Partying and Parting

January 9, 2017

 Here it is the 9^th of January and I wore a sweater to walk at 6:15 and again at 8:15 because it is “cold” here: low of 57 with a high of 81. Our last month is dragging on. We are so ready to move on to what is next. Hard to believe we have been here almost 10 months.

Ron’s work is near completion and he is helping another group with a project but even it is spotty so he is bored at work often.  I fill my time with grocery shopping and preparing meals. I still walk three times a day with Ron (once at 6:15 a.m. and Kamla (at 8:15 and again at 5:00). Sometimes if I don’t sleep well I skip my walk with Ron to grab a few more minutes of sleep. I have been sick for a month and sleep determines how well I am recovering. Currently I have a coughing fit after breakfast and a drizzly nose but that is it. Thank goodness for small gifts.

January 14, 2017

Last night we went to dinner with our neighbors Dev and Priti. We had invited them saying we wanted to take them out as a thank you for their kindness to us.. We were driven in their car by their driver. Dev said he picked a restaurant that was quiet and we said great we will be able to hear each other and we can visit. HA! We arrived to discover a birthday party for 5 year olds. Need I say more? Oh yes I do, in addition they had live music with amplification just in case you couldn’t hear the performance in this smallish hotel restaurant. OY! We all just laughed. And of course had to scream at each other to be heard. Dev INSISTED on paying the bill. He said when they come to the USA we can pay.

This weekend is a HUGE kite flying festival and these folks take it seriously. It is noisy with air horns, blaring music, and yelling. Some fliers use string embedded with glass to cut the string of other kites in an endeavor to be the last flier standing so to speak. Our four year old neighbor has been out to collect kites that have either fallen or gotten tangled in trees and so far has seven to my knowledge.

 

  Around 11:30 this morning Amit, next door, came over to invite us to their terrace to fly kites. Their terrace is much higher than ours as they added a floor to their home. Most homes here have a roof top terrace and as we looked around from their high vantage point we were amazed to see how many people were on their roof terraces flying kites. Parties galore.  Amit was the main flyer with Ron assisting with the reel of string. Any time Amit’s kite string was cut by a competitor he would jump up and down facing them on their roof top and yell congratulations to them.  When he cut someone’s sting he would repeat the jumping and yelling but shout bragging rights. 

I think I have mentioned that we live in a dry state here. I learned that Gandhi initiated this and it has been in place since his time here. It is strictly enforced to the point of being absurd currently. Dayal, Amit’s father, has had a legal permit to buy alcohol for 36 years. Yet he is not allowed to serve it to anyone in his home. So Amit poured Ron and his beers into copper/brass mugs, as opposed to glass which would reveal the contents, and pretended it was coffee. When they ran out of beer a servant brought up another bottle but they quickly hid it behind the terrace wall and Amit squatted down on the floor to refill their mugs so no one could see. He jokingly invited Ron to take his photo so we could show our friends in the US how Indians drink beer in Gujarat. We all laughed. 

After flying numerous kites, we came home to get ready for a society luncheon at the clubhouse green. It was another gorgeous day here and it warmed up to 84 degrees. It has been cold and some days the house never warms up, making we wish for a space heater or furnace. The party was catered and there was a simple meal of pappadam, a thin cracker, white rice, a vegetarian dish with a cooked balls of dough and mixed vegetables, fried bread and sweet dhal. Dessert was jalebi, fried orange dough in sweet syrup served warm. I would like them without the syrup but it isn’t possible here. Gujaratis eat a ton of carbs and it is not at all unusual to have at least three to four carbs in a meal. 

Afterwards we came home and picked up a gift basket I had gotten a couple of days ago to give to neighbors who had given us tickets to Saptak, a 13 day festival of Indian classical music. We attended two evening performances and thoroughly enjoyed them as each was different. This a 37 year old festival and people come from all over the world to attend. Tickets are not for sale but rather given to those who support the Saptak foundation. Our neighbor’s mother started the tradition all those years ago. We had a short but great visit with Rajal and his wife. Rajal was a professional tabla player and retired due to a problem with his shoulder. He took time to tell us the whole story about how his mother was a professional dancer, and then went intro theater after having her family. It really was great to hear the history and development of the organization and festival. The first performance was for one night and featured Ravi Sankar if you are old enough to remember him. The festival grew in popularity and it now 13 nights. It ends the night before the kite festival so it will now always be a 13 night event.

 We came home and rested then watched a B or C grade movie. Afterwards I went for a hour walk with Kamla. We had leftovers, watched the NPR Newshour on the computer and Mohan came over with barbequed paneer which was a nice addition to our meager meal. We went up on our terrace because we were told there would be some big, about three feet high, lit paper lanterns aloft. We were lucky to watch someone in the green opposite our house light one and set it free and watch it drift to the sky then float across the neighborhood. We don’t know if they use kerosene or wax or what to fuel them. We have seen tremendous displays in Thailand of these lanterns. I have to wonder what happens once the fuel runs out. Does someone get bonked n the head with the falling mechanism that carried it aloft?

