Seeing places anew, as a traveller of means

Did you visit a country as a tourist long ago and ticked it off your bucket list?

- Abhishek Asthana

Visit it again, because now it will be a different country.Not because it has changed or developed, but your new income strata will unlock a different experience at the same destination. It suddenly becomes a different city.

I visited Europe in my 20s, due to a concept invented by package-tour companies called the honeymoon — an extension of the usual punching-above-your weight Olympics called the wedding festivities, where people take high-interest personal loans to feed their relatives three varieties of pasta at a Noida banquet hall. Evidently, I couldn't really afford the Euro trip, but I went with the same irrationality with which we booked a poolside wedding venue to please foofajis (husbands of paternal aunts). Hence, I booked the cheapest possible return-flight tickets and hotel rooms. My partner was luckily from the same school of thought, and thus we kickstarted our hunger games. My post-MBA salary hadn't seen many appraisal winters. So, we had to optimise.

An eight-hour flight later, we landed at the Schiphol International Airport (Amsterdam). As we waited in the serpentine immigration queue, we saw a couple with a baby skip the mile-long line and directly land at an immigration counter.