Little above a year back, a young man of 20 something, having finished a year at his new job, received the good news of his secondment to London. In preparation for his six weeks in London, the young man set out to a few shops in the city to buy the necessary attire for the new job profile that he would be in.

On 3 May 2010, this young man took his first long haul flight from Bangalore to London. As he walked out of the airplane and took the cab to his apartment, he fell in love with the city and hoped that those six weeks would be a lot more. Little did he know that his wish would come true. However, his work was recognised and he was given an offer he could not refuse. And, he didn’t.

The six weeks turned to six months and the six months turned to nine, as he waited for his visa. After a brief visit in Bangalore, he packed up his belongings and returned home to Mumbai. In Mumbai, as he struggled to adjust to the time zone difference, he tried to put his affairs in order and met a few friends. He was back to London in early March to begin his new job in a role where his friends would refer to him as “Banker”.

I don’t need to tell you that the young man is me and am happy to say that I have completed my first year in London, in a job I grew to love!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. This isn’t the case with Ajay (yes, sad joke!), who is perfectly at home at his work place. But, I do go out and have my share of fun and this included a wardrobe improvement with the help of his new found friend Sveccha (introduced by the great Idea-smithy.

We went to Westfield mall, which is one of the largest malls in Europe (view on Google Maps). I picked up a few shirts at the T.M.Lewin store and at Marks & Spencer, a pair of shoes and something that makes me smell real good!

Some Vietnamese food, pastries and Starbucks completed the rest of the day. This was the first day of the long two weekends, the Easter weekend and the Royal Wedding weekend, most of which were spent in the confines of my super sexy apartment!

What use is a good, well furnished kitchen (courtesy Tesco Direct), when you don’t put it to use. Met up with Sveccha on Saturday and we decided to cook at home. She did the cooking and we did the eating. The prawns turned out to be super awesome and the rice and the dal were yum! Need, I say, I need to take up cooking as a hobby!

And, work continues as usual…

Lil white mouse heard of Mumbai Times Cafe, which opened a while back in Bandra, near KFC. So, we decided to check out the place for dinner.

Parking in that area can be a pain, but we were lucky to find a spot for my bike. Mumbai Times Cafe is located on the fifth floor of Crystal Shoppers Paradise which is diagonally opposite KFC in the same lane.

We were greeted the moment you step out of the elevator and led to a table for two in the “sand” section. I call it the sand section because sand covers the entire floor out there. You also have a tiny canoe there as well. The place is built with the idea of dinner by a beach, I guess. You won’t find one on the fifth floor though.

We ordered the Seafood Pulao, which is a mixture of clams (cockles), prawns and rice. It turned out to be a good deal spicy and this was washed down by mocktails and a margarita.

The quantity of the dish was really good for more than two persons and the service too was pretty good, which is always something I look forward to in a restaurant and sadly, there aren’t many that fulfill this.

The prices are on the steeper side, but then again that’s the case with most of the recent restaurants I’ve been frequenting

Anyway, I recommend this place if you’re looking for non-veg food, especially sea food.

After a quiet two days at home, I finally ventured out on Sunday evening for mass. I?ve realized that I can spend days at home without evening stepping outside and not even think twice about it. Pizzas always get delivered, don?t they?

Anyway, Sunday the 4th also marked the 28th Wedding Anniversary of my parents and since Dad isn?t here I decided to take Mom out for dinner. However, she chose to order home and so be it.

Dinner was Chicken Manchurian, Prawns Masala and Chicken Fried rice. We tried a smaller new restaurant near my place instead of the regular one I ordered. While the chicken was good, the prawns was terrible. Note to myself. ?Do not order sea food from small places?.

Monday and Tuesday were normal days. Aditya was in Mumbai yesterday on placements work and dropped in after that was done. Took him to InOrbit, Malad whose sheer size had him all amazed.

Got back home, bid farewell to him and got ready for Seema?s birthday party. We were at her place gossiping and chatting till post 10.30pm before I drove back home. Had no energy to make any of the blog posts I had originally planned. Had also decided to make my way back to Pune and so needed to get some sleep.

Caught the second Volvo to Pune. The last time I was on my way back the bus tire was punctured and the driver and cleaner spent a good hour fixing that. Fortunately, today I didn?t face any such problem, though the bus that I missed by a minute broke down on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. After our driver lent a hand, we were on our way.

Reached here in the morning, met up with friends and then got down to making those blog posts. The count of unread posts in my RSS reader is slowly mounting. As is the case of my Gmail inbox which seems to be locked due to Google detecting unusual activity. Now, me not checking my email for 20 hours is characterized as unusual Hopefully, this gets unlocked by tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a long day with a lot of lectures scheduled. We also have a so called Finance paper to work on tonight.

After a rested day at home, Friday was a tiring and leg breaking experience!

Friday is the big Mapusa bazaar, which means lots of things to shop and lots of crowds to shop with… I’m not a crowd person.

Anyway, caught the morning bus to Mapusa and entered the bazaar. Ruth didn’t join us, so Crispin, Lil white mouse and I had to share the carrying of the bags.

We walked through the bazaar and picked up loads of vegetables, some bread and then visited the fish market for some bangdas (mackerels) and prawns. Then went to pickup the things we needed to take home, which included cashews, booze and Goa Sausages.

While shopping, we made sure we kept consuming fluids; sugarcane juice, lime soda (got fleeced), lime juice and flavored milk. Needed this as it was horribly hot and we really sweated like pigs!

After a good few hours of shopping and several heavy bags later, the three of us caught a bus back to Cansa Board. We should have taken the rickshaw but tried to save a good deal of money. The consequence was increased biceps after lugging the heavy bags up the hill and down into the valley.

We had lunch and hoped to get some sleep which didn’t happen and then set out on our next adventure. This time we were joined by Ruth, Dora and Vally.

I didn’t know fully what I was getting into, but within the first half hour of it I realized. Well, we walked… yes … walked and walked and walked some more and when we were finally done walking, we walked some more!

Walking was up a long uphill road, along which we found some cashew fruit, some other weird fruit (which meant more of eating unwashed fruits of a tree). We also stumbled on a Gold Mine, where they are mining and exporting gold ore for further processing. And after still more walking, we finally reached the place we setout to be, a small spring.

I was rather disappointed seeing the size of it, because it just wasn’t worth the walk. And, one thing about walking is that you have to walk back. So, we began the long journey back in the dark (the sun had almost set by then), with one stopover for water at a house.

We finally got back extremely exhausted, with my legs almost broken. Again, it was a quick dinner and sleep in preparation for yet another long day.

I found somebody to help me with my typing of the book. The person was none other than my mother who helped with a great deal of typing. And in return I cooked a portion of Sunday lunch.

I hunted around for a prawns recipe and found a Ginger Prawn Recipe. As usual we made some changes to the basic recipe.

Didn’t use the jumbo prawns as suggested since we already had the normal ones. We also added potatoes to the mixture. Replaced the stock with simple water and substituted the spring onions for normal ones.

Well, I always knew that I could follow recipes, but this one turned out a lot better than my expectations. If my salad and egg burjee were starters, I’m ready to go pro