A Tale of Two Cities

Yes, yes…I know I’ve been horrid – putting up this blog almost a month after the TT night! My bad – but I’ve genuinely been bogged down with work. And that, by the by, I’m utterly delighted about! Yeah, I’m one of those. *silly grin*

By the by, I’ve realized I leave ‘Truly Thursdays’ in the title of each post. Kinda lame, since this blog is dedicated to TT! :D Mistake rectified for future posts, including this one, but will not go back and change the others. Time constraints, remember?

So what did we get upto on 26 November? For starters – it was a public holiday (it was a long weekend, thanks to Eid)! And for reasons I’m not particularly sure I understand, we tend to skip TT’s on public holiday Thursdays. So yeah, we didn’t have a particularly clichéd TT night.

Having said that – we had two sets of separate TT events that same night! :) One set was a boys-only night, where our TT boys (minus Rohit) went out on their own and kicked some…er…balls! :) While yours truly was in a city far, far away from Dubai! *giggle*

Now, this post will not be like the other quick-sentenced TT posts since it wasn’t a traditional TT night. I will, however, get into details of what happened.

To start off: an extremely dear friend, family member, guide…I could on, ya know? We’ll call him ‘Uncle’ from now on. That’s what I call him anyway! :) So, Uncle had invited me to Abhishek’s (his son and my friend from college) wedding pretty much as soon as the date was finalized. Now, for obvious reasons (read: work, no leave, work, some more work) Rohit and I couldn’t finalize our tickets. It wasn’t until Wednesday that we figured out that there was no way both of us could go. To cut a long story short – Rohit convinced me that I should go on my own since there was no way he could make it! It took very little convincing to get me to agree! Now, the glitch was in trying to get a ticket – everything was overbooked thanks to the long weekend!

And then came into picture our very own wonder woman – my mother in law! *salute* She made a few calls and before long, I had particulars of my flight with me and was rushing home to pack to head out to Calcutta! Oh, Calcutta! *smile*

The days that followed deserve a separate blog post which I will get to sometime soon *fingers crossed*. So, I reached Calcutta on Thursday evening and had a fantastically chilled out evening with Uncle, Aunty, Abhishek, Nana and their close friends. I was introduced to and very briefly spoke to Anandita (the bride to be) who should’ve left to go back to her place, but waited around to meet me! *hugs* There was a lot of strumming, singing (Abhishek played Iktara!) and a little bit of dancing! The mood was…oh so fantastic! Aunty looked stunning – but what else is new? *smile*

Here’s a glimpse of that lovely evening – my very special TT, and the first with Uncle!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Abhishek Banerjee!

My favourite wall in the house! :)

Poet, singer, guitarist...what more could I possibly say! An absolutely delightful woman to whom I owe one of my poems!

Childhood friends. Can't you just tell? :)

There he is - Uncle. :)

Finally caught one of Aunty's blouse! Yes, yes I know - she's gorgeous!

My second favourite wall in the house!

While some sing along to the tunes being strummed...

...others enjoy the ambience with a drink.

Pensive!

My-mehendi-your-mehendi moment?

The lovely, glowing Jia! :)

Moving on…

So our boys – Claudio, Ryan and Avinash – decided to honor our TT tradition and step out for some random fun. They decided to go to the relatively new entertainment centre at Dubai Mall – Sega Republic! *rolling eyes* And to think they’d be a little less predictable.

What did they get upto? Oh, nothing much – just the fighting-it-out at various consoles. So why start a new paragraph about that? *hehehehehehhehe* Well, that’s because the night wasn’t entirely uneventful! As is customary for anyone who goes to Sega Republic, these boys went on the roller coaster. They didn’t think they’d had enough with the first round, so they decided to go for a second time around.

Now, I’m sure the boys aren’t telling the whole story but I’m sure they did something horrible to tick off the guy manning the roller coaster for as soon as they sat, they realized that it seemed a tad bit notched up! So they went roooooooound and roooooooound and rooooooooound faster than they had the last time! A regular twin-session in any roller coaster is enough to throw anyone off their balance, and these boys got the extended, rough-ed out version the second time around!

Needless to say, they were a little disoriented. So much so that as the wobbly trio was about to get off the coaster there was this heart-wrenching scream from very close by! As Claudio and Avinash looked about to see who got stabbed, they realized that Ryan had doubled over on the floor. Not only was he letting out painful moans, but, they realized, he was curled up on the floor in a foetal position, holding on to his *ahem* crotch!

That’s right, y’all! He knocked his nuts! And pretty hard, I might add! *tearing from laughing real hard*

Needless to say, boys being boys dinnae take any pictures. But here’s what the roller coaster in Dubai Mall looks like:

YAOOOZA!

Ok, I have no idea who those two people are - I just got this picture off Google!

Aaaaaaaaaaanywho…! So that’s what happened last on 26 November in Dubai and Calcutta! :)

Yes, I’m literally just gonna start typing out the blog for the following TT. :) We’ve missed a couple of TT’s, but I’ll mention those in the next one!

And guys – there is a ‘comments’ tab below each blog post. *geeze*

Soon. Toodles!

