Moving!

Our Guesthouse
Originally uploaded by qiubuo.

So, in case you have been wondering where we've been staying for the past two weeks, here is a picture of our guest house. It's located in a new area of Bangalore called the Dollars Colony. It's been fun and I am a bit sad to leave. But at the same time it will be nice to have our own place at last.

We received our new bed today, along with a small dresser that we bought from a nice family across town. They said they were from a gold mining area and spoke English as their first language. Like other Indians they have learned Kannada here in Bangalore. Interestingly, there seems to be a movement to preserve Kannada, even though it has millions of speakers. Apparently some of the local people are bothered by international and Indian companies moving in and bringing their languages with them, diluting the base of Dravidian languages such as Kannada. (Most of the languages in Northern India are derived from Sanskrit and are Indo-European.)

Gilles and I think we came to a compromise on the maid issue: we will give her the monthly part-time salary she asked for (around $17) and have her come only two or three days a week instead of five. When we saw the state of the apartment we realized we really do need someone to clean, at least right now - we don't feel that guilty because it's not our mess. When we signed the lease yesterday, the landlord asked the watchman to find us someone to clean; he stands at the front gate all day and asks the women passing by if they want work. He sent a woman who already cleans for other families in our building to our apartment. She doesn't speak a word of English, but I'm sure she speaks several other languages, since she asked if I spoke Hindi. I of course didn't understand the question, but luckily my DSL salesperson was at the apartment at that time and interpreted for us!

Speaking of DSL, we are almost wired! It is a somewhat complicated process, as four different people have to visit the apartment to install the telephone and DSL, but that is representative of India in general: in a country of a billion people, why have one person perform a task that four can do?