Not everyone gets to
celebrate their birthdays with the entire family. And not everyone gets to
celebrate it while on vacation. Still fewer get to celebrate it in Goa.
Me? It was
three-upon-three for me on the second day of our Goa trip.
It dawned just like
any other day, but with a huge difference. I was in Goa, and I had turned 20.
Yeah baby….
We spent the morning
beside the awesome pool. Yeah, they had a pool and a splendid one at that. I'll
try to get some pictures of the pool here. The whole setup was great. You have
a large pool filled with crystal clear blue water ( why is it that pools are
always blue??? ). The sides of the pool were as green as they could be, with
palm trees and hedges here and there. There were seats where you could lie down
and relax, as a lot of foreigners were doing.
I had a slight
aversion to water, so I stayed on the side, I stayed dry with one of my cousins
who was clicking away madly at anything he could see. Grass, water, seats,
flowers, the more mundane, the better. Come to think of it, our whole tour
photo collection came up to just short of 12 GB. 2 SLR cameras can help, plus
you've got an uncle and a nephew who can't give their cameras a rest. The
result, I still haven't seen all the pics we took!!!
Evening was when it
began to rock. For me. For years, I never celebrated my birthdays, I never had
a cake or candles, I never took photos or anything. But now, I had my entire
family on my 20th birthday with a cake ready to be cut, with candles!!!
The chocolate moushe
cake was purchased by my sister. But we had forgotten to keep it in the fridge.
The result??? Nothing much, the cake just got gooey. Sticky. But who in the
world cares, right???
We lit the candles,
I had happy birthday sung out for me, I blew out the candles (ooooppps, forgot
to make a wish…then again, at that point, could I have wished for anything
more???), cut the cake, and then the photo session began. We began shoving cake
down each others throats and posing. We had to hurry, a taxi was waiting to
take us to a Saturday Night Market.
The market was held
in a huge ground and it was laden with stalls, some managed by Indians, others
by foreigners. Who am I kidding, it was mostly foreigners. We split up into
groups and began window shopping, minus the windows. After some time I got tired
of just looking, I went into a shop and enquired about the price of a T shirt,
the ordinary kind. The kind you normally get off the streets in Kerala for Rs
200. I asked the price, I was prepared for anything under Rs 500, but the lady
swept me right off of my feet.
And not in a good
way.
One thousand eight
hundred, for all the shirts here…
Oooops. Well, I
didn't need a T shirt anyway.
After the price
shock, I didn't buy anything. My uncle bought me a T shirt for Rs 400 after
heavy bargaining. That's when I realized, foreign shops, fixed price. Indian
shops, anything goes. Bargaining is the law.
That's just about
it. We moved around the ground for a long time, then returned.
Day 2 gave me the
best birthday I ever had in my life.
The final day, day 3
comes later...
