The year that was

Here comes the look back at the year post timed around B'day. Last year I delayed writing this post so much that I never did. This time around I will start with something and try to append it over time.

New Things:
1) After a long long time I finally took the change of moving to Mountain View, California. The first time I ever relocated out of my country.

2) My first vacation to a country in South America. I spent 15 days in Brazil for the Christmas and New year break.

3) Bought my first Road bike in December and have been enjoying biking ever since completed about 1600 KMs in 5 months after a relatively poor 300 KM in first 3.

4) My first trip to United Kingdom: Britain and Scotland.

5) First Couchsurfing experience being hosted by Maira in Rio De Janeiro amazing experience

6) First shot at running a half marathon and completing it successfully.

7) My first ever multiday treking experience in the Uttarakhand (65 KM hiking in 6 days).

Old Fun Stuff that continued
1) Attended the second Salsa Rueda Festival in San Francisco in Feb 2010.
2) Learned many more interesting dance forms including Lindy Hop/Swing/Cha cha.
3) Interest weekend trips in California, Death Valley, Las Vegas, Mt Shasta and to other places: Crater lake in Oregon.
4) Language learning continued. I am much better in Spanish now though my French and Japanese didn't get any attention
5) Visited Malaysia on a team offsite.

Looking Forward in next year:
1) Triathlons
2) Visiting (more) countries in Central and South America
3) Scuba diving
...

Bay Area Salsa Rueda Festival 2010

Bay area Salsa Rueda festival 2010 the second of its kind was held from Feb 18-21st this year in San Francisco. If you a Salsa-Rueda dancer in the Area this is an event you cannot and shouldn't miss. Similar to last year the event offered a whole bunch of 1 hour workshops, evening performance shows by many Rueda groups and live music/DJ party for social dancing later in the evening until late night.

The event went for 4 days adding a day from last year and the excitement was there till the very last moment, though you could see with such intense dancing everyday most ppl were exhausted by Sunday afternoon :) And the Mega Rueda held on Sunday evening didn't turn out to be as much fun as last year. The Google Rueda group had group outing on Saturday, unfortunately not many from the big group could make it.

I have few videos from the event put on Youtube, trying to share some here too:

This year I experimented with the Intermediate class after trying beginners last year. The problem was at many time slots they didn't only had Advanced Rueda class or some other non Rueda workshop. Some one mentioned that based on the feedback last year they had a permanent Beginners' slot guess this years feedback will make sure they have so for Intermediate and Advanced ones too. Anyways in absence of Intermediate classes I decided to try few other things which turned out good experience. Specially some SalsaTon or plain Reggae classes where Marco Ravella from Canada gave some basics of body movements for all Cuban dancing styles with focus on Reggae where they are much more important.