Locked up Abroad

No no no, don’t get me wrong. Looking at the title of the post, I am not locked up abroad. I am rather addicted to the series Locked up Abroad. :P. My favorite past time these days has been watching Locked up Abroad on National Geographic channel. Not enough of the series on TV, I had my friend download all the series and since then I am hooked to my laptop screens. 

Locked up Abroad is a British documentary featuring true stories of people who have been arrested while travelling abroad, usually for trying to smuggle illegal drugs out of a country and have received lengthy prison sentences as a result. 

It takes viewers inside firsthand accounts of capture, imprisonment and pure terror far from home. From kidnap and torture to foolish plans to smuggle drugs, this nail-biting series tells the harrowing stories of people who set out hoping for adventure or easy money, only to end up in situations beyond their worst nightmares. All the while your heart will be on your throat pounding.  It’s suspenseful. And it leaves you thinking, What if that were me?

And also, Thank God it’s not.

All the stories basically revolve around easy money through smuggle of illegal drugs. Each and every one of them are offered a vacation of their life time abroad with good amount of money at the end for exchange of bringing in little (sometimes large) amounts of cannabis, heroin, cocaine, name it.  Some have been kidnapped, some have “accidentally” swallowed condom after cocaine-filled condom, but they all face the same fate – dismal grey cells, some serious hard time, and an understandable fear of shower time. The difficulty they have to undergo at the airport security and through the customs officials are the tickets to their prison. And some even try to escape through the prisons after not being able to tolerate the prison terror. All the prison escapes tales we have read about or seen in movies turns out to be true here.

It set out a food for thought for me. It kept me thinking. How naïve we are in this part of the world. I have no idea as to what would happen if we get locked up abroad and if we do not speak the language. Especially if you love traveling, you got to be careful.  After all these episodes, it had heightened my paranoia so severely that I felt I would never leave Bhutan. Maybe I am overreacting here. :P 

It might be a night of stupidity that goes horribly wrong, a brief moment of indiscretion, a lapsed visa or a straightforward case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but whatever the circumstances, there is no doubt that being arrested or detained in a foreign country could be the most terrifying and alienating experience to ever go through.

If you want to experience the thrill and the suspense and want to know more about this series watch Locked up Abroad on NatGeo channel every Mon-Fri at 10:30 pm BST. And trust me you will learn a lot of lessons. Learn the laws of the land and stay safe.

FarmVille on Facebook-How I stopped playing

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. It is more than that actually. For people of our age our lives revolve around facebook, isn’t it? 

From the moment we reach office, the first thing we do is open the facebook page, then only comes the official emails and all :P. And basically we are on facebook all day long; God only knows what we are doing. Today it’s "are you on facebook?." I wonder what our lives would have been if there was no facebook.

I was rather amused when an elderly blog friend of mine in Massachusetts said that she is not on facebook. Holy cow! When asked why, “it’s simply that however much I try to create my username, it always says try another name, sick of it I gave up the idea of opening an account.” Too amusing, isn’t it? Hats off to her!  

I have my 9 and 10 years old niece and nephews who are on facebook. God forbid, how could they access it? The true digital natives.

After being on facebook for quite some time, I got bored with it. I had one sole purpose to be on facebook-to play FarmVille, a farming social network game developed by Zynga in 2009. You can virtually farm, starting from plowing land, planting, growing, harvesting crops and trees and raising livestock.  

I have never been committed to FarmVille than any other game. I have been continuously playing FarmVille for the last 4 years with just a 6 months break in between, constantly worried that my crops would wither since a crop-specific amount of time would be there. It needs lots of dedication and commitment. From a level 1 farmer I reached to level 100, quite an achievement! I have become a sophisticated agriculturalist now hehe. 

I introduced this game to my roommates whilst in Post Graduate days and to others and since then we have had competition as to who would reach the higher level even after joining jobs lol. I know I have wasted a lot of my time yet this have become rather addictive:(.

  

I had this target of reaching level 100.  Yay I did it! Now I am all goodbyes to FarmVille. I am stopping playing this game and rather invest this time productively. Hope I keep my promise :P.

Here are my farms, altogether there are 5 farms, but I have only 3 pictures here. It usually takes an hour every day for me to visit all the farms and work on it. 

Original Home Farm

Winter Wonderland

Lighthouse Cove, another farm

Another week is gone, I spent my weekend watching Jism 2, loved the movie.How was your weekend? The whole time I was doing this post I listened to Maula song from the film. Another heart touching song with wonderful lyrics. 

                                                

 

A happy week to all!