Disclaimer: “#2” does not necessarily mean that a trend has been established.
Dear friends and family,
More therapeutically than based on popular demand – but thanks to those compassionate souls who pretended to be looking forward to Update #2 anyhow – below a further collection of events that kept us busy here in India. Following a trend in society where, if one correctly can spell the name of a concept and has thought about it for at least seven minutes, one can call oneself an expert, we are expert on all matters Indian after having lived here for over five months.
Adjusting to life in the US took less than two months, after which it took five years to find out that we were more foreign than we initially thought – given the regularly shocked, sad, unbelieving, and blank stares we got from hard-core Northern and Southern Yanks when we just friendly acted as non-pretentious gentle Dutch souls (I still don’t understand why I received a button with “I’m not opinioned; I’m just Dutch” from a guy from the church youth group). Yes, I know that Yanks are not from the South, but reactions from Southerners when being called Yanks always amused me; the quick ones normally replied with something like “What can one expect from a German …” to get even. Adjusting to life in India is over four months old, and still going strong. As it will for some longer time.
I’m not aiming at any coherent picture of this in the story below, but will jump just wherever I like to. As in Update #1, feel free to jump to the “Warm regards” at the bottom, unless you want to join the small, select group that read #1 completely – and who’re still bringing tears in my eyes from gratitude.
Let’s start with a highlight. Just after we sent #1, we got notice that we could get our favorite house in Palm Meadows. We got the key on September 10th, and between the 10th and the 15th changed the Bangalorian concept “clean house” into a DenHaanian concept of clean house (yes, that’s from Mieke’s maiden name). I have to say that the Blonkian concept (mine, not my mother’s) is somewhere between the two. The 15th, we received our sea freight. The container was repacked into four small lorries, and 14 laborers plus one overseer took care of unloading them. It was a pity that it was one of the few rainy days of that week, but what the heck, so was it when we married in the beautiful month of June with only one rainy day (yes, you got that one). They started at 11am and finished around 4pm with 295 boxes and packages, at which time most of the furniture was also re-assembled. They did a great job – hardly things broken, just some stuff wet. We were luckier than some of my colleagues, though, who had considerable damage and “lost” items.
All houses in this sub-division are stand-alone, crème-white, and all a little different. The houses are a bit close together and many, like ours, have no garden to speak of, but most have nice patios to sit outside. Palm trees are lining all streets. Overall, the sub-division offers a quiet world totally different from the world outside the gate. Our house is at a quiet cul-de-sac, which makes it even quieter than many other places in the subdivision. With three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a garage, and a study, we have plenty of space, and even guests don’t have to be parked on the patio (dependent on the guest, some probably will, though). It doesn’t beat our house in Houston – probably nothing would – but every day we’re extremely happy with it and its location. Commute times to school (with a school bus) and the office are 40 minutes and 15 minutes, respectively, at least most of the days.
So far, there are two main lowlights (being Dutch, we can easily dream up more, since Dutch have perfected the art of complaining). They fall in the categories “privacy” and “mobility”. Let’s start with privacy. I’ll probably exaggerate a little, but I’ll have Mieke proofread this, such that it passes a test of some Christian honesty. Well, the concept privacy was not invented here. Local people enjoy company, and don’t want foreigners to miss their company either. Mieke is affected most by this. The whole day, there are people around the house, like the gardener, or people from his extended family, with or without doing work, with or without asking for money. For many of them, all of a sudden Christmas took on a deep meaning for those who otherwise have no deep-felt connection to the Christian faith; meaning that they all wanted to wish us Merry Christmas, of course without any thought of getting something back…
We almost had flooding at our back door during rainy season, so that needed to be tackled, and this took 10 laborers about three weeks.of digging and ripping up the excuse of a garden we have to build a sort of underground tunnel that, in my simplistic view, will act as a hiding place for snakes and rats during the year, and will have a 10% chance of doing what it is supposed to do during rainy season. Anyhow, those laborers, and their legion of supervisors kept the activities buzzing around the house, including ringing the doorbell, at super-league level. Just when they were almost done, other people started working on our leakages (living room, guest room, and master bed room). Through some divine revelation it was clear that repairing these leakages required breaking open two balconies, making deep channel cuts in the concrete, and filling those channels with concrete again. This still ongoing work (only three weeks yet) also required a lot of doorbell ringing, and Mieke was with company most of the time. As a note, to check if the repairing had worked out, they put water on the balcony, such that it couldn’t escape, to check if it didn’t leak anymore. Oh wonderful happiness, the old leakages didn’t become greater. Unfortunately, other places on the wall inside became wet, which supported our cynical Dutch view that the problems were not caused at the balconies in the first place, and that they have now introduced a new problem. We also have some interesting wall bubbling inside the house upstairs, probably also related to some leakage, but we’ll probably stay quiet about that to our landlord now we have a bit of an idea of the tactics to resolve leakages.
