Horrors horrors!

After losing my lovely lovely Adidas watch, (which I didn’t make a report… DUH~ cuz i lost it in school) I decided not to take any chances with this. I HAD TO MAKE a police report, otherwise, consequences would be grave. Very, very grave indeed. Thus I shall start today’s entry on a rather solemn note, so everybody, do not be shocked at what you’re gonna read alright?

Remember me being molested in Jaipur?? Well… Oh man this is so hard to say… I’ve enough of being leered at by strange men okies!

Hahahhahah nahz relax guys, I’m just pulling your legs. Nothing happened to me lah. Ahmedabad is a pretty safe place *touch wood*.  Were you scared for a moment? Lol. That was pretty nautanki (drama mama) huh? Tee Hee. I’m bored lah that’s why. Anyway I really did go to the police station, but it wasn’t anything dramatic at all like being molested etc etc. Okies, let me start from the top again:

After Jo and I ended class yesterday (can you believe it, class ended a good 15 mins early, which means we could eat lunch earlier! Love teachers who don’t drag class time~), and had lunch, we hitched a ride to ETA Travel to reconfirm our airplane tickets with Malaysian Airlines. The stupid Malaysian Airlines gave us the freaking wrong address though, so we ended up at a wrong travel agency. But the guys there were very nice. They checked up the address of ETA Travel, sent someone with us on our vehicle to direct us, and offered us water. DAMN NICE lah. But I don’t remember the name of the agency so can’t exactly promote their services here. It’s at CG centre though.

So off we went to ETA Travels and there, we reconfirmed our tickets to go back to Singapore on 20th (night)/(reaching) 21st (morning) June 2007. So after we did that, Jo and Ken are rest assured of their tickets to go back. BUT ME… ME with the MIA ticket had to do something about my precarious situation.

Jo told the lady attending to us that one of us (me) lost our tickets and had to have it reissued. So this is the conversation between me and the lady:

Lady: ” Lee Linzy (that’s how she pronounced it) Jasmine, you lost your tickets? So how did you lose it?”

Me: “I threw it away.”

Lady: looks stunned. and just stared at me for awhile.

Ken buried his face in his hands and which i presume by his rather ahem, offending actions, pretended not to know me. Lol. So yeah, I had to go through the whole tedious process of trying to proclaim my innocence at not knowing that it was my golden ticket back to Singapore etc.

Lady: (after regaining composure) So where did you throw it?

Me: Into the dustbin?

Don’t remember how she looked at this pt, but i presume she was abit stunned for a moment again hahah. Guess Malaysian Airlines don’t often have pp who willingly (but unwittingly alright) throw their airplane tickets into the dustbin and remember that darn scene so vividly.

The lady advised ordered me to lodge a police report so that they could blacklist the ticket etc, and then reissue a new one, so off we trotted to the police station. When we went back to the MICA van (which brought us around. So far, we had a 3 min stop so we could buy Baskin Robbins. Jo had a single scoop of Almond Praline smth, I had a double scoop of chocolate monte something and Caramel Nut something and Ken had well, nothing haha. We also stopped at the wrong travel agency, then at the right agency, and now, it’s off to the Police Station. The driver had a rather quizzical look on his face when I showed him the name of our next destination. I mean like 3 foreign students suddenly wanting to go to the Police Station? Sounds sexily dangerous, no? Heheh.)

At the police station, the moment we entered the premise, it was a different feel alright. You know how Singapore’s friendly neighborhood police post has like air conditioners, computers and basically, the works? Well, here it’s an entirely diff story. The building was damn lok kok type, and we turned right to see a door revealing a room with the lights switched off, and a guy sleeping in that room for all and sundry to see. Oops. don’t think it is the right department. So we turned left, and went into another room.

Clearing my voice with much confidence, I boomed, “I’m here to lodge a police FIR (not sure what FIR means,but that’s what the lady at ETA told me to say. Probably means affidavit or something along those lines) The policemen in the room then set to work. 1 of them sat in front of me (Police Sir Inspector aka PSI 2 stars on his rank), 2 on the seat adjacent to me, and one beside me. Then we started with the procedures.

One of the policemen whipped out a fresh piece of plain paper, folded in half, and then in half again such that it became quarters. The dictation began. The PSI dictated, I replied and wrote. He would point to one quarter of the paper, asked me to write my name, my address etc. Everything handwritten. Funky huh. No pre-printed paper as such. And then after I finished doing as he said, the young guy next to me whipped out another fresh piece of paper and started doing the same thing in Gujarati (a local dialect of Hindi). He asked me for my name, and wrote Jasmine in Gujarati. How funky is that? Then he asked me whether I was married, I said no, so he asked me for my dad’s name. Then he wrote, Jasmine d/o (daughter of ) Lee Hong Choon Edward. Hmm… India is still very much a patriarchal society! And the rest of my details which I wrote in english, the guy translated in Gujarati. Even my address like was written in Gujarati by means of phonetics i guess.

Talk about personalized service. How often does one get 4 – 5 policemen attending to oneself, with handwritten pieces of report as a surety of sincerity? What an experience indeed lol. Oh one more exciting piece of news man, the PSI’s gun was laid bare and plain on the table while I was giving my details. If I was more evil, I could have snatched that gun in a moment of mojojojoness and like I dunno, threaten to do harm? GOd it was so dangerous to leave it lying there like that???

I would have whipped out my camera and taken a picture, but really, I had no wish to be locked up in prison here or to have that gun pointed to my head, asking me to kindly put the camera away.

So after lodging my report in the lok kok police station, I was told to report there to collect my FIR (which would be in Gujarati, and which I then have to go to a courthouse to get it converted into english… The police station only issues FIR in gujarati and the travel agency only accepts FIR in english. What a system yeah.. So bloody troublesome lah, darn ticket. If only the print of 21st June was larger dammit.)

Okies so after our day of adventure, we went off to Swati’s (a local vegetarian restaurant) to pig out. Two oven baked, wood-fire thin crust pizzas, 2 local gujarati snacks and more ice-cream in the form of 2 mango ice-creams with real mango pieces in it (lovely, mangos are in season here now and it’a absolutely fantastic), 2 chocolate cinnamon ice-cream (absolutely heaven) and 1 chocolate orange ice-cream (funky funky flavor). Tee Hee. Absolutely great. No time to care about figure lah. 3 more weeks left in Ahmedabad, gotta pig out on all the great food places man…

Hmm classes are also starting to pick up which stinks. Not that we study much but still. And mind you, lest you think I am a bubblehead, I am like topping the cohort here in the subjects I am taking! I’m a genius! I have started to interact with some of the new batch of students and they are really nice and friendly, but they are really eager bunnies too. The first lesson of class that we had with them was at 9 in the morning and by 855 am, everyone was already in the classroom whereas Jonneh and I were still in the canteen, finishing up the last of our breakfast. Like dudes, chill man.

And when Jo and I entered the class at 9.02am, lesson had commenced. What the hell??? When we were with the old batch of PGP students (now promoted to PGP-2), at 9 am, you would still see pp strolling into mess, trying to stuff as much breakfast into their mouths before gg to class, or like pp walking to classrooms with breakfast in hands. Not properly seated and all ready for classes to start.  I reckon though, that given a few months, things would change around here again haha.

Okies class in another half hr… Sighs. Seeyaz all and looks like I’ll be able to make it to Singapore afterall (after one more trip to the police station, one more trip to a court, one more trip to ETA travel agency and a cash penalty of USD $25)

What a tough journey just to get my butt on that plane.

Lotsa Love

Jasmine

ahmedabad, india, Malaysian airlines, missing plane ticket, police station

By projectjasmine

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