"The road to a friend's house is never long."

-Danish proverb

{ Moving closer to claiming Phirta hoon main London, Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco :P}

The days spent in California could be very succinctly described as cacking till the last drop of energy we had, then sleeping, hogging and back to cacking again! That’s about all we did for 15 days, only the settings of this routine changed, from the posh hills of Hollywood to sunset at the beach, from chilly night at Berkeley roads to sleepy days at Stanford. Loads of noise, crazy antics and crazier photos, laments about painful roomies, attempts at making exotic sounding dishes (some unexpectedly successful and some not quite so), repulsive IIT level fattes, howls of laughter (mine being the loudest of course :P) and heroic efforts to sing adding to the cacophony!

It was of course the reunion that it was supposed to be. Everything fit together beautifully and I got to pain both my set of friends ample :D

In addition to all the useless scraps of conversations, taking endless potshots at one another, misguided attempts at humour, bold trials of short dresses and subsequent portfolios, endless arguments about who'd put on/lost how much weight there also transpired a few gems, ones that make brilliant anecdotes.

Being the first one in our group to land at Stan I got to spend an absolutely lazy day with Shruti where all we did was chat continuously from 9 in the morning to 12 in the night. The high light of the day being us draining the last drop of culinary enthu we had, cooking for 4 hours! :P

The day next was a crowner of faux-pas! It began with Jyothsna suddenly realizing she had some work and a lot of mourning to do and poor Swato who came to SFO thinking she would go philandering around Stan, incredulously realizing she was being shipped off to Berk instead and Arun toiling over a dinner for which the main guest didn’t show up!

Shruti and me in the meanwhile were confidently yacking away. After all we had done 3 runs of our Master Plan to pick up Sindhura from the airport, and had a Plan B & C prepared, in case we missed a connection. Even if everything went wrong we’d be home by 9.30. Or so we thought. Midway a sentence we realized we should leave to catch the B line. Strolling outside, I turned back to Shruti (who was armed with maps btw) to confirm if there was plenty of time for the shuttle to come. Pat came the reply, “I don’t know”!!! Jolted, we decided to run, but the damned B line took off right before our eyes, leaving us panting!

But an A line showed up 3 minutes later and we ran to catch that instead. Shruti, though buried in the bus timetable, was again clueless as to where it goes or when it reaches. We boarded it anyway and hence missed our first Caltrain by no more than 5 mins.

To be continued...