Still on the subject of privacy, apart from these activities around the house, there are the numerous miscellaneous doorbell ringings (mail, bills to pay, requests for financial support, questions, etc.), phone calls, and whatever can be invented to ensure that you would not feel lonely. Part of all the company is undoubtedly caused because we haven’t yet mastered the art of either not giving money, or giving the right (small) amounts, although we are getting better (Mieke more than I) in becoming more seasoned no-sayers. Personally, I’m still impressed with myself that last week when I replied to an older gentleman who again wished me a merry Christmas, I replied with “Thanks, you too” after which I closed the door. Okay, I had given him too much money for Christmas the day before already, but still a proud and brave act.
Privacy in the office is not better. We have an open office plan, my desk is next too a major walkway, and since I have not yet mutilated someone, people still believe that I’m friendly, and dying for conversation … all the time. Some seem to live on the theory that working uninterrupted for more than three minutes causes insanity, and they want to keep me sane. Pretending to not notice that someone is standing behind you or that you are in a serious business conversation with a colleague, does not work. On the latter, when a conversation is important enough for two people, it’s clearly important enough to join in. Thanks to the low average age in the office, and in all fairness the lack of sufficient project work for everybody yet, there are regularly mini-markets held on the floor; groups of 5+ people happily enjoying each other’s conversation on all subjects of life, at full volume, and with a lot of happy laughter. Although this makes for a happy atmosphere, it not necessarily makes it easier to concentrate. Anyway, I’m grateful for having the chance to practice one of the Tenets of Taekwon-Do, namely “self-control”. Also one of its rules “I shall not misuse Taekwon-Do” has taken on a special meaning.
Most people I work with are very young (I could have been their father if I would have been really fast), experience levels are low, and there are many, many questions, all the time. Most questions are good, although regularly thoughts pop up like “Is my accent so bad that when we went over this last week, and the week before, I really sounded like a talking elephant?” Oh, and then there are those questions that should have been asked, but never were. Like what a specific concept, critical for a project, actually meant, so that we happily move forward with the project for some time, only to find out from the results that someone had no clue what the real issue was. While I type this, I’m coming up with the following hypothesis that I’m going to test in the future: “Questions that could be interpreted as a lack of knowledge are not asked enough, and questions that request support for executing a task are asked too much”.
This all started around the theme of privacy, but let me say that I enjoy my work and the working environment most of the time, at least every other day, and that it’s fun to see that your activities sometimes even help people getting up on speed and moving forward. It’s not a relaxed environment, hectic as heck and chaotic at times – but it’s working in a new and young organization that has still a long way to go but that, as I’m convinced, will be a powerful group within Shell in a few years (okay, I know that at least one of you now thinks “keep on dreaming, baby”). Then, looking back, it will be cool to be able to say that you were part of that group when it was being developed.
On the second main lowlight, mobility, it’s easy. Traffic and infrastructure in Bangalore are so freaking bad that going somewhere in the evening requires so much patience that in practice we stay at home, or within Palm Meadows, as much as possible. Going shopping in the city itself costs easily three hours (incl. at least two hours in the car), so while Mieke regularly goes into the city during the weekdays, I’ll do it as little as possible; evenings are out completely, and during weekend days it’s easy to have better things to do. Friday evening is the only evening we go out, namely to our Bible study group – most times at Tom & Erna’s house – which is between 20 minutes (very good) to 70 minutes (very bad) driving away from us. Traffic is unpredictable, so the 20 or 70 minutes cannot be predicted. Mieke doesn’t drive here, so she is always bound to have John our driver around to go any place at all. This is a major pain for her, since one of her major pleasures in Houston was to go wherever, whenever, and with whomever. Here it always requires planning, bound to times of the day, locations, and never alone. On top of that, listening to music and the radio in the car was a big pleasure, while here there is always a lot of noise because of the traffic, and we can hardly play any music because one needs to be ale to hear horns beside and behind the car to stay alive.
