I was at Manipal this weekend, attending TAPMI Homecoming 2006.  It was an amazing experience.  Guru had booked the tickets for the trip, and on Friday (29th) I left office at 5 PM and headed to Chennai Central.  Boarded Mangalore Mail, which left at 8:15 PM from there and reached Mangalore at 12:30 PM the next day.  We stayed at Adamaru Mutt in Udupi.

A brief recounting of experiences from there on follows:

• Lunch at Woodlands, Udupi was great, very nice to taste the Idly Fry again!
• We reached TAPMI by afternoon, and it was awesome to walk around the campus.
• Met Profs Lionel Arahna, Mohan Kumar, and Saji Mathew, and then the current PGP Chairman, Prof R C Natarajan.  It was great to talk to them after a long time.
• Next visit was to the TAPMI 8th Block Hostel, and the Mess.  Surprised to see the new Night Canteen that had opened there!
• Walked to MIT 9th and 10th Block, where we used to have coffee on some nights.
• Then visited Little Chef, where I had a taste of the famous burger (see the drawing here) after 1.5 years!  Also paid a visit to the shop next to Little Chef and the VCD/DVD library there.
• Thanks to some of the current batch students, Guru and myself got to have a look at our hostel rooms (205 was his and 206 was mine).  The hostel rooms are now all Wi-fi enabled now, and I'm told 70% of the students have laptops...  I noticed that the current occupant of 206 had a MacBook.
• After this, paid a visit to Music World and bought the VCD of Karam.
• Spent some time at KMC Greens.
• Had dinner at Andhra Mess and then headed back to Udupi.  Watched Karam, pretty nice movie.
• The next day, we visited Sri Krishna Temple in the morning.  Met a couple of batchmates and juniors there.
• Had a great breakfast at Woodlands — the bread-butter-jam was great (you'd think something with just three ingredients would be easy to make, but it still surprises me how so many other places can get every single one of them wrong!).
• Watched Escape from New York on the laptop.
• Went to TAPMI again in the afternoon, spent a few hours there, and met quite a few people from different batches.  Had "double black coffee" at the canteen.
• By 5 PM it was time to say goodbye — and considering the place, and the people, this was not at all an easy thing to do.  I wonder when I will get to visit Manipal again, I certainly hope it is sometime soon!

We reached Mangalore station by 7:30 PM, and West Coast Express started by 9:15 PM.  The train reached Chennai at 3:30 PM today (very long journey, but I managed to get part of my Movies List updated during that time — actually, a bunch of the 2006 entries), and now I'm back at the house.

Homecoming was certainly an unforgettable experience — considering the (overly) hectic time I've been having at work recently, this was certainly a much-needed dose of mental peace.  Well, I have a few more hours of "freedom" to enjoy before I have to be back at work tomorrow.