Puri beach

The beach in Puri was a dessert sort of a destination I had in mind. Clearly realizing that the beach would have nothing to do with a typical concept of a beach people would have outside Indian I was still fairly excited about seeing some sea, walking on the sand and indulging seafood.

Due to my small temple crawl I made it to the beach right before the sunset. The embankment was stuffed with hotels, holidaying Indian families (Kolkatians in particular tend to come here), state emporiums, restaurants and food stalls. The beach itself was crowded with people just lazing around, walking, bravely playing with the waves or safely watching the brave ones; vendors who offer a camel ride, sweets and snacks, statues of Lord Jagannath again, pearls, shells, and tea cooked right on the sand - none of those minding the intense-pink disk of the sun sinking in the horizontal layers of the clouds in the distance.

While waiting for my tea I engaged in the conversation with a girl seating nearby. She invited me to join her. This is how I met these guys from Bhubaneswar who altogether work as software engineers in Infosys. They come to Puri every now and then to chill. Looking at them playing with the waves I recalled the merry bunch from Hyderabad with whom we actually did the same in Vizag in February - just driving around, having ice-cream and lassi, getting soaked wet while playing with the waves, loading in the cars, shifting the drivers, singing and dancing, while driving along the beach - so young, so so careless, so powerful, so full of thirst for life.

I parted ways with the bunch this time though to check out some machi-walas - fishermen selling fish on the shore... While looking for some I came across something I had never seen in my life before - a night market at the beach with the small stalls lit up by neons: selling all sorts of pearls (good quality, mam) jewelery, shells of any shape and size, some cheap textiles...and so on to cater to multiple interests of the holidaying people. Still keeping my seafood plan on I could not help checking out the market and ended up with some this time real (easy to tell, they are just heavy) pearls. Right after I found my machi-walas and got to eat expensive and disappointing deep fried prawns which were followed by a dirt cheap yam fish... Check out this victorious face of mine... ya come and live with aloo parathas and see for yourself shortly after.. Textiles shopping at the emporiums where I went wild again and some milk sweets Orissa is good at made it so complete that as saturated with pleasures as ever I was getting back to my hotel in Bhubaneswar...