I think I have now officially been on the most boring flight ever. It was 6 hours to New Delhi, but my god it felt like it would never end, and seeing that it was on Christmas day, it felt even worse because I wanted to be on the ground eating turkey and what not. Instead, I ate a turkey sandwich drenched in soy sauce in the plane before landing in a pool of smog that made me cough the minute I set foot outside the airport.
Thankfully, we got in the car just minutes after and started making our 6 hour car ride up to Chandigarh. The ride would have been 4 hours or so, had it not been for the thick fog that settled in and reduced the visibility on the road to no more than a meter. It would have also helped if we had remembered the address of the house. But anyway, we stumbled "home" at 9.00pm local (11.30pm HK) after starting out at 7am (HK).
This morning, we decided to explore Chandigarh and my god it's so beautiful! Hence it's slogan - the city beautiful, I suppose haha. We started out the day with a visit to one of the most famous destinations in town...The Rock Garden, which was designed by this guy purely out of his passion and dedication to the arts. He started years ago by collecting broken tiles, porcelain utensils, glass bangles, etc that people threw out and used them to create these statuettes of animals and people in the woods. When the government started to clear the woods, they found his creations and threatened to demolish them, but clever Mr. Chand got public opinion on his work and the site became Chandigarh's most famous tourist destination, with several more expansions made over the past 10 years. I have to say that I was incredibly impressed by the amount and quality of work put into the gardens...and to think that he did it all by himself! There are not really many words I can use to describe it, so you're just going to have to wait until I upload the photos to Flickr. It was awesome stuff!
From there, we went to see the Rose Garden, which is possibly one of the largest city parks I have ever laid my eyes on. It was simply huge. Unfortunately, the evening fog had started to settle in by that time, so the view wasn't as great as I had hoped, but picture this - green and blossoming roses for what looked like miles in every direction you look. I was just glad that I could walk on the grass after looking at Hong Kong's "DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS" signs for 12 years.
En route, we drove by my mum's schools and university and the house that she was brought up in. My eyes and jaws dropped and got lost somewhere soon as I saw the place because it was... enormous. Greek columns and all. I never associated my mother to anything like that, and it was just very strange to see that. Interestingly, my parent's Hindu wedding also took place there too.
All along the way, we've been eating extremely heavy Punjabi food that's laid with a ton of homemade ghee, served with a pan full of homemade butter, and topped with fresh cream that would probably be enough to feed an entire Indian wedding party (trust me, that's a huge number). It tastes amazing, though I think I'll be at least 7 sizes too big by the time I return to Hong Kong in a week.
Because of a slow internet connection, I'm having a little trouble uploading the photos, which is why the formatting of the post sucks today. All my photos from the trip are also going to be unedited because I don't really get much computer time.
Thankfully, we got in the car just minutes after and started making our 6 hour car ride up to Chandigarh. The ride would have been 4 hours or so, had it not been for the thick fog that settled in and reduced the visibility on the road to no more than a meter. It would have also helped if we had remembered the address of the house. But anyway, we stumbled "home" at 9.00pm local (11.30pm HK) after starting out at 7am (HK).
This morning, we decided to explore Chandigarh and my god it's so beautiful! Hence it's slogan - the city beautiful, I suppose haha. We started out the day with a visit to one of the most famous destinations in town...The Rock Garden, which was designed by this guy purely out of his passion and dedication to the arts. He started years ago by collecting broken tiles, porcelain utensils, glass bangles, etc that people threw out and used them to create these statuettes of animals and people in the woods. When the government started to clear the woods, they found his creations and threatened to demolish them, but clever Mr. Chand got public opinion on his work and the site became Chandigarh's most famous tourist destination, with several more expansions made over the past 10 years. I have to say that I was incredibly impressed by the amount and quality of work put into the gardens...and to think that he did it all by himself! There are not really many words I can use to describe it, so you're just going to have to wait until I upload the photos to Flickr. It was awesome stuff!
From there, we went to see the Rose Garden, which is possibly one of the largest city parks I have ever laid my eyes on. It was simply huge. Unfortunately, the evening fog had started to settle in by that time, so the view wasn't as great as I had hoped, but picture this - green and blossoming roses for what looked like miles in every direction you look. I was just glad that I could walk on the grass after looking at Hong Kong's "DO NOT WALK ON THE GRASS" signs for 12 years.
En route, we drove by my mum's schools and university and the house that she was brought up in. My eyes and jaws dropped and got lost somewhere soon as I saw the place because it was... enormous. Greek columns and all. I never associated my mother to anything like that, and it was just very strange to see that. Interestingly, my parent's Hindu wedding also took place there too.
All along the way, we've been eating extremely heavy Punjabi food that's laid with a ton of homemade ghee, served with a pan full of homemade butter, and topped with fresh cream that would probably be enough to feed an entire Indian wedding party (trust me, that's a huge number). It tastes amazing, though I think I'll be at least 7 sizes too big by the time I return to Hong Kong in a week.
Because of a slow internet connection, I'm having a little trouble uploading the photos, which is why the formatting of the post sucks today. All my photos from the trip are also going to be unedited because I don't really get much computer time.
(Top left) Recycled porcelain sculpture $at the Rock Garden; (top right) Rose Garden; (bottom) Ducks and geese at Sukhna Lake
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