Sachinn Garg

The eight day trip was a joy ride which kept leading us to sights we had never expected in the starting of the day. And to be honest, the stories and turn of events are beyond both: my 180 IQed brain and the scope/length of a readable blog post.

Perhaps bullet points shall serve better.

• Lille  introduced me to a new phrase: a crazy drunk city.
• The feel of coming out of a silent metro station to emerge into a crazy place where being undrunk was a rare commodity was second only to seeing the blinking lights on Eiffel (covered later in the post).
• And then we hit a night club where the desis liberally tried the pick up line of the night: “parle vous anglais?” Do you speak English?
• Paris was nice, a perfect touristy place where you can never have seen everything.
• <For more Paris travelogues, read “A Sunny Shady Life..!” by Sachin Garg.>
• And then one fine evening in Paris, we got to know that our Visa allows us to go abroad and Boobli fought hard to hold back her tears of joy.
• It was Frankfurt time
  • a city where everybody wears penguin inspired suits
  • a city which I will remember for the biggest book store I have ever seen more than anything
  • a city where Boobli said bye to us for the week as she could finally go to her aunt’s German house to wash her clothes
• Next was Cologne for Boobla and I.
• At 2 AM in the night, at 10 degree celcius, when Boobla and I were blissfully sleeping in the train, we saw Cologne written on a glow sign indicated that we were there.
• We kind of got up and looked at eachother. The look said only one thing, that we havent slept enough. ten seconds later, both of us were in deep slumber again, letting the train lead us where ever it was going.
• In the morning we got off the train and looked for another glow sign to find out where we were. It was Hamburg, the city of Gary C.
• So not so intentionally, I found myself in the land of Gary C, without a clue that what was her phone number or which part Hamburg she lived in.
• As Boobla found a bench in a park to catch up on the remaining snippets of sleep from the train, I changed to relatively less stinking clothes and began my search for a German cyber café to mail Gary C.
• Some four hours later, Gary C and I found ourselves sitting in a Thai restaurant and catching up on yesteryears the way two great chaddhi buddies/ diaper friends should.
• The same evening BOobla and I started our twenty hour return journey from Hamburg to Aix.
• Back in Aix, where temperature was a good twenty degrees higher than Hamburg, life came back to its lazy self.

The End

As we sort out our Visa formalities, the Eurotrip hasn’t really begun begun yet. We are both: France-stuck and France-struck.

Settling down is also coming along alright except for the toilets.

Why cant the western world understand that there are places where only water can reach and paper cannot?

The shopping modus operandi is simple.

First of all you memorize the table of seventy.

Each time you pick up a thing in the market, you see the price tag.

You multiply the Euro value of the price with seventy to get the rupee value.

You exchange a look of disappointment.

You keep it back where it was kept, as if it was never removed from its place.

As for the household chores, we have set up an absolutely flat organization with an open door policy. Boobla, Boobli and I share equal rights in this place except for Boobli, who has a special right to beat me and Boobla with a hunter each time we do something wrong.

Moving on, this Sunday, Boobla and I got up to realize that it was still the weekend, even though we had had the previus day off. We are still getting used to the two day weekend after long time. So we had more than a few options to look forward to this weekend.

We narrowed down to Mersailles and Mersailles brought in front of us the mortality of the French. Where Aix seemed to have people who were almost unrealistically sweet, the native French seemed like a minority in Mersailles. The city had a highly rustic, unkempt look to it, cluttered with North Africans and hazaar immigrants. Whether the city was rash or Aix is too smooth, I don’t know. But somehow it still left me with a good taste in my mouth.

As the day ended, Boobla was regretting not being able to buy the Football jersey of the Mersailles Club and Boobli’s best moment was when she could come back by my bus pass and save some five odd Euros (350 Rs). My best moment, well, definitely, the top view of the girls at the beach city from the Cathedral. The adrenalin is running fast as we get excited for the amazing travels we guys plan to make in the coming months.

As all my stalker fans would know, I have been to France some two years ago.

But the company I have this time is in sharp contrast from the last time. Where I had Sai, the IIT Chennai Tamil guy with me last time, who went to Eiffel on the first weekend and dismissed Paris as unimpressive and never went out in the city again. This time I have Boobla and Boobli, whose concept of a shoestring budget trip does not allow them to have Maggi without Coke, making me check the meaning of the word shoestring in my dictionary again and again.

So the big question we guys are now facing is that where to begin our Eurotrip. Where Boobla wants to kick off the Eurotrip with Barcelona because he wants to buy a Spanish guitar (Boobla once went to Kanpur from Delhi to buy a Dhoti), Boobli is hell bent on Nuremburg because she wants to wash her clothes at her aunt’s place.

Well, personally, I wanna go to Prague. Why? I need a haircut and god it costs as much as an annual personal grooming package at Habibs in New Delhi. Eastern Europe would be so much cheaper. I am not kidding. Boobla agrees.

And yup I gotta write about IAE (pronounced orgasmic EE AA UH, as I said). As Boobla and I are trying to get used to getting hold of our jaws on seeing the women in this part of the world, in a weird moment I ended up challenging a seven foot Finnish guy and an eight foot Dutch guy into a Football match between the Europeans and the non Europeans. The match should be sometime next week and I have very high hopes from the Brazilian guys. Fingers crossed.

