Sylvia's Journal

I had wanted to join Sita and Axel to their Paris conference, a meeting that would have been of great interest to me, but I waited too long and the cost of a ticket jumped from 900 to 3.500 dollars. Out of curiosity I was looking for the cost of a ticket to Mumbai, which was half the price. I am learning these days that waiting for last minute price reductions is old school – this doesn’t happen any longer: prices go up to astronomic heights starting about a week before liftoff (and I wasn’t willing to buy a cheaper ticket that required traveling to Paris via Istanbul or Dubai).

I decided to take a trust fall and buy the Mumbai ticket in the hope that we can dislodge the stuck proposal I made with my Indian team to the the government of Uttar Pradesh. Since my team mates live near Mumbai I decided to fly there and meet them for the first time in the flesh, contract or no contract.

No sooner had I sent my itinerary to them that they told me that one of their clients was looking for someone like Sita to help with an event. Would I be interested in joining the team?  Of course I would!

And so, on December 6 I will take off for an Indian adventure I cannot even imagine quite yet. It cannot fail because I finally get to meet my Indian team mates – I’ll stay at their house and then we scheme from there. Whether we will make it to Lucknow is at this point not guaranteed. Our client there is hard to pin down on dates. If we get to see her and put some more oomph into our proposal, it would be the cherry on the cake.

But that is not all. There is this fairly recent ritual of the new year’s dinner with my siblings and their partners at one of their homes, in Holland. My brother got very ill, earlier this month. He spent over a week in the hospital where it was touch and go. He is now home, still ill but hopefully on the mend. The annual New Year’s dinner is planned for December 28 at his house. How could we not be there? This time I did not wait and clicked on the ‘purchase’ button for two tickets to Amsterdam at the end of the month. We will spend the transition to 2020 in Holland.

South Africa wasn’t the last trip of this year after all. Friday evening, I will leave for India and then right after Christmas Axel and I are off to Holland.