7 hours adventure! - Part 2

The next couple of minutes took very long time to pass. At least that was how I felt. Probably, "'hundreds' of automobiles" is an exaggeration but certainly there were enough cars and buses ahead to shock us. Slowly they moved. The moment we reached the bus station we jumped out of the bus, ran to the Tram stop, jumped in to the next tram and lost us amidst the crowd, counted the seconds, reached the port, ran ran ran! Finally, we made it to the port, and thankfully due to heavy crowd check-in was still open. After few minutes of standing in one of the most disciplined queues, and clicking few pics near a miniature Eiffel tower kept nearby, the excitement was back in me. The enthusiasm and energy was back!

As we were rushing in to the tunnel leading to the cruise I noticed few young guys who seemed like students holding some signboards and thrusting something in the hands of everyone entering the cruise. When I was rushing past them, one of the girls there gave me a small packet and said something which was neither audible nor understandable to me. It was then that I noticed the red-ribbon symbol on their signboards and could guess this is what she must have said - "Have it safe!". We three kept on laughing about this incident for a long time.

Like any other luxury cruise you must have heard of, this one too had so many things. Restaurants, coffee shops, gaming centers, pub/disco, swimming pool, massage parlor and lot more. I spent some time sitting in a restaurant, sipping coffee and watching a fantastic violin performance by 4 Bulgarian girls.

And then there was this cartoonist/caricaturist from Bulgaria again who made a caricature of me with few "Indian" elements sketched around - which included, elephant, snake and kamasutra. I wanted to ask him why didn't he know anything else about such a big sub-continent of India, but I stopped myself, for a moment I thought what I knew about his country. I couldn't recollect even the capital of Bulgaria for a long long time.

The best time pass I had was watching a Premier league game of Arsenal, a Real Madrid game and a Serie A game all running parallel on European satellite channels inside a sports bar. It didn't occur to me for a while that I was in the middle of some sea in the Scandinavia!

If you were wondering what is this "7 hours" about, I'm coming to that in a short while.

--S--