Our driver, John, is a great guy. He’s a Christian, totally dependable (that should then go without saying, but sadly is not always), a careful driver, and his English is pretty good. Mieke and I like him a lot, and both feel safe and comfortable with him in the car. Especially for Mieke that is important since she’s with him a lot; and when they are nor driving somewhere, he’s around the house most of the day. John is in his early 30s, is married and has a baby girl. Once he played in the Karnataka State football (soccer) team, and could have gone far, if it hadn’t been for issues, probably financially, that prevented a real football career. When his football career fell flat, he went through a tough time, and that was also the time when he changed from a Christmas-Tree-‘nd-Easter-Egg Christian into a committed one. Notwithstanding our luck having John as a driver, we would still prefer being able to drive on our own, and being spared the regular embarrassment of being clearly so rich in comparison with him. Like we bought a new television (Tim and I won this battle) – John was with us in the shop – that cost almost his annual salary. And we had a wrong Internet plan for a couple of months, which cost us over half of John’s monthly salary, and which bill he went to pay for us at some office.
Luckily, I’m able to drive myself in the weekends, and to the office, if needed. If Mieke doesn’t need the car throughout the day, John has a day off, and I drive myself. This gives at least a bit of a feeling of mobility. And Mieke’s feeling of privacy jumps up a notch when John is not around. Driving here is never relaxed – the basic idea is that you expect that everything that has the potential of moving on the roads will do so, in a stupid way and without any indication – but if you have a rather heavy car, as ours, it has its charms as well. As explained in update #1, weight immensely helps the intimidation factor on the street. And honking the horn all the time feels a bit like playing cowboy and Indian, so it’s sort of fun for the average Western male. A last word on the traffic, at least for this paragraph, it not only looks dangerous, it is. I’m still surprised how few heavy accidents I have seen, but Tim and Mieke have both seen fatal accidents, with dead bodies lying on the street. My own encounter with death here so far has been with a dead man lying under a pass-over where our previous driver, Radju, parked our car. We didn’t notice the man until we walked back to the car and Radju pointed us to the man, lying less than two meters before our left front wheel in a pile of garbage. Not a very uplifting experience.
After our privacy and mobility lowlights, let me go over some general experiences here. An interesting one was when Mieke bought cane garden furniture, which she paid for by Credit Card. When it was delivered they told us that the payment had not come through, and if we would please take care of that. We paid with the Credit Card of our American bank, and had indeed seen that that Credit Card was not always accepted at shops. Checking our statements – which was not trivial at first since we were not properly set-up for that – showed no problems, and the bank eventually confirmed this. John had gone back to the shop a few times to check matters out, and they became even offensive to him. The shop owner then called me and told me that he really needed copies of my passport and credit card in order for his bank to complete the transaction. O yes, baby, and you want the key of my front door and the password to my email address as well …? Well, after John brought him a paper copy demonstrating that the payment had come through from our side, it became quiet from their front. Later John told me that he had had a hot discussion with the shop owner in which the owner said something to the order of “but they are rich Westerners with enough money” suggesting that it was a trick all along. Nice trick. Never buy at “The Cane Factory” in Bangalore, all ye people.
Our first experience with medical care here was because I moved some boxes wrongly. When it happened, I heard a funny, squeezy sound, almost passed out, and generally didn’t feel very happy. The next day I had to go to Malaysia for a week, which was not an overall success because it hurt like crazy, and my upper left leg became numb. So a week after the event, via a Shell-related doctor, I was referred to a hospital to have it checked out. That was on a Saturday morning. It took 2.5 hours to get there – traffic and hitting two wrong hospitals first – which was sort of uncomfortable. Around 2pm a doctor could see me, around 4pm I had had two MRI scans, and around 6pm all tests were done to have me admitted the next Sunday for surgery the following Monday (microlumbar discectomy). Tuesday I was back home from my first ever anesthesia and surgery, and with a bag of medicine, including a load of painkillers. From Friday onwards I was back at work. Surgery was performed by very professional surgeons, the nurses were very nice young Indian girls constantly asking if I “was paining”, and the hospital was a nice new building. The whole experience including after care cost about as much as one night in a hospital bed in Holland, and it took less elapse time than scheduling one MRI scan in my beloved home country. At least for people with some money, medical care here is fantastic.
