Chp 749. Pre-Wedding Party

As the saying goes, there are three stages of rings in any marriage - Engagement ring, Wedding ring and… Suffering. :D

My dear cousin BTi had just gone through the first phase and I was at home in Aizawl just in time for their Pre-Wedding party!

Family time.

Our family is a lot bigger than the above, but this party was hosted by the groom's side, and so it was just a handful of us from the bride's side at the party. I've been close friends with Joe and Esther, the groom's sister, for a long time, and in fact the two of us were responsible for the two of them getting married :D :P

It was that night one year ago during my short vacation back home that the magic happened. Of course, BTi and Eoma had known each other from before, but on that "fateful" night, I met up with Joe and Esther at Aijal Club, which I blogged about here.

Esther brought her brother Eoma along, and I went as BTi's chaperone.

Eoma was surprised! :D (it's a family inside joke)

However, it was my turn to be surprised when I got the news of their wedding plans earlier this year :)

Surprised as in, not shocking surprised, because I always knew they were perfect for each other. I was surprised because I was so damn good at this cupid game :D

I received the Pre-Wedding party invitation two weeks ago.

Immediately I was like, yo let's do it! I packed my bags and wheeeee… sun-kissed between the Heavens and Earth, on my long flight home from Pune to Kolkata. What a glorious way to wake up.

At Kolkata airport, I waited for my next flight while I updated the group about my location.

Of course, one cannot simply pass by without the traditional mug of chilled Ultra at the airport KF lounge. :P

Thadaaa… finally reached home sweet home.

A very quick facial and makeover at our neighbour's beauty salon because mom told me to find a girlfriend at the party :P

Aaaaand I was ready for the partaaay!

Joe and Esther had booked the rooftop of Hotel Floria, and the place was beautiful!

The dress code for the night was semi-formal for men and black dress for the ladies. I decided to go "Peaky Blinders" ishtyle :D

As Thomas Shelby of Peaky Blinders once said, "Everyone's a whore, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves" (my all-time favourite television series quote) that night I was filled with a lot of confidence to finally meet new people and exchange phone numbers, but alas, those never happened eventually :(

But the party was so much fun. Invited guests queued up to take a picture with the beautiful betrothed couple.

The Goa wedding crowd :)

Oh how I miss our wild days back there [part 1] [part 2]. I think it was during those parties at Goa that Esther realized BTi would be the perfect sister-in-law for her :D

The ceremonial dance of the bride-to-be and groom-to-be…

…which was quickly gate-crashed by the sisters of the bride and groom :D

We were all happy happy :)

A wonderful live music performance by this band called "This Chord". They were bloody awesome!

A few more pics of the crowd taken with my phone. Click on all photos to enlarge to a new tab.

As you can see from above and below, there was a good crowd from ICFAI too, as Eoma is a faculty there along with my sister, Effie Fanai, u Mahumi etc. As the night got older and bolder, their faculty instinct kicked in and they started lecturing to the people sitting in their tables :D Just kidding :P

It was nice meeting Chris Sailo again too [third from right below], and we talked about our UPSC coaching class days and bitched a lot about our common friend and my Delhi "roomie" Maduha :D

Chris came all the way from his table, pulled me to his table, introduced me to his wife, and then he just left me hanging next to their table. I felt like an unobtrusive lamp post so I slowly headed back to my corner :D

Serious conversation with Joe, Don and Zorema. To be frank though, I didn't know most of the people at the party so it was great to stick around with these guys at the corner.

The awesome hostess Esther, who was running around everywhere managing the event. In the middle of all that, she went around with my phone taking photos of each table (all the pics above) for my blog update, since I was too shy to do it.

Esther promised me that she'll introduce me to some of the single ladies at the party, but unfortunately, she was Miss busy-bee throughout the night and so that could not take place, which is understandable because anybody in her shoes would go through the same thing.

Becky arrived quite late, sans Lalrina as he was out of town. She along with Don's wife Puii are Esther's BFFs.

The irritating Dindini :) It was great to finally meet her hubby too, and we caught up a lot on our crazy Delhi days back when I was staying at Zuala's place briefly because I had to apply for my Chilean Visa at the Embassy in Delhi.

