The Honeymoon! Part 1

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Yeah! You saw? I've got ads on my blog!!! Yay!! That means Google has started taking my blog seriously. This is huge!!! Do you know what this means?? That my random nonsense might finally start paying! I know! Amazing right? Well.. not really.. why you ask? First, not many of the blog readers actually click on the ads and two, even if they do too few and far between and it pays peanuts! Good thing I write not for money but for sharing with the world :)!!!

Alright then, what was this post about? Yeah.. The Honeymoon. Before your mind starts racing and the heart starts pacing (or is it the other way round?? Anyway who cares!!) This post is about my first ever international trip! It goes without saying I'm a romantic and I've grown up on my dose of Bollywood movies, so when the choice of the destination arrived I had no doubt in my mind it had to be Europe!! We did have difference in opinion here as he wanted to go to New Zealand because one his favorite movies series LOTR was shot there, Yes.. this is how nerds decide where they'll want their honeymoon. But in his defense, I'm not better it's just that we follow different genres of movies, a match made in heaven aren't we?? :D It's pointless to even wonder who won ;)

So now that Europe was decided, the next question to be asked was where in Europe? Now at this point it is important to mention that I'm horribly bad at geography (Yes it's true, I'm not being modest here) and this (I) was the butt of all jokes all this while when we were planning what all countries to go to (His Favorite one, You which continent is Turkey in? I know The answer now It’s a transcontinental country Europe+Asia, but I’m sure I’ll soon forget :P True I am that bad). So for all practical purposes I was going to be no help in planning, it was all up to the Geo Wiz! And the timing was just so wrong, he had to shift his house and we were getting married (well this one was obvious) and there was office (which I think by now you know we're both practically in love with) and other commitments which left little time for the research required to plan out a fabulous trip. We were in a pickle you could say, but then we did make the customary visit to tripadvisor.com and makemytrip.com to get the ballpark expense figure. This is out of personal experience, makemytrip customer care is awful! But searching fares, well no one can go wrong with that. So now we knew that the air tickets were going to cost us around a lakh and the hotels were around 8K a night. Now what? This is where our research more or less came to a standstill, because let’s face it there is no known cure for laziness. So then I decided to take matters into my hand (You see if I wanted to see Europe so bad, it was my duty to make it happen) and I started scanning the Tuesday edition of HT city regularly. For the non-HT readers, Tuesday is the day for holiday packages. All the companies were more or less offering the same price, except for D’pauls they were offering 10K discount for the first 20 bookings. And like the discount hunter I am we landed up at their South Delhi office, two starry eyed newbies. I think the moment we entered the office, the agents knew convincing us would be a cakewalk. Anyway, they did make the effort, showed us some pictures (which looked precariously dated) gave us vivid descriptions and stuff and then told us rather seriously if you book now you get a discount which may not be available later. Now given that I’m any advertisers dream, I fell for it. We booked a trip in February, for the month of May. Too eager are we? Well.. better safe than sorry I say, and there was this 10K discount which was rather surprisingly, on till April end J Such innocent souls we are we believe in everything we’re told.

So now after we came back home, as an afterthought I started to read the reviews for the agent online. Yup! After booking the trip.. No I’m not a retard; I just believe there is good in everyone if you know the right places to look at. And the reviews were not cool… Then I called up the fiancé and told him, he also went hmm… should we have done this earlier? Yeah.. OK next day at the office I ask my friend who actually had gone on trip recently via the same agents. She was all positive about it, phew some respite. But even so the negative reviews still haunted me. And the fact that it would be a group of N00B (DOTA fans would know what this means) tourists which included us being taken around the country somehow seemed very shameful to us. This implied we were not capable of planning our own trip, which let’s face the truth was the case.

Anyway, this way or that, what was done was done. What came next was the part where we collected the documents for the VISA. Oh my god!! Never has anybody been that suspicious about our relationship’s authenticity, everybody took to agree that the two of us our together without us having to prove anything. But the French Embassy, No! It needed proof that not only were we together, our parents’ had no objection to our relationship. Only one parent would just not cut it, all four parents needed to give their blessings in writing. For the first time in the four years of our togetherness we needed an NOC from our parents! Then we needed to prove that we would for sure get married before we leave for the trip, which meant we needed to provide the wedding cards, and this was what four months before the trip.. and 3 months before the wedding? So my mother wasn't the one worried about the cards being printed, my father wasn't the one worried about the cards being printed, but it was our very diligent and extremely cooperative travel agent Piyush. He tirelessly bugged us for every random document the embassy would have needed. Oh by the way, did I tell you just these wasn't enough, they also wanted to see our wedding photographs, Yup! Before the wedding! Man! Such prudes these Schengen countries are. This was really a tough one as we never had any other formal ceremony except for the wedding, we provided random family gathering photos as proof J. But in hindsight it seems worth it as these random documents saved us from a visit to the embassy, which we later learnt from the fellow tour buddies had happened for all of them.

Finally when the VISA did arrive, it was official that I was going abroad! But somehow the excitement did not kick in until I boarded the plane. Oh before that, just when we arrive at the airport, I try to clean my specs for clear vision and pop, it snaps! Yeah! What a great start to the journey right? And as you would expect I carried no spares (In my defense, I prefer contacts and I did carry a spare for that. But as you would expect that was never needed :P) So here I am roaming around the airport with sometimes hazied sometimes clear vision, waiting for my first international flight. By the way, I must say this in writing, Qatar Airways are the best airlines I have traveled in, one may argue what would she know flying outside India for the first time. True, but the “Husband” also agreed and he’s a little bit well traveled than I am J We had a 3 hour stopover at Doha, which is an reasonably easy time to while away given the amount of gadgets we carrying on us. But no, we wanted to eat something, this even when we had been given breakfast in the last flight and were sure to lunch in the next. So we start hunting for food, first stop, Costa: a sandwich. Hunger not satiated. Next stop the airport cafeteria, I don’t clearly remember what I ate there but one thing was sure, this trip was going to be completely about food!

By the time we finally landed in Paris, we had already identified a few of our D'pauls gang. And then once at the Airport we now needed to find our Mr. Eric.

This post is turning out to be longer than expected, so why don’t we do this.. let’s split this one up into a part series. And I feel like ending this one here.


And now that you are at the end of this post do you see the ad below J Don’t be irritated I’m just too excited <It’s called being high Energy J>