| India trips are always highly anticipated. Visiting your home country after a year or more is exciting. To see your parents, relatives, friends, to see all the changes your little or big town has gone through, but still be the same underneath bringing back warm fuzzy memories of good old times is heart warming. It does take supreme amount of planning. Passports, visas have to be uptodate, H1b is a nightmare. As is the Parole on EAD. You have to carry all the supporting documents of employment.
The warm muggy air that hits you when you land in Chennai when your jeans and jacket feel too stuffy and hot lets you know you are home. The dark skinned airport authorities make you feel like you belong. ;--p Daughter suddenly seems 'not of this place' in her till then normal clothes. Because other kids are wearing earrings and bindi and clips and anklets and bangles. Her accent that seems 'oor' back home feels phoren in India.
In the first ever trip back home, when I returned after dreaming about India for 1.5 years, the longest I had ever ever stayed away from home, I rebuilt India with my memories of 21 years and added a generous amount of imagination and increased everything a bit in proportion. So when I landed, roads looked too tiny and my room oh man my room looked super tiny. Really did I spend four years of college here ;--p It takes a week to get over jetlag so that week is spent eating and sleeping during the day and again eating and watching TV at night. Tiny titbit - jetlag is always worse when you move east ward, that is forward in time, because body finds it difficult to catch up, while moving west ward or backward in time is a bit easier. I have noticed jetlag in India is worse than jetlag in US.
My previous India trips have been all about weddings. Four weddings in the last four India trips, first one being my own. Always exhausting. This will be the first time I am going just to visit India. With no elaborate plan in India. I hope to take my Mom and Dad out to some places. Visit my brother in Bangalore.
So I was at the travel clinic two days before because I wanted a food poisoning medicine that needs a prescription. When I put India as one of my destinations, I got more vaccinations and medicines to have for India than my other destinations! seriously?! Everyone is super scared of Malaria. I try to get BSK the doses but didn't realize I needed to take them too. Actually BSK also has travelled with no malaria meds. She got numerous mosquito bites and would get lumps all over. I don't know if I will be unlucky this time. But the nurse did scare me. Typhoid, malaria, measles, chicken guniya and what not. Who knew! Why do I have to get so many vaccinations to visit my own country. And the nurse says she doesn't want me to bring back those diseases.
So looks like IPL may be happening at that time, DH wants to watch one match. May do that. Looking forward to free time, hope I will have the energy to get out and explore.
See ya! |
hey have fun and eat lots of good mutton chicken biryani :)