It is officially week 2 of our stay in India, and things are beginning to fall into place. We found an apartment in an area of the city called Malleshwaram, which is known as a “vegetarian” neighborhood. We can only assume that this means the neighborhood is almost completely Hindu, as opposed to some of the more mixed areas of town, which have neon crosses and high mosque towers. There are several prestigious schools in the area, along with a Pizza Hut and a Pizza Corner (an Indian equivalent?) We have been told that we can find non-veg food in restaurants around, and there have been rumors of frozen chicken at the supermarket, so we should fit in fine.
Apartment hunting was quite a cultural experience. First, we contacted a realtor who had taken out a nice ad in the paper. Gilles spoke to him on the phone, and we traveled to the area where we thought we would find the office. There was no office. We called him again, and he said something like “Fulbright” and something like “Sampiki Road.” So we asked the phonebooth guy for directions and were told to go to the first big street. When we got there it was called something completely different. So we kept walking, and ended up at another big street. Officially lost. So we walked into the Pizza Hut, took in the air-conditioning, admired the blond missionary families (I’m making assumptions – but how often do you see white families with more than 4 kids?) and asked directions from the very pleasant teenage waiter. He told us to go back to the first big street. Apparently that street is known by many names, none of which are written on the sign.
I called the realtor again, and this time the word “Fulbright” finally rang a bell. We had passed a supermarket called “Food World” on that big street. Oops. Who would have thought the real estate agency would operate out of a supermarket? Well, now we know that running a business in India just takes some time and a cell phone. We spent the afternoon visiting places - often the realtor would call ahead of time and speak to the owner in Kannada; we only understood the word “foreigners,” though I’m sure “raise the price by $100/mo” was in there too. Sometimes the owner would meet us to ask questions. The first was always for Gilles – “where do you work?” They were all impressed with his PhD and his job at the Indian Institute of Science. It seemed to open a lot of doors. I was shown lots of nice places to hang laundry.
Now that the apartment hunt is over we are in the process of buying furniture. I for one am not used to being this close to the place of production. Our first foray into furniture shopping consisted of visiting several tiny, crowded shops in the city center, where we were handed catalogues written in Italian, Spanish and French. When we asked about particular models, we were told “we can make that.” Apparently, they can make anything from bamboo or wrought iron and it pretty much always costs around $100 for a couch, two chairs and a coffee table. We were shown photos of furniture made in these workshops and shipped to Arizona, where it now sits poolside, and a set of German passports (lots of patio furniture in Frankfurt too, it seems). They even served us chai. In the end we're hoping to get a set of bamboo furniture painted dark blue with white cushions. Hopefully our entire apartment will look like one big multi-level patio.
The shopping district, aptly named Commercial Street, is the most crowded place I have ever been. It makes Times Square look like a philosophy club meeting at an American high school. It makes rush hour at the Chatelet metro station look like a bar mitzvah in Arkansas. I can’t even think of other crowded places to compare it to, my life is so un-crowded. Here’s how you can generate your own India Shopping Simulator: take a narrow street, then fill it with everyone you know. You may have to double that number. Now line the sides with tiny stores selling things that all the people you know inexplicably want, like plastic Mickey Mouse watches. Now tell them all to switch places. To complete the experience, place a mosque at either end and make it prayer time. Oh, and here’s the best part: now give a few of the daredevils in the group a selection of vehicles, say a scooter, an SUV, and a cart attached to a motorcycle, and tell them to travel from one end of the street to the other as fast as possible. Don’t forget the dust clouds!
Speaking of dust clouds, we are slowly getting used to the auto-rickshaw experience. It’s kind of like a combination of L.A. traffic and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Some drivers are so confident in their whirligig maneuvers that it really does create the sensation of a choreographed traffic ballet. We were a bit shell-shocked after our driver maimed a dog yesterday, but it seems to happen rather frequently. We have certainly heard quite a few yelps. The cows, on the other hand, have it pretty good. The rules of the road here are definitely determined by size: if you’re smaller than the oncoming vehicle and/or animal, you get out of the way. The cows are not privy to this information, so they regularly divert buses and vans. We heard that the UK let loose a few cows in India to widen the bovine gene pool – some of the stubborn ones do look like Jerseys.
In other news, Gilles has started work, though as we arrived just in time for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali, and the end of Ramadan (known here as Ramzan), not much work has been going on around us. For the past three days the sky has been erupting in colorful fireworks and firecrackers have been making us jump every few minutes. I read in the local paper that 60 children were injured by fireworks this Diwali – many blinded or burnt. So I am not so sure about all this demon-chasing (apparently the festival is in celebration of the death of a devil whose name I certainly can’t spell).
This weekend we also visited Cubbon Park, which is a beautiful green area right in the middle of the city. It houses a huge children's playground (no unaccompanied adults!), an aquarium, a courthouse, and a technology museum. While we were walking a crowd of young girls and boys started calling out to us, "Excuse me, excuse me!" We stopped and they asked where we were from, then shook our hands (the boys shook Gilles' and the girls shook mine) and asked our names. They were clearly happy and perhaps surprised to meet foreign people on their Saturday walk and it was fun to chat with them a little. As I'm used to being inconspicuous in most foreign countries I've visited, I didn't expect to look so weird here!
A few days ago I made a proclamation Gilles thought he would never hear from my lips: I am tired of rice. Yes, the limit has been reached, and it was really not that high after all. After seven days of eating rice, I came to the sudden realization that I have never eaten rice twice a day for a week. We thought we would expand our diet on Saturday while we shopped downtown, but our hopes were thwarted when one Lonely Planet offering was non-existent and the second was closed. We went to a seafood restaurant on top of a department store, where Gilles ordered a baked crab and I broke down and ordered a Thai Red Curry, only an hour after composing my own Bollywood Ode, “No Rice Today” (Jeff – you can use it in your film and/or reality show (“Tonight, on ‘The Call Center...’”). Still, it may have been curry and it may have been served on a bed of rice, but it wasn’t Indian. Soon we’ll have our own kitchen and it will be steaks for everyone!
