My 22nd!

So 26th of October was my birthday. In a completely new country, I wasn’t really expecting much of a birthday celebration this year, but I was pleasantly surprised!

I started getting wall posts and text messages from my friends at 5pm Eastern time since it was midnight in Doha! Until now I’ve got 106 happy birthday wall posts (facebook counts them now, i didn’t go counting all of them! Point being, I was touched by every single one of them. I want to reply to every wall post, and I will try my best to do that!

The best thing ever, though, was Varun’s video. Varun, I was expecting a video since we did one for shivani (oh and creepy is the new cool btw) but you blew me away man! I’ve put it up here as well. I love you bro!

Apart from that a few people in doha actually celebrated my birthday with a cake and all. They had a picture of me and made it look like I was cutting the cake and blowing the candle and everything…they had me on a videocall watching and they sang for me and everything

My point is, you guys all made me feel really lucky today, and seriously made me realize how much I miss all of you. I wish you all the very best, and I really can’t wait to come back and meet all of you again. I’m counting down the days!

Coincidentally, 26th October was also the first day of the NBA season! I met up with a bunch of guys from UPitt at Koubaa’s house and we watched Boston Celtics vs. Miami Heat… I was like the only one cheering for the Heats! It was a close match, but Celtics deserved the win, their teamwork was amazing. We had a barbeque with it, and pizza and everything, it was great!

Best 22nd birthday ever!

That tunnel I was talking about + Dinner with our Professors

Alright, so I haven’t been posting anything for a long time, and for that I want to ask my buddy Varun for forgiveness! My life’s been pretty crazy right now, but I’m using that time to gain a lot of experience from my seniors from all my classes and stuff (well at least i’m trying!)

So I promised a video of the best view you can get in Pittsburgh (read this: http://dohmusafir.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/pittsburgh-the-city-of-bridges/)

and voila… i found it! The camera really doesn’t do it any justice.. maybe I’ll try getting a video of it again sometime.

Coming soon: How my minor courses are going, about my Kung Fu lessons, and maybe about my trip to Niagara falls with Samee and Allan.

Also, just a quick word of appreciate before I close: Dr. Randy Weinberg, Professor and Head of the IS department over here, graciously invited the IS students from Qatar over, where Barbara (his wife) and Dr. Raja (our IS course professor)’s wife, Viji, cooked us an amazing dinner, something we hadn’t had for a while!

 

From left: Dr. Raja, Dr. Weinberg, Allan, me (woohoo!), Samee

Dr. Weinberg loves Qatar!

More posts coming (hopefully) soon!

…and I have been dancing around!

Just to make this clear from the beginning, I am NOT spending too much time in the Singapore clubs. Even if I were, it wouldn’t be the topic of a post of the blog being read by my academic advisors back in Qatar . I have been into spending sometime into real dance, like legit sh**. A month and a half ago, I signed up with the Bollywood dance club at SMU, titled Nach Le. Its been addictive since then.

When you see a bunch of simple and cute girls standing on a stall promoting their student organization for Bollywood dance, you would mostly expect them to take you through self-made and/or readily adopted classic Bollywood dance movie steps. But that was not how it was turning out to be! From Hip-pop to Salsa, the group essentially shakes their booty to every style of dance on Bollywood music. And just if you thought it wasn’t high-quality enough – a pro dance instructor comes to the dance studio at the university every week to teach us the simplest steps he can offer. Mind you, these are really hard for us! And some stretching and socializing, joking and laughing gets us to be able to do this:

This is the group’s performance at SMU Challenge, one of the annual events at the university. Hope you enjoy it (Oh yeh, you will also figure out a number of reasons why I love the dance club )

So you think you can fly kites?

Image courtesy: (the photographer)

October 2^nd 2010, yet another birthday anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, marked the beginning of a week long of recess break for me, for this Fall semester. And in what better way could I begin the celebrations than by doing something Singaporeans love to do as a hobby in their spare time: flying kites!

One of the SMU student organization known as SMU Icon (International CONnections) organized a kite flying event at place by the sea known as Marina Barrage for all international students interested in the same. Although I must admit now that I have never flown kites or even held the reel for anyone, I signed up for the event because I simply had nothing better to do on this Saturday evening (the alternative was involving myself in a Java pair programming session – uh.. no!). I reached 15 minutes late (also known by most as “on time”), saw only “Asian” faces all around, signed up, boarded the bus, and got to this gorgeous place where we were to fly kites.

The first 45 minutes were spent making our own kites (what?! the email said we were all going to get one free kite! I assumed it was going to be ready-made!). This was a lot of fun though! And in no time were we all finding best windy spots to fly, just the way desperate-for-internet people locate Wi-Fi hotspots. I struggled for at least 1 hour, with interruptions from the smell of free snacks which were being served less than 20m away, to merely have the kite launched in the sky. I am sure FAIL BLOG folks would have loved to capture those moments. The other Singaporeans insisted we change the spot, and we all relocated to a breezier spot.

Let me skip all the new struggles faced here or how I was awed by the winds and all that. In less than 20 minutes, I had my what-seemed-like-a-one-dollar-kite fly so high, that my thread reel ran out. The organizer noticed this and declared me winner to the competition instantaneously. Am I proud or what?!

Last week – The job fair and buggy rolls

(Note: This was meant to be up last weekend but ‘something came up’… sorry! )

So the past week has been really busy for me.. I went home for Eid break and so was dumped with a bunch of projects and assignments when I was back.

To add to that, they had massive companies like Apple, Google and Adobe (and many many others) come over for job fairs (3 days long for business and technical majors). So that means I was suited up for three days straight! My feet were begging for mercy because of the amount of walking I did in my new formal shoes!

