I Love Elephants

Magali & the Elephants in Yangon Zoo, Myanmar (1994).

Elephants to me are huge, sweet and gentle animals.

Here in Mumbai we used to see them on the road along with their mahouts who used them to beg for money and food. Normally they do not harm anybody but there are some instances where they have gone on a rampage and killed people (mostly due to ill treatment) Now they are banned on the roads in Mumbai but can be seen on the outskirts of the city.

Since Magali was just one year old we had been regularly taking her to the zoo in different countries.

Here in Mumbai we are not allowed to feed the animals but I remember when we visited the zoo in Yangon, Myanmar we had to pay a certain amount of money and we were given a small plastic basket filled with sugar cane. Magali and I enjoyed feeding the elephants.

About five years ago the whole family went on a holiday to Bangkok where there are a lot of elephants at the zoo and different places we visited during our stay. Magali even sat on an elephant for a fee where the trainer was taking the elephant around the area for the ride. There too we could feed a lot of elephants with sugar cane and they would nicely take it from your hand.

Magali (above) & me in Safari World, Bangkok (2009).

Poachers should leave the elephants alone who they kill for the ivory. Ivory is banned in India and many other countries so I hope the elephants can live a longer life now.

Love to all,

Sheila

This post has been written as part of ABC Wednesday.

Holiday in New Zealand

Hello everybody. It has been a long time since my last blog post.

These last few months have been busy and my husband and I have had a holiday to New Zealand where we spent Christmas 2011 and New Year 2012.

My friends who are settled in Auckland since 2002  had been inviting us to visit New Zealand since a long time and last year we decided to visit them. We have known each other for over 25 years and were colleagues at Bombay Hospital.

We have had many holidays abroad to Disney World  Florida in U.S.A., Penang, Mellaca, and Kuala lumpur in Malaysia and Bangkok in Thailand.

Ezy & Me.

At all these place we booked into resorts and really enjoyed ourselves. We spent a minimum of 2 weeks at each resort and all the holidays were lovely. All these holidays were as a family. Magali always accompanied us. But this time she did not want to come along because she said we were going to live in someones house and that she did not like that. 

We left India on 21st December and were received at the Auckland Airport on 22nd December by my friends.

We were our mad selves all the while and the men were wondering whether we were drunk (not possible since we hardly drink) or taking drugs (also not possible since none of us does drugs).We laughed and laughed remembering our old jokes and cracking some new ones and Ezy added to the fun by telling some funny happenings on board the ship.

Almost all of us.

Ezy is normally very quiet but there in Auckland he was quite talkative and my friends were quite surprised.

We visited all the places in Auckland and went for overnight stays to Coromandel and Rotorua.

My friends have a good social group and there were lot of invitations to parties and the days just flew by.

I missed Magali a lot and was sad because this was a first holiday abroad that she had not acoompanied us but she enjoyed herself too with her parents out of her hair.

We spoke regularly over the phone, on skype and also exchanged messages on twitter. So it did not feel like she was so far away.

On 20th January 2012 Ezy and I celebrated our 22nd Wedding anniversary and it was Ezy's birthday also.

So the three of us had lunch at a  mall food court followed by a lot of shopping.

Life could not be any better. I am loving it.

Love to all  of you,

Sheila

Almost six months...

Since I last posted. What a pity. In this time, I have been on a vacation with an old friend (which was a lot of fun), celebrated yet another birthday, & done many more things. But housework, voluntary work at the Home for the Aged & of course my favorite frontierville keeps me so busy & I am very lazy to type. So there. These are my reasons for not blogging. I hope that in the future blogging becomes an internet priority over those silly Zynga games that I enjoy so much. I think I should take part in the next round of ABC Wednesday.
Hope everyone is well.

Bye for now,
Sheila

Mafia Wars

Mafia Wars is a multiplayer browser game created by Zynga. It is available on Facebook.

Addicted to Mafia Wars

I started playing Mafia Wars after I registered on  Facebook in April 2009. My daughter was playing the game and she invited me to join. When we were in Goa I played a little when we went to the cybercafe. After that we went for a three week holiday to Bangkok and when we were not sightseeing or shopping the three of us used to go to the cybercafe at the resort. With the high speed connection at the resort I played a lot and got addicted to Mafia Wars.
After our return to Mumbai in June 2009 I continued playing at home and when Ezy used to see me playing when he was at home he teased me and said that I did all the jobs in Mafia Wars New York such as Mugging, Auto Theft, collect on a loan, bank theft etc. and enjoyed myself.
Right now I am on level 955 and I really do not know when I will be bored and stop playing the game.
Till then I will have fun by robbing and looting in the game.

