after all the obstacles

So it turns out we're going to Sri Lanka after all. This necessitated ditching Arod (which wasn't quite ditching because she encouraged us to go and made all the flight arrangements, but I have a guilty conscience). Amusingly, my manager (who has requested for me to call her 'dear respected madam' in true Indian fashion) and her fiance may be joining us as well; the flight issue isn't as bad for them as she's willing to take Monday off, while I did not want to take time off since I just took ten days of vacation. We're also taking the same flight as Regina and Rohit, who are going to Sri Lanka for a week, so there will be six of us in the same beach town an hour south of the capital. I've booked a fancy-looking room at a beach resort (called the Taj Exotica, part of the Taj group that runs the hotel where we have brunch on Sundays), and we intend to spend the entire weekend drinking and lounging on the beach (and perhaps picking up super-cheap clothing bargains from the sweatshops--which sounds horrible, but buying from the Gap outlet in Sri Lanka just means that some other poor soul didn't have to load the clothing onto a ship or something). We're leaving Friday morning on a direct flight to Colombo (the city, not the grumpy but brilliant trenchcoat-wearing detective), and leave Sri Lanka Sunday night on a flight for Chennai/Madras. We have to spend the night there, get on a plane early Monday morning, and come back to Hyderabad just in time to work. Yay. The beach will be quite lovely, I'm sure, so it should be a rollicking good time.

Thank goodness that all of that was settled, since I was thoroughly sick of trying to make travel arrangements (and I'm sure Arod was even more sick of it, since she was the one dealing with the travel agent and she didn't even get to go in the end). But that means that I leave India on Friday morning, after only four and a half days in the country. Ridiculous!

Now it's time for bed, but first I'm going to try to post some pictures of my European adventures. Let's see if it works out as I intended...