Nine+

Nine

I finally turned nine last week (but save the stereotypical jokes about being on cloud 9 and all that - ever since my dad joined "The Punnery" group on Facebook, we have had an overdose of PJs and  our conversations at home have gotten more "meaningful")

So, as partially captured in this blog, it was quite a journey to 9 years...

     

I had a nice birthday with just the family - we got two cakes ("so I can have my cake and eat it too") and went to see the movie Oz, which was a lot of fun.

Nine is certainly an awkward age (especially to blog) - since I am not a baby or a little kid (or even like my kid sister Anukha who still pretends to be a baby) who  have a wide latitude for what is considered fun and interesting to others. I am mostly in my own world of school, friends and activities and have very little extra time to be interesting.

I have been dabbling in a number of activities (to find my calling, my dad insists but I suspect that it is just an elaborate ploy to keep me occupied while he ensures that no tech / gadget blog remains unread) ("It is a tough job", he said, "but someone has to do it "). Over the last year, I have been doing gymnastics at Twisters (I love it), swimming, skiing, chess, lego robotics and Hindi classes. (As they say, never a dull moment and just in case there are any dull moments, I ensure that I can still throw a nasty tantrum just for old times sake).

We traveled to India last winter and had a memorable trip - I wrote my first travel journal (not voluntarily though - it was part of the homework for missing 1 week of class due to the trip). We went to Chennai first for my dad's college reunion - after I got past the Chennai heat and the spectacle of 40+ year old grownups behaving like college kids or worse - it was a lot of fun. We went to the Guindy snake park and saw more snakes than I could shake a stick at.

We then spent a few days in Vizag with my grandparents. It was a town buzzing with activity and the favorite pastime seems to be shopping as every store we went to was overflowing with shoppers - the entire town must have won a lottery or something. We went to the beach a couple of times - besides the usual beach stuff, we saw cows and goats on the beach itself - not a sight I would normally associate with a beach, but was fun. In Vizag, we also had a large family picnic with more cousins than I could shake a stick at (about 80 cousins, my dad said. I am glad I did not have to remember their names). The picnic was a lot of fun as we got to spend a day in the farm. We also visited Hyderabad to spend time with my maternal grandparents. We visited the Golconda Fort - it was amazing, especially hearing all the stories about the fort from many hundreds of years ago - I only wish people did not litter. We then went to Pune and Mahabaleshwar and had a really awesome time with cousins - India was fun.