My very own symbol of a new beginning?

It's funny how things work out sometimes, don't you think?

It was only last Friday (it's really been a week already?) that I reminded you of my previous stay inSlovakia and said how it was going to be very different this time around.

True enough, I wasn't driven around in a nice car all days long. I wasn't taken to do study tours ofhotels, nor was I fed in fancy restaurants. It was the middle of the summer and not the middle of the winter.

And yet, somehow, so many similarities. 

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On Saturday we set off on a 5-6 hour trek around our hotel's area. We come off from the forest by a nice looking restaurant and then continue around the lake to get to where our hotel is. I'm talking very passionately with my friends and suddenly I see Julia look to my right with a longing expression on her face - just next to me, the rain-soaked and snow-frozen me, is a glass wall behind which a couple of people is lying on nice comfy spa beds overlooking the mountains we'd just wandered. 

Suddenly it hits me - I know this place. 

I've been here. 

I've lain on one of these beds.

December 2010. Slovakia FAM trip before Vienna and my flight to Bombay. The complimentary night at the Kempinsky High Tatras Hotel.

There was snow then, there's snow now.  

Woah!

A wave of memories floods me and emotions overtake me. I'm laughing like crazy and feeling the hope, lightness and joy I experienced that night we stayed there. The hope that I was beginning an awsome period of my life, the lightness of being which comes with spending a night at a luxurious 5* hotel, the joy of excitement for all the adventures ahead.

So here I am, almost two years later.

Adventures I did have; no more stays at 5* hotels but in a Goan hut barely holding together and in a tentall over Iceland; an awsome period for sure, though not at all what I might have expected at the time.

The funny thing is, the Tatras Trekking weekend was, in my head, a beginning of a second part of 2012. The better, more exciting and more interesting part. The one with more fulfillment and adventures. Oh, let’s not forget more awesome food.

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Let's see if Kempinsky becomes my very own symbol of new beginnings.

Do you have one of your own?