Take care,
Sheila.

This post is part of ABC Wednesday.

G for Goa

Goa is the smallest state in India. A native of Goa is called a Goan in English,Goenkar (गोंयकार) in Konkani, Govekar (गोवेकर ) in Marathi.

This collage is made by Magali after our last holiday.

Though my husband and I are born in Mumbai our parents were from the same village in Goa and the families knew one another. When our fathers were old enough to leave Goa they came to Mumbai to make a living because in Goa there was nothing much to do. They earned enough money and later went back to Goa to find Goan wives and brought them back to Mumbai where they started their families.
Goa is visited by large numbers of international and domestic tourists each year. The beaches of Goa are famous and quite clean. We love Goa but only for a holiday but now with all the drunken driving and drug dealing going on, Goa is not a very safe place and  we are used to the fast pace of  life in Mumbai.
Though we have a holiday home in Goa we visit only once a year in the summer vacations as a family because Ezy is usually home at that time.
We also love to spend time at the resorts in Goa since we have a membership and spend a lot of time on the beach just enjoying the cool breeze and relaxing.
I look forward to our Goa holiday every year and maybe this year we will be visiting Goa in the Diwali or Christmas Vacations.
With lots of love,
Sheila.

This post is part of ABC Wednesday.

Being lazy and not blogging

Hello everybody,

It has been a very long time since my last blog post and though my daughter Magali has been after me since a long time to write a blog post, I have been very very lazy.

After my husband arrived on 11th April from Brazil we packed our bags and left for Goa the same afternoon.

The time we spent in Goa really flew fast and we enjoyed our stay there especially at Haathi mahal at Mobor.

After coming back to Mumbai we spent 5 days at a resort here and I was in no mood to blog even though the internet was not disconnected at home.The little time I was at the computer was spent reading the newspapers and doing other things like checking mail and replying back.

We left for Kovalam Kerala with high hopes, because until this holiday we were lucky to have really great holidays in India and abroad. But I was really sorry that I had booked into a resort where the people as well as place was not really to our liking. Everyone in Kerala was out to take us for a ride and to add to it was the weather with Thunderstorms and heavy rain which forced us to spend our time in our room . We did not even have cable TV for 10 out of 14 days we were there at Kovalam. The only saving grace of the place was the scenic beauty.

Life is busy now as my husband is at home and is hungry all the while.So I spend time making some different things for him to eat. Even Magali has cooked a lot of food for him and he jokingly tells me not to get her married soon as she has to cook for him when he comes home. And sometimes when he is angry with her he tells her now that she is 18 years she can get married and go live separately.

Will try to take a tag a few days later.

Take care,

Sheila.

Egg sandwiches and college days

Yesterday began as any other day since Magali was sleeping late and being a Sunday I too did not have to go out in the morning. At around noon time I received a call on my cell phone from a number I did not recognize and a female person asked me to guess as to who she was. I thought of a different friend from college who is settled in Mangalore but the voice did not match.

Sitting on the steps with my friends in
Lonavala. Can you spot the 17-year-old me?

She reminded me of our degree college days when we used to play Table Tennis and bunk college to go for movies. Now I somewhat guessed that she was one of the five friends from my group because she mentioned 'egg sandwiches'. Those were the days when we were allowed to carry whatever we pleased into a cinema hall and our group always planned as to what each one of us would bring for all to eat during the intermission. The menu for the four of them used to change but I invariably had to make egg sandwiches for all of us because all of them loved the sandwiches and so did I. I had finished college and gone to Bombay Hospital to do my Registered Nursing while the others did what they planned to take up as a career. Two of the friends got married and are homemakers and two are single and career women. While two are in Karnataka state (one in Udupi and one in Mangalore) three of us are in Mumbai itself.

Us again! (left to right): Sujata, Neeti, Eleanor & Me!

The best thing that happened was I got hold of all their telephone numbers and spoke to all of them. So yesterday I got in touch with four friends whom I had not met or spoken to in years. We are planning a get together either here in Mumbai or in Mangalore.

A holiday together would be great fun. We had gone on a holiday together in December 1980 to Khandala and I happened to have 2 photos which Magali has managed to capture with her camera as we are too lazy to use the scanner.

With love,
Sheila