Typical!

*Self-indulgent post warning* The whole idea behind this post is to ramble about a rather “typical” trip to a sea-side that I had the fortune to go to with a busload of retired & middle-aged people (mostly women) of my own kind aka South East Asians. Here are some tidbits. All very typical.

Its 8.20 AM. We were supposed to leave by 8 sharp. Of the 54 people supposed to go, there’s no sign of 40 of them. Which is typical Asian. The rest 14 are busy whining about how they could’ve slept an extra hour, how they forgot their shawl on the way out in the hurry, how their two year old son hadn’t even used the loo and so on. Even more typical.

8.30 AM: Damn it.. even the coach isn’t here. A call to the driver brings forth the typical dumb thing that you last expect to happen. He was told to get to the departure point by 9 o’clock by his co-ordinator, who himself was specifically told a hundred times to send the coach down by 8.00. I can’t understand how hard is it for someone whose sole job is to write the correct numbers on a rota sheet of a driver to get it right! Bastard.

8.40 AM: I continue reading my copy of Metro. Front page. Owen Wilson and Michael Douglas posing on the last night’s premiere of You, Me and Dupree. Its a crap film. Not wasting my hard-earned 10 quid on this. Page turn. Rain all day today. And we are on a trip to the beach. Ha… so typical! Health news–Too much stress shrinks the human brain. Page turn. Sketches of the main suspects involved in the foiled trans-atlantic aircraft blasts. All Muslims. Typical. And 9 of them living within a mile radius of where I am. For East London, very typical.

8.45 AM: An Englishman driving away in his Ford Transit on the opposite road-side cranes his neck out to shout “You crazy fucking immigrants” at us (by “us” I don’t mean anyone in particular but everyone in general). Given the crowd I am standing in, I just shrug it off as typical!

1.00 PM: Arrived in Bournemouth (the seaside and all). The weather’s crazy. The sky’s darkened so bad, its like the Gods have conspired to end the year-long British drought all in today. For once, the weather bitch was right. It looks like its gonna pour. Typical!

1.30 PM: Started walking from the town-centre for the amusement park. The big advertisement on the penultimate lamp-post cruelly informs us “Funderland–Great rides for all ages from 11 Aug-8 Sep. Closed on Wednesdays.” Hehe.. did I mention “typical”?

1.45 PM: Walking down the common park in the city centre. A professional English orchestra atop a stage giving a free, live, quality performance while a drunk Englishman swears at them from the park below continuously. The crowd looks on as two policemen jump in from nowhere and hurriedly take him away. A few yards ahead, two more wardens try to wake up a passed-out-piss-drunk man. Not much further down, there are three wardens are questioning a group of twentysomethings about their loitering around a children’s magic-learning tent. The befuddled look on the guys’ faces (the ones being loudly questioned)… typical.

2.00 PM: Its still not started to rain, even though the clouds are all swelled up. Great! Just spotted a monstrous gas balloon swinging 150 feet above the ground! Turns out to be a 15 minute ride (the balloon’s perfectly and securely tethered to the ground) for £10. Definitely going on it but my partner wants to use the loo before going on it, just in case.

2.15 PM: Having done away with the necessary leaks, we finally start walking towards the balloon ride. And the pelting starts. Can you get more typical than this? The ride’s closed, so we decide to do some shopping and have some lunch to break the “typical” jinx of the day.

3.15 PM: After an hour or so of window-shopping, I hit upon just the right pair of shoes. Cool yet comfortable. Funky yet understated. Just one glitch–an outrageous price tag of £82. Can’t buy. Typical!

3.45 PM: We decide on having lunch at the big M. I order a toasted deli sandwich. Am starving. It takes them 10 minutes to have it ready. Typical.

4.15 PM: Finally decided to walk alongside the beach, now that we have come all the way. Its not raining. The balloon ride is closed for the day though. Just midway, we meet some of the other fellow passengers. Apparently, the one hour speedboat ride into the sea is a blast! Can’t wait to go!

4.40 PM: The closing time to buy tickets for the last speedboat ride is 4.30 pm. I glance at my watch and wonder… how many more typicals for a single day?!?

5.00 PM: Disappointed, we are walking alongside the beach. A small motorised trolley takes us to the mall road just a few feet above. We decide to make the best of this one atleast. Inside the trolley, we manage to click 3 pictures in the 50 second ride-time. 2 of them, come out to be too dark, and hence-useless. Deleted them instantly. In the 3rd one my eyes are frozen in that half-blink. Hummpphh… Typical!

5.45 PM: We start walking down the deserted road and decide on building a sand-castle before we say our final goodbye to the place. Halfway through chiselling a turret out, it starts to pour again. We suddenly realise how drenched we are going to be by the time we reach the other side of the atleast 20-feet long sandy beach. And drenched we get. Down to our skin. Despite my partner having an umbrella in her bag all through. Typical!

8.45 PM: Most of the 3 hour long journey back, me and my partner (who, I forgot to mention, is a project manager in the senior’s club, where I work part-time) spend racking our brains in the crossword and clockword puzzles in Metro. We are certain that today’s celebrity in clockword is Simon Hoggart, but just can’t wait to find if we’ve got it right for the first time.

9.50 PM: Its quite late. The office is in a school campus which has precisely 4 iron gates and 2 electronically secured doorways. We unlock each one of them one by one just to get into the office, log onto our machine, and cross-check the answers from metro.co.uk. We reach the right page. Hell! The answers are updated only till Monday 21st August. As they say–perfectly typical.

12.40 AM: Yea, that was my day–perfectly typical. It would be perfectly typical if this post makes you think I have lost it or I don’t make sense. Its just when I think of something different to write, this unforeseen bomb of headache plus hypersomnia plus tiredness drops on me from nowhere. TYPICAL!

PS: Some great man in some great land in some philosophical mood in some gone-by era rambled before he died that there’s beauty everywhere. Its only a matter of waking up and seeing the world you inhabit in a different light. You know, one of those Robert Frosts or his ilk, who wrote poetry inspired from sitting on their arse all day in a room in New Hamphire countryside with broad windows overlooking meadows and the bliss of nature et al. Anyways, coming back to the point, yours truly would like to amend the aforementioned saying or a line in poetry or a snippet of prose or whatever that is, and substitute beauty with typicality.