I. love. the. airport.

My favorite place in Bangalore undoubtedly and without competition is the airport. It's unbelievable how much I love the place. I have an almost sentimental attachment with the place. I have hugged, cried, held friends, smiled, laughed, felt ecstatic, waited anxiously and watched with a sad heart as friends and loved ones left. It's as if buckets of all emotions were emptied in one place - their contents thrown out on the canvas of the arrival and departure gates. The place is magic.



The coffee at the airport? It's just normal cafe coffee day coffee but do i love it. Again because it's coffee loaded with all the goodness of all the emotions of picking up friends and seeing them after weeks or maybe months and just taking every bit of goodness in over a cup of coffee. The coffee allows the happiness to sink in and the feelings to settle. You know, get over the ecstasy of seeing people you love after a long time and get your adrenaline back to normal levels. You know the feeling, right? The coffee allows me to drink in the love, the warmth, the moment. Trust me, at any other given moment, I do not like CCD coffee. I'm a south indian that way. Filter coffee for me is what it is.



Do I sound weird? Maybe. But then I'm alone in this city and all my family and friends (barring a couple), basically people that I love are far away. So, they have to come through this airport. Again if I've to go see them, I've to go through the airport. The airport is my gateway to my loved ones. Does it make sense now? In any interaction with anyone that I love, the airport is instrumental. Hence, the almost mad love for the place.



But it would be unfair to say that that is the only reason for the love. The place is really awesome on its own. The lawns, the gardens, the benches, the coffee shops, the eateries, the people, the sheer energy and emotions. It's fun to watch all the people there and guess their stories. You know, like lovers seeing each other off who just can't let each other go, or spouses picking up their better halves -some only for formality, others genuinely happy, parents waving final good-byes to a child who mostly is going abroad to study, families giving assurances to a jittery young lady who is presumably flying abroad for the first time to be with her husband, uncles who cannot stop giving final instructions to their families, so on and so forth. It's full on entertainment - the breadth and depth of these emotions. At which other place do you see such uninhibited display of so many emotions.



Just like at the library, I can spend hours at this airport and stay entertained. But unlike the library, I go here way too many times. Not that I'm complaining. I can go more often and I would go more often if I had my way. Also, unlike the library, they have coffee. :)

To the library

Like I said in my last post, my saturday was spent here:



Well, this is the state central library! And I. loved. it. Yeah I'm a nerd that way.



Now, I drove a friend for some work near Vidhana Soudha. The parking happened to be near the library. The library is a beautiful red building which I had seen a couple of times earlier but the thought of getting in never crossed my mind. Now since I had time to kill, I thought why not?



I was a little hesitant to go in at first. I thought I would need a membership or something. So I walked in just to inquire. The guy saw me walking in and said "Madam, please leave your bag here". Yayy just like that I was in! Yeah after that he made some small talk about which part of delhi I'm from (It was probably broadcast earlier that I was from delhi) and what I think about Anna's andolan. After that, I was in.



The library inside, is really something to experience. Well also because it's been such a long time since I went to a library. And also that I generally love libraries. I can just sit in a library and kill hours. You have to experience the library to know really what it is.




The boring one!

I searched and searched and after a very boring book finally found a really interesting one on Indira Gandhi by Dom Moraes. So engrossing was the book that I kept on turning pages after pages and just like that 3 hours were over. And I learnt new things like Nehrus' actual family name was Kaul. Really nice read. I would love to read the rest of it soon.



Correction: I would love to go back to the library and read the rest of it.



The only thing missing was tea. If they had tea, I might have never left. ALso, I was very hungry. But mostly tea. I could have foregone lunch if I could get a big cup of tea. That's how much I love tea and books, especially if they are in a quiet, Victorian, sprawling with books library.

god's own country

I spent my saturday here:



But more on this later. Have to get earlier things out of way first.

The gift of long weekend, one week back, was very well received and very well utilized. When I was a young and dreamy girl, I saw an ad in the paper which showed a young couple in the rains under a canopy of lush green trees. The ad was for Kerala in the monsoons and my young heart melted looking at the picture and I have wanted to go to kerala since that day. If it's in the rains, better!

And I got it baby! More than 10 years later but I did make it happen. Yeah, I rock like that.

And just like that it was another awesome adventure. Adventure I call it because it was. Most of the drive was through forests; we even stayed in a foresty area though there were some houses nearby but it was in the midst of a forest; none of the doors in our house had latches!! What?? Yup! Midway through the first night, I thought someone would come in and slit my throat (I do blame a certain guy who put this idea in my head just as I was about to slip under my blanket).



It was officially accepted by my friends that lack of sunshine drives me nuts. So much so that it's not even funny. What happened was that the first day we landed there it was raining continuously and the sunshine person that I am, I was majorly depressed. I even suggested that we go back after all that driving we had done to reach the place. Nuts I know. Good sense prevailed my friends who put their foot down and that proved to be a good thing because sun smiled for us for the rest of our trip. Smiled less, burnt is more like it. And I loved every bit of the warmth on my skin which pissed off my friends further because it was HOT. I think they might have cursed all the sun drama that I do.

But I welcomed the sun and drank in every bit of its warmth. and my friends concluded that lack of sun causes serious harm to people around me.



As usual, we enjoyed lazy mornings of refilled tea glasses.



And evenings of friends huddled together and sharing and cribbing and laughing.



We went to a 5000 years old temple. Yes I went to a temple. I do that sometimes. Mostly because it was a pretty walk through a forest and the temple was 5000 years old. And I'm only 97% atheist. I even prayed.



It helps if the temple has a run down moss covered smaller ignored building that no one would come to.



We met the coolest old man with a pretty young wife who also happens to be the world's best cook. She made the most awesome fish curry and her chicken curry was to die for. Serious.



And I call him coolest because he drove his jeep over the most treacherous mud path right on the edge of a cliff. With all the ease and composure of a pro.



We met some of our jungle friends on our way. It was quite poetic the way deers galloped right in front of our car as we drove through the forest.



The icing on this trip was bluff. Yeah baby. My first real card game. I couldn't get enough of it, I'm dying for an encore. If you didn't know, I suck at cards. You should see me shuffling.



Another discovery was 'puttu', typical kerala breakfast, and that it makes me wanna throw up. yeckkkksssss!! You know what calls for another yeckkksss?? - leeches who tried to be our friends on our random walks through random forests. What were we expecting in a dense swampy forests after heavy rains, anyways?

The kerala ad in the paper years back had no mention of leeches or puttu (I wonder why). But it did show a good time and good time I had!