29th January, 2008

It's been five years! Really? Have we really come this far? Seems incredible!

Yes, it's been five years since we got married. These five years have been absolutely fantastic for us. Our love has only grown stronger over these 5 years and we feel blessed to be with each other. we celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary by taking a 4 day trip to Shimla.

Shimla was fun and verrrry cold. Last time we had gone to Shimla, we missed catching the snow by 2-3 days. But this time, we were lucky to be there in the snow. shimla is one of our favorite places to holiday in, especially in winters. I especially recommend the goodies at the "City Point" on the lower mall. They have chocolate pastries like no other place anywhere. The coffee and the rolls are great too.

We stayed for two days at the Brightland Hotel, and it turned out to be a nightmare. We had booked the hotel on the basis of our past 'very good' experience there. But this time we found out that they had completely abandoned the old building and the new one was all commerce. We wanted a valley view room. And what we got could not give us a view of anything, as there was no window!!!!!! And we could not do much as we had already paid the whole amount in advance when we made the booking.

So we stayed there for two days, ordered all our meals and chai coffee etc from the room service, and stomped out on day 3. We checked into this nice 5-star hotel called "The Leela Regency" and we had a great room there, plus lots of other benefits. Not to say that the move was easy or quick. We had to literally fight with the Brightland folks to let us leave. They wanted us to cough up more money. But we were in no mood to do that. So there was an ugly battle of words and finally a scene was created that was driving away other people. The proprieter had to finally apologise for bad service (thandi chai, no heating, constant noise outside room, cold food etc)

But apart from that, Shimla was great.