Another day ends.......

Another day ends, and the evening descends which will be followed by night, made long because again I will be talking to myself or trying to kill time with a blunt knife. Everyday as evening comes, there are some fundamental questions that suddenly wake up in my mind, which always demands to be answered and most of the time I fail to do so. These questions are very simple, for example, what is the plan for the evening? Where are we eating? What are we eating? What will we be doing after reaching the hotel? It seems that there is someone else inside me who asks me all these questions and when I fail to answer them, he gets annoyed like a kid on a train journey, who never gets satisfied by the answer to his question of “When will we reach there?”. Why were these questions not relevant earlier? Or Why this “insider”, never asked me all these earlier? Reason is simple; we both always knew the answers.
It was a fairly routine life, with every need taken care of, but then it all changed when I (or We) reached Europe. Suddenly “what about the dinner?” became the most difficult question to answer. Well I have tried to satisfy this “insider” in many ways, but it always keeps on asking me the same questions everyday. I try to amuse it in all the possible manners, sometimes by just roaming around aimlessly in the city, ending up in a restaurant in search of something vegetarian. Then I thought, let’s try a new strategy and I introduced him to the concept of cooking. Voila! It worked, but my happiness was short-lived.

After getting the answer of the most fundamental question of dinner, and also having a plan for the evening in place (cooking it, of course!), he seemed to be satisfied and remained in the good mood. I was not forced to long walks now, although occasional trips to city centre couldn’t be avoided just to change the mood. But then, it all started to fall apart. Cooking dinner ourselves meant that we will be confined to the room most of the time in the evening, and hence not have much to do apart from surfing the net, watching TV (and trying to learn Swedish from subtitles) or reading a book, all of which seem very fair activities if you have a social life in place on most of the days in the month, but the “insider” came to know of my strategy and immediately retaliated. Now, suddenly the food started tasting monotonous, strange and on some occasions bad. Like a whining child, every day while coming back to hotel, he will keep on telling me, “let’s do something different today”, “let’s go out and try something new today” and at times I gave in also, but then idea of spending almost 20 Euros on something which you can call vegetarian, but can hardly call a decent meal doesn’t find acceptance with me. Not that I am a miser or have anything against eating out, but I am firm believer in value for money, which I was not getting.

Now, the rains have started, so everyday after coming to hotel room, I tell him that it’s raining hence better to spend the evening inside then to go out and wander aimlessly. Now, I think he also has understood that I will not take him anywhere and he has to remain imprisoned inside me, coming out at times in the form random thoughts and giving me another way to spend the lonely evenings under the illusion of doing something productive and useful in the form of putting these thoughts on paper. “Happy writing” it says to me!!