Truly Thursdays – Board Game Night!

A blog post long overdue is coming your way. Why is it overdue? Oh, I could come up with a million plausible excuses, but am gonna spare y’all the torture and just say that I’ve been busy. Very busy. And very, very lazy. :)

As all things go, I’d decided to put up a poll to allow people to vote in their choices for TT on Wednesday of every week. Alas, that didn’t happen! Well, the poll is up now, but it wasn’t then! So after a quick round of email choices being sent out, followed by choices streaming in, we decided to call it a Board Game Night. And what a night it was!

Our intention was to play Scrabble and Monopoly and see if we could squeeze in a game or two of cards. Yeah, right. *tsk tsk* What was meant to be a night of board games turned out to be a night of Monopoly alone!

And hence we landed up at Sev and Claudio’s place on 19 November, 2009 for a night of insanity a.k.a Monopoly! Here’s what happened:

My C3 partner Claudio was on time – as always – met me in the parking lot – we drove to Sev and Samir to follow them to Samir’s place – our man was in no mood to drive – so we left his car off – got everyone in my car – gave Samir a feel of what a sports car sounds like – since mine only sounds like a sports car and drives like an 80 year old hag – reached Sev and Claudio’s and got the ‘goods’ ready – Rohit showed up shortly with the board games I’d requested him to bring along – Sev and I caught up in the balcony, just like old times – while the boys did what they do best – surf the net – and all of us ended up watching extremely interesting YouTube videos – “Dear Penis” being a clear favourite – as Sev tried desperately to give Rahul directions to get to hers – he’d driven all the way from Abu Dhabi to be a part of TT – that’s how cool we are – he didn’t make it cuz he kept overshooting their building – so he decided to be a part next time – and we finally got around to opening Monopoly after stuffing our faces and having the maiden drinks – 9.15 pm is when all of us settled around and picked our little play pawns – while Rohit all but drooled over the credit card machine and practically got down on his knees in prayer when it automatically calculated the millions it was fed – slowly, all of us were mesmerized – but we snapped outta our fascination – all except Rohit – and went on to play – the first half an hour or so went by rather quickly and uneventful – everyone was getting reacquainted with the rules – most of us hadn’t played it in over a decade – Claudio was the first to pick up a property – and gloating with happiness and joy – foreshadowing his upcoming fate, going by exactly what happened in Dubai – and Samir kept feeling uncannily unlucky with no property, only cash in hand – the men kept going at it and before us women knew it, auctions were taking place – the 3 men were giving us 2 women nasty stares – and smirking, saying “there’s a reason why women aren’t good businessmen” – while Sev and I just kept quiet and watched while the men went at it – before long there were apartments and hotels being built and everyone having to pay up rent – Claudio got his knickers in a knot and was pulling his hair out – at one point he was at Sev’s feet, cuz of the lack of anything else to do – boy thought he could get solace there, but she kicked him right back to his place for having mocked us intelligent women earlier – Samir sat in one corner calculating his growing millions, utterly disappointed that he didn’t have more property – Rohit got kinda fed up with the ‘ka-ching’ sound of the credit card machine and started to sly-ly negotiate with Claudio and Samir for property – I merely sat and waited for Sev to give up the one property I wanted, while she waited for the same from me – soon, her and I were sitting on pots of money and tons of rent and the boys were exasperated – I yawned at one point, saw the time and practically screamed – it was 1.30am – just seeing the time made me drowsy and I passed out on the couch while the other 3 played – Claudio declared bankruptcy and saved the little hair on his head in the bargain – Samir and Rohit fought it out for second place while the clear winner of the game with $ 32 million was Sevda – aptly name the Donald Trump of our Board Game/Monopoly Night!

*phew*

That took a while! And to think that we didn’t even get to open another board game!

Here's a peek at the different sentiments and moods of our Board Game Night!

My experiments with the D3000 continue...

The angels...

Rohit and Sev - model material, the pair of 'em!

Just getting started - big!

Samir's quite fascinated with his credit card! He's finally allowed to own one. :P

Rohit getting carried away with his role as a banker! :)

That tongue-in-cheek expression says it all! My fair lady chants: Just you wait, I begin...just you wait!

You can see the pain behind that smile, can't you? Good attempt, Samir. His heart was breaking around this time...he'd lost too much!

"Where'd all my money go," says Rohit...

"Here!" answers Sev.

My Cinderella hour (+ 1.5 hrs). :P

Here's a tribute to the changes in Claudio's persona as the night went on.

From "I've got this covered baby!"...

...to "Hmmm...this is...interesting", while Sev's thinking, "We'll see who has the last laugh"...

..."This can't be happening to me..."

..."Saaaaaaave me, baby...please!!!"...

...and finally...
*giggle* Told ya! :)

The following Thursday was 26 November and we were all off for Eid. I’ll put up a quick post on what happened on individual fronts, since we didn’t end up having our ritualistic TT.

We’re off to…um…er…well, we haven’t decided yet. We’ve got 3 votes in and all of them for different things. So, we’ll only find out next time where our little TT gang landed up tonight.

Here’s to TT – toodles!