goa

Before the final month of my year in India and exams and papers started to fill everyone’s free moments I decided to relentlessly bug my friends until they bought their plane tickets to join me in Goa for a week. (Needless to say there were thanks all around afterwards for the gentle prompting.) Goa is an area of India that is famous for it’s Portugese influence and its amazing beaches. Most people who come to India make time for at least a short repast here.

Since we had a group of seven people all with different schedules, we all arranged our travel separately and ended up arriving and departing at various intervals, but all staying for about a week. Owen decided to take the week to join us before finally returning to the U.S. after his 4month stay in Nepal. So, Owen, Eiad, and I flew down together from Delhi and met Lene, Jurgen, Katha, and Liv on Tuesday.

Luckily we were able to contact them by text messaging on our cell phones and finally found them on the southern end of Palomlem Beach at "Dylan Coco Beach Huts." All along the beach front are these one-room huts of woven mats and palm leaf roofs on stilts facing the ocean. Our group occupied 3 adjacent beach front huts so we could talk to each other from our hammocks on the poarches.

As time tends to do when you are truly enjoying life the week went by all to fast. Each day we’d sleep until we were good and ready to wake up (for me about 8am out of habit.) Then we’d slowly congregate at the corner table in the eating area and tuck our feet into the sand as we woke up with our first cup of coffee or go for a quick dip in the ocean before breakfast. The late mornings and early afternoon seemed to disappear in a haze of swimming, reading, and laying in the sun and before you knew it, it would be lunch time.

There was one restaurant a 2 minute walk down the beach that had tandoori pizzas, a good greek salad, or a blue cheese, bacon, and apple salad that was to die for. If we were up for a walk we’d work our way down to the market and go to the "Blue Planet," one of the health food stores for vegetarian tofu or pumpkin burgers with hummus and beet and carrot salads.

Since we didn’t have lunch most days till around 3pm by the time we finished our leisurely meal it was time for our 5pm boogie-boarding. From 5-7pm we could enjoy the low tide waves and the sunset.. Sampson, the guy at the rental shop, would usually let us keep them for an hour and a half, not the hour we rented them for. The seven of us having an uproariously good time was good publicity for his shop.

On the days we were feeling particularly productive we could go for jogs in the morning, played frisbee, do some yoga on the poarch, play football with the local kids in the sand, Owen and I tried Kayaking one day, and we all took our turns going for long walks to explore the rock cliffs at the ends of the beach. The rocks cliffs enclosed the visible world to our little stretch of beach making us really feel like we were living in our own paradise for the week.

The evenings were always reserved for a dinner together and one of the many beachfront restaurants where we could hear the waves crash as we ate our grilled fish. The biggest decision to make most nights was whether we wanted Red Snapper, shark, Kingfish, or Pomfret. (The snapper was usually the best.) After a leisurely dinner with conversations some nights and peaceful quiet on others, we’d all walk back along the beach to our huts and sit in the hammocks for awhile before settling-in under our little fans in our huts for the night.

One of the special nights for me on this trip was my 24^th birthday on Friday. Being with such good company in such a beautiful place was more than I could as for as a celebration, but a good meal never hurts. So, we went to our favorite seafood restaurant where the management was starting to appreciate us for our loyal and large consumption and had a seafood feast with strawberry daiquiris and coconut fenny (the local spirit.) I had simply planned on ordering a banana pancake for desert as a celebratory touch, but when I came back from the bathroom everyone was sitting at the table wearing conical birthday hats and there was a little chocolate cake in front of my chair. It was a complete surprise as I hadn’t seen a bakery anywhere. They even found two candles in the shape of a 2 and a 4. Owen had been late to dinner I found out because he was trying to sneak the cake in through the back of the restaurant and got lost, walking all the way to the end of the beach. So, the cake, along with "Happy Birthday" sung in German, Norwegian, Arabic, Swedish, and English, and a gift certificate for a massage from the group completed a wonderful birthday.

The trip was all around a celebration of friends, food, sun, and relaxation. We were all happy we’d take the time before the fast-approaching end of the year to do this together. Now we are all back in Delhi, and it’s 100+ degree heat trying to finish papers, exams, and travel arrangements for the rest of the month. Goa was a dream, I just wish we could have stayed asleep longer:)