A few weeks back we went to a beach hotel in Goa, which is a very popular vacation destination on the West coast of India. We had booked the flights and hotel via the Internet, which went reasonably smooth, be it that it cost a lot of time. Goa, which had a Portuguese past, is pretty, more organized and much cleaner than Bangalore, so it was a great break from the city. The beach was wide, clean, and white, the food was good, and the resort as a whole worth a recommendation. Many Russians and Germans were there as well, but I guess those people also need to go somewhere on vacation. It looked like that being heavily built offered discounts where we were, so esthetics paid a bit of a price. Yes, we so compensated it all…
During this vacation we went on a river cruise for a couple of hours, as part of a half-day tour (was complimentary by the resort, otherwise we cheap Dutchies wouldn’t have done it). To our surprise the boat left at 6pm, at which time it already started to get dark. But we thought that maybe the lights on the shore would be the sightseeing attraction. Wrong. The trip turned out to be a floating disco and beer-drinking event, the highlight being the presence of a large group of university students. Apart from that they were generally highly irritating, partly because they happily threw their glass beer bottles into the river – like if India already didn’t have a garbage problem without educated college students contributing to it – and partly because they were mainly male and ugly. Furthermore, they looked particularly stupid, and behaved particularly rude towards the only white-faces on the boat – like if we don’t have enough Dutch people on this planet to already take care of global rudeness. Unnecessary to say that because of the dark, nothing was there to sightsee. After a prayerful time in the car on the way back to the resort – we really didn’t yet feel like leaving this Earth without Tim but together with half a dozen innocent people on bicycles without lights or traffic manners – we happily stepped into our room, finding Tim doing what he’s best at (watching movies). One last note on this trip: Mieke and I had to pass some time in a small park before the boat left. Finally we found a bench there on a quiet place – romanticism to the ultimate. But of course, alone is just alone, so a lady with her son walked up to us, and sat down three meters away from us on the ground. She didn’t say anything, just sat there with her son. Must have been my big nose that attracted her to that spot so close by – maybe she expected it to come off after some time. She couldn’t know that we had walked through the whole park to just find a quiet place without people around.
Early December, Mieke and I drove up Chennai on the East Coast for the wedding of Kavitha, a friend from our Oman time. Tim stayed home – his first time being on his own for more than one night. The kid did fine; he ate pizza, played computer games, watched movies, didn’t do the dishes and didn’t clean up, so regular teenager behavior, but without any nastiness, so we were proud of him. Chennai is a 6-7 hour drive, and John did 90% of the driving. It was our first time out of Bangalore. It took almost two hours getting out of the city and its suburbs, after which the countryside became very green, and somewhat hilly with big rock formations peaking out of the ground here and there. Nice to see, but not to the extent that you’ll make it a regular trip. All along the road, which was very good for a change, there where villages with the normal amount of living creatures – from one to four-legged – with ever-present enthusiasm to cross the road, overtake cars, and to ensure that driving didn’t become boring. We didn’t see more than 3-4 accidents, and hardly any blood on the road, so a little disappointing.
It was a small wedding, just around 500 guests. I use the term “small” here loosely. We were anxious to meet Marcus, the man brave enough to marry Kavitha, and were very pleased to see that he would probably survive. He plays the guitar, among other instruments, and those people are normally strong, since they have survived lots of abuse from family who don’t appreciate that playing the same tune for the 1,234th time in a row is called practice, and doesn’t imply a lack of creativity. Okay, my dad overdid it with his organ-playing, I have to say – but Tim and Mieke don’t have a point regarding my guitar playing; they should be grateful that I don’t play a recorder or, heaven forbid, an organ. Apart from meeting Kavitha and Marcus, we met another friend, Kavi’s sister Amritha, and the rest of her family, which was great after over five years. One of the fun things of expat life is that you’ll often meet old friends again after a long time, and that you can more or less pick up where you left years back.
