So I recently reached the End of India. I have just spent the first two weeks of December travelling around Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the South, mostly by train, and taking in Ooty, Madurai and Kochi, with a stop in the middle at Kanyakumari (pictured), the Southern-most point in India. The end of the line. And then five days ago I left India. It was four years ago today that I arrived in Bangalore at the start of that adventure, eventually […]
So somehow this blog seems to have fallen off my radar this year. For most of it I’ve been incredibly busy at work, including studying for my PGCHE as well as leading a re-write of our undergraduate curriculum. It feels like I had barely any time to do anything outside of work until September. I’ve been planning a trip in the first half of December, so I’ve also been looking back at where I’ve already been over the last 4 years. […]
So I’ve hardly posted anything here since the start of the year… partly due to being unbelievably busy at work for the last 3-4 months, and when you spend most of your day writing documentation, going home and writing more stuff doesn’t really appeal. Plus I’ve been in India for 3½ years now, and I think I’ve probably reached the point where I’ve already said most of the things I wanted to say about the country, and reported most of my observations about how […]
Yet another anniversary… today is one year since I arrived in Delhi. The last 3 weeks have seen cold, grey, damp, foggy weather, and even some rain on Friday, the first for a couple of months. (It was even cold rain—a first for me in India.) But thankfully the weather was great today, with clear blue skies and enough sun to get the temperature up to about 17C. Meanwhile at night it’s still down to around 7-8 degrees, and I’ve […]
THREE YEARS IN INDIA! Today, 17 December, is three years to the day since I arrived in Bangalore with 2 suitcases, and no idea of what to expect from living and working in India. Because I had never been here before. Hard to believe it’s 3 years already–2013 has gone by so quickly. I’m loving my job at Pearl Academy, which is just the right balance of challenging and rewarding. And I have a great flat in South Delhi, with […]
At the risk of being repetitive, I’m going to bang on about the weather again. Because it’s now very, very hot. Today it was 45 degrees celsius when I took the photo above, and reportedly it reached 46 in Delhi at some point. Slightly trumping the previous hottest temperature I had ever experienced, which was 44 in Athens (Greece) and Brindisi (Italy) when back-packing around Europe in the late 80’s. My memory of Athens was that elderly people were dropping […]
I’ve been living in Delhi for 3 months now, and everything seems to have become “normal” quite quickly, at least compared with when I first arrived in India over 2 years ago. Some things have normalised remarkably fast; some of them less so. An example of the former would be the daily commute to and from work on the metro, which has changed from: being an empowering novelty—Independence! Efficient, clean, reliable public transport at last! (Are you listening, […]
A week ago I was bitten by a street dog, right outside my flat. I was walking to the shops about 8pm, along a badly-lit road, and it jumped out from behind a parked car, snarling, and bit me on the ankle. I was more surprised than anything else. It’s a dog that I see every day—street dogs are everywhere in my neighbourhood—and I didn’t even know it was there until it had nipped me. I checked out the […]
So here we are then. I’m now a Dilliwala—a resident of Delhi. The past 3 weeks have been a bit hectic and complicated, given that I started a new job while living in a hotel, and meanwhile had to find a new apartment within 14 days and register the address at the Foreigners Registration Office. But I managed it, and this time it’s an order of magnitude easier than when I first arrived in India 2 years ago, when I […]
Right then—I’m back in India! The 4 weeks back home in the UK flew by incredibly quickly, and sadly I spent the last 12 days down with a nasty virus and doing very little apart from coughing, sleeping and experimenting with various flu remedies. Many of my grand plans for visiting friends fell by the wayside. I left the UK just as the first major snow-fall of the winter was arriving. 7 hours later I was in Dubai looking […]
