The last couple of days before I flew out of Auckland were very emotional and hectic. I was feeling very nostalgic and melancholic. I would not be able to play squash and cricket as much anymore! There was also the small matter of living away from my family for the first time and missing all the great friends :-). The farewell officially started off when I went to 'Shilpa's Birthday' at La Porchetta. It would have helped if I knew that it was in the Parnell one and not the one in downtown lol. Somehow I manged to get there (around 25 mins late as usual) to see the biggest gathering of my Kiwiplan buddies waiting for me! It was a true surprise; I had no idea that it was coming! Thanks again guys for organising the surprise farewell party and for the awesome headphones! I use them everyday!
After some days Asheesh was in town for the Russell Peters jig and I got to say bye to him and Husain then. The taxi picture was taken that day! By the way, all thanks to Rob for the pictures in this post :-) We had lunch at Nandos and then went to Asheesh's house to watch Husain's wedding video. We also managed to fit in a game of foosball!
My last day at work was a very eventful day. They had a farewell presentation during the monthly lunch which was very nice. I got woolen gloves and thermals which I am sure I will need in a month or so when it starts snowing here! I said goodbye to everyone at work and left at around 6:30pm. Then I got my last takeaway from Punjabhi Dhaba. Thejas and me always got takeaway from there every Friday. I got a drop from Sanjev that day because I had already sold my car. So I said goodbye to Sanjev and told him not to break TSS :-). Then Thejas and me had our last Friday Punjabi Dhaba takeaway dinner. After that I dropped Thejas to the busstop and part two of that day started at 9pm (!) when we went to Sunil's house for his birthday dinner.
The dinner at Sunil's place was great (thanks to Sunil's Mom :-)). A bunch of us got together there and had a good time. Then we all decided to leave because it was getting late (everyone was going to come to the airport the next day). When we were about to leave, we got the crazy idea of me going downtown one last time! So we called Sunil and headed out to downtown. We finally ended up at a coffee place in downtown which is open 24 hours and chatted for hours and hours about almost everything! It was great, there were flashbacks from engineering, philosophical discussions about the meaning of life and the list goes on and on! We finally decided to leave at 4am!
So I got home at 5am and like always I had left things to be done at the last moment! By the time I finished up all those things it was already 10am. Thejas came home at around 8am and we had some of the Punjabi Dhaba stuff from the previous night for breakfast! Rob, Cara, Sunil, Prasanthan, Anand and Vinod arrived at 10am to take me to the airport. So we loaded the suitcases into the cars and headed to the airport. Asheesh and Sanja called while we were on the way to the airport. Once we got there I got into the long queue for checking in. I had 30kgs in my suitcase and was worried whether they would accept it because the maximum allowed was 25kgs! Finally we got to the counter and as feared, the lady asked me to reduce it to 25kgs! So I removed my long snow jacket, sandals and woolen blanket to get it down to 25kgs and finally managed to finish the check in. I managed to stuff the sandals into my hand baggage and decided to carry the snow jacket with me, but I had to leave my favorite blanket behind! Now that I think about it, I should have carried the blanket and left the snow jacket behind because I have another snow jacket anyway.
After checking in, we went upstairs and had some coffee/juice/snacks and also took the photos that are shown below. Then it was time for me to go :-( I very sadly said my goodbyes and then went in. After getting in, I could still see everyone because they were standing at the higher level, so I waved them goodbye till I could no longer see them and then went in to my gate. I reached my gate exaclty on time because almost everyone had already gone in. So I hurriedly got in then the next phase of the journey started! Auckland to KL. It was mostly eventless, I watched a couple of moives and played some chess! That is it for this post. I will post some pictures of my university in the next few posts and then fill in the rest of the things that have been happening in the posts following those. So watch out for those posts :-)
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