As I wrote 2 months ago, I had to move to a new apartment — or “shift” — recently. Actually it’s been 4 weeks since I moved, but work has been unbelievably hectic since the start of 2012 and I’m only just catching up with stuff. I had been really dreading finding a new place, since my first experience of flat-hunting in Bangalore wasn’t good. So many apartments here seem to be a pile of junk, or really dirty, or […]
One of the things I’ve realised about expat life is that people regularly come and go. But two of the people who’ve recently left our college, and Bangalore itself, will be particularly missed. Sonia and Nick were the only other British lecturers in the college, and not only did they help me to settle into life in Bangalore, but they also provided much-needed cultural reference-points, and even got most of my rubbish jokes which would have been lost on everyone […]
It’s exactly a year since I arrived in India. Almost impossible to believe that 12 months can fly by so quickly.
Happy Solstice! Today is the Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere — as good a time as any to reflect on the last half year. Last Friday it was 6 months since I came out to India. Obviously, daily life is now quite different in many ways. I now live in a big flat with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and 3 balconies. (But still practically zero furniture!) More to the point, I have space for a garden outside which is […]
Learning a new language gives me a special buzz that’s hard to describe… somehow it feels like a different kind of learning to most other things. There’s a lot of memorising (alphabet and vocabulary), systematic understanding (grammar) and some skill in pronunciation and comprehension. To me it feels similar to learning a musical instrument in many ways. But you get to try it out on random strangers and communicate with people who otherwise might be out of your reach. […]
At the college where I’m currently teaching we have 4 terms a year, with officially 1 week inbetween. Some of my colleagues went off for a week or 10 days in Hawai’i or Thailand or North India, and they’ve come back fresh-faced, relaxed and obviously well-rested. Being new to the job I haven’t accrued much holiday entitlement yet and was thinking to save it up for later in the year, so I headed to Pondicherry for 3 days, and didn’t […]
Amazingly, I’ve been in Bangalore for 7 weeks now. Time is flying by, and we’re already half way through the teaching term at college. It’s tempting to keep counting days and weeks, in a Robinson Crusoe kind of way, but it’s more interesting to reflect on the on-going, qualitative, psyschological changes that I’ve noticed. After about a month, I was on my way to work and suddenly realised that things felt “normal”. There’s something I once read about it taking […]
I bought a kurta recently, and yesterday I took it to a tailor’s shop to be altered. Two guys were working at treadle sewing machines in their bare feet. There was only just room in the tiny shop for them to fit in, but there were racks of clothes hanging up on the back wall. Obviously, business is good. I paid my Rs 60 and told them I’d come back the next day. When I went back to collect the […]
OK… I’m about a week and a half in now, and I think the initial shock and fatigue have mostly worn off. All the things I’d been expecting to find seem to be true, and then some… the noisy and chaotic traffic, the warmth of the people, the in-your-face poverty, the amazing food, the colours and the smells and the intensity. Actually the traffic is way worse than I’d expected — but more on this later. Bit of a cliché […]
So I arrived safe and sound in Bangalore 4 days ago. My first time in India. Since then so much has passed through my brain (not to mention my nose and lungs) that I’ve felt incapable of blogging about any of it. It’s pretty overwhelming. In the meantime, I’ve added some fairly long comments to my flickr pics as I upload them… I need to work out a system for doing this and blogging at the same time. I just […]
