Dream On, Shall We?: AWAY FROM HOME

This was the first time that I was going to staying away from home. I had to relocate for my first job from Bangalore to Hyderabad in July last week last year. Seems like just yesterday, it was initially fultoo exciting and fun when I was staying in the company guest house for almost 3 weeks with my other outstation colleagues, who had joined the company along with me. But, when I started looking out for places to stay I realized the complexity of the situation. Thank God! I met my roomate in the flight to Hyderabad. She was from my own college but we had never met in the three years of our degree. We went out apartment hunting from the next day we reached Hyd. And then as the wise men would say 'welcome to reality!' it dawned on us. The brokers were so lazy and hopeless. they would say, 'if we find something we will let u know, but do not rely on us. You carry on your own hunt.' We went to the most pathetic houses that one can not even imagine being livable. Finally, after a lot of persitence and persiverence, we found 'our' house. Our parents did offer to come over and help us look for places and settle down. But we were adamant on doing it all by ourselves, otherwise parents would have come here and went their frustration (of not finding a house and being away form their jobs for so long) on us! Thats what happened with another colleague, whose folks came over to get her settled. It was a nightmare for her to handle her parents and hunt for houses. Finally, we found a 'good' house. It is a duplex. The owner, an old couple stay downstairs and we the 'devils' live above. I remeber our first shopping expedition to Big Bazaar. We 3 house mates went shopping and picked up like 8-10 xtra big bags of all the house hold stuffs. From dustbins, buckets to jhadoo, door mats, containers to store grocery etc. Later that night, after our domestic shoppings spree and loading it all in an auto we decided to head to one of our colleagues place to pick up our second hand 24 inches television that he was selling for 3K! Can you ever beat that. So with out even getting our first pay we swiped our parents (only use in case of emergency) ATM cards to pick up the TV from his house, his house was in such a god-forsaken place (almost out of the city) at 10 o' clock in the night!! And we were all new to the city. We finally located his place and collected the TV. The damn huge TV, plus 10 bags of shopping at Big Bazaar, plus three of us (all well built) in the back of that puny auto, in the inclined roads of Banjara Hills, galvanting around at 11 pm in the night, with none of us knowing the way back to our new home!! A sensible person would have freaked out, but not us, we were laughing our heart out!! This is a day-to-day common incident at our place. Moral of the story-all the four of us apartment mates are crazy as crazy can ever be!!