The first: enjoy dinner at an Indian restaurant in East London with the same lovely British expats I stumbled into on my first morning in the Delhi guesthouse.
The second: Be appointed chief price negotiator, and successfully haggle the waiter into a ten percent higher discount and a few extra bottles of wine. Best customer, indeed.
The third: Go to Brighton.
We had planned for weeks to go to Stonehenge. If by 'planned' I mean, 'talked vaguely about' so that Saturday night found us googling 'trips to Stonehenge' at 2 am. We walked to the nearest hotel the next day and asked if there were any tours going, but of course in tourist high season they were all booked. Oh well. I'm told it's smaller than you expect, anyway.
Our Plan B was to hop on a train head to the coast, to the Atlantic City of the English channel.
At the end of the evening, my sunburnt face glowing over a plate of vegetarian tapas, I confessed I could hardly imagine any of the past two years of living abroad going half so well had I not been placed in such good company in our guesthouse in Delhi. I had arrived thinking I'd be traveling alone. Then I thought I'd disappear back into my country, never to see them again. Instead I find myself toasting the health of these same friends twelve months and two lifetimes away.
Isn't it nice to know that, sometimes, Plan B can be the better option anyway.
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