Tag Archives: Friends

Coorg- A Photo Essay

Posted in Travel by

In some ways, our trip to Coorg was a rainy mess, but we still managed to have a great time. The rains made the place look so beautifully green and we ended up taking tons of pictures. We did have to be a bit careful because we didn’t want the rain to get into the camera. In spite of it, quite a few photos ended up with a bit too many raindrops :( .

The best parts were the awesome energy by everyone in the group, the 2 kids managing to have a whale of a time together, the non-stop games of Ass in the bus. All in all, a great weekend!

Also, the snubnose was soo extremely adjustable with the completely new setting and new people, I was extremely thrilled with her behavior throughout the trip :) .

Anyway, here are a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. More are available on my Flickr page

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Lunch at Serengeti

Posted in Jahnavi, Restaurants by

Last weekend, we had a huge meet-up with friends to celebrate. The occasion was the birth of a baby girl for one of the guys.

Based on good recommendations, we decided to go to the Serengeti restaurant in Total Mall, Madiwala.

Our Plates

Our Plates

Set amidst a lush jungle ambience complete with sound effects and a life-size elephant, it transports you to a tropical rainforest environment (somewhat similar to Rainforest Cafe).

There is a huge elephant at the entrance with a mechanized trunk that moves when you enter. The elephant is followed by a cute bridge that leads you to the dining area. The waiters are all dressed in forest garb looking a bit like Shikhari Shambu. There are tons of animal dummies strewn all over the place, which provided a good distraction to all the kids. The ceiling is covered with artificial green leaves and trees. There are also some streams and some artificial rain.

Overall, the atmosphere was very good. A little on the dark side, which I did not like. The snubnose was also very uneasy at first, though she soon settled in and began to feel quite comfortable. I also did not like the damp smell that was prevalent because of the artificial rain and the streams.

Once we were seated, we opted for the fixed menu and settled in.

The fixed menu consists of soup, naan, one side dish, one dal, one pulav, and curd rice. Dessert was gulab jamun and ice creams.

The food was overall very good. The soup, the naan, and the dal were excellent. The gulab jamun sucked. We had ordered paneer tikka starters, which were extremely delicious. The snubnose polished off quite a few.

Doing whoo whoo to cool the soup

Doing whoo whoo to cool the soup

Can you see the empty plate?

Can you see the empty plate?

I did feel that the price (Rs.300/- + tax) was a little bit steep, when there was not too much choice. However, that is mere quibbling.

Generally, we all enjoyed the meal, and lingered chatting and catching up for a long time. Most important, the kids had a blast :)

More photos below:

All smiles

All smiles

The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers

Btw, there were a few downers:

  • Serengeti is not a rain forest in Africa. It is actually a plain, so this restaurant is not very accurately named
  • North-Indian food, nothing remotely African
  • The yucky restrooms and the basement parking

If you can overcome these blah things, you will enjoy a good experience at Serengeti :) .

Scintillating Convo on Bowling

Posted in Conversations by

rolling-eyes-icon-picks-1085394_75_75 Went bowling with office friends yesterday. Came back home really excited and chirpy and blurted out:

Me: I had a great time bowling today. You know I bowled really well!
Hubby: That’s great, did you make a strike?
Me: Ya, several times, I was very consistent today!!
Hubby: Wow, what was your score?
Me: I scored 42!!
Hubby (scratching head): Huh…but if you got several strikes, you should have scored more than 100…
Me: Oh! you mean strike as in “strike all the pins in one throw”. I meant that I actually hit the pins today
Hubby: Rolls eyes and picks up paper

One of those Suppandi moments in my life :)

A Food Friendly Post

Posted in Jahnavi, Restaurants by

I have been eating out a lot lately, thanks to a suddenly blooming social life…I seem to go through these in phases, there are weekends when all I do by means of recreation is curl up under the blanket with a lovely book, and occasional trips outside to the library or meet the in-laws. After a few weeks of this, I am ready to get back into the fray of things – catching up with friends and gossiping about others :D

Last weekend, I met up with all my ex-colleagues (from 3 companies back – amazing that we all still keep in touch !) at the spanking new Coffee Day Square in Kasturba Gandhi Road. This has got to be one of the better Coffee Day outlets in Bangalore. The space is humongous, comfortable, they also have a larger variety of stuff than the standard CCD outlet…single-origin coffees anyone ? this is the place to go to. The biggest plus of all, they have valet parking – the biggest boon for a coffee shop located bang in the heart of the city.

Cafe Coffee Day Square

Cafe Coffee Day Square

After lingering over coffees and cake, we all made our way to Rajdhani – a Rajasthani / Gujarati restaurant serving thali meals. As usual, I did not enjoy the meal ( I am not partial to thalis), ate a couple of pooris and some veggies and unsuccessfully tried to feed something to the snub-nose; she did not show any interest either. In addition, the really looong wait for the food really put me off -this wait, even after we had booked a table !

Thali meal

Thali meal

However, everything is forgiven when the company is good, and we had such a nice time that we quite forgot everything and just gave ourselves up to joking and laughing.

Came back home and somehow managed to feed the snub-nose a giant bowl of papaya to make up for the lackluster dinner…a pleasant change from her normal food and tired, she fell fast asleep as soon as she hit the bed.

Next weekend, I meet up another batch of ex-colleagues from 2 companies back…and I am already looking forward to the massive dinner I know we are going to enjoy at Nanking.

Probably, the only positive thing about changing companies is the great people you meet and befriend along the way !

Brunch at Brookfield Cafe

Posted in Restaurants by

This weekend, we caught up with friends over lunch at Brookfield Cafe. This is a small, unpretentious, vegetarian eatery located in (you guessed it) Brookfields.

