Merry Holidays and meeting a new me!

Planning a trip for vacations in secret can be a lot of fun; convinced in the summers of 2012 by my Besties Rabia and Sarah that I should accompany them to Lahore on their official trip to LUMS in December. However, I had doubts about that, for one I wasn’t sure that the office would allow three people to take off together. Anyway with super planning and cunning scheming we planned to make our trips look coincidental rather than planned.

The whole plan was that I’d take my annual leave of 15 days, head out to Islamabad spend a week with my cousin and then travel to Lahore with her and join Rabia and Sarah who would come directly to Lahore a week after the start of my holidays.

The fun of the trip was when we all had a secret that we were dying to share with everyone and yet we had to keep our faces straight. Rabia and my (true karachites by tolerance) concern during the trip was how are we going to live thru the winters of Islamabad. To brace against that, we decided to go for shopping together. Rabia had plenty of insights into the tolerance from her trip of the previous year. And I had taken plenty of advice from my cousin in Islamabad on the winters and her precautions very seriously.

We planned to go to Sunday bazaar one weekend which allowed buying everything we needed from one place. With that plan in mind we woke up early on a Sunday morning and planned to have breakfast together and then head out shopping. Shopping alone is quite a tiring thing but shopping for 3 women 2 of which had an obsession with coats, bags and boots and one of which had a craze for socks shopping. We spend a good long time roaming about to buy things we needed and ended up buying a lot of things that we didn’t need.

The extra exercise (shopping can be exercise for us, as our major activity of the day can be limited to walking up to the television to turn it off) left us hungry by the afternoon plus it was hot! Seriously Karachi winters don’t affect us at all; in fact trying all those different coats left us sweating.

My favorite shopping was the shoe shopping. Finding my favorite boots in the first try was most amazing. But the rest of the shoes I tried while the other girls went about shopping were quite a time pass. I believe our longest time spent was finding socks for Sarah; she bought every possible color, print, character on her socks, ranging from superman to monkeys she bought them all.

Our shopping trip was pretty tiring and we ended up heading out to Sarah’s home for refreshing ourselves and ended up having a party at her place. While she was busy in cooking things for us, we ended up trying our new shoes, coats, sweaters, socks and pajamas. Sarah believed that we’ve over prepared for the winters but then someone who’s lived all their lives in Islamabad has no clue how terrifying the prospective winters experience can be.

The start of the whole vacations was pretty chaotic coz I was not sure how I will go, as much as I wanted to go by bus (the idea was to see different cities, take pictures on the way and write for a travel blog) I wasn’t allowed to travel alone, for the historical reason that traveling alone that far in a bus might be dangerous. So I turned towards the most reliable and safe (for a young lady) travel mode the airplane. Though the flight to Islamabad did put me off my budget I managed by borrowing for my trip.

Until the very last day I wasn’t sure when I’d be traveling; coz here again I was traveling with my cousin who would also play host to me in Islamabad and he had a very doubtful travel plan. Anyhow he called me in the morning around 10 and said get ready by 3 our flight is for 5 in the afternoon. Fortunately I had already packed for my trip two days in advance. Now all I had to do was get ready and board the flight.

My cousin picked me around 3 in the afternoon and headed to the airport. Just about the time we were to reach the airport we encountered our first problem of the trip (and I guess the last). The car had heated up but seriously I wasn’t concerned about it coz I was at the airport (I know a very Bitchy Thought).

Anyway we walked thru the check-in, deposited our luggage, ran thru to the waiting lounge, and arrived at the precise moment when they were boarding the flight. I didn’t have any time to rest, breath or even look around. I walked right into the airplane and bumped (not literally) into a colleague of mine; said hello to him and then settled into my seat.

As much as I wanted to sit in there and take pictures of everything I was intimidated by my cousin and his serious looks. So I sat in my tiny seat quietly hoping to find something of interest to keep me occupied. Never in my life have I been so terrified of flights than I was at this time (constantly thinking of all the recent air plane crashes of PIA and Air blue). I’ll have to admit that when comparing my journey of PIA and Pak railways I’d choose the latter for reasons I shall explain a little later. I tried sleeping, but that didn’t work the pressure in the cabin was so crazy, it hurt my ears.  It hurt so bad that there was a point where I wanted to cry!

The food was ok I don’t even remember what I ate, must have been a sandwich or so, but the time spent eating was the only diversion I had in that craft for those few hours. There was no Television to watch, there was no music to hear just the pain of my ears, and the horrifying thoughts of crashing into the margalla hills. Oh and the only thing I do remember is they served us with toffees the moment we settle in before take off. I wanted to grab a hand full of them but then again ‘mature’ is what I had to behave. 

When we finally began our descend I hated the plan so much! The pain in the ears wanted to make me cry and I wasn’t sure we’d be alive by the end of the journey, however a little part of me was really excited coz my vacations had just begun!