A Trip To Pondicherry..

It’s May 11th and my parents had decided to go on a tour to Pondicherry for 3 days from tonight till May 15th (Sunday) Morning. I always wanted to Live Blog something and I got the perfect chance now to do it, since I have my new MacBook Pro and Ike (Nokia 5800) with me all the way. But I couldn’t, since I need to get better blogging experience to do that. Anyway, like my other blog posts, I’ve divided this into 4 parts with respect to the date. Hope you like it..

May 11:

My Mom was pretty bored in these summer holidays and wanted to go on a tour as usual. She had been telling this for the past two weeks and my Dad finally booked tickets to Pondicherry for all the 4 of us. Unfortunately, at 11.30PM my bro had called to his friend to enquire about the schedule of exams and was shocked to find that there was an exam the next day. It was the ‘Engineering Graphics’ exam and he had to move to the hostel as soon as possible. So saying he boarded the bus at 3.10PM and went off.

My Mom and me started packing things up for the tour and we sort of finished at 7.15PM when my Dad came from the office. We got everything ready for the trip and started from our home. We went to the Bus stand at about 9.45PM and we were waiting for the bus for about 45 minutes. Finally at about 11PM, our bus showed up. It was an AC-Deluxe sleeper bus and it was the first time, I get to travel with my new mac in the upper berth. I was pretty excited but soon fell asleep after chatting with my buddy Prince till midnight.

May 12:

Having disturbed by the gleaming rays from the morning sun at about 6AM, I woke up and the bus was passing by the countryside of Cuddalore. There was no 3G-network coverage and I was thinking when these country people would get to experience the awesome technology goodness of this age. I believe that the network operators don’t invest to support 3G in these areas since most of the people aren’t interested to use or they don’t even know what 3G is. Anyway, I fell asleep again since I had no other choice.

At about 7.15AM, we reached Pondicherry and got down from the bus. We hired up an auto-rickshaw to get to the hotel where we booked our stay using MakeMyTrip.com. It was Anandham Residency, located in the heart of the city near the Nehru Street, which is one of the busiest streets of Pondicherry. My dad went to the reception for getting acknowledgement from the staff and we went straight to our rooms. We had booked two rooms, one for our parents and one for my bro and me. Since my bro went to the college, there was no other way for me; I had to be alone for the whole day.

At 9.15AM, we went to the restaurant and had a buffet breakfast with the usual South Indian cuisine (Idly, Dosa and some Pongal). Then we went back to the reception and I took some photos of the lovely fishes in the aquarium they had kept there along with a big fish swimming lonely in another glass tank. They also a pot of flowers filled with water in front of the lobby and I took a snap of that too. Then we had a walk around the hotel for about 20 minutes, where we bought some soap dishes for our home and went to a Temple named ‘Shri Angaala Parameshwari Thevasthaanam’. After that I came back home and started typing this blog.

Soon I got a call from an unknown number. I attended it and it was a computer-recorded voice of Bharath telling me to register my number to talk to him on May 12th. He had told me to dial * to activate the service but I just dropped the call and continued my work. But soon after 5 minutes, I got an annoying message from my network operator AirTel, stating that 15rs has been charged from my account and thanking me for registering the service. I got very annoyed and angry on seeing the message and texted my friend Arumugam regarding the issue. He told me to call the customer care and report it. I called to the customer care and fortunately the issue was immediately solved and I got my 15rs credited to my account. I called Arumugam to tell about my experience about my first call to customer care, but unfortunately the call extended to 21 minutes and I lost 13rs again :P. Anyway I at least used that money now for talking.

Then we started to move out of the hotel once again. The temperature around the city was scorching hot and we walked through the streets. The streets were regularly divided into large squares like in the foreign countries and that’s what makes Pondicherry quite beautiful. All streets were named both in Tamil and French. It’s easy to spot a foreigner, probably from France in any part of the city since there a lot of roaming almost everywhere in the city.

