Afternoon dalliance

We picked up “Elections: the Race to the Parliament” board game in a souvenir shop along with some candles and a travel thermos. “New Game Board where you can capture enough States, win the Elections, and become the Pri-Minister of INDIA.” It’s neat to look at, but not much fun with two players. The chance cards are the best part:

Goofy brother masterminds publicity snafu. Move to No Action.

Opponent’s attack ads backfire. Go again!

Make secret deal with the governor. Win a state with no primary elections.

Tournament Cricket Victory leads to surge in polls. Move to the next State space.

Spouse involved in real estate scam. Wait 1 turn.

Your vice-presidential candidate actually makes a sensible speech. Go again.

The 'Hood, The House

Looking out from the cinema, this is the nearest major intersection several blocks from our home. The Big Cinema building isn’t much to look at, its most prominent features being a McDonalds and a KFC. The children you see on the curb are always here, begging. There are a few restaurants, ATMs, and small malls on the corners. Most of the streets leading away are filled with rows of smaller shops: Pharmacies, bottle shops (liquor), hardware stores, sweet shops, etc. You find nearly identical shops in every neighborhood.

Weather

One of my greatest fears about moving to India was the weather, the heat. I don't handle even Pacific Northwest summers all that well. It's been okay so far. I start to sweat pretty quick walking around in the sun, but am mostly comfortable. We'll see how I do as the weather starts to get warmer and more humid approaching summer and the monsoon.

The natives clearly feel it is winter. I see women with bulky knit sweaters on over their saris all the time. And the men wear earmuffs!

Getting the house ready

The company stops paying for the hotel after the 12th. My mission this week is getting the house ready.

Tomorrow I'll hire a car, go to several malls, and finalize appliance purchases with the real estate agent. The list of things to get immediately just so that we can live in the house keeps seeming to get longer. "Electric kettle" - Hm, I may be including more than is absolutely necessary.

I mosey over to the house each day to make sure the painting will be complete before we move in this weekend, measure things, etc. Today they had finished the rooftop terrace. It is very pink.

Cleaning up India's streets?

The streets can be very dirty here. Garbage and tire fires burn right on the sidewalks. People spit and piss and litter wherever outside the gated oases of planned, private development (like Magarpatta City and our housing society). I don't think I've seen a public trash can yet.

Leading up to this move, I started reading the expat blog Diary of a White Indian Housewife. I highly recommend it. Sharrell is an Australian who married an Indian and moved to Mumbai. She also writes the India travel section for about.com.

She recently posted about a group in Bangalore, The Ugly Indian, that is making interesting efforts to beautify the city's streets and curtail further rude behavior. Basically running with the Broken Windows Theory, they have had very good results so far.

Street dogs

As expected there are many, many stray dogs. They are kind of cute for the most part, though I try not to look too closely. They are slim, but my whippet is slimmer. Only dogs with owners pay any kind of attention to me. Nobody pays attention to them either.

Today I had my first unpleasant experience in India. I was walking back toward FotoFast to check out a couple of furniture stores. Along the way there are several car 'dealerships.' Somebody was slowly backing a car into place right in front of me - right onto a sleeping dog's leg. The dog is screaming, trapped. It seems to take an eternity for everybody to figure out what is going on, to drive forward and release him.

Light switches

I have already gotten used to the switches here. In India down is up and up is off. I marveled a little at the number of switches in the hotel, but it is nothing compared to the rows and panels of switches in the house.

Out and about

I've been taking it very easy so far. Only setting myself one serious goal a day.

On Saturday Boaz and I went out to visit the house. We decided on paint colors for the two guest bedrooms and I won the battle to have the roof terrace painted as well. We had lunch at a sit down restaurant in the neighborhood and wandered the minimall where the cinema resides. I managed to stay up until 8pm, but I was wide awake again at about 2am.

Sunday we went to one of the very western style malls. Like many things in India it seems, it was under construction. There was one great home store in particular. We've settled on some low, modern patio furniture from there. The food court was a new experience. You go around to order food, they give you a coupon or tell you how much, then you go to a cashier for play money and back to the food stall. So far as I can tell, all Indian Chinese food sauces are made with tomato paste.

In the afternoon I managed to make a massage appointment. It succeeded in relieving the tension in my back and shoulders from the plane ride, but also left me a little bruised. I did not opt to prepay Rps 10,000 for a 30% on future services.

We spent Sunday evening with Boaz's coworker Zeev and his family in their lovely home here in Magarpatta city. The hotel and Boaz's work are both in Magarpatta city, so we were able to walk. Here and in our society in Kalyani Nagar it is very comfortable to walk around. Greenery is well tended, streets are clean, not too many people or tons of traffic.

Last night I made it to midnight and woke up naturally at 8am! This is going well.

