A Christmas beach vacation

Answers for the question in birthday blog:-

Microscope, ludo bed sheet and giant dice (I admit, that was hard), nintendo switch (the cover but who cares?), book,Jenga and a Qiwi cube.

Moving on.....

A Must-Visit Place!!

Hi reader, ✋✋

Do you like the beach?

Beaches are the best places to go during the summer (except this summer). You can either surf in the huge waves or sunbathe while sucking on a grape popsicle. Beaches also have beautiful shells coming up with every tide. You probably know by now where this is going right? You're right, today's blog is about my Christmas trip to Puri, Odisha. This was a long one (5days stay). I was going to be there with my paternal grandparents and my cousin brother's family (and my parents obviously).

The journey went something like this......

23rd December 2017

We were at the Yeshwanthpur Railway Station (It was a train journey) waiting for our train to arrive at 11:30 p.m. It was a blood moon night. We boarded the train, looked at the view for an hour and went to sleep. It was kind of hard to sleep with the chug-chugging of the train but I stayed up an hour after bed so my brain did give in after some time.

24th December

I woke up at 6:30 a.m as I was sleeping facing the window and the Sun decided to shine right into my eyes😒. I ate breakfast and the rest of my day was mostly uneventful.

25th December (aka Christmas)

We reached Puri at 7:45 a.m. After buying a few snacks, we took a 30 minute taxi ride to our hotel (Hotel Sonar Bangla). We exclusively chose this hotel as most of the hotels spoke Odia, a language we didn't know but our hotel was Bengali, a language we did know (We wanted a place where they spoke English, but that wasn't an option). My cousin was coming that evening (Lucky him, he stays in Kolkata and Kolkata was far nearer than Bangalore to Odisha so he only had to travel 12 hours and not two days😑)

We checked in to our hotel at 8:30 a.m and were welcomed with delicious Christmas breakfast consisting of bread , juice, cornflakes and fresh fruit.

We ate and then went to see the beach. (We had to go right at that time if we don't want any crowds or sunburns) Luckily, the hotel we had chosen was across the road to Swargatham beach. We weren't going to actually get into contact with the sea yet but we were going to look around

 

In the evening, we went to a nearby fair. I tried the shooting balloons in the shooting arena. I popped all of them (I guess I have a hidden talent 😃). By the time we came back my cousin was here and since we hadn't seen each other in a year, we talked in their hotel room (There were eight people so we had to take three rooms). After eating dinner, we walked around the beach and went to sleep (In our rooms not the beach).

 

26th December

I woke up at 8:00 a.m and went to eat breakfast. Today there was the normal breakfast of  luchi and bread (What a disappointment after the Christmas breakfast 😐). And finally we went to the beach! It had beautiful shells and cool sea water (Cool in both ways). We had a lot of fun running into the waves and seeing sand sculptures.

 

After that we took a Camel ride (Though I would be lying if I said I didn't scream for half of the journey)

 

 Then we went to the fair again (Where I beat my cousin to a shooting game 😏). We also got some cotton candy and a kinder-joy (Hey don't laugh, it was my cousin's idea). We came back, spent some time walking around the beach and went to sleep. (In our rooms not the beach)

 

The next two days went by in almost the exact way so unless unless you want it to seem that I copy-pasted the last four paragraphs, let's just fast forward to the last day. Wait a second, I forgot, we went to Konark Sun Temple. The place was nice and all that but it was very hot 🌅. We enjoyed the rest of the day at a bazaar.

 28th December (Last day)

Our train to Bhubaneshwar was at 1:30 p.m and the train to Bangalore was at 8:00 p.m. My cousin couldn't find any train to Kolkata other than one that was at 3:00 a.m so they were already gone (Maybe I was luckier by staying far away 😃). Unfortunately, the check-out time was at 7:00 a.m so we had to wait 5 hours for our train. To kill time we went to the beach and saw some sea urchins (From a safe distance). But while staying at the beach, I had a gut feeling we had forgotten something.

 

 

 After spending 5 hours at the beach, we went for a long drive. It was only at 3:30 p.m that I realized that my 'gut feeling' was justified. The train to Bhubaneshwar had left 2 hours ago! We had to walk all the way to Bhubaneshwar (Just kidding, we took a cab). We reached the the station when a haunting realization came to my mind. We were here at 4:00 p.m but the train was supposed to be here at 8:00 p.m and at 7:50 p.m, just when I was exited about going home, the train got delayed by one hour 😡(Talk about having a bad day). Thankfully we were finally on board the train at 9:00 p.m.

 

We reached Bangalore the next day and got home by 7:00 p.m. Even though we had to eat the same food everyday and we had to wait for six hours for the train on the last day , the Puri trip was awesome 😄

 

See you in the next blog,

 

✋✋