The India Trip

Trust your instinct. I keep forgetting this and the consequences can be really bitter tasted. Like the India trip I had on early August, my instinct said "don't take the job. It won't be as good as you thought it would be," but I ignore it and went anyway. And it's right, the journey is not as enjoyable as I want it to be.

I mean, India! I've been wanting to go there for so long, and now I'm disappointed by the fact I don't enjoy the trip, not enjoying the conference, not enjoying the food and try to squeeze working and traveling and shopping in two days is exhausting.

It was a long 8 hours trip by plane and we have to transit in Bangkok, Thailand. Should be nice if only we have some times to browse around the Svarnabhumi Airport. But guess I'm just too tired to walk around and chose to just sit waiting at the boarding room.

The three of us, I and two other female journalists from Jakarta arrived at New Delhi at about 9 pm local time (or 10.30 pm Jakarta time) and went straight to the hotel. The long journey is exhausting and we went straight to bed. The conference awaits in the morning.

Day one, workshop for journalists. I thought, we thought it's not going to be a whole day thing, but it lasted until 5 pm. Great, a very limited time for sightseeing and shopping. It doesn't really matter anyway, I wasn't intended to do some shopping actually, but if I see some nice saree I do like to buy some. We went to some street seller, the Janpath market. It's a nice place and they're selling some nice things too, but unfortunately, I was horrified by the sellers yelling and overall unfriendly gestures, so I keep my distance and not even try to ask for the price, let alone to bargain. And there goes my saree..

Day two, the conference took all day, like it should be. Just the usual working time, interviewing, writing, sending news.. and a reception dinner at 7 pm. The usual. Probably the unusual thing is that our flight back home is at 11 pm that night! We carry our luggages to the dinner and I started to feel it just not worth it, to go to India like this. Too exhausting. But it probably just me complaining.

But like in any other conference, I got the chance to meet some fellow journalists from other countries. It's fun to talk about nothing, just chatting with them and write emails after we went back home. Like a pen pal, but we got to meet them first before writing those emails, so it's the 20th century pen pals, I guess.

My boyfriend doesn't really like to hear me complaining about those exhausting work trip coz as a deputy editor, he doesn't get to travel a lot anymore and he thinks that any horrible trip is worth it, just to get out of the office some times.. poor guy... But I must say, I didn't really like this trip. Fortunately I managed to put a smile on the pictures.. :)