I am back - after an amazing trip back home :)

It's been a month since I last wrote. I was pre-occupied with the preparations of my trip back home and then with the actual trip. A trip back home is always exciting, partly coz I get to meet all my near and dear ones and partly coz I get to shop a lot and receive a lot of presents ;) (did you just call me materialistic!! guilty as charged :) )

The time I burnt my own hair!!

I have been hooked on to this Taylor Swift song - Bad blood for some time now. It portrays the emotions that arise inside you when a great relationship (that she calls mad love) turns sour (she calls it bad blood). There are a hundred emotions that arise like confusion, pain, sadness, but I think the most dominant one is - anger (unless you are an absolute saint). I am quite bad at expressing anger so I keep it to myself and brood over every little detail silently. I recently spent a good one month being angry with a person (day in and day out). I had lost all good sense and cultivated my anger into this all-consuming hatred for everything around me that connected to this person.

Trip to Jakarta :)

 I last saw her on my wedding day three years back. Last month I got to know she is coming to Jakarta for work. All I could think of was; she is right here, so close by!! I couldn't wait to see her. I booked my flight to Jakarta as soon as she booked her tickets from India to Jakarta.

I have never been to Jakarta or any part of Indonesia before so I knew nothing about this country. The only other way to experience a country without visiting it; is to read about it. So I started reading and I got to know that people don't speak English there. They just stick to the local language. Luckily the local language is similar to Bahasa Malaysia (language in KL). In the last one year, I have only picked up some phrases of Bahasa Malaysia from the locals and learnt the numbers and greetings. As I wasn't going backpacking to Jakarta, this was quite enough.

Living in KL - Part 3 - Life with Friends!!

My life in KL has come full circle - from being taken around the city by friends; to taking friends around the city an year later. This is the story of my first year in KL. The difficulties of being so far away from family were overshadowed by my encounters with some of the best people I have ever met in my life.

It was a roller coaster ride;  and how I wish I could freeze time at the highest moments !!

P.S. This post is third in a series of posts about my life in KL. You can read the other two posts here and here!!

Living in KL - Part 2 - Food in KL

I hope you got a glimpse of KL through my eyes in my last post. Today, I will continue to talk about my KL experience of the most talked about thing in my life: FOOD :)

In my new adopted hometown, the three adjectives that people most often use to describe me are: Indian, Married, Vegetarian.The first one is obvious living in a foreign land. The second one is alright (although I could do without the tag sometimes  ;P) but the third one is a bit of a surprise.

Now you see, nobody bats an eyelid back home when I say I am a vegetarian. Actually. I never have to say 'I am a vegetarian' coz unless someone specifies their preference to eat meat, it is a foregone conclusion that the whole world is 'shakahaari'. But over here in KL, people make it a point to confirm whether I at least eat fish or egg when I say I am a vegetarian and some go ahead to confirm if garlic is 'ok'. So the word 'vegetarian' in itself doesn't mean much to them.

Living in KL - Part 1 - Moving from Delhi to KL

A year and a half back, I made this huge decision of moving from a city where I had two families to a city where I had none. I moved from Delhi (to keep references simple I would stick to the city 10 minutes away from my actual hometown Faridabad) to KL. I wouldn't say it was easy. A lot of things changed, both on the personal front as well as the professional front.

As promised in my earlier post, I am trying to capture all that happened in this one year of my life. Doing so in one post isn't feasible, so I will split my experiences. Both of these cities happen to be the respective country capitals so comparisons are bound to happen. This post talks about my observations of Delhi vs KL and I will pour out other details of the last one year in the forthcoming posts.

Coming from Delhi, the grandeur of KL didn't really hit me (at first) as I had expected it to. Tall buildings, broad highways, high-end malls felt like - been there, done that!!

Short trip on the long weekend - Melaka :)

Long weekends are the most welcome times of any year. Unlike the festive time holidays, there is no set menu for this meal :) You can go ahead and mix your own ingredients - sleep the weekend off or shop the weekend off or travel on. 

This long weekend, I did all of these :). I could ramble on and on about how much fun the whole weekend was, but that might take a while. For now, I would just write about the most amazing part of this weekend - Road trip from KL to Melaka. It's a short three hours drive, which is pretty much the amount I had to spend driving to and from my office in my hometown.

Yes!! That is a cycle rickshaw and every glitzy thing on it is battery operated!!