I got extremely excited when I heard about this place. The reason being, there are very few decently priced restaurants in this locality where you can go get a thaali meal on days when you don’t feel like eating at the office cafeteria. My food-loving friends in HP, ITPL, and SAP will definitely be jumping up and down with joy at the thought.

Brookfield Cafe offers a variety of rice options such as jeera rice, biriyani and so on. They also serve chaat and ice creams after 3:00. On working days, they offer a north-indian and south-indian thali (about Rs. 45/-).

On weekends, they have a weekend brunch for Rs.99/-. It consists of a paratha and some rice, along with some sweet or lassi. Doesn’t sound like much, right? but boy, was it a lot. I was unable to complete the food. The paratha was delicious and as big as the plate! And rice, after that…I was literally unable to move after eating. But…oh, so yummy, and perfect for a brunch :)

The best part is the pricing. You can get rotis for as less as Rs.5 /-.

Interested people can find Brookfield Cafe at:

335, B-Block, Opp Bank Of India, Ganesha Temple Road, AECS Layout, Brookfield, ITPL Road, Bangalore, 560037

Laughathon at Barbeque Nation

Posted in Restaurants by

Went to catch up with my friends over dinner at Barbeque Nation in Indra Nagar.

Contrary to popular perception, this is a pretty veg-friendly restaurant with enough options for me to be comfortable, relax, and enjoy myself. The availability of wine on the house also helped :)

We sat n chatted n laughed so much that we never realized the time passing by…suddenly looked at the watch and realized OMG…it is 11 and time to move on home.

How do I feel about the restaurant ? To me, it is one of those places where you go with a big gang and just hang around eating starters and drinking wine. A noisy, festive kind of place.

The restaurant offers you some starters on a grill, which you can grill right on the table. There are 5 veg starters and 5 non-veg. The veg starters were pretty decent, and I was tempted by and enjoyed the mushrooms on offer (something that I am a little wary about). Here is a photo of the starters grilling on the table:
Starter Grills

The main buffet is so-so. Probably, I wasn’t very hungry, but most of the food on display looked extremely rich. Barbeque Nation is advertised as a restaurant that is drawn from Mediterranean, Asian, American, and Oriental cuisine. However, the buffet only had North Indian food (all paneer and cream based stuff). I ended up eating only the biriyani and dal.

The desserts are also not upto the mark. Not as much variety as I expected, and I ended up just having the brownie with ice cream, and chocolate sauce.

I have been reading in newspapers that restaurants and hotels have been down-sizing the size of their buffet offerings. Looking at the Barbeque Nation buffet, looks like this piece of news is true.

Brunch at Royal Orchid

Posted in Jahnavi, Restaurants by

This weekend a bunch of us decided to meet up over a long brunch at the Royal Orchid. Located next to the Golf links- it is unofficially known as “Bangalore’s only hotel with a golf course”.

Their coffee shop – Limelight is located beside the lawns and has a pretty great ambience. Things did get off to a rocky start though.

We had booked a table for 14 outdoors (this would allow us to relax as well as watch over the kids playing on the lawn). When we got there, we found that our table was allotted to some body else, and we were pushed right inside next to the buffet – a disaster for us all. All the kids would have had a field day throwing food at each other.

After almost 1/2 an hour of standing about and arguing, we finally got things sorted out, and a table was placed for us in the patio.

And then the fun times rolled…

The brunch buffet is from 11:30 – 4:00. We were all there by 12:30 and we stayed on till almost five, when we were politely asked to pay the bill and leave :) .

The kids had great fun playing on the bouncy castle, going on the merry-go-round, as well as playing with some stray puppies that had somehow wandered into the lawns.

Some pics below (courtesy the Sat man) :

Here we go around the mulberry bush
Too busy digging in to even look up and smile
Future Target of Maneka Gandhi / PETA
Group Shot

The food was okay. The thing is, when the price is 900 bucks, I tend to expect something stupendous and this buffet was not that. I have eaten at better restaurants at half the price. However, the ambience is great, the place is accessible, and it really helps to have a lot of open space when there are kids around. Not sure that I would really appreciate this place otherwise.

Dinner with my much-missed ex-colleagues

Posted in Restaurants by

Last month, Shobha (one of my colleagues from our HP days) came to visit Bangalore. Our whole gang met up for dinner and we all had a total and complete blast.
I am not going to blog about it as Shobha has already written it up in detail in her blog. Here is the link…
http://gugiinsingapore.blogspot.com/2008/07/still-in-bangalore.html

Farewell Dinner

Posted in Restaurants by

Recently gave a farewell dinner for one of my colleagues who was leaving the company…Although we had given an official farewell party, we had another more personal one from all the folks who are close to her.

We went to Nanking- a chinese restaurant in Sigma Mall on Cunningham Road (one of our old haunts :) ), and had pretty much a blast- laughing and joking. The only regret is that none of us took any pictures that evening. Otherwise, I would have posted it on this blog.

After dinner, I dropped her off home. We had a sooper-looong conversation in the car, just before dropping her off. Were talking almost till one in the morning (something of a rarity in my life these days)….

Really, missing her big time :( … and already started planning the next reunion :)

Lunch at Friend’s

Posted in Jahnavi by

A colleague of Kalyan’s invited us to a lunch at her place to celebrate her 1st Wedding Anniversary. Went to her place and had a really nice time. The food was really good, and the crowd was a family crowd (Jahnavi had some friends to play with).

Anyway, we all had a really nice time. Her neighbours own a cycle and a tricycle and all the kids had fun taking turns on the cycle. However, if you look at the photos below, you can make out that Jahnavi was pretty much holding the controls all the time :)