Our brother Zuala was truly missed, may he rest in peace, and the two of us talked a lot about him. Those crazy nights of laughter and revelry with Zuala, Janet, Dindini and Fonzie will forever be engraved in my memory. ♥

BTi and Nancy's friends too had a great time at the party.

Let's not forget the awesome people from "Local Beer".

They kept supplying the much thirsty crowd with good ol Local craft beer. I messaged my friend and neighbour Zomawii, owner of "Local", who was supposed to come to the venue too, but she had to cancel in the last minute as her hubby was still busy at work. It must be a very tough life running a brewery, especially now that there is an uncertain future ahead because of the likely scenario of Mizoram returning to the dark Medieval days of Prohibition era again :(

I finally got to meet the one and only Goosh Vangchhia :)

It was also great to meet my senior from Montfort U Zarmawia, and we had a great time catching up on school days and we also had a serious discussion about some of the upcoming business opportunities in and around Mizoram…

Mature discussion? More like drunken dishkashawn! :D

The food was really great too, though to be honest, at the state in which most of us were in that night, I don't think we're qualified to judge the quality of the food :D

My sister and I left towards the end of the party since the next day was our dad's 5th year death anniversary and we had a busy program ahead. The rest of the merry crowd went and continued the party at World Bank Road, or at least that's where they said they were going to go.

All in all, it was a wonderful Pre-Wedding party, and I will be updating my blog soon with the rest of the events regarding the wedding function. So cheers for now, everyone, and thank you Joe and Esther for being such amazing hosts.

Chp 748. Mystery Rooms - LOCKOUT

If you're not aware of what a "Mystery Room" is, it is an extremely fun and challenging puzzle game where you are physically locked in a room with your friends and you have to solve all sort of clues like riddles, ciphers, codes, encryptions etc. which will lead to the next clue and so on until you get out of that room. It's all about team work. Victoria Concordia Crescit :)

Two years ago, my friends and I, all hardcore gaming geeks, went to "Mystery Rooms" here in KP and tried out the "Hurt Locker" package. I blogged about this incident here. It was an extremely fun event and we managed to escape from the room in the very last minute!

Last week, we had some visiting consultants in office from the US and we all decided to participate in a session of "Mystery Rooms" again.

The package we went for this time was "LOCKOUT - The Prison Break Challenge".

You and your friends had been wrongly convicted of a crime you didn't commit and imprisoned for life. As it is National Day, the Jail warden and all the other jailors are out celebrating for an hour. You have exactly one hour to escape from the Jail before they come back!

Ooooh. Such an intriguing plotline indeed.

What made this experience even more fun was because of our two visiting consultants, who are legends in the gaming world. There's Dave Rohrl, who had more than 25 years experience in the gaming industry. Some of you who played "Plants versus Zombies" might know of that "Crazy Dave" character who kept popping up on the screen... that character was based on him!

And then there's Jenna Miller who had worked at leading Gaming companies like EA, Glu, Zynga, TinyCo, Digital Chocolate, Playdom and GarageGames and was recently the lead designer of "Farmville 2".

Now I'm not going to lie. We had a very impressive team line-up, and with my buddies Roshan and Hackr joining us as well, we were sure to crack the case. But unfortunately... we failed. We reached till the very last clue that would have given us the key to escape, but we were unable to solve that in time. :(

To be fair though, we did perform quite well, solving most of the difficult puzzles quickly, but we wasted a lot of time trying to fetch the bloody key to our jail cells that had, unfortunately for us, dropped and bounced too far beyond our reach. Jenna had to improvise and used our Jail mattress to retract the key, which I'm sure wasn't a part of the plan :D

Other than that, I am not going to reveal anything else that we did in the Jail, as it would be a spoiler for those looking forward to try this. Trust me, you won't regret it, do go for this really challenging package.

One thing I'll mention though, I really love how we were made to role-play the part of the game. As soon as the game started, we were told to wear our Prison uniforms and handcuffed. And then the "Jailors" shouted at us and abused us, ordering us to standing in line and look down as we were marched into our cells. We all played our role to perfection. And the game started from there onwards. Great time indeed.

Here is us after we failed to escape.

Still, what mattered was the amount of fun we all had. So in case any of you have never been to a Mystery Room (or sometimes called Escape Rooms), do gather your friends and try to solve the puzzles. Great time pass too.

Cheers for now.