For today I was on my own. I needed to get a bunch of passport photos for getting a cell phone, registering with the FRRO, for leasing documents, etc. You need passport photos for everything here. Boaz warned me that it was not a pleasant walk to Foto-Fast, but said that I could Google it and walk there. I didn't find crossing the big streets too harrowing. I did have a hard time knowing what constituted a street in the eyes of Google and if I had gone too far, not far enough, teleported to a whole new city? In the end I only made one wrong turn and quickly realized my mistake, still feeling uncertain the whole way.

Then I grabbed a rickshaw and met our real estate agent and handyman at the house to get the painting underway. Both there and on the return trip I seemed to have more success pronouncing Indian placenames to the drivers. I'm afraid I did not do very well in getting a good price for the paint though. With the real estate agent, handyman, additional painter dude and paint shop attendant all chattering away in swirls of Hindi, negotiating discounts for me (or so they wrote on the receipt, from inflated prices perhaps), insisting on exact colors and brands - I let myself hang back a little more than I should have.

Next on to the real estate agent's appliance store. I resolved to be savvier this time. I asked about prices for all of the items we need, compared different models. I will take some time on this and furniture shopping to look at various stores and bargain some more.

Of course I am stared at whatever I do and much more so alone than accompanied by Boaz. Honking is more or less constant on the roads here, but I'm pretty sure some of the men on bikes were honking and moving their lips at me. I am more comfortable in pants than even a long skirt at this point. Scarves are a godsend. They give me the flexibility to wear sleeveless tops and cover up as much or as little as I feel comfortable throughout my day. I only brought one shawl though and it is better suited to Pacific Northwest autumns. It is still pretty early. I may go shopping for some scarves too before the day is out.

Now back to Magarpatta city. First stop the wine shop!

First day in Pune!

It was terribly early and dark when I arrived. Very little traffic and hard to see much of the city in our short drive. I may be desensitized from all the conditioned, recycled air on the planes, but my very first impression is that this Indian city smells a lot better than I expected.

After settling in a bit at the hotel, we are going to make our way to the new house. Boaz wants to repaint ASAP, so I need to see it in person. I was hoping to walk there; the best way I've found to get a feel for a new place, but it doesn't seem super practical here.

My next mission is to find a massage, but it is a holiday. Hopefully I will at least manage to stay up until a reasonable bedtime and nip this jetlag business in the bud.

Happy new year!

Here is the view from our hotel terrace:

Retrospective travel checklist

1. Get super frustrated that you cannot drag and drop new TV to your iphone. Have some deja vu - you've been through this before. When you finished this task three weeks ago in anticipation of this very trip.
   
2. Conjure a blizzard at your first destination, which delays your flight 2 hours for what was to be a 2.5 hours layover. This a great way to add drama to your trip and a potential workout. You may have worked up a sweat in the first few hours of a 30 hour journey, but you will enjoy the free booze all that much more.
3. Develop a severe addiction to chapstick. Tip: Bras make a great pocket for such small items in a pinch.
4. Drop heavily dressed salad all over yourself at the first meal.
   
5. Don't play any of the games you thought would be good for the plane.
6. Stay hydrated!
7. Go to the bathroom on the plane, if only to not sit for 9+ hours straight. It is okay. Everybody will understand. Warning: International flight bathrooms are not any better than domestic.
8. Revel in having no rowmates. Prerequisite: Item 2. Conjure a blizzard.
   
9. Curse not bringing a gentler reading light. Like the one in your checked baggage.
10. Bringing 3 or 4 excellent (and pretty serious) books about your destination provides the weary traveler with another rare opportunity for exercise. Be sure to bring at least one lighter volume for actual reading.
11. Realize you've totally overlooked Indian poetry in your new collection. What is wrong with you?
    
12. Ask for two tiny glasses of wine, fearing they will not come by again for like ever. Sheepishly have your first glass topped off when they return in 10 minutes.
13. Confuse "Local time at destination" with expected arrival - panic. Realize no self respecting German airline would use nonmilitary time, so that can't possibly be when you land.
14. Learn to chair dance.
15. Remind yourself that science is awesome and you are more likely to be killed by a donkey than in a commercial airplane crash and have another tiny glass of wine.
16. Countdown in increasingly small intervals the time left to touchdown. Tip: This is made more difficult by reading, which does not conveniently demarcate the passage of time like TV and movies.
17. Brush your teeth between each flight.
18. Change into warm fuzzy socks and pack away stinky shoes before last flight, swapping one embarrassment for another.
19. Take two sleeping pills in the first place or admit defeat; your body is pretty damn sure it is 11am and you should be awake. Special thanks to Greg for providing the sleeping pills!
    
20. Pack your carry on as though it is all you are taking for a short trip because your checked bags cannot run as fast as you in a blizzard.
    
21. Barely manage to contain short bursts of sheer excitement.

View from the plane in Denver: