Pittsburgh yaatre :-D

Ok its been sometime and things have happened. I'll just give a glimpse of few before the main Pittsburgh post.

• One was the thanksgiving black friday sale (For ignorant people like I was previously, Black day sale happens right after Thanksgiving day where stores offer hugggggggge discounts. That day most stores open at 5 AM in the morning!!). God!! We went at about 8 AM and you should have seen the rushes. All the parking lots were full. We had a few fixed items (jackets, sweaters) in mind, so we had a good time grinning at the queues ;-).


• Later we went to Pittsburgh, where I had darshana of not only Lord Venkateshwara, but also of my first snow fields :-D. This story will be continued in detail later :-D.


• Saw my first snowfall last thursday (1st Dec 2005) and the feeling is indescribable but will try to do justice to it in my next post :-D.


• My Parents-in-law' gruhapravesha went on great and so did the shifting.


• As our current apartment lease is getting over, we were looking for another and fixed on one 2 weeks ago. We signed the agreement on saturday and will be moving next week.


• A major re-shuffling going on at my workplace. I was working under a manager, but will not be working under him, but another guy from next month. Things are muddled right now, but cross my fingers and hope everything's positive :).

Now that I've got them all off my chest, onto the Pittsburgh post :-D.

25th November 2005:

We left Lexington at around 12:30 PM on Friday. Pittsburgh is about 5 hours drive away from Lexington. The route we took had us actually crossing 2 states - Ohio and West Virginia. Pittsburgh is in Pennsylvania state. I packed a lunch of rice, some curry and curd. We also had a few other fruits and snacks with us. So we set off.

Stopped for lunch at a rest area in Pennsylvania. We actually planned to have lunch outside on a picnic table, but I was feeling too chilled, so we went back to the car. It was then I noticed the small white patches on the ground. "Yes that's snow", was Sri's cool response :-p. Man, I was thrilled and touched one of the patches immediately. It felt like crushed ice powder, thats what it is anyways :-p. From then on, we started seeing snow on the roadsides. They evolved into complete snow fields after sometime into Pennsylvania. We stopped at a petrol bunk where I took this photo:




We reached Pittsburgh at around 7 PM and landed at the hotel. Since there was an Indian temple here, we knew that there's be Indian restaurants around :-D. Sri had previously researched and fixed upon a restaurant called "Namaste India" and we set off to the place to have dinner.

I must accept that in first look, the restaurant was a bit shabbier than any of the Indian restaurants I've been to in US so far. But the smells coming from the kitchen were lovely. We hesitantly ordered mirchi bajji as the starter and were ready to get out of the place if the dish wasn't good. But all our fears turned out to be nothing when the food actually arrived :). The bajji was delicious and so were the veg noodles, veg fried rice and the gobi manchurian we ordered later ;-) :-D. This hotel was a typical south indian restaurant we find in Bangalore. The noodles were pukka desi and I almost cried as I had my first bite. God!! Its been more than 7 months since I ate noodles like that!! Needless to say, we both thought that the food was excellant and enjoyed it very much :).

26th November 2005:

Next day, early morning we set off towards the Sri Venkateshwara temple of Pittsburgh. As I mentioned before, its one of the earliest Hindu temples to be built in US. You can find more information on their official website here.




The temple is beautiful. It seems it was modelled based upon the Tirupathi temple in India. The SV temple is actually built on top of a small hill. We went inside and it was exactly as if we were back in one of the Indian temples. The first god we saw was Ganesha. After doing namaskara to him, we went around the main gudi. There was a sathyanarayana pooja going on at one place. It was all very serene and peaceful. Next we entered the main gudi and saw the Venkateshwara idol, very big and exactly like the one in Tirupathi. It seems all the idols were brought to US from India!! We got an archane done in both our names, did namaskaara, took teertha and prasada of bananas that the poojari gave us and sat in the temple for a few minutes. The temple is being renovated from the inside. The only sad part for me was that photography was not allowed inside the temple ;-).

Then we found out that we could buy prasada. Since we hadn't had breakfast, we decided to make the prasada our breakfast and bought Puliyogare, Pongal and Boondi laddu. As the temple is exactly like Tirupathi, I almost expected the Tirupathi Laddu too, but I was disappointed ;-).There's a hall in the temple premises where the devotees eat the prasada. I guess the hall is also used for functions. We both ate the prasada and bid goodbye to the temple. As I walked outside taking a couple of more snaps, the thought I had in my mind was, its all like India except the snow fields and the posh cars :-D.







We immediately started on the drive back home. There's actually nothing else around in Pittsburgh for a visitor, so headed back. The drive back was again, thankfully Sri would say, without snow fall. It seems snow fall is hazardous to driving. But there were snow fields in sight until we crossed Pennsylvania border :).




So thats it, that was the short trip after a long time. Its getting too cold to go out on treks/hikes etc. Forget treks, its getting very difficult to continue our daily walk in the night after dinner :(. So, good that we were able to go to a place atleast when we did have holidays. We actually had planned to go to Chicago that weekend, but it seems its very windy and extremely cold out there. So shifted the plans to Pittsburgh :). Glad we did, for it was one of the most beautiful trips so far :).