For those of you who have been wondering, as Neuro evidently was, if I’m having a good time, the answer is a definitive yes! I’m really enjoying it here. I’m falling in love with India, I’m getting more work done than I ever have at home, C&I are getting to spend a lot more time together, …, all in all it’s going really well. Sorry if that’s not coming across in my blog entries
C gave a talk last night at the local Linux Users Group. It was a very enjoyable evening. We had dinner with two of the members afterwards, and discussed formal specification and program visualisation. Scintillating. No, really.
I went to the orphanage this morning. Me and another first-timer ended up teaching a group of (I guess) four to six year olds. Thankfully someone had donated some alphabet and numbering charts, which made it a lot easier. Although, the picture for ‘x’ was ‘Xmas Tree’. I just sort of brushed over that one.
They got very excited when I brought out the camera. They all wanted their photo taken. The group shots were the most difficult to take. The whole group kept moving towards me as I moved back. It took a lot of persuading to get them to stay put. As soon as I’d taken the last photo they surged towards me to see, each saying “madam, madam” to get my attention so I’d show it to them.
Here’s a couple of the photos:
I’ll leave it at that for tonight, but I’ll be posting again soon. Drop me an email, and let me know how you’re doing.
Tg
ps I’ve fixed the link to the short video I posted a couple of days ago. It’s just a street scene, taken from a moving car, but I hope it gives you a bit of a sense of the atmosphere here. There’s only one car-horn in it, which is very few, even for 15 seconds
I’ve realised tonight that I find Aerosmith’s image sort of cuddly, and familiar, which I suppose couldn’t be much further from what they were going for. Must be all the time I spent watching MTV when it was still good.
I’m watching VH1’s “then and now” while C sets up the wireless lan in our apartment. Or rather, while he reads the whole manual for the wireless router before turning it on. C, I love you, but you’re a big nerd.
We’re going to Bangalore for a couple of days, probably next week some time. It’s work, so C’s trip is definitely on The Company, and mine probably is. Then in a couple of weeks we’ll be going to Ajanta Caves with some other ex-pats for a weekend. It happens to be on our anniversary weekend, but we’re going to take off together the following weekend (which is a long weekend here). C said to leave it to him, so I’m really looking forward to that So we’ll be doing quite a lot in the way of travelling in coming weeks.
Some more India facts:
Our washing is done by dhobi wallahs. They come every day and collect the dirty washing. They take it and quite literally beat the dirt out of it (I believe there’s some detergent and water involved somewhere). There have already been a couple of button-casualties. Then they press it, and bring it back when they come to collect the next batch.
The air is full of dragon flies. Any enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The view from Gamma (the building where we eat dinner) looks like a scene from Mad Max.
Is that the time? G’night folks Tg
Wait, I almost forgot to give you guys this link which I found hilarious.
I discovered this last night when I almost choked on some water. I spat the whole mouthful on the floor (except what was in my lungs), and I realised how much I love marble floors. If you’re going to spit on the floor, marble really is the ideal.
C has been invited to give a talk at the local linux users group, so he’s sitting here making a slideshow while I blog.
I’ve put a few more photos on flickr. This is my favourite. I also took a short video of the street (it’s 4.5Mb) as I was being driven home from a brief shopping trip.
It’s been raining like mad for a couple of days now. The kind of rain that floods the backroads to Maynooth. It doesn’t mix well with the extensive road works that are going on. I guess they were banking on the monsoon behaving itself and finishing when it was supposed to.
Actually, the extra-long monsoon this year is a bit of a blessing. Apparently they’d used up all their ground water in the drought of the last few years.
Speaking of the road works, they’re causing a bit of a scandal. The MCH (the organisation responsible for the road-widening project) has cut down about 400 trees as part of the project. There are lots of people up-in-arms about it. It turns out that the MCH did ask permission to cut down the trees, but they asked the wrong civil servant. And the wrong civil servant gave his permission. So the MCH went ahead and cut down the trees. What they should have done is inform the forestry commission, who should have inspected every single tree to see if there was any way it could be saved (by transplanting, or using as a feature on the road).
While looking for links for the “save the rocks” society, I’ve just discovered that Hyderabad has a theme park called Snow World. We are so there!
We are so going to bed. It may be 5 past 7 in Ireland, but it’s half past bedtime here.
I began this article sitting in “coffee day”, where the slogan is “A lot can happen over coffee”, where the wireless access is free, and where I was greeted from another table with “White. Hey, white! White person.” I didn’t go over to find out what exactly they wanted.
I had to go back to the apartment when the broadband guy called to say he’d be there in ten minutes, we were expecting him the following Tuesday. But at least now I have (albeit it flakey) access from the apartment. C is going to get me a wireless router today.
I’m actually starting to settle in. I must admit that in the first couple of days there seemed to be a small possibility that I wouldn’t, ever. The shopping trip was a lot of fun, with a certain amount of guilt attached. We really are stinking rich here. We went to buy some clothes, and the driver brought us to a place that does Armani suits (among others). Everything there is distinctly affordable by our standards. I bought a saree (I’ll post a photo once I’ve got the technique down), and a salwar suit. C got some new clothes too, but he hasn’t ventured for anything traditional yet. I also got a sewing machine. It’s not the height of modernity, but it is Priti.
