Exactly 2 weeks from today, Madhu, Shayna and I will be on our flight to Mumbai! Yippee ! The last month and a half has been excruciatingly tedious – it wasn’t necessarily slow or too busy, for that matter, it was just plain tiring. It feels like we’ve been planning and researching for ages – it’s time to just leave and get going.
It may have been boring, but we did manage to get quite a few things done over the past few weeks. We applied for passports and received them in exactly a week. We shopped for tri-climate, layered, jackets that would come handy in rainy, light winter or really cold conditions – they were expensive at almost $300 each but most practical. We also bought good hiking boots. Since these are heavy and bulky items, we packed them all (including some of our other jackets) into one suitcase and sent it with a close friend who was travelling to India last week. This has freed up quite a bit of luggage space for us – we should now be able to fit the rest of our stuff in 4 bags of 23 kilos each, quite easily.
We also bought an Asus netbook for me. It’s PINK in color – Madhu will probably keep a safe distance from it. I wanted a netbook mainly because I didn’t want to lug the heavy, full-sized laptops around. Since Madhu already has one of those, which can double up as a DVD player and would be perfect for managing our pictures and music, I figured I could do with a lighter version that doesn’t even have a CD drive. It’s a really good laptop, though – is extremely light, is priced perfectly, looks good (very important) and is perfect for my use, which will be mainly internet browsing and posting blogs.
With recommendations from friends who are completely into photography, Madhu bought a professional quality SLR camera with 2 separate lenses. He enjoys photography and is totally looking forward to experimenting with the new equipment. I bought a small, ‘point & shoot’-variety camera (Nikon 10MP 3x zoom) for myself, which can easily fit into my sling purse. It’ll be handy for occasions where we don’t want to lug the big SLR around – like meeting friends or going out to dinner.
With all this new gear, we feel prepared for the adventure ahead – can’t wait to get started!
We announced our plans at work and began the transition process as well. In fact, Madhu is already done – his last working day was Friday, Sep 25th; mine is Oct 9th. With time on hand, Madhu is now getting the last few things done – like applying for Indian visa, selling the rest of the furniture, selling the second car (the first one sold a week ago), etc..
Yesterday was our 10th wedding anniversary. We went out in the evening to celebrate and had dinner at a really nice Tapas restaurant, which was within walking distance of our apt – LOVE living in this neighborhood; all the nice restaurants are so close by. Over dinner, I couldn’t help but muse about the time when we first talked about doing something like this – it seems ages ago yet it has just been 5 months. But so much has happened over these months that Rivermark and our life there seems like it was eons ago. Last year, if someone had told me that on our 10th wedding anniversary we would be on the verge of an adventure like this, I would have laughed them away. Yesterday over dinner, everything seemed meant-to-be.
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