The early hours:
Despite having slept at stupid o'clock, I was up at about half nine. This is when the heat had become a hindrance to my movement. I found myself wide awake mentally, but unable to move away from under the fan. That's when I wrote-up my first blog entry & caught up with e-mails, facebook messages, tweets & suchlike. Okay, I'll admit, I'm just trying to make myself sound supremely organised, truth is I probably let quite a few messages slip between the cracks without even realising. ;) When you manage your inboxes by practically having an iPhone embedded in your hand 24x7, shifting to checking once every few hours when in a wi-fi zone is a tad overwhelming.

Anyway, shifting from under the fan for over a few minutes was like walking into a sauna. Quite the predicament. As I sat around, a number of thoughts were running through my head.. I'll share 'some' ;)
- is what the rest of my trip would be like? spending my days racing between fans & air conditioned places until dawn & then coming out to play at night like The Batman?!
- still kicking myself for booking a flight on a Friday. I'd seen London Dreams on Thursday in London. That's 1 of the 2 releases. Aladin had been out for at least 36 hours & I hadn't seen it yet. Shameful. This said, to my surprise, I have yet to meet somebody who has that sense of duty towards releases.
- Aaaargh, need cash, so many people I need to get back to, meets to organise, so many things to do.. go-go-go-go gadget!

The afternoon:
Like one of those kids who keep testing the water temperature of a swimming pool immersing themselves a little more with each test, I eventually shifted out to non-fan territory. The temperature was tolerable. Okay, maybe I got pushed into the pool somwhat. It was past noon & my babysitter, whose place I'm staying at was headed to the dentist in Navi Mumbai (which is a couple of hours drive away), so I figured I'd get on with what I had to do too.

My agenda for the day was clear:
1st priority, acquire funds via an SRK Bank ATM,
2. acquire local sim card (ideally with data),
3. go see Aladin,
4. do that socialising thing .. provided time allows.

My babysitter was kind enough to organise an Airtel Prepaid simcard on the way to the cinema, a spare key to the flat & some Dhokla for brunch. So we got a Rickshaw to Inorbit Mall (near Malad) via these pit stops & then parted ways.

It was a relatively smooth ride, with the exception of one small collision. Our driver smashed the back lights off another rickshaw when trying to maneuver. The incident was quite amusing. Both drivers stepped out of their vehicles, had a bit of a stare-off for a minutes, hand gesturing away & then just decided to carry on.

I'd been informed by the seller that the sim card should be active within the hour, so by the time I was done with the movie, I could get hold of the people I wanted to meet & so on.. wait hold up, I forgot to acquire funds from the SRK Bank ATM.

Luckily I'm at a mall, so they do have ATM machines, but they didn't have an SRK Bank one in particular. At this point I was unaware if much like in the UK, you can use any cashpoint to withdraw money. So I withdrew a small amount of cash from my NRE account. I didn't want to use the UK account in case I did get charged then it's possible I'd get charged twice as much sue to currency conversion too. I've yet to know whether I was changed but at that point in time, it was a necessity, if I didn't acquire funds I wouldn't even have money for a cab anywhere, the film, etc, etc..

I saw Aladin at the 15:15 show. During Intermission I got me a fruit juice smoothie, I was dubious that it was blended with ice & that the ice would be from water that wasn't filtered, but I caved. It looked good, so I thought I'd risk it. The juice wasn't as good as it looked. Mweh. Wasn't expecting much from the film yet was disappointed, but still, at least I had seen it now.

The evening:
3 of the 4 things were checked off my list & it was only around 18:00, time to get hold of some people I thought. So, I tried calling Mr. A. The call failed. Well that's rubbish. Tried calling C*, same message, tried calling their customer services, eventually got info from them that it can take upto 24 hours to activate. Baah .. This sucked.

I had a coffee at Barista, got some change & then figured out how to use the local payphones. I called Mr. A who was quite enthusiastic, tried arranging to meet, but I was rather unsure about where I was, what I was doing, etc, etc so it wasn't quite happening. I decided to go for the safer option & waited for my babysitter to return & share her plans, there were a number of people coming round to the flat in the evening & it'd be a fun & frolics driven evening. I rescheduled meeting Mr. A to Saturday lunchtime, with an easy going evening ahead. In good time, the tweople arrived staggered in numbers, 6 or so by about 3am. We ordered in take-away. Much merry-making & conversation was had overnight, the conversations were quite random, reminded me a little of my lunches with Adam at work, one of the girls pointed out that I have good looking feet. :) At around 05:30, a few of us went to see the sunrise on the terrace of the building. I took my camera along too. Most my snaps turned out crap, too blurred. Eventually, I slept at around 7am (for 3-4 hours).