Confessions Of A Temporary Shopaholic!

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I do not like to shop.

I have made it quite clear in a few of my earlier posts. I do live in a shoppers’ paradise, though! This country has more malls than railways stations (Hah! Gotcha! Actually, Kuwait has no railway network).

Every other day, I can see a mall coming up in some neighborhood (three years, and I am still exploring neighborhoods in a country whose inhabited area is probably about the same size as Goa). The existing malls keep mutating in to larger versions of themselves… spreading like a plague over the area… branching like the tentacles of an octopus (I am looking at you, The Avenues Mall!)

For all the atrocious, air conditioned architecture that these malls are, they do provide a respite from heat during the unbearable summer days… a cool place to hang out and maybe fill your tummy with cuisines (read… fast food) from all over the world.

Coming back to the whole point of the post… am shocked at myself about the way I have spent money over the last few weeks. Given that I was upset and still am going through a roller-coaster phase where the car has a few wheels missing and the track has gaping gaps in it… I should be able to pardon myself for this expensive soul-soothing. But, what turned scary for me was the way I shopped. Normally, I’d walk in to a shop and I would know exactly what I want to buy … this is majorly because the kind of shops I walk in to are electronic stores and the occasional shoe shop… and I go there when I am perfectly settled on what I need to buy (ok… the part of knowing what to buy in a shoe-shop isn’t carved on rock truth). Shoe & bag shops, at times, do make the ‘typical’ woman in me take over. Oh…we all have our quirks!

What’s wrong with the way I have been shopping the last few days? Everything!  Absolutely everything has been wrong… I enter a designer store or even Debenhams and I see a dress and I grab it… then I see another dress and I grab it too… and when my arm can act as a hanger for no more dresses, I take them all in to the fitting room and try them on… do a little pirouette in front of the mirror and now comes the shocking part… I buy ALL of them! Hello, girl!!… have you ever heard about price tags? Do you even have enough money in your account to pay for all that? (Psst… I have been lucky; I did not have to turn back embarrassed from the counter… Thank you, MasterCard).

Phew… where did the time go…when I used to buy two outfits an year? The smart, calculating (read… maha kanjoos) girl has turned in to a short-term shopaholic (I sincerely hope this isn’t a long term relationship… designer labels and me).

I would soon be packing up and leaving for Bombay, and I am gonna have to hire a ship to carry my stuff (dresses, shoes & bags) home… Thank goodness, Bombay has a port! I have already ordered for cartons (pronounced ‘cartoons’ here… and salons are spelt ‘saloons’… Sheesh, can you believe that!!! Ufff! I digress). When the carto(o)ns are here... I have to weigh my stuff in batches and pack them all in along with a precious cargo of my books (which I believe, deserve air travel) and set them sail on a ship to Bombay… hope a 100 kilos would not raise too many eyebrows! :D

Of late,… I do feel like a character from a Sophie Kinsella novel… in more ways than one… more on that later…