We watched Oliver Stone’s Nixon until 12:20 way too late and it wasn’t that good with all the inferences to conspiracy theories. Neither of us could get to sleep and it was sometime after 2:00 before we drifted off. I slept in until 9:00 after texting Kamla at 7:00 that I would not join her for our morning walk. 

Sunday was the second day of kite flying and it seemed that fewer people were participating today, maybe because there was not much wind today. We stayed home and relaxed. We are reading the same book (e-readers) Thank you for Being Late and it is a great read by Thomas Friedman about the current and future world we live in. Much is about how technology has speeded up our existence.

Our days drag a bit as we are eager to move on to what is next but we have until Feb 3^rd before we leave India and are managing it. We will have a respite during our trip to Nepal between the 27th of Jan and the 1st of Feb.

A cold and allergies.... and the same for the economy!

December 28, 2016

Christmas was a non event for us this year.  We stayed home and watched some movies on the cable network and Kamla sent over some slices of a plum cake with Christmas decorations. She is an amazing woman! Keep in mind she is Hindu yet she has Christmas decorations for cake slices.

I came back from the US with a cold which later turned into a chest infection. I took a regime of antibiotics and it got better but I still have the cough. I am very tired of it. Sometimes taking a decongestant helps but not today. I am now walking with Ron at 6:15 and Kamla at 8:15 and again at 5:00 and I am glad to be back to it.

December 29, 2016

Yesterday I had a difficult day physically and didn’t walk. I was sneezing, had a runny nose and was coughing. Today was worse so I went to my doc. I am having an allergic reaction to something so now I have three prescriptions, two that are new to me. My doc serves the poor so he charges very little for a visit, 100 rupees about $1.50 US. So the last time I visited him I asked if he had patients who couldn’t pay and he said yes so I asked if I could make a donation to cover their costs and gave him an extra 500 rupees. Today I offered again to give him extra and he said he still had some from my last visit and declined taking it. How I love an honest person. I told him I admired what he was doing and it was so needed in India to help the poor. I told him today I hoped I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore because I was tired of being sick. He laughed and said he would call the Badlani’s, our neighbors and his good friends, if he needed more rupees from me. Nice guy.

We are moving ahead with plans for departure. Ron has just about wrapped up the curriculum for the 12 classes he has created for CEPT. Kamla, our fabulous neighbor wants to buy about 90% of the household goods we are selling. This makes things so much easier for us as we will not need to answer phone calls , have people come over to view items, etc. We will give the items she isn’t buying to our staff or to a charity that resells them to help the blind.

We have planned some trips. Ron will finish his contract around the 25^th of January. On the 27^th we will fly to Kathmandu in Nepal and spend four days there before returning here on Feb 1 to pick up our luggage.

We will leave here Feb 3^rd and fly to Colombo Sri Lanka where we will visit friends and travel to Jaffna at the north end of the island. We could never travel there when we were living in Sri Lanka because of the civil war; but now it is open to tourist so we will go with our friend Suba who is from there but now lives in Colombo. 

We will leave Sri Lanka on Feb 13^th and fly to Thailand. It is a short trip but it leaves at 1:30 a.m. It was the best option as all the other carriers took us to some other place first then we would have a double digit layover time of 10+ hrs so we opted for losing a night’s sleep and getting there in a direct flight that takes 3.5 hrs. We will spend a few days in Bangkok to see friends, eat some great food that the big city has to offer and then head south to Phetchaburi where we will stay. In March we will need to leave the country as we will have a 30 day tourist visa and we will go to Indonesia, probably but it is yet to be decided because we haven’t taken time to read about Indonesia.

December 30, 2016

Demonetization is still with us. Today’s paper said the banks had 30% of the currency they needed in November and 50% in December. The lines are shorter but still there are lines. Fifty thousand local people and 100,000 migrants have lost jobs in Ahmedabad as many businesses cannot endure the downturn in the economy. High end housing is not selling. It has been weeks since we have seen an ATM that has any rupees. Restaurants are empty and mall stores are all having sales and on and on it goes. In 45 days the government issued 60 changes to the rules, sometimes reversing what they have said the day before. It is as though no one is in charge and no one has a clue as to how to deal with the chaos that has been created. Bankers have been harassed and threatened. In rural areas locals took matters into their own hands and locked bank employees out of their workplace. The prime minister is unapologetic and is convinced he has done a good thing but 1.25 billion people were impacted by this and for many it has been a huge hassle.

Tomorrow the prime minister is addressing the nation and I am hopeful he will say the bank will have adequate currency soon.

My allergies are only slightly better today but I rested after lunch and the sneezing and runny nose abated as long as I was lying down. It wears me out. I went to bed at 8:30 last night and read until 10:00. Fortunately I slept well and did not walk this morning.

January 1, 2017

Happy New Year! After a lovely breakfast made by Ron of French toast with Canadian maple syrup we sat on the veranda and enjoyed the morning air. The high today is 86  with a low of 59. Pretty great weather after suffering through summer. Every day is sunny and the air is polluted with hazy views in the distance. We have 28 days in Ahmedabad left with six days away in Nepal. We are eager to move on to what is next for us.