I hope I do not see what my juniors at MDI did to us. Still not over the four one defeat.

It’s been three days since I touched down and to be honest the urge to blog has not been this high in many years.

Brace up for a long one, my journey from the third world to the land of immaculate legs: France.

The packing was in itself a diploma in making shopping lists. A total of twenty shopping lists and seventeen visits to the market later, I convinced myself that I am ready for the first world and the challenges of the exchange rate.

I had not had a peaceful minute for around sixteen hours when I reached the airport to meet my fellow travelers. Two of them. Two very very interesting and writable-about people. And that I must.

The first one: Boobla, no part of the nickname being any comment on his body part, is just a nickname he carries from his first college. Boobla had shaved his head and definitely worsened his chances with the French chicks.

The second one: Boobli, a name thats a distortion of the word Bubbly, an adjective that she totally personifies.

Also, a tribute to her awesome friendship with Boobla.

So my dad got to meet my travel mates and I m guessing his hopes of finding two typical B school students going with me were gone down the drain. He tried his best to feign confidence and hugged me Goodbye.

I had a clear cut list of things that I would do in the flight:

• read some French/
• write a blog post/
• read about France/
• read a book.

Of course, I spent the flight sleeping and doing nothing out of these.

To be honest the moment when I went to sleep at the end of the journey, that might have been my most tired point in last five years, seven months and twelve days. This is also the time elapsed since I went to Vaishno Devi, on foot.

So the first morning at IAE (pronounced EE AA UH) was naturally sleep deprived and I was pretty sure Boobla and Boobli would be oversleeping till afternoon. But at the precise hour, I found both of them standing at my doorstep, each flaunting as much legs as their gender allowed. Boobli, looking as elegant as ever and Boobla looking like an Iranian mundu.

I smirked, as I slipped into my neatly ironed jeans and the latest Benetton T shirt and Converse shoes. I was happy that I was going to win all the brownie points for Indian background and the French chics will found Boobla unpolished and unkempt in his brown shorts and yellow shoes.

So the first two days went OK and suddenly Boobli made an observation which I would have never believed two days ago. Where Boobli was the only female company I had seen in the last two days, Boobla was beating me black and blue. He was a total hit with the chicks.

On my way back to college Katerine, the Chec Republic (however you spell it) chick, who had been confusing beach clothing with classroom clothing, got hold of me and a conversation began. Somewhere in the fifth minute she made a comment: Don’t you feel hot in the jeans?

And instant realization stuck and a flash of the whole zipped through my eyes. I realized that a majority of students wore shorts to college and they were mostly the coolest ones. In fact, I realized that the only people wearing jeans were Indians and Chinese, two communities who have a tradition of being unfashionably geeky.

Next morning, I was standing at Boobla’s doorstep looking for fashion advice. That guy is a genius.

Well.. as I celebrate successfully remembering the password of this page..

A sip of water will help you gulp the fact that I am still alive..

A lot seems to have happened since I last saw this window of ‘update blog’.

Apart from a military schedule which saw my hair line recede by a few meters and dark circles get a few shades closer to the colour of coal, we lost the inter batch football match. My roomie narrowly missed a visit to the rehab cos of the depression.. but he is stable now, last heard.

But the big news is that the Eurotrip mentioned here went on to actually work out and I am flying tomorrow evening. In the process I also got to give an I-told-you-so look to those who backed out from the same Exchange Program and regretted fervently. Will miss them badly.

I have half a mind to write detailed travelogues in this space from the Indian perspective. But the chances are bleak and I would not suggest that you Bookmark this page expecting the same.

A few hours a day are now reserved for day dreaming as to how the four month trip is going to shape. Wont mind a few incidents that I would not want my kids  to know or even my friends for that matter..

As they say.. what happens in Europe.. stays in Europe.

Nobody said that? Well, I do now.

How I wish the title meant what it seems to mean.But I need not confess, its a cheap trick to arouse interest in what is to follow.

And would you have still been reading had the title been my-rant-on-losing-my-laptop?

This was the first time I became a victim of any sort of crime.

The first thing that you realize when your laptop gets stolen is that what all data did you lose. A mental scan is carried out C drive, D drive, E drive. In my case, I did not lose much because of my habit of creating online back ups of everyhting I can. But still, the pain is not alleviated.

The monetary loss is no small either. The internship stipend is still nowhere in sight and the cash outflow is rising faster than the mercury in Delhi.

Not many of  my readers have expressed any desire to hear my voice.
But for the sake of those few who have,

you can hear me talk about my book on RED FM.

Hear are the details:

Channel : Red FM 93.5 FM

Date: Saturday, 9th May, 2009

Time: 2PM to 230 PM

Bye for now as I gotta work on my diction and roll my Rs and nasal twang my Ns.

As the Class of 2009 bids adieu to the MDI Campus, each one of them have a copy ‘A Sunny Shady Life..!!’ in their bags, each with my signature which seems to have gained some value for the first time in 22 years.

It was on top of my to-do-list and totally worth the ten page proposals, the unpleasant meetings and the ten minute discussion which ffinally nailed it.

300 copies piled in Student’s Council Room, MDI Campus.

I would like to thank the Student’s Council for distributing ‘ A.S.S.L.’ as mementos on the Convocation ceremony of the Batch of 2009.

Thanks for the great response to the book.

Here is the Oxford Book Store Top ten List: