Blast! I had a very good post written in my head and now I can’t remember it! This is crazy.
D & P have their Hindi common test tomorrow and this last week has been crazy with teaching them. They don’t speak the language and it’s compounded by the fact that the school does not give us the syllabus for the term. I really don’t know what to do.
I was actually going to post this yesterday, but was very tired at night and so decided to skip it. This is going to be a fairly long post, so in order not to bore anyone, I’ve decided to split it into two parts.
Living in Singapore, any trip you make out of the city involves needing to use your passport. So most children here have their own passports by the time they are a few months old and being a ‘first world country in a third world region’, these children have become seasoned travelers by the time they start school.
Life was very different when I was growing up in India. Although my hometown is India’s commercial capital – Mumbai – plane trips were never as frequent as they are now. Going on a flight used to be a huge thing and people dressed up for the occasion, unlike now where due to the proliferation of budget airlines, it’s like using the bus or train and we dress the same way.
The first time I flew in an airline was in the late eighties when I was around 12-13 years old. There was just Indian Airlines for domestic travel then and choice was something air travelers had only read about in foreign magazines. We flew from Mumbai (or Bombay as it was called then) to Bangalore where my paternal grandparents used to live. The memories are very fuzzy now after so many years, but I do remember being very disappointed with the airport in Bangalore as it looked like a bus station to me with no crowds and nothing of note inside the terminal.
Then fast forward a couple of years later and when I was about 14, I took my first flight alone. It was the summer holidays between my class IX and class X and my maths and science classes were starting, so I came back to Bombay alone. My dad who was also there in Bangalore with us dropped my at the airport and my maternal grandfather, who used to work with IA then picked me up at the airport. I then stayed the month with my maternal grandparents.
My first international flight was when I moved with my husband to Singapore. This was a few days after my wedding and I don’t really remember much as I was sobbing all the time because I had to leave my parents, sister, everything known and familiar to go to a new place to make a new life with unfamiliar and new people!
Now in my current job, I fly to various countries in the region two to three times a year. Add to this, holidays to India and other countries, I think I’ve come a long way and have become a confident and a blase flier!
There are more stories to come – two especially I want to put down. One is this incredible flight I took in early 2009 from Singapore to New Delhi and back and the other is the one about me taking a flight on 27 November 2008 – the day Ajmal Kasab and his colleagues from Pakistan held Mumbai hostage – a day that probably will be etched in my mind forever as it will be in every Mumbaikar’s mind. More about that tomorrow.
I was actually wondering what to write today. I had a very troubled sleep last night and probably got ound 3 hours of sleep. So the result was that I was very sleepy the whole day and today there was no chance of sleeping in the morning as after my parent volunteer duties in D and P’s school, we had a breakfast chitchat with the school prinipal and vice-principal. There was also a yellow chempaka tree which the parent support group (PSG) gave the school to commenmorte its official opeing last month. I’ll write more about this in another post.
So after the chitchat, I went sraight to work and was sleepy throughout the day. The chldren have thir hindi term 3 common test on Saturday and I just didn’t have the energy to teach moe than 2 pages.
Now I’m beat and am off to beddy bye….See you tomorrow, hopefully with more energy and something new to write.
My sister called me on Thursday and confirmed that she, my brother-in-law and two adorable nieces were finally coming to Singapore! This trip has been in the offing for the last year and a half and finally it was coming to fruition. In fact the month after my sister, it’s the turn of my parents – but that’s another post.
After we brought our new place, we converted what was supposed to be the study into a guest bedroom. The original owners had left that space as part of the hall/dining room. The floors are pure marble and so in order not to mess with it, we decided to do the doors in such a way that the tracks (it’s a sliding door) are at the top of the room. Now we installed a fan in the room, but there is no air conditioning in the room. Since we will be having guests back-to-back, S asked an acquaintance who is in the a/c business to come and have a look at the space to see what best will work in that space. We already have a 3 split a/c and apparently we existing main unit can’t take another line. So the alternative was to have a casement unit, which would mean sacrificing one window for this. The last choice is to have an air cooler. We checked out air coolers today and have kind off narrowed it down to two options. The first one is about S$249 and the other is S$349. We’ll probably go for the $350 one but need to check out some more places before we make the final decision. Ah well I’ll make the update when it happens
It’s Friday and the weekend’s almost upon us! Fridays are the start of the cherished weekend and is so full of promise. We intend to do a lot over the weekend – be it some long awaited trip, some cleaning that you’ve probably put off during the week or something else that you want to do during the weekend. This promise is carried over to Saturday when you do feel a tad guilty that you’ve probably not finished all that you wanted to and set out to do over the weekend, but then you console yourself that there’s still Sunday. Suddenly it’s Sunday afternoon and the guilt returns with full force and knowing that you just can’t do all that you intended to do this weekend, you promise yourself that next weekend, you will definitely do it! That my friends is the story of about 80% of my weekends! Have a good weekend and do remember to complete all the tasks that you’ve set for yourselves. On Monday I’ll report on what I did and what I did not do. Maybe this blog will help me stop procrastinating all the time.
Memories and Such 