This is part 3 of my 2023 journey, as I’m heading to Thailand for a trip at the end of March. Part 2 here.
The wedding
One of my oldest school friends was getting married a few hours south of Bangkok and about 15 people from my high school class were going.
It was an intimate wedding, with events over 3 days, and an evening ceremony on the beach.
The days were spent dancing, eating, going to the beach, the evenings much the same. The contrast between the resort, with its ocean and friends and gaiety, and my house back in Delhi couldn’t have been greater.
The trip
Some of us planned to travel in Thailand after the wedding. We went first to Koh Samui and stayed in one of the best houses I’ve ever lived in, atop a mountain, overlooking the bay. There were fresh cooked meals, massages, gorgeous views from every floor, the house full of people I had known my whole life.
We cooked and ate and drove around and partied and snorkeled and got sunburned and watched the sun set. Some nights we stayed in and had heart to hearts and reconnected as only very old friends can.
Late one evening, all of us got on a ferry to the smaller island of Koh Phangan, and went for the famous full moon party. I had read about these parties in Readers Digest growing up, but had never really imagined making it to one.
It was along the entire beachfront of that tiny island, bars at the south end playing loud music, the beach packed. I found myself quite overwhelmed and retreated to the north beach for refuge, where I met someone who was seeking similar reprieve.
I spent most of the night hanging out with them, talking about where we grew up, how we came to be on that beach. We drew pictures of each other and played silly games. Eventually I made my way back to the party and my friends and dancing. At 6 am, we took the last ferry back. I sat alone on the uncovered bow, still swaying as the sun rose over the ocean.
The final few days of the trip were spent in Bangkok, which included the best night out dancing of my life. We went to a club with really good and not too loud music, got bottle service as a group, and danced ceaselessly till the club shut down. We then went to Khao San road, and danced down that crowded street, picking up the music of each bar we crossed.
Dancing down that crowded street at 3 am with my oldest friends, while people at the bars looked on, felt like the most iconic, movie like moment of my life.
Returning home was a giant let down, and I had severe vacation withdrawals for days. I was back to my night time work schedule, back to a largely solo, homebound, dance-less existence.
Summer in Delhi
I began house hunting as soon as I returned. This was the first time in my life I was getting to pick my neighborhood in Delhi, and its hard to overstate how excited I was about the idea of moving.
My parents live in a neighborhood that is quite isolated from large parts of the city - most of my friends lived more than 45 minutes away. That meant I had to drive an hour and a half for any social activity, that it was really hard to host, and that impromptu plans were impossible for me.
I would conservatively say I saw about 100 houses, covering just about every neighborhood in the part of town I like. There were many nice places, but nothing felt right to me.
After weeks I saw a ground floor flat on a corner lot. The moment I saw the walls of the bathroom, I knew it was the place. It was a kind of a pumice stone, with unfilled cavities in the rock. The corridors were wider than usual, the layout different than anything else I’d seen. It turned out the owners wife was an architect, and had heavily weighed in on the design, which is why it felt unique. There were trees all around, and the first thing one would see in the morning would be greenery. I was sold.
Two days later the deposit was paid, a lease signed, and I was more excited about the future than I had been in a really long time.
Outside of the house hunt, my nights were still spent at work. The job wasn’t terribly exciting. I spent much of my night playing chess and watching youtube, but grew very bored of that.
There were many calls where I had to listen and be aware of the conversation without actually contributing anything. This meant I couldn’t do anything that involved the language parts of my brain. I found myself doodling a bunch of the time, and eventually decided to painting and sketching during those calls so that my night would not be a complete waste.
It was around then that I started keeping a notebook after reading art blogs and books, something that I’ve been doing since.
At the end of April I attended one of the most glamorous wedding I’ve ever been to. The hosts work in fashion and social media, and the wedding was just unbelievably beautifully done. The clothes, the flowers, the insane attention to detail. Through the trip I was called babe by complete strangers, and I loved it! As a result I’ve been calling people babe all year, my newest and most enjoyable linguistic tick. :)
Summer Abroad
There were a few happy reasons to travel in the summer. My first cousin was getting married in June, and some friends were having a joint pre wedding trip to Amsterdam.