The second thing that happened was the Buggy Rolls. Now for those of you who don’t know, CMU-Pitt has this crazy yearly tradition of doing buggy races – check out this link to see what a race looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkh9gI26bVU&feature=fvst

Yes, the ‘drivers’ are people that are actually inside the buggies! It’s pretty intense stuff if you ask me.

So I joined in as a mechanic, the people who actually design and build the buggies from scratch. I learned a lot of cool stuff, but buggy is a very secretive business. So secretive, in fact, that there are things that were covered in the workshop that we’re not allowed to see until the older guys feel like it! And the pushers and drivers aren’t allowed in the workshop or ask about how we do stuff either.

Mechanics meet up every Saturday and Sunday for ‘Rolls’, where their buggies are test-driven on the track every weekend up to Spring Carnival when they have the actual race. They have to come in 3 hours before rolls to set up a tent, bring the buggies in, and do all the super-secret things before rolls start! We come in every weekend from 4am and stay until 10am, it’s crazy! I would talk about all the stuff that happens in rolls but it might get a bit lengthy. I’ll post up a slideshow from my rolls sometime this week as well. Until then, stay safe everyone!

Silent Disco and International Peace Day

It was another day and just another meal at the local foodcourt, which is right opposite the School of Information Systems here. I met up with some friends and some unknowns at this foodcourt, out of complete coincidence. We enjoyed the conversation over the meal, although I must admit that I was struggling to digest “Maggi prata”, which was simply ramen stuffed into a whole wheat bread. Not only was it poorly prepared on this day, it was rather bland when eaten with sambhar, a south-Indian soupy delicacy. If you feel strange reading about this strange food, you can only imagine how I reacted on first trying it out.

We were all set to leave, when one of people I was having dinner with very enthusiastically announced that we were all going for the “Silent Disco” down the road. Okie, seriously, what?! Is that the name of a song? Or just a strange club’s name. It cannot be a genre of disco, now can it?! Well, turns out I was in for something super strange, yet fun. Let me allow the video below and picture on the left explain more.

Just to leave on a light note (the part above was also light, actually!): Today, we had the celebrations for the International Peace Day event at SMU. I, Mr. Patriot, am representing Oman. I wasn’t aware it was going to be a harder than wearing a kandoora (local Omani dress). Turns out it was – we had to say “May peace be there in the world” in our local language. Bummer! After failing miserably in the first practice, I said “Ana Uhibbu Falafel wa Hummus” (I love falafels and hummus) on the final event! And no one reacted Miss you, Arab buddies!

Last Day of Ramadan – bus breakdown + missed flight et. al = fun packed day

So I’ll start my day from iftar two days ago, 8th September. I was taw the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, a masjid that’s like ten minutes away from my dorm. I took my iPad with me (still thinking of a name for it.. suggestions would be appreciated!) so I could finish off one of my assignments. It was the last night they had Taraweeh and I felt bad i hadn’t attended any, so i was going to work until prayer time.
I did do work, and after finishing prayers I was on my way home but i thought I’d say may goodbyes and Eid Mubaraks to everyone before since I won’t be seeing them for Eid. I bumped into Aamir and we chatted for a while, it seemed like his flight was leaving around the same time as mine the next day so we exchanged contacts so we could go to the airport together.
We talked to Raheel for a while, and he kept telling us to stay a bit longer at the masjid because he just wanted to talk to us and stuff… After like half an hour of talking i realized it was the night of the 29th-the last of the blessed nights of Ramadan. with a push from Raheel i decided to spend the night at the masjid to pray and worship.

Raheel and I had a lot of deep conversations about religion and everything that night, and we did a lot of praying and worshipping. For once I actually felt like i w as doing something useful for ramadan!

The day, however, did not go so well because of this. I was sleeping in almost all of my classes, and Thursday is the busiest day of the week for me, with only an hour worth of breaks between 830am and 430pm.

Left for home around 5pm after a bit of other work, and started packing for the bus i needed to catch at 6.
Met up with Aamir, got on the bus, and headed towards the airport. When we got on the highway, we started hearing this beeping sound. The beeps got faster, and then they stopped, and suddenly the bus stopped. The five people in the bus started staring at each other… And the driver was extremely quiet. He wouldn’t say a word, and nobody dared ask him what was happening. Two minutes later though, bus bus started moving. Aamir and I acted like nothing happened. Soon enough, the whole thing repeated, but this time the bus stopped for longer. Then a third time, and a fourth. It came to a point where Aamir and i would bet when the next time the bus would shut down again!
By the fifth or sixth time, we were standing and the next bus on the schedule (it left half an hour after us) passes by, and we all sit on that bus. It’s way past the boarding time for my plane by now, and there’s no chance that i could make it.

I go to the check-in counter and find someone who just finished her shift to make a new ticket for me so i could come back the next day. Charges me $50.. Oh well. By this time we had to break our fast, so we found this cafe sort of place and had our last iftar for Ramadan there. I had a tuna wrap which i spent at least five minutes trying to get the plastic wrap off of! Then i wished Aamir happy eid and thanked him for being there for me to blow my steam off with. If he wasn’t there i don’t know what i would’ve done!

Anyway, i was pretty annoyed at the bus service and so didn’t feel like taking that home, and realized that taking a cab home tonight and taking one back the next day would be expensive.. So i went and rented a car =D
The weird thing was that if i hadn’t rented that car i wouldn’t be able to go to eid prayers! I also used it to explore the city with some of my buddies from CMU.

I think I’ll end my day here, loads of things happened on the first day of eid but Im sure nobody has the time to read about my crazy life! And if you do… You shouldn’t! Go and enjoy Eid break everyone, Zaid’s out!