Sitting in seat 23E of the flight Air India AI 111 on a Sunday afternoon, I write
this post en route a London (and am posting it 5 days later when I have some time on my hands to actually do that).
Travelling on a company/client sponsored trip for
a project, I don’t think I am all that excited at this moment. Well maybe when
I land at LHR, it’ll be different?
As the Indian capital and almost everyone I know battles
with the scorching heat, I am set to be greeted by the British capital which is
currently clocking 90 C. I barely have a jacket or too with me and a
‘trench coat’ or ‘umbrella’? Nope.
As I thought about taking out my laptop and putting this all
out in MS Word, I had a can of Heineken in my hand, the 2nd of the 2
can alcohol quota that can be served to a passenger on board I presume. I am buzzed
aboard this flight, in a middle seat between one of my colleagues on the left and
an aged woman on my right, frequently peeking at a spectacles clad, skinny cute
girl with shoulder length hair sitting in 22K who, after a little recon, seems to
be working with ZS Associates, a Sales & Marketing
consulting firm I guess.
With Eminem blasting through my headphones, this is the only
time I think I’d get to write something up that is totally unrelated to the project
I am travel to London for. Literally swamped with work, we’ve been notified that
neither do we have weekends anymore, just 7 day long weeks till this engagement
comes to a close by mid-July nor can we hope to go sightseeing in London for
the first few weeks.
Oh well. It is what it is. Being the over planner that I am,
when we expect the
workload to simmer down a bit, I plan to apply for a Schengen visa and visit
Paris, followed by Geneva, Florence, Barcelona, Nice, Strasbourg and the likes.
Ummm, too much? Well, I’ll try to check boxes against at least 3-4 of those
cities.
Visiting Paris has been a dream since after my friends and I
got ourselves enrolled at Alliance Française. La Ville Lumière. Oh la la. Well,
now it’ll just be an English Channel and a EuroStar ride away. I’d also gotten
though an Assistantship program sponsored by the French Education Ministry
where I would’ve lived and worked with a primary school in Western France for a
period of 7 months starting this October.
Oh it would’ve been so amazing. I
would’ve come back totally ripped (assuming I would’ve eaten healthy and worked
out regularly which I highly doubt), with fluent spoken French and a very
unique sort of experience on my resume. But as always, ambition, career growth
and future B-School probabilities came into the equation and took ‘Mon Reve
Parisien’ away.
If not 7 months or 7 weeks or even 7 days, one thing I would
love to achieve on this trip is to spend at least 1 full friggin day in Paris, strolling
around on Champs Elysees singing ‘Oh, Champs Elysees, hugging Eiffel Tower so
tight my ribs would come close to cracking, sitting in a roadside café with
cobbled pavement and sip hot coffee, having French baguette and some wine in a
park, taking a boat ride in the Seine and of course, showing off my semi-fluent
but very rusty French skills in front of my colleagues.
So till the time I achieve this objective and write a
follow-up post describing every ounce of my week long Eurotrip in super minute
details in July (over planning at its peak over here), I’ll try and get back to
work I need to finish on the plane, the reason why I cramped my already cramped cattle class leg space by
keeping my laptop bag under my seat and not in the above compartment.
Jusqu’a la …. Au revoir!