Once I’ve finished this entry, I’m going to go back and put in links in the previous one, so if you’ve already read it, it might be worth going back for a look. They’ll mostly be photos, which you can see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meaigs/ anyway.
We went for brunch again yesterday, and we waited for the mariachi band to come back. I forgot to mention them in my last entry. They play every week at the Taj Krishna. As it turns out, they’re Christians. The first clue was when they played “one day at a time, sweet Jesus”. The clincher was when C saw the “Jesus never fails” sticker on one of their guitars. Apparently they have a brand new cheesy costume every week.
C and I made a bit of a faux-pas on Saturday. We had planned to go out for lunch, but it was the last (and biggest) day of the Ganesh-dunking festival, so we thought we’d check if there was any lunch first. Big mistake! There wasn’t lunch prepared, but the staff spotted us, and there was no polite way for us to extricate ourselves. So we had macarone and cheese for lunch. Mmmm.
Anyway, I should put this away and get some work done. Hopefully my blogging will become a little bit more frequent now that I have access from home.
Have a good week, and remember kids, Be HIP. Honour IP.
Monday morning: 10:30 here, 5am in Ireland. Yesterday was a strange, but very good, day. We arrived into Hyderabad airport at about 2am local time. It has some of the dirtiest curtains we’ve ever seen. We waited quite some time, with diminishing hope, for the bag containing all our clothes and all our anti-malarials. Talk about putting all your eggs in one rucksack! Thankfully, it finally arrived, and we headed on through customs.
We were met at the airport by Ismail. He’s in charge of organising the cars for the ex-pats from The Company. When we followed him outside, I was shocked by the heat. I wondered what it would be like during the day, considering how hot it is at night. but it turns out to be pleasantly warm, with a nice breeze.
The scent of the air is also striking. The air of the whole city seems suffused with all the pleasant smells you might associate with India: incence and spices and sweet flowers. I don’t know if it’s like that all year round though; we arrived in the middle of the 7-day-long Ganesh-dunking festival. Idols of the hindu god Ganesh – tiny and massive – are submerged in the artificial lake in the centre of Hyderabad in the midst of lots of celebration.
Once Ismail had handed C his new mobile phone, our driver took us to our “guest-house” – the apartment we’ll be living in until April. The drive there was surreal. Road markings are practically non-existant. Traffic travelling in opposite directions is generally separated by a sort of kerb – a 5 inch tall barrier – I can’t imagine the bedlam if it weren’t. Cars just duck around one-another at any available opportunity. Wing-mirrors seem to be a bit of a luxury. Most drivers don’t even bother looking around much, they rely on other drivers beeping. Some auto-rickshaws and trucks even have “please honk your horn” painted on the back.
From what I can gather there’s a kind of car-hierarchy. Auto-rickshaws and motorbikes give way to anything, buses give way to nothing, in between those two your ranking seems to be based on the value of your car. If you think roundabouts in Ireland are crazy, you should see how they work here. You go on if there’s nothing blocking your way (by which I mean: in the five-inche space in front of you). There are many signs on the road saying “obey traffic rules”, but I’m not sure they’re working.
The sights and sounds on that first car-trip were a bit overwhelming. It’s hard to describe my first impression of the city. It’s not that it’s filthy, but it has that sort of inescapable griminess of large, hot, over-populated city. The buildings aren’t boarded up, but they look old. We could tell we were getting close to our apartment when the architecture started getting bigger, more modern, using more glass. Our jaws dropped as we passed “Cyber tower“, the first of the office blocks built in “Hitec city”. Then we saw the weird arches that say “Hitex“. We still don’t know what that is.
Needless to say, we were a little shell-shocked when we arrived at the apartment. Knowing that something is going to be shocking doesn’t stop it from being shocking, though you sort of expect it to. That drive was a strange introduction to the opulence here. We have an en-suite room (with the largest bed I’ve ever slept in), an en-suite guest room, a large kitchen (fully stocked with snacks and drinks) and a tv area. Though, the apartment does have that slightly shoddy finish that apartments thrown up in big numbers have. The TV has 80 channels of Hindi pop music and indecipherable ads. Settling in may take some time.
The drivers are available downstairs whenever we want to go anyplace. Wherever you go, they wait outside in the car until you’re finished, and then drive you home. Food is cooked in one of the other apartments by that apartment’s _cooking staff_. Every Sunday the ex-pats have brunch in a luxury hotel — at The Company’s expense. Some of the guys volunteer every Sunday morning before brunch at a local orphanage – reading to the children – so C and I will hopefully be joining them from now on.
C is taking tomorrow off, and we’re going to try and get some shopping done. Not for any necessities, you understand, it wouldn’t do for us to have to bother with such trivialities, for furnishings and sarees and so on.
Well, I should probably try to get some work done, we don’t have internet access yet, so I can’t even post this.
Your correspondant in India, Tg
I made my blog considerably more beautiful while watching “Sleepless in Seattle”. Both worthwhile activities in my book.
So, I’m going to India with the hubby, soon. Damn soon. We’ll be going to Hyderabad, for six months. I’m really excited, and quite scared. The hubby asked what Indians eat for breakfast, so I asked my Indian friend. He more or less said “rice”. I guess I should have known.
While I’m there I’ll make sure to keep you up-to-date with the various rice-delicacies I feast on, as well as how my cricket lessons are going.
I sure hope I don’t melt in the heat.
