Mumbai fun

The last post in this series is here..

We went from Cochin to Mumbai and had two full days in Mumbai before our return flight to the US.

Having visited so many temples every day in Tamilnadu and Kerala, why stop. While San was busy trying to get blouses stitched urgently, MIL and me went out to visit local temples. We visited 3 that morning.

Later went with San to another local temple and visited what is probably the worlds best one stop beauty store. (you can see it in the video).. 

We managed to eat out a few times..

watch three movies in two days.. the movie theater is the building next to in-laws apartment. We can just walk down and go see movies!

Here are two lapata ladies at lapata ladies..

Then we spent an evening at Ambani center. It was a stark contrast to the other shopping we did. The stores and complex was grand but there were no people in the stores! 

We walked around, took pictures and drove back in time to get some rest before flying out the next morning.

A video highlight..

The return flight was not direct. It was Mumbai to B'lore and then to SFO. The airport in Bengaluru was nice. We actually enjoyed the two hour wait.

Then there was a disaster of a return trip where the tail section of the flight had no power! 

No way to charge phone/laptop, call the air hostess, or watch anything. It was a horrible 16 hours in a plane with a local power cut. They werent even apologetic. We were to get some money back as token compensation for this horrible trip and it has been 6 months plus and we still don't have anything from Air India. There has been 20 + emails back and forth and a check leaf was wasted. That was about it. They have bought all these used planes from Delta airlines and are flying it BLR to SFO. Ratan Tata must be sad now that he can see what is going on from wherever he is!

The trip on the whole though was a happy one. Checked all the items that were in the plan. Did so much in 10 days! 

Now that I have finally finished posting about the India trip in Feb/March, can get back to otehr things that have happened since!

Long weekend

After many years, we are staying put at home for the long weekend, helping my parents adjust to the USA.

Daddy and the little one are also recovering from their sore throats, surprise gifts from the weather change here. It was a 15 degree drop from the usual high temps the last two days.

We decided to go hit the one local indoor place where the grandparents could walk and the kids could have fun for a few hours! The Great Mall..

It took us a good 25 minutes to find a parking spot, but off we went with the sea of people shopping for "sale" items and got the kids some summer wear.

They promptly posed for my indoor photo shoot.

More tomorrow..

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The smell of School !

I guess school is going to start soon! That means every store has a "school" sale with things from notebooks, backpacks, shoes, down to the toilet items we found for "dorm" residents.

While the stores are busy selling anything and everything in the name of a "back to school" sale, what interested me was the smells as we walked through a section of the local Target store.

It was weird. I can easily understand one thought process jumping over to another, in my head. It is almost routine, as is obvious by the rambling in this space.

Have you, ever had a smell jump over and create a flashback smell in your head? It happened to me. I was in the notebook section and was taking a whiff of that smell which for some reason reminded me of those little erasers we used to have in 1st standard. The little orange or green ones, which have an outer shell that looks like a hippo or elephant or rhino, and you open the animal in the middle and inside is a nice cylindrical scented eraser! Remember those?

So there I am, in the middle of this aisle, with my nose held high, trying to savor that smell for a few more fleeting seconds, when all of a sudden, there is a smell jump! I suddenly smell fresh notebooks and brown paper, the ones we used to cover all our 192 page classwork and homework notebooks with, just two days before school started. That instantly brought a flood of memories.

Till I can remember, our school used to give out the books from the "school book store", three or four days before school started. This way we could cover all the texts, notebooks etc, with brown paper covers. These large sheets of brown paper would cover at least 4 of the 192 page std notebooks. Later in life they introduced the long "Assignment" notebook, which would make sure that we wasted enough of this paper.

My parents would theorize that the school must be in cahoots with the brown paper manufacturer association because they would mandate all kids wrap the notebooks! If we did not comply, we would get "blackmarks". Yes! you got that right. There was a chart in every classroom called the "Blackmark chart". 10 signatures from the teachers, and you get to go to the principals office!

In different sections, this chart would show different trends. In rooms where the kids were all dorks and extremely competitive, the chart would be near empty! In rooms where kids would pride themselves on getting in trouble, it would be a race to get to the maximum limit of 30, at which point you got to stand outside the principals office the whole day, get the occasional insult from the PT master and life would go on!

As usual, I digress! What were we talking about? Ah, yes, the smell of 30% fresh notebooks, 30% brownpaper, mixed with another 10% of glue (the green goopy maida flour glue!). Add to that the smells of new plastic lined school bags from the local "Amma Fancy store", new Bata canvas shoes, the unique smell of white shoe polish that we would apply in multiple coats, the smell of the new school belt, the smell of school uniforms, fresh from the "Artland" tailor shop, etc. etc., and you start wondering "Looks like it was not a bad childhood after all. So many great memories!".

Well, I even get a flashback smell, of the dreaded hair full of coconut oil, which my mom or aunts or grandma (in some cases all of them) would come and apply to support me on my first day of school, which would instantly turn me into mosquito man (kid you not, you could visibly see a mosquito halo around my head with all that oil) and make my friends joke, "enna da, ennai kadaiyave thalaiyile thookindu vare?" (What gives? It looks like you are carrying an entire oil store on your head!).

Just as those memories vanished into the background, saw that Jr. was smelling everything as well, just like dear old daddy!

Hopefully, we made her childhood experience of getting ready for school a memorable one. Who knows, a few decades from now, there might be a Jr. blogpost on school shopping and the smell of school supplies at Target!

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