Goa !

" fan gates "

2012-02-23T19:34:00.000+05:30

" MTV Cribs Goa - Presidential Pool Villa "

2012-02-14T03:27:00.001+05:30

Aguada Anchorage - Presidential Pool Villa

Two words : Villa Resort

Three Words : Awesome Villa Resort !

Located ? Sinquerim

Closest Land Mark - Taj Fort Aguada

Fun fact - Parts of Ra One were shot here and lets just say some of the Khan brothers own one or two villas this side. For more fun scoops you will just have to get in touch with Gavin

Property Summary

If you could give a Villa a five star rating then this would definitely be it.

Presidential Villa Overview

So having an opinion on everything worth writing about, yours truly had the pleasure of staying at The Presidential Pool Villa. The bad news is that after working 9 to 5 jobs and paying our taxes it'll take us a life time to own something as fine as this, the good news is that this place can be leased out. If you do plan a vacation with your family and would like to indulge and spoil them, then why not. At the end of the day one would want to have value for money and if you are getting five star treatment and facilities at one third the rate, then indulgence will be a hard habit to break.

One of the first things that gets your attention about the Presidential Villa is that even though its located in the heart of the property, its segregated from the rest of it. It ends up giving you this sense of belonging, you know your own place that feeling you get as a little kid where you say mine, mine, mine ! I hope that when you come to the property its during the day, 'cause as you walk in the garden greenery, the villa orange and the swimming pool blue really bring the place alive. Dont get me wrong its equally pretty in the night, with the lighting it looks something like this :

The Villas is spread over the ground floor - one bedroom, living room, kitchen, dining room

The first floor has a small lounge with a library and two bedrooms

and the second floor has the master bedroom.

Before we get into the bedrooms, let me just say that the washrooms are fantastic. Honestly, you can tell a lot about a place once you've seen ironically by where you going to be your dirty work. Men not so particular about the washrooms but a lady’s disapproval and the whole holiday will go for a toss. Did I mention that this place comes with a Jacuzzi : )

The bedrooms are spacious, furnished with a wardrobe, a dresser and a king size bed. Often over looked is the linen being used and might I add is top notch quality, with extra blankets, towels and quilts being made available on request. The bedrooms each come with and attached washroom and a balcony.

I don’t really cook too much except for the odd meal on a Sunday but speaking from past guest experience a lot of people especially families really enjoy this facility. For one it saves up on expenditure on simple meals and more importantly in the case of a pure Veg Family a fully equipped kitchen is nothing short of heaven for them on a vacation.

The living room and the lounge around the pool provide for ample space host and entertain the family and guests that may visit.

I could go on and on about this place but this is not my fathers place but it is this guys pops : Gavin , do get in touch with him for a booking or visit his website for any further queries.

" code of conduct but the party's still on ! "

2012-02-10T11:17:00.000+05:30

With everything shutting at 10'o clock , goa's party being party heaven now looks like a scene out of banglores night life ! with most of us only accustomed to getting ready to attend a party at 10 , calling it a night at 10 is something new to all of us .

Never the less , "the Crew" at F Beach Club says the show must go on and go on it will !

After last weeks over whelming response, its back again this weekend from 6-10 !

Nice Art work on the flyer wouldn't you say ? if you guys got the time show the boys at the crew with a like on facebook : "THE CREW"

" 5 Reasons Sunburn 2011 Sucked ! "

2012-01-30T16:45:00.002+05:30

" Find You Place In The Sun "

While I do understand that greater ticket sales is more revenue for the company which lets you get better artists and have a grander festival, you need to keep in mind not to commercialize the festival too much or the festival will just burn out eventually.

1. Gate 2 !

Gate 2 seemed to be Area 51 ! Nobody knew about it other than us back home from Goa. I got to the main venue on the 27th at 5pm and there were a sea of people. Am talking huge crowds, easily ten thousand and more and more people just flowing in.

The process of entering was three steps, redeem online or complimentary ticket + get festival ticket + get band. Each of these lines were serpentine, I mean if I got there at 5, I was looking at walking in at nothing less than 7 .

The entrance to venue two was where Vanilla Lounge used to be, the task of walking all the way that side was a bit daunting and I would have called to find out the situation but the phone lines arrgh .. . I'll elaborate more on that a little later. With the distance to the second entrance a good kilometre I took the chance, the last thing I wanted to do was wait in a queue, I fucking hate queues.

After a good ten minute walk I got to the second entrance and it was beautiful ! There was barely anyone ! I mean a handful of people at the most, it took me less than three minutes to get plugged into the festival.

Definitely more awareness needs to be created about the second entrance.