We came across one of the cousins with his parents who were doing their shopping. Within a minute, we finished our small talk and starting moving to the restaurant for lunch. I have a bad habit of drinking Sprite after my lunch in college and I ordered the same here too, but awkwardly the Sprite given here was 300ml, that 1.7 times getter than what I drink in college. It was clear that I couldn’t drink it fully. So I took out my water can and started transferring the Sprite from the bottle to my can. All the waiter and those people near my table was looking so curiously what I was doing, and to make it look more weird, I took snaps of it too :).

After that, we started moving to the beach. The day was getting really tiresome and boring. On the way, we went to the Park that is managed by the government. Most of the people were poor and they filled almost all the park benches while they were sleeping. I took my HandyCam out and started shooting video of them. Also, I took a couple of snaps here and there especially the four-sided pillars built by the French hundreds of years ago in memorial of the soldiers who died in the war.

At about 3.50 PM, we reached the beach. As most of us know, Pondicherry doesn’t have a usual beach, instead it has a pile of stones and the deep sea is just in front of it. We got a call from my bro that he has finished the exam and got the bus to come here to Pondicherry. Then My Mom called my relatives and informed them that we are here in Pondicherry, and soon my cousin Narendran and ElanChezian got excited and wanted to see us immediately. Narendran couldn’t wait, so he came out to the beach with his bike and reached us within 10 minutes. We haven’t seen each other for a long time and so we were talking uselessly for quite a while. He showed off his new bike ‘Apache Hyper Edge 160’ and we were playing with it for some time.

Then with our parents, we went to the seaside coffee shop named Le Café and had a piping hot drink of Chocolate with sugar cubes. It was really awesome and re-invigorating and looked yummy to just see it. With lots of excitement to drink, I actually forgot to take a snap of it. Having finished the mug of hot chocolate, my cousin went back home. My parents and me came back to the hotel.

I stared continuing this blog for a few hours and tried chatting with some strangers over Omegle. At 8PM, we went back to the restaurant and had our dinner and got some Noodles for my bro. Then we set off to the bus stand, to receive my bro after his long trip and came back to our room at 11PM and quickly went to sleep.

Side-note: We had an aquarium here in our hotel, wherein a giant fish was isolated in a big tank which was swimming very lonely back and forth. I felt very pity for this creature as it had no company to talk to or play with. I even prayed that it should get some company very soon.

May 13:

We got up very early and started moving to my Grandpa’s house. The streets were filled with emptiness everywhere since the day was the Counting Day for the Tamilnadu Elections. The 144 Rule was adopted throughout the city, by which no one should come out of their houses or even if they do come out, they should not talk with each other (sort of). We spent the whole day in my grandpa’s house playing with our cousins and there is nothing more here to tell. We were staying there till 9.30 and started back to our hotel by a very long walk and reached our rooms by 10.30PM.

May 14:

Having woke up very late, we booked a Toyota Innova to goto the Amusement Water Theme Park named ‘PogoLand’ situated on the outskirts of the city. We went with my cousin ElanChezian and his parents and stayed there for about 3 hours. The water was not so clean, it was easy to find floating dirt floating here and there. I even felt like puking up on seeing lots of people spitting on the pools where we were swimming. I couldn’t take it, anyhow I managed to be in the water for atmost 2 hours. With a severe headache, half deaf ears and reddish eyes we came out from that stupid place and came back to the city. After finishing our lunch, we went back to the Beach and stayed there for half an hour and returned back to our room. I was feeling somewhat ok after taking some rest and about 5PM, I started playing Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and continued it till 8PM. Then we had our dinner, bid farewell to the staff and came to the bus stand.

Then we got our bus at about 10.30 and came back home at Coimbatore at 7.45AM the next day.

Side-note: While coming out from the hotel, I tried to say good-bye to that giant fish and was surprized to find out that the fish was having tiny pack of goldfishes swimming around with it. Although it seemed pretty logical, I felt like as if my prayer came true. I took a few snaps of it, I’ll be posting them soon. Till then stay tuned to this post..