Waiting for Friday

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As I wait for Friday, when I leave sunny Stepney for Kolkata, I'm half excitedly, half nervously, wondering how the hell I got myself into this. Travelling to India on the other side of the world.

On my own. For three months.

How did I get into this crazy situation? The furthest I'd been on holiday was to Ibiza, and that was my last holiday abroad, and that was about seven years ago.

I suppose I'd better explain how and why I arrived here, as well as those I hold responsible.

I've always been kind of fascinated with India. It goes back to before I was the wannabe 60s mod I am now, to my teens, when I was a wannabe 60s hippy. My favourite group was The Beatles, and I loved their psychedelic music more than anything else. That exposed me to these weird Indian instruments called sitars, which hooked me in immediately. The Beatles trip to India to see the Maharishi Yogi also caught my attention. It seemed like another planet.

Even so, travelling never really appealed to me. It was something that other people did, and hardly anyone I knew had been travelling either.

When I moved to London I met a lot of people who'd been travelling and loved hearing their stories. All the better that my friend Kerri had actually been to India, and I would spend hours listening to her stories about her adventures over there. Going travelling suddenly seemed more realistic though to me it was still a nice idea I'd never get round to. Especially if there was no one to go with at the time.

I woke up on New Years Day this year and to give myself a kick up the backside decided I'd go to India as a New Years resolution. I still thought I'd never really go though. A day later I was walking home in the snow when I bumped into my housemate Rob going out to meet our friend Temsu, an artist who I met at the New Years Eve Party. I went along and spent the next two hours huddled round a heater in a freezing studio in Whitechapel, trying to keep warm by drinking tea after tea while Temsu talked about travelling, the world and life in general, and Nagaland - the area of India where he was born.

I walked home full of life, no doubt boring Rob (who's been travelling a million times) in great detail about how there was a whole world out there, and that I was going to go to work on Monday and immediately book three months off for exploring India. To my (and a few other people's) surprise I actually did it.

So here I am. Waiting for Friday ....

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Comments

[Sarah]

Enjoy!
Andrew all the very best as you begin this new journey in your life. I look forward to hearing more over the following three months. Safe journey! Sarah x