Relaxed Weekend

The weekend after Coorg, I decided to take things easy. Well, to be honest, I had said the same thing about the Coorg weekend too, but I just couldn’t get myself to stay in Bangalore, but well, this time I succeeded. It was a combination of getting tired of sleeping in a moving vehicle during weekend, fatigue and running low on money.

The same week, a new wave of interns had joined us, and Friday night was spent at Chandana, the local hangout place 5 minutes away from campus. The occasion was primarily the farewell for a friend of ours who had joined the same time as me. A group of my friends had already attempted to guilt-trip me into going to Chennai this weekend for some volunteering event. But having heard so much about the horribly humid weather there, and the lack of anything that could get my blood flowing in excitement, I managed to say no :)

Anyway, Friday night I met a couple of the new interns as well who I really managed to get along with well. On hindsight, even though I only knew them for a very short period of time (about 2 weeks I think), if I was to select only 5 people who I’ll keep in touch with, they would make it in that list (and no, if I can, I want to keep in touch with everyone)

Oh yeah, btw, I’m writing this on the flight back to BKK. Everyone is virtually asleep, and the movie on the main screen doesn’t seem too interesting.

Back to the story. Basically the new interns were all planning to go exploring Bangalore that weekend, and they invited me as well. I said yes, and when they told me the time (meet at the lobby at 8.30 am), my jaw dropped, and I changed it to a “maybe”. Finally I did wake up at 8 am the next morning, but just to text them saying I’m going to be lame and sleep in hahah. So Saturday was spent working on my other side projects, and I was planning to go into town for some dinner.

Another friend of mine had expressed an interest earlier the day before to go into town for dinner, so I called her up and we met at the gate. For some weird reason, I had assumed that she had booked a cab, and well the fact that I called her, she assumed that I had a cab. So there we were, at the front of the gate, staring at each other and asking “where’s the cab?”. Since we weren’t really that desperate to go into town (especially using the bus) , we walked straight back into the campus. This is where the difference between an undergrad and an MBA comes into play. She began walking towards the restaurant under our hostel, where they served buffets for over 100 rupees per meal.

Confused, I asked her, “where are you going?”. She had no idea that there was another food court on campus that was open on Saturday, whereas for me, I wasn’t willing to drop so much dough on one very mediocre meal and hence had gone hunting for open food courts earlier. At dinner, we met another intern and we had an interesting conversation about different places we want to live in the world. Whereas I had a very simple answer (everywhere), he had a much more thought out answer. He named about 5 places and had extremely good reasons for shortlisting these cities. I felt really dumb and immature at that point lol

Anyway, Sunday was an awesome day. It started off with a friend and I going to play bowling. There was a long waiting time, so during the waiting period, we hit up the arcade in the same complex. The arcade was fun, and when we were playing air hockey, a crowd had formed around the table. And then during the game, I accidentally hit the puck too hard, and it flew off the table and hit one of the spectator’s privates. It was extremely difficult not to laugh lol (I probably did laugh too!)

There was also this other game….basically hitting this thing with a hammer as hard as you can,, it tells you the score. The first time I hit it, the machine broke down! (I’m a beast!) So the dude working there put some credit into another machine and let me hit again. I broke the high score (of course) and then the machine stalled again. Apparently I’m just too good for these toys.  (as a side note, we realized later that every time someone plays and does NOT beat the high score…the high score comes down by one point….way to raise a guy’s ego and then crush it!)

We later realized that there were some games which gave away tickets, which can then be exchanged for prizes. One of the games was shooting hoops, and together combined, we won quite a lot of tickets (around 70 I think). Happy, we headed to the  counter to exchange the tickets, to find out that anything remotely good required like thousands of tickets. We finally got just one of those soapy bubble blower thing.

Bowling was fun too. My friend started off by saying that he isn’t good at bowling. And then his first two balls go straight into the gutter. So yeah, I believed him. He then comes back with 3 or 4 strikes and finishes the game with around 140+. You can imagine the look on my face….lol (I played bowling with him again in Mysore and again he kept getting strikes as if they were candy, so no, not a fluke)

We also had plans to meet another dude for dinner, and on the way to the place to meet the guy, we passed two places which looked good and we said we must go there one day. One place was called China Pearls, a really fancy looking Chinese restaurant, and the other was Mocha, a hookah lounge which we heard had good milk shakes.

As it turned out, the place we were going for dinner was China Pearl! I felt like an eight year old boy who just got a gift for his birthday. The food was incredible and yumm….i’m hungry now. Shouldn’t have mentioned food (Thai Airways did serve decent food, but the portion was tiny and they didn’t have extras :( )

After China Pearl, we went to a place that served Tunday Kababs. Best-kababs-ever. The guy we were with a big food freak and he really knows his stuff. The story behind this Tunday Kabab is that apparently it was very popular and started in Lucknow. The owner’s son did an MBA and then came back and expanded it to Bangalore and somewhere else I believe. Amazing kabab. So soft, and it just melts in your mouth. Wow.

We had some time to kill, and somehow (I don’t remember how the conversation went), but somehow, we eventually decided to go to Mochas. Oh wait, I remember now. We were looking for dessert (ice cream), but didn’t find one, and then someone suggested the shakes over at Mocha). So there you go…the two places that had caught our attention earlier…we landed up at both places.

What a night! An excellent way to spend my last weekend (and my third weekend) in Bangalore, since the weekend after that was Mysore and then after that, I was done.