'Tempe Town Lake' weekend

The long weekend of July 3/4/5 was one of my most eventful weekends in US, thanks to the ASU people - Viju, Ashwini and Teja.

Friday night - Saturday early morning:

Dinner at Delhi Palace, followed by the timepass movie - I hate love stories where I met lot of folks from ASU - Viju, Teja and Harish. Good fun, lots of movie kalaai after ages. Went to the Tempe Town Lake, which is an artificially constructed lake at downtown Tempe very close to the university campus. Apparently the lake side offered an excellent view of the sunrise and I wanted to check it out. I had passed by it during the day but never knew it looked so gorgeous in the night, with lights on all the bridges over it. So, we were there, by 2 am, sitting at the bank, chilling our feet with the water. It felt unf****ng believable (Simbu 's dialogue from VTV :P). Viju's iPod Touch and my Sony Ericsson proved to be a source of several valuable songs as we listened to dozens of Ilayaraja, ARR scores for hours together. Planes that dipped over us at periodic intervals before they landed at the Sky-Harbor airport, added to the ambience. The culmination of Tamil/Hindi/Telugu songs and movie talks went on till 4:30, after which we could observe the horizon far beyond, getting bluish and the clouds getting darker spreading their shadows on the water, which was already well lit up by the reflection. Soon the sky completely brightened up with a smile. We hurried and made a move in order to beat the heat. Arizona heat has a reputation of kicking in so quickly. After hunting around for places to have tea/coffee, I managed to grab my favorite Chai Latte :)

Saturday evening:

Went shopping at the nearby Tempe Marketplace, which seemed a pretty decent place to kill time with many shops and malls.

Saturday night - Sunday early morning:

I woke up from a nap and was called for VTV movie in one of Viju's labs in the university. That seemed pretty exciting. VTV somehow has been a movie for me, that has this wierd characteristic. I hated the movie the first time I watched it (except for its ARR music). I literally cursed Menon for the terrible job. Second watch, made my think that it was not that big a shit as I thought initially. Couple of things like Trisha, Nalini Sriram's brilliant sarees :) appealed to me. Though, Simbu 's acting was still unacceptable and looked outrightly foolish. Third watch, and I seemed to actually like the movie. Alright, so this being the motivation, I was in lab at 2 when we began watching the movie, turning the lab into a movie theater. Ended at 5 with a whole bunch of comments and PJs throughout the movie.

Sunday night - Monday morning:

July 4, being the Independence Day here offered me a chance to join the crowd at Tempe Town Lake for the famous fireworks show.

And so we were there at 9 and witnessed a huge crowd. I got a feel of the night life at the popular and most happening Mill Avenue as I saw the streets flowing with people - old, young, on cycles, with instruments, kids on shoulders, music, flags, etc around. We couldn't get into the lakeside area - Tempe Beach Park, where I could see a stage being set up with a band that was to host the music for the night. We instead got close to the bank beside the park fence, which offered a pretty good view of the lake, bridges and the beach park before us. At 9, there was music and fireworks began.

(Tempe Town Lake side)

It was a 40 minute long incredible fireworks display with the band beside the lake playing. I could identify - Come on baby light my fire at one point during the show. Thanks to the fireworks mode on my Nikon Cookpix L20, I was able to capture several beautiful moments of the show.

View the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVv5rh0UyKk

The sky finally went black at 10 and being hungry, we headed to a Chinese restaurant at Mill Avenue, for dinner. I had not had a good opinion about Chinese food to be honest, but Viju claimed two dishes to be really good there and the food that we ordered did seem pretty good actually, especially the Eggplant dish. My face lit up when I was told that Eggplant was another name for Brinjal, and so the dish finally boiled down to (pun possible :P) a form of baingan bhartha dipped in spicy sauce. Dinner ended with fortune cookies (I never knew they existed anywhere other than on facebook :P), which are typically served with Chinese food as deserts. The cookie has a message inside which is to be read as, suffixed with - ".. in bed" :) And, these were the ones we got :P

We wandered along the Mill Avenue and thought of spending the night again beside the Tempe Town Lake. The place seemed addictive especially during late nights. But before moving in, we spent sometime at the Beach Park entrance, discussing/singing songs from various movies and our childhood days. It brought back many old memories especially recalling the prayer and bhajans which I learnt in my school days. I also realized that all four of us had studied Sanskrit in our school days and so we had lot of common stuff to recall and remember.

At 2, we took a walk beside the lake, did couple of pictures experimenting with the Self-Timer, B&W and Sepia :) After some random discussions on random topics, we made a move at 4 back home, finishing off with a coffee at Ashwini 's place.

Overall, a great long weekend.