An Outlet: Part 7

15 August, 2019.

Happy Independence Day!

The first thing I did after waking up is cut up some tondli for today's bhaji. Then I spent about 45 mins on Duolingo and caught up on social media.

I went for a bath and wore normal home clothes. It was only then that I realised that I had completely forgotten that today is Raksha Bandhan as well. I quickly got changed into traditional clothes, made the rangoli while mom prepared the puja plate. We did the Rakhi tying ceremony and Alex handed me my gift aka the nail polishes and chain that I had bought. I didn't get him anything because he didn't tell me what he wanted.

After changing back into my home clothes, I cleared the Rangoli, put clothes for washing and laid the table for lunch.

I partake in a little bit of self KPop Random Play Dance everyday. Obviously I don't know most the dances but they just give me a lot of energy.

After lunch, I put the washed clothes for drying and watched some Cari cakes' vids. I then organised my phone files and filled water bottles while reading a book called "The Rosie Project". Kristen had given it to me about 2 months ago but I started reading it only today.

In the evening I got ready to go to a retail store to buy some sports shoes that I could wear to my gym. We hadn't been to that place in a long time and when we arrived there, we realised that they've changed the entire set up for some reason. What used to be one big three storeyed store with separate sections has now become 4 randomly placed stores. Pretty inconvenient.

There was a clothes store but it wasn't open yet which was strange considering it was 6:30PM by the time we reached. Why keep the store closed on a National Holiday when you know a lot of humans would be off work?

Anyways, we entered the main store and holy crap there were A LOT of people at this place. A FRICKIN' LOT. It felt like I was at a crowded station because you couldn't walk even take 10 steps without either bumping into someone or being blocked.

This is what I call the "Discount Effect". I knew that there would be a lot of people at the store but this was worse than a fish market. There was this dude who was continuously screaming through the loud speakers and frankly, the way he was speaking was just demeaning. He made everyone look like misers and it was as if he was addressing a herd of animals.

Dad was utterly disgusted looking at and listening to everything and swore to never enter the place again. We left the store in a matter of minutes and headed towards our market. We bought my shoes at a "trusted" shoe shop. They are silver in colour with purple accents. I hope they manage to stay functional for a long time.

We ate vada pav on our way (dad's wish) and then went to a snacks store. I wanted dad to visit the newly opened store so we just ended up buying my fav white chocolate puffs and some onion pakodas. Since we were near our market bazaar, we visited that place as well. They were offering a lot of discount and offers here as well but the crowd and overall shopping experience was so much better than that other store. We picked up a lot of items including onions, pastas, hand washes, shampoos, biscuits, scrubbers, etc.

The marker bazaar has this unspoken security rule that everyone must keep their extra bags in a shelf outside the store. This one didn't have any token. People were just expected to leave their stuff when they go in and take them when they come out.

I had kept my newly bought shoes in one of the shelves and when I came out, the bag was missing. There was a similar looking bag right next to where I had kept mine so we deduced that someone mistakenly took my bag instead of theirs. Honestly, I was a little pessimistic. I thought someone stole my bag when they realised that it was a new one. Turns out, the first theory was correct. We found a receipt in the similar looking bag and got through to the owner after a lot of phone calls and messages. We waited for a long time for them to come and give our bag back.

Because it was taking so long, dad and I went ahead to that new store. Yes, that's three days in a row. They can consider me a regular now. Mom joined us soon. Oh, if you're wondering where Alex is, his GRE date is closeby and he was at home studying for it.

As for us, I knew that we'd be buying a lot more items because dad was with us. We bought some Schezwan sauce, Makana, rice noodles (interesting choice dad), some kind of fryums, onion pakodas yet again, coffee, chikki cubes, scents, etc.

Yeah, we came back home with a lot of bags.

I laid the table, we had dinner and then I watched Mentalist with Alex.

EVERGLOW is having their first comeback and I heard their highlight medley today. Even though they just have 3 songs on the EP, all of them sound really nice. Their title track Adios already sounds like a bop! They had an excellent debut and I hope their comeback follows suit.

I accidentally cut the skin of thumb while cutting some onions. Yet, I did manage to cut the rest of them and make the chapati dough.