With the very happy thought of living in the beautiful, centrally located home on my return, I headed for London in early may, with an itinerary that took me via Amsterdam, Paris, and Toronto to the wedding in Michigan.
I landed in London just before the coronation, and spent a few weeks there. I was still working, but the time difference with the states was so much better than India’s. I lived in a flat overlooking a park, and every morning I woke up to the sight of green trees and grass and sunlight and blue sky. It was ❤️.
In London, life formed a routine. I’d wake up, do yoga, and go off to one of the many museums on my list. I’d explore for a few hours, and by lunchtime, it was morning in Texas. I’d do my morning meetings from the museum cafeterias, and afterwards either work from there till close or on light days carried on exploring.
Towards the end of the trip I stayed in a room on the 3rd floor of a house. Light poured from the big windows, and I felt extremely physically removed from the world, four flight of stairs away. Most mornings there I slept in, my phone on another floor, and just looked at the light and the clouds and shadows the lace curtains cast on the bed and on my skin.
I stayed up in that room for hours, so quiet, so removed. I felt like Rapunzel in her tower, and wondered why anyone would possibly want some man to come and take away her solitude.
I allowed my mind to get so bored there, so deliciously, obliviously, comprehensively bored. I loved it. I picked up a book called Light for Visual Artists around that time.
I was really sad about leaving London :( There were lots of friends there, and I was happy, and comfortable, and felt safe and taken care of. I really didn’t want to leave. But I had committed to the Amsterdam trip, so somewhat begrudgingly, I got on the train.
I got to Amsterdam a day before everyone else, and spent the day on my own in a hostel. I honestly did not love it. Bikes were quite hard to rent, the canals were nice but not terribly exciting, and the red light area gave me a very creepy vibe.
Everyone came in the next day though, and things got a lot better. These are my friends from Toronto, people I went to university with and with whom I spent many years of my life.
The bride-to-be had organized the trip, and done so insanely well. She had planned everyday from morning till late at night. We went to the Van Gogh Museum, and I loved it. It was the first time I was going to a museum dedicated to a single artist. You could see how he experimented with color and subjects, how his art progressed through his life. His use of complimentary colors, the switch to brightness, the beauty he created even through his low phases.
Once a few of us, including the groom, got on a cruise boat before everyone else after being assured the boat would wait. But just as they were walking down the gangplank, there was a loud click and the boat unmoored and set off.
We looked at each other in utter disbelief, laughed as we reassured each other we couldn’t be blamed for this, and started filling ourselves with wine and cheese.
The last night we went to a rave in a warehouse in an Amsterdam suburb, with costumes and performance art and bonfires and people in monster outfits. I have never before seen anything like it, and fully expect not to. There were middle aged people in full festival get, and they partied like they had decades of experience.
From Amsterdam I needed to get to Toronto, but flights were absurdly expensive. I eventually found a cheap flight from Paris to New York that gave me another week to hang out in Europe.
I spent that week in Paris by myself, and for the first time truly enjoyed solo travel. I went to a bunch of museums including the Musee’ D’orsay, the Dior exhibit. The L’ouvre, I was sad to discover, was booked out.
Most days I sat in cafes in the neighborhoods the big writers had sat at, and wrote. Montmarte, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse. In the evenings I went to nice bars and speakeasies with my notebook and my iPad, never alone in the company of all the writers and artists who had worked there, their streetscapes still hanging in the museums.
It helped a lot that I had a guide directing me to all the nice places 😊 I loved Paris. I loved my time there. I didn’t know anyone there when I came. I knew no one new when I left. In Paris, it was just me and the city.
Les Mots je ne comprend,
les sons que je ne peux pas faire
les gens que je ne connais pas
la ville à laquelle je ne peux pas échapper
The words I don’t understand,
The sounds I cannot make,
The people I do not know
The city I can’t escape
That’s all for now :)
<3
Devansh
Part 4 here :)