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 […]
Here’s today’s BBC weather forecast for Bangalore: …and it’s been almost exactly the same since the beginning of March. We’re well into Summer now, and it’s HOT! Today was around 35 degrees, with no wind and humidity around 12%. Baking, dry heat… and everyone tells me that Bangalore is a pleasant climate compared to most of India, so I guess I should think myself lucky! (Yes, I’m obsessing about the weather again. I was fantasising about walking barefoot on lush […]
OK so my last post was titled “A place in the sun” and I ended by talking about the Monsoon. I might’ve known that would bring the rain… It’s 9pm, pitch black, and it’s bouncing down just now — a proper tropical downpour. Apart from a few drops once in January, this is the first time it’s rained since I arrived over 2 months ago. Not only is it throwing it down, but the electricity went off around 7.30 so […]
So the lease on the new apartment is signed, and I have keys! Unfortunately since it’s unfurnished — or what they call here “semi-furnished” (?) — I can’t move in properly until the bed and mattress that I bought this weekend have been delivered. Hopefully within a day or two. After 2 months of living in a hotel room, I am more than ready to get a place of my own! Especially since the hotel is next to a building […]
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 […]
There was a state-wide Bandh in Karnataka today — a kind of protest, curfew and general strike, which meant that shops, restaurants and pretty much everywhere was closed all day. My fellow lecturers and I had planned to go and see the degree show at Srishti, but that was closed too. So we ended up whiling away the day at a swanky hotel, eating a long slow buffet lunch out on the terrace. It was pretty full, presumably because it […]
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 […]
