What a day

Yesterday I spent the day with an old buddy of mine. We were together in Bangalore for two years and now he has shifted base to Gurgaon. I picked him up from his guest house and headed straight for the Metropolitan Mall. The idea was to find parking space before it fills up. At 11:45 AM, all we could find was space just enough for one car in some obscure corner of the second basement. Ours would have been one of the last cars to enter the basement.

The first priority was to get hold of tickets for some movie. We zeroed in on D. Got the 2:00PM show. Then we headed for Amoeba for a round of bowling and other games. My friend amazed me by his bowling skills; he had just the right speed and the way of releasing the ball to generate that spin I have never even tried. The only problem was that his direction was not always right; at one time he bowled three gutter balls in a row. He ended up with 105, I got 135. Not bad. Then we played one game of Air hockey, and the both of us enjoyed it to our heart's content.

Time was running out; we had to have our lunch before the movie began. Since his stomach was not in its best of shapes, we went to Banana Leaf, as South Indian cuisine has lots of light dishes. I had onion uttapam and a pair of rawa idlis. He was content with some Aapams. After lunch we headed straight to the movie hall. The seats we got were comfy, but the angle at which we had to sit could have been better. D turned out to be a nice movie. Pretty clean too. Of the lot playing these days, it’s perhaps the best Hindi film.

After the movie, we went window shopping. The first victim was the Bose store. Now this friend of mine is a major fan of Bose systems and has a long-cherished dream of owning one of them. Joseph, the CI agent at the shop sat us through a small but lovely demo of one of the Lifestyle systems. The sound was just awesome. He told us about some of the awesome features of that system, including the ability to pick up similar-sounding songs from the 340-hours-of-music capacity hard-disk it carries and the RF remote that works across walls and water from over 65 feet. It also played two separate songs across two rooms simultaneously. As I mentioned, we were window shopping here. But that day I resolved that one day I would also own one of these systems. And if things go as planned, that would happen within the next 5 years.

Then we just went around the mall and went into the shop that sold amps and speakers. We found out one Denon amp that would fit the BookShelf speakers from Bose. Just that the amp was priced a little to high. Maybe some other shop has a better deal for him. As for me, I know I need to save every penny. Well, almost.

We decided to have a Mc’D softy each and walk to the next mall, the Sahara Mall. For the fear of not finding parking space, we left the car in the basement. The moment we stepped out, we noticed it was drizzling. We walked about 500 meters to the mall and headed straight for Big Bazaar. The shop, as usual, was filled to capacity but it was hot enough for us to just rush through the things I wanted to buy and get billed ASAP. It did take a long time but we had chosen a cooler set of counters. Once out, my friend stopped at the Airtel Shop to pay his bill after which we left for the third mall.

The only thing we liked in this third mall was the LifeStyle store. It had lots of good stuff we want to buy, at some time in future though, like an easy chair and bean bags. I bought an aromatic candle from there and went to check out the rest of the mall. Finding it rather deserted and utterly boring, we went back to the Metropolitan. We first went inside Marks & Spencer, as it was offering a 50% discount. The discounted shirts started at Rs 990, and so we just came out of the store. Anyways, it wasn’t my idea in the first place. We then went inside a bookstore where I found just one book but the counter was packed and my patience just gave way. I dropped this latest title from CK Prahlad which I was getting for 80% of its price. Maybe I’ll read it later; maybe I’ll go to Michigan and study under this great guy himself. Oh, I am a big dreamer .

Then we had another bad experience at the Barista outlet. I waited in the queue for some time and ordered two Ginger Fizzes. They were out of them. Then we asked for Lemon Ice Teas. They were out of them also. So we decided to have coke/Iced Tea from the Mc’D and push off.

From there we went to the guest house of my friend, saw some TV and then I took off. Both of us were really tired from all that we did in the day. I still had an hour of travel in front of me. But there was contentment that I had spent a very nice day.

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