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Pony: Travel teaches toleration
1.21.2003
I just ate the greasiest pizza and it was pure ambrosia. Also, it was not brown or containing garam massala.
Would it be appropriate for me to follow critique on the food by telling you that 700 people have died from "cold" (+4 to -1 celcius) in India, this week alone! In Toronto and Montreal, you can easily imagine freezing to death. I guess we never think about hypothermia in the big city.
I posted some pictures yesterday, and as soon as Rich gets a chance, I will put more photos from the field visit.
Has anyone noticed that Spam seems to be outsmarting junk mail filters? Try to avoid sending anything to my pregnant snotmail account.
Good news: this trip feel like it is lasting for ages.
Bad news: the missing people part is equally prolonged.
Sunday I bought some beer in town (Kingfisher big bottles, fyi) and had a bottle with Sasha that evening. It had been a couple of weeks since I had had a drink and I have to say that I can understand alchoholic 50's housewives. Booze, to its credit, takes the edge off an isolated existence. Next day, however, it seemed like everyone in the neighbourhood was saying: "beer, beer, girls. canada. drink. beer. tik-eh."
We shared some beer with Pramoud and he now seems to be gettign very familiar. uch, I know: It is awful to say that about someone who is employed to serve you. "the servants are getting familiar". How pompous.
Neither of us feel comfortable askign him for stuff, exactly. We bring him little gifts, like gulab jamun (sweets) and beer. Sasha made him a bracelet. But now he comes into our rooms when we are there and has changed the boundaries to a point where I would like him to take a step back. Now my first world guilt and need for privacy are doing a bit of battle. I'll keep you updated.
Pramoud borrowed my English-Hindi phrase book and after 1 afternoon with it, he came into my room with his dimpled smile and said: "When_will_you_be_going_to_ Puri?" It was the first sentence he had ever spoken to us in English. Sasha and I could not stop grinning. We will be in the middle of workind and one of us will break out with the Puri question.
We are going on the 23rd. For 2 days.
The website is coming along OK. But it is exasperating. I may have mentioned before that Bhubaneshwar is like Northern Exposure except there are cows and it is hot. Everthing here is done in inverse. They want to think of design first and content second. We have 7 working days left.
They also have these bizarre inspirational quotes printed out on dot matrix printers and posted everywhere in the office:
An example: "If we think we can, that makes us right."
huh?
Friends I will see on my return: I bought some hilarious inspirational quote posters on Sunday. My favorite is a train on a bridge at sunset with a seriff-y font that says: "Travel teaches toleration."
Are you all still into irony? As decor? Or is 30 the cutoff?
