General

Call it a manifestation of an idle mind or somebody who was simply not able to sleep. Usually such theories abound only in that cases. I have often wondered why people no longer look at astrology as a science and instead take it at face value. Of course, 98% of astrologers do make money by prophesying what WILL happen to somebody. Those people in my opinion, are idiots, and neither view astrology as a science nor do they understand what they are saying.

I have often viewed astrology as a “probabilistic science”. In techie terms astrology simply says, based on the data-set you provided me { birth, place of birth, stars, palm lines etc } and comparing it with our database, it is likely with some degree of confidence that something may happen to you. Beyond this, I don’t think astrology makes any conclusions or provides a definitive solution to life. Its just probability. Because 9000 out 10000 people with similar traits like you shared the same history, astrology says its probable you may follow suit. The key word is probable. You may, you may not. There is no guarantee to it.

Isn’t that way pretty much how contextual ad programs work, like adsense? All that the computer is deciding is if 9000 out 10000 people came to google with specific keywords, and they clicked on a sponsored link, likely hood of 10001 person also clicking that link is high. Whether that person may or may not is probability. He may, he may not. But given the data set that Google has on the history, it makes a fair probable calculation that a given ad will result in a click through.

Its fascinating how principles of astrology finds itself in our modern world in a variety of ways ;). I am sure they are a lot of other areas too where we could find similar comparisons. For that I need to let my imagination go wild even more!

Its about time I moved to a new theme; the last black theme has been lasting way more than I’d like. I like this theme – when it says its a minimalist theme, it really means it! No widget support, no fancy stuff – pure css and thats it. I like this. This is as good as it gets for minimalist design.

This time its all white – I think I’ll stay on this theme for a while. Who knows this theme might force me to blog more LOL 😉

I intend this post to be small with information about the places we stayed and the things we did. It might prove useful to somebody who comes in looking for it.

Athens is the center point – so if you are getting to greece, Athens is the place you will land and move out of Greece.

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Mikonos / Santorini

The next morning we had a very early flight to Mikonos. A very early flight meant we would again reach our hotel well before the check-in time. I was mentally prepared for another Attalos like experience already. Since Anu was traveling to India from Greece, we had a truck load of luggage with us. We were flying by Aegean airlines to Mykonos (or Mikonos, they are the same). To my surprise, we were not asked to pay for the extra baggage we were carrying, and we had a lot more than the allowed 15Kgs per person. We found out rather quickly why – the plane was almost empty 🙂 Our flight was delayed by an hour due to fog and and cloud cover at Mikonos. The flight was a quick trip at less than 45 mins; Barely had we eaten our cookie that we were going to land.

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Delphi, Meteora 2 day trip & Argolis 1 day tour

Next morning, we were going to be picked up at 7.30am in the morning for our two day trip to Delphi and Meteora. Given my experience with Attalos hotel, I was not sure whether they would keep my luggage for the night we were not going to be staying there, or if they would charge a fee for it. Luckily, they did have a luggage storage service. Most hotels in Athens have this service, where-in you can leave the luggage in their storage and go out (this is useful if you have to check out early in morning, but want to spend the day in Athens, or you have 2-3 day intermediate trip like we had).

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Athens Day Tour

This was one tour or a day hike that I had planned well in advance. The very reason of staying at Attalos was the ability to do this hike as all major attractions were close to this hotel. You must remember from my previous post about Athens and its origins. The phrase “You must remember” has been ingrained into me, thanks to our various tour guides. One of our guides had a set of phrases that she used pretty much in any combination – “Of course”, “Therefore” and “You must remember”. Hence, you must remember what I mentioned about Athens in previous post.

So we got up very early on Day 3 as we had estimated at least 8 hours to do the day hike going through all the spots. As in any European hotel, or most of them, bathrooms tend to be very small and completely functional. Do your business and get out. Its not a vanity place. At this point, I must tell you about Greece’s sewage system. Apparently this was laid out years ago by British, who in their infinite wisdom and perhaps their desire to down the Greeks, designed the system in such a way that errr, except for human waste, nothing else can be flushed down the toilet. Sort of airline toilets ;). So when you are done wiping, you throw it into the waste bins next to the toilet, not in the toilet. It takes a day or two to get used to it, and the bins are cleaned every day, but still you are left with a feeling as to why the system hasn’t been upgraded. This is true for everywhere Greece, so expecting a 5 star hotel to be different is going to be umm, disappointing!

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The first day
With nothing to do, we decided to walk through the city; like Mumbai, Athens starts early. By 7.00am it was already bustling with life; cafes were open, streets were being cleaned, people were already hurrying to their places. We decided to simply take a morning stroll across the Monastriki area in the morning and soak in Athens smell. Instead the roads we took led us to dumpsters, dogs and filth all around. For that fleeting few hours in morning, both of us were just disappointed, and were already re-thinking our entire decision to come to Greece. It was not a pretty sight, and our feeling was of that of despair.

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Its been a while I’ve blogged anything substantial except for my automated tweet collection; What better way to put some zing into this blog by writing about our recent travels eh? As Anu’s exams got over in May, and she has a long three month vacation ahead of her, we had begun planning about her going to India for summer holidays well in advance. However the idea of doing a European country on the way to India excited us, as 1) It would save us money of buying dedicated tickets to the country and 2) We could fit in a few days of visit in the country.

As it turned out a few days really became quite a few days; in-fact close to two weeks to be precise. And the first European country we did as a couple? Greece.

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