2. Alcohol

As much as they would like to keep this under wraps, the public must know that on Day One there was no alcohol available till 7 pm ! If you are going to be the biggest festival in Asia, have the best artists and charge 8.5k you need to deliver. Whether that means you get your licenses approved or bribe the right officials, get it done. Budweiser one of the main sponsors, running contests and promotions isn’t available at your bars, you got to be kidding me !

3. Network Connectivity

!dea, Vodafone, Airtel and whatever network was in that Candolim circle wouldn't just connect calls, even Rajnikanth wouldn't get through. I can understand it might be an overload in one particular circle but you need to connect. If Abshikek's on tele telling millions of Indians get !dea we should invite the man himself to come and make a call. If they did connect, they just dropped.

Now some smart ass will say, why do you need to make a call ? Shouldn't you be enjoying the festival?
Try losing the people you've come to the venue with, it’s pretty funny when you think about it now but ask my friend Nestor about the one hour that he got lost for on the final day and he'll lend you some obscenities to make your ears bleed.

4. Queue's

I hate Queue's !
I hate the way its spelt !
I hate the idea of it .
And most importantly, I hate waiting in them.

A queue to a bar ? Really ? If the VIP bars have no Q's, I believe the general public should also have no Q's. If the public is too much, then just have more bars.

5. Venue Size

This year Sunburn took the initiative of getting a shuttle service going from the area where you parked your car to the venue,

Dear Mr.Sunburn,

You need shuttle service between your Stage A & B !

Regards,
Everybody

Shuffling between the two stages and with a little dancing here and there by the end of the night you are just exhausted ! You don’t notice it till the party's over but it’s bloody exhausting and can you blame us, with so many great artists performing at different stages you want to try and catch a little bit of everything. The dust too is not exactly helping, there’s not much you can do about that but you could make the venues a little smaller so it doesn’t look empty in certain places.

" Inception "

2012-01-25T15:47:00.000+05:30

All companies have some reason or purpose for venturing into business. Our story is more based on one particular experience in Pune more than anything which I believe was one of the motivating factors to setup shop online.

So, once upon a time there were .. . two young lads fresh out of college who secured jobs in the fair and not so distant land of Pune. I got to Pune a week after Nihal did. After crashing with a couple of friends and a hotel it was time we decided to get our own place. Alas, began one of the most shadiest bunch of dealings and individuals one could string together.

The basic need of the hour at the time was to get ourselves a roof over our head. Accommodation we weren’t to picky about, a one bedroom or even two would be nice and if worse came to worse even a studio would suffice. So through the lady at the employment agency we met one character who went by the name “Speedy”, neither the ride he came on nor the lack of athletic body he possessed could justify that nick name. Never the less, “Speedy” tells us theres a brand new apartment in Koregaon Park. So keeping our options open we pack our bags from where we were and arrive to have a look at this place. A new building, about 50 meters from the main road, our ‘to be’ apartment was located on the ground floor.

Our verdict on the apartment ? In the words of Nihal and I quote ” You opened the door and the apartment ended ! ” , it was that small. So with new tiling and an attached cramped toilet was about the only luxuries it had to offer. Other than that it was bloody well empty, we weren’t picky an decided we would make this work.This is the first con, our willingness and acceptance.

The gentleman who Speedy introduced us to was a Nepali Chap with a rickety old kinetic and an foreigner for a girlfriend who looked liked she needed some servicing as bad as the bike that the arrived on.

We were told the rent was 7000, we were wrong. Rent was 9000 and the place wasn’t even worth 3000. Gradually this Nepali broker offered it to us at his best price of Rs. 8000. Though much, we agreed, this was con number 2 : No contract. After insisting on one he gave us a piece of paper on which he wrote and signed that we would have the place for two months. Wait a minute, two months come again ? Yes, just two months as in two months time we were told by him shamelessly that season for the Osho Ashram would start and foreigners would be willing to pay much more !

Oh, it don’t end there, our man for his services would like not one but two months rent as brokerage fee ! So basically what our little Nepali friend was saying was he wanted 8000 (Rent) + 16000 (Brokerage) + Water and Electricity Bills = 24000 in cold hard cash up front and to add to that some shitty contract. We were so confused, confused over whether to slap this fellow silly or sign him up for stand up comedy !

Eventually the choice was but obvious and we didn’t take it but it got us thinking about the difficulties that a tourist would face back home in Goa. So through trial and error and a lot of different ideas we settled on one with a particular ideology and three years later we are here at goatravelandliving.com

As I recollect the incident now I can’t help but laugh and even though at the time it was a really negative experience, we learned our lesson and drew the positives out of the situation, oh who am I kidding there were no positives in that situation with the exception of the inception of the idea of this company .

P.S – If you do see a small Nepali broker in Koregaon Park with a rickety old kinetic with an equally rickety old girlfriend, you call us !