Day 7: The Morning After

If your heart has ever been broken, you know what the morning after feels like. For an instant after you first wake up, you feel gloomy without quite knowing why. Then it all comes flooding back.

We wandered out into the living room, bleary-eyed, not quite sure what to do with ourselves. Unni and Veena were packing, getting ready to leave for their afternoon flight. The atmosphere was like a tournament after the final, a party after the last guest had left. Sigh.

Well, our hopes may have been destroyed but our vanity was still intact. Our first order of business was to go out and buy what seemed like every brand of newspaper sold in Port of Spain. Why? To see if our pictures were splashed across the pages, of course! It appears we still managed to underestimate our newsworthiness. Some of us made a splash far beyond the island. Veena was BBC's face of distraught India!

Saying goodbye to Unni and Veena left our sadly depleted party feeling even more glum so we decided to drown our sorrows in food. We still hadn't managed to visit the much-recommended Hot Shoppe so we made our way there. It was worth the wait. We had dhalpuri (parathas stuffed with daal), a crumbly paratha called buss-up-shut (which, if research on Google is to be believed, originates from busted-up shirt), and the delicious mango curry which we'd been craving since we first tried it at the cricket grounds.

Then there was only one more thing left to do. Inevitably, we made our way back to the Hilton. The guys were somewhat reluctant so we agreed to "just one drink, and then we'll leave." The Indian cricketers were of course nowhere to be seen (chicken). Fortunately we saw our good old friend OJ wandering about the hallways so we were able to maintain our perfect record of celebrity sightings. I have to say he looked more like a rapper than a cricket star, gold chain, baseball hat and all, but who's complaining?

And so ends the story of seven days in T&T. Goodbye T&T, hello...Michigan??!! That's right, folks. The next stop for this bunch is the Rothbury Festival in Rothbury, MI. If you'd never heard of it before, join the club. Perhaps my next blog will be titled, "The Rothbury Festival Seen Through the Eyes of an Outsider Who Sticks Out Like a Sore Thumb."

Bye, bye!