Hello Bolly!

i'm in bollywood! *smiling, color-coordinated dancers jazz-walk into frame*

the city formerly known as bombay has been my temporary home for three days running. while marlon is off doing various business-y things, i've found myself -- hmm, ano nga ba? alone but not lonely. each day has its highs and lows, but oddly even the lows occur to me as highlights.

day 1, tuesday

we land in mumbai after a four-hour flight from india. ever had waves heat pound at glass windows to get to you? walk from plane to immigration at the mumbai airport and you will. stepped outside and had the novel experience of having my jeans "shwup", a sensation akin to vacuum-packing, to my lower legs. verified that the "twenty-nine degrees centigrade" temperature announced by the captain upon touchdown was off by about, oh, just ten degrees.

fell in love (with a resounding ka-blag) with our hotel, the itc maratha sheraton. oh god, this hotel. i want to take everything in our room home with me. there are beautiful indian dupion silk drapes (in my wedding motif colors! let me at 'em!) and delicious aromatherapy toiletries in apple, apricot, basil, parsley and sandalwood. (naka-shook na ako ng isang buong set for my mom.) there's a pillow menu (!) and 100Mbps Internet.

and when you step out of your room, it's just beautiful. it's a light-filled white atrium, with latticed windows that remind me of the alhambra, stretching all the way to the ceiling.

our first lunch in this hotel convinced me that i will have to be rolled back to my family. i love indian food to bits (now making up for all the years that i fiercely resisted it as a child), and this hotel reportedly has some of the best restaurants in mumbai. god help me. ang traje de boda!

bits and bites

marlon and i spent the rest of the day immersed in work, albeit separately -- him at the office, me at the hotel. nawili ako masyado sa bilis ng internet at sa ganda ng kuwarto -- i did not set foot outside the room for the next six hours. pathetic, i know.

after welcoming home my sweaty, dusty, mumbai-encrusted fiance, we set off for a group dinner with the twenty or so p&g global folk who'd flown in for the week. it had all the makings of a great dinner -- first was the superb food that seemed to never stop getting plunked down on my plate.

then there was ridiculously excellent service -- one waiter dashed to my side after i took a bite of fish, murmuring "madam, you have ordered the vegetarian meal. but i just saw you take a bite of the fish. i am sorry for not informing you that it indeed was fish that i put on your plate. are you alright?" my gawd! i bit back the urge to tell him that i was just a vegetarian poseur.

there were extremely interesting people, of which my favorite was dr. colin, scientist-turned-beauty p.r. director. forget chi-chi fakeness and empty smiles -- this guy is a genius on so many levels, without that "i-know-more-than-you" aura, and so much fun to talk to! feeling ko parang tumalino ako pagkatapos ko siyang nakausap. haay idol ko na siya.

discovery channel

what i loved most about dinner was stepping into marlon's world. at one point in the evening, i just stopped and took in everything around me -- being in mumbai, the gorgeous surroundings, the intelligent conversation -- and realized, marlon's part of this. i just sat with that for a while, letting a whole new world open up: a world of him. suddenly, the man who cuddles with me at movies, loves corned beef and comics, and who i regularly "save" when he blanks out on people's names took on a whole new dimension. at that dinner table, on that night, i discovered marlon all over again. that alone was worth coming here for.

back in the room that night, talking to marlon about what i had done for the day and what i had planned for the next, i uncovered something rather prickly about myself.

why i hadn't stepped out at all was not because of the amount of work i had or the comfort of the room.

and why i wasn't at all excited about flinging myself out into mumbai was not, in fact, because of anything about mumbai.

(to be continued)