June recap - Week in Dallas

The last few weeks have become a blur, like the bright red balloon that was once in your hand, so close to your face, but shrinks into a tiny dot on the horizon once you let it go. So have the first three weeks of June, flown away to merge with the countless days before it although each day was distinct and fun.

Short story – we spent a week in Dallas after bidding farewell to our cool, mellow Seattle days. The brilliant hot sunshine slammed down hard on us as we stepped out of the airport, forcing us to peel off our well-worn jackets. It felt….. just like….. Hyderabad! Yippee! But we still had two weeks before boarding British Airways back to Shamshabad. So Dallas weather gave us a little preview of hot days, flat expanses of cornfield as far as the eye could see and a severe inclination to stay indoors.

Dallas is famous for not having any sights worth seeing. As a former colleague questioned when she heard that we were heading back via Dallas “Have you been to Dallas before? No? That’s why you don’t seem to know that there is nothing to see.” Yes, Dallas is the city where the charismatic president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an event that is marked by a plain brownstone building (this is hearsay, our friend Paresh refused to take us there but instead showed us a similar ordinary building and asked us to assume it was “the memorial”).

We stayed with our ever-smiling and gracious hosts, Priya and Paresh in Plano, Texas. I can honestly claim that I visited Plano (not Dallas) since it took us a week to go through Plano’s central attraction – unending shopping malls. Did I mention “air-conditioned” shopping malls? Aparna was in holiday heaven. Fortunately summer holidays had begun so the kids, Pooja and Vikram were home. Our memories of the curly-haired naughty Vikki-tikki-aloo-tikki (nickname coined by the then 5-year old Aparna) toddler from seven years ago took a beating when we saw the strapping Vikram with his trademark impish smile, flying around on crutches, obviously mastered quickly after a recent fracture in his toe.

We met two other families who had been neighbors in California, all the cute chubby kids were now skinny teenagers oozing attitude. We spent time at an indoor pool on Sunday, had dinner with Ritu and family (Sridhar, Kartik and Malvika) one night, dinner with Krithika and family (Raj, Aditi, Saatvi and the visiting grandparents), browsed bookstores, shoe stores, department stores (you get the general idea). Aparna found a supporter in her demand to get her ears pierced (she already has her earlobes pierced, she wanted a second one). So Pooja and Aparna ended up with additional studs one evening.

Overall, Plano was a place where we totally relaxed, talked, laughed, hung out by the pool in the backyard and basically, chilled (or tried to stay cool in the blistering heat). And soon it was time for us to head to Washington DC (the country’s capital). Stay tuned.