An Outlet: Part 7

16 June, 2019.

Mia came over today. She's been on her vacations/interncation even before my exams began but we weren't able to meet until today.

As usual, we caught up on each other's lives. Alex was there as well so his extroverted self also joined for a while.

At somepoint we decided to play Taboo and it was hilarious! I am not a fool but this game surely makes me look like one lol. I'm either really good or really pathetic at this game and today it was the latter. We had a blast tho.

Around evening, Mia left and I quickly started getting ready for my dinner plan. Due to all the bonding during the wedding season last year, my paternal cousins made a plan to meet up today. This was the first time we made a plan without our parents (not that we even make plans with parents but yeah).

Anyways, the decided venue was far and Alex and I had decided to go with Parker and Pamela so we booked a cab, picked them up and went to that place.

Parker and Pamela's family just came back from their almost 15 day trip to the North East so they told us all their experiences throughout our ride to the mall/restaurant. I'm happy that they got to go for a trip after so long.

We reached the mall and met up with some of our cousins. They had smartly chosen a seat right in front of the TV screen so that we could watch today's India vs. Pakistan cricket match.

Everyone reached at last and we started figuring out what to order. And it took so long my goodness! This problem happens when there are too many decision makers involved in a group, each person wants to take charge which ends up being a noisy mess.

Some of us ended up ordering some alcohol. This wasn't planned and I was very wary while deciding whether to order myself one or not because nobody from this family knew who drinks and who doesn't drink and since we're not thaaat close, we don't know who will spill it to their parents and who won't. Obviously our parents wouldn't have been cool with us drinking because we had junior college kids with us as well. And also because we were meeting like this for the first time.

I decided to have one in the end. I initially wanted to experiment but settled for the safe mojito. Honestly, I couldn't even feel the alcohol. The food was good but the portions were waaay too less for the price. We spoke and obviously watched the match from time to time. The latter involved almost the entire restaurant. There was a time where a Pakistani batsman nearly got out and that's when the entire population at the restaurant went "OOOHHHhhhhh".

Anyways, the service was quick so we got done earlier than imagined. We spent some time at the food court where some of us got ourselves some desert or chicken popcorn. We watched a little bit of the match on our phones and once everyone were done eating, we began to head home.

Now 7 of us were headed to the same direction with 6 of us staying close by. 2 of them literally stay a couple lanes apart from us. Initially, I thought that we were going to go back just the way we came but due to some major misunderstanding, we ended up having to take 3 different rickshaws back home. How uneconomical.

Anyways, Alex got pissed off because he didn't want to spend that much money given that we/he had already spent so much, not just today but the past couple of days. We then took our rickshaw to the nearest railway station and took a train back home. I really don't understand why people avoid trains even when it's not rush hour. It's so much more practical and money saving!

We were back home in 45 mins and that was the end of the day. To be honest, today was a bit awkward but it was nice too. Don't think we'll be planning another outing anytime soon tho.