hell, but none of us was able to eat anything due to huge quantity of food they offer and other specialties of restaurant. It was a long day, so next day in next post.