Em's Twisting Kaleidoscope

This isn't a regular post. I'm not going to tell you one of my stories about a place I travelled to and what I did there. Today, instead, I'm in one of those moods when I want to talk about where I feel like being. Where I currently am isn't a bad place but recently I have been feeling the urge to travel. To just pick up a bag and leave. But where do I go? Do I go backpacking across lands hitherto untraversed, admiring green mountains, flowing rivers and deep valleys? I don't know. I just feel like being in the midst of nature with nothing but my music for company. It could be a lone beach house or a mountain top, I don't much have a preference, so long as I get to spend some much-needed alone time. Let's for one second imagine a secluded beach house with a white bench and a tree right outside. Wouldn't that be the perfect place to sit and read or write as many blog posts as I wish to write or just listen to music like I wish to? Let's imagine...

Why have I never written about the best holiday of my life? I don't have an answer but I do have a solution. This. The best holiday of my life was the best for one reason because it was just that. A holiday. There were no schedules, no to-do lists, no places to see list- it was a vacation, a vacation in Thailand. So we had just shifted cities from Chandigarh to Lucknow owing to my dad's job and I'd had a horrible bout of chicken pox, so my summer hadn't exactly been fun or relaxing. There were two weeks for school to start and we had just come back from my grandmother's house after dinner when I suggested toy dad that it felt like a good time to go on a holiday. We looked up countries which offered on-arrival visas and viola! there we had tickets booked for four days later to go to Pattaya and Bangkok for a good week. No extensive planning, nothing- we just made a spontaneous plan and followed through and had the best holiday ever. Pattaya is a beautiful town...

Dubai. There is no way to tell , when you're in the middle of the city, that it's in the middle of a desert, an actual desert. It's overflowing with skyscrapers so tall, New York City would get a complex. The Shaikh Zayed Road is basically the main highway which cuts in between this huge pyramid of gigantic concrete towers. It's what they call a concrete jungle,  no kidding. If you told someone a few decades ago they could transform a desert into what Dubai today is, they'd tell you you were off your rocker. But then they would be one of those maniacs who underestimate the power of money, will and sheer brilliance. Dubai tells you what the human brain is capable of doing. You could never tell going to the beautiful beaches in the middle of the city that they weren't wonders of nature. Bt that's not the only wondrous thing about the Emirates (I pronounces it Eh-mi-rah-tees when I wrote that. Haha.) The United Arab Emirates was also the first time I found...

Lesson #552: Walk. Walk the city that you just found yourself in. You never quite learn as much about a city as you do when you walk its streets on your own two feet, stumbling across new and old, unusual and familiar, all kinds of things and explore its beauty by yourself. I think the reason I remember New York City so well is because I walked its streets so much. My most memorable moments are the ones I spent counting down the blocks left for the destination to arrive.  I just happen to be in one of those moods where I close my eyes and find myself walking down 3rd Avenue again. Walking from 3rd Avenue to Times Square. It was the night of the 17th of May 2013, my dad’s birthday and our first night in New York City. We’d just enjoyed a Turkish dinner at 3rd Ave which is usually the place for a lot of restaurants, all in line. The day had involved a lot of driving from Jersey and into the City, with a lunch in a Mexican bistro followed by the yummiest local produce str...