Buzzed Aboard

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 2^nd 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!