The wedding church service was very good – we were glad to see that they had ended up in a solid and enthusiastic church – and the reception was quite an experience. It was held on the terrain of a horseracing track, with a stage for the wedded couple on an open grass area, with hundreds of chairs in front of it for the guests. After the direct families of Marcus and Kavitha were introduced, people had a chance to congratulate the couple and, more essential, to eat. Good food, nice people, and a nice place – we really enjoyed it all. And it was fun to see how hard it was for the young couple to keep smiling after two hours of shaking hands, and making pictures with everyone who congratulated them. Particularly seeing Marcus massaging his cheeks was funny. Like all married men, he’ll regularly need to do that to keep smiling (this is my story, okay – nothing prevents Mieke to get even with her own version).
We saw a bit of Chennai and its beach as well on the trip, but because it was rainy most of the time, we didn’t see it at its best. The road out of Chennai in the rain was interesting – particularly from the inside of a car. The people outside, who waded through the mud and water, had probably other thoughts. Or maybe mud just feels relaxing between the toes – and the rain is not so cold like in Holland, so rain is maybe just a treat.
We have become friends with a young woman, Cheryl, who works across the street as cook, and we try to meet once a week on Sunday afternoon, which is the only time she is free; she doesn’t fall in a labor category where work is regulated by labor unions or stuff. She has an amazing life story. From a very poor family in a village, without any education, with a dad who drank too much with unhappy consequences at home, she left home as a teenager and came to Bangalore by bus without money or fiends, or anything. From the bus stop where she was standing at night after arrival, without any plan on what to do next, she was picked up by a lady who saw her there, and who didn’t want to leave her at that rather dangerous place, especially for a girl. The lady brought her to a hostel where she could stay. Via the hostel, she was linked up with a church, and she became a Christian. Just listening to her story is very encouraging, from being dirt poor without any hope, to having a purpose and joy in life, even though materialistic there is not too much difference.
Cheryl found a job with our neighbors across the street some five years ago. She makes long hours, but is treated well, and is allowed to attend church on Sunday morning. She prayed to God that she would love to be able to read the Bible, and He answered that. Skeptics will have other views, but we see it as a miracle that she now can indeed. She still cannot write. The Indian family where she works speaks English at home, and she could only have her job because she was able to speak English within a miraculously short term. We are amazed how well she does that; her gift is sort of a heavenly wink by God. Her family in the village is still flabbergasted when they hear her talking to her employer over the phone in English during her holidays when she’s back in the village, and they can’t understand how she has picked that up.
Via Cheryl we have come into contact with a pastor who works within the villages close to where her family lives, and who is growing a church. His story is also a remarkable story of someone with more guts than I would ever have, who moved with his young family from the city to the villages because he believes that that’s his calling. He’s been beaten up by people not happy with having him around, being put in jail for a month and a half on false accusations, and his properties has been damaged. The cell in jail was so crowded that during the night the inmates could only lay on one specific side, since there was no room for turning over on the other side. Still he and his wife know that there is the place they need to be with their two young boys. Mieke and I are happy that we can be involved in helping them acquire some land and build a church, where they can have church activities that are otherwise impossible. The pastor also plans to use the building to be built to act as hostel for kids who live on the streets, and for women who have no other place to go. It’s pretty cool to be able to support a good cause just around the corner, instead of causes far from your own world and imagination.
Mieke is doing a children’s program with Erna and some other ladies every week in an orphanage, which she enjoys a lot. They tell a Bible story, sing, and do crafts. Their group consists of about 10 kids in the age 6-13 years old. Most have sad life stories, and some have horrible ones, like two little brothers who have seen their mother put on fire by their dad. Most are being put up for adoption, and recently a couple of the kids have left for Europe and the US, hopefully for better lives than they had here. The adoption process normally costs years, so many kids have to wait long from the moment that they know that they have been adopted to the actual moment of departure.
Tim is doing well at school. He has friends there, and spent a lot of time with them on Facebook, MSN, and the phone communicating with them, and other “friends”. We have regular discussions at home on the concept “friends” – in Tim’s view, our concept is out of date and from the Middle Ages. Of course, you can easily have 200 friends, and, no, the average conversation is not restricted to “sup”, “not much”, “lol” (laugh-out-loud), and “rofl” (roll over floor laughing), to mention some often-used deep, emotional phrases. Our attempts to get a deeper insight in the quality conversations haven’t resulted in much yet, but they must discuss deep stuff – looking at the monthly phone bill we have to pay. I have renamed Facebook into Bubbabook, since I suspect that many Facebookers are Bubba’s (or Rednecks – people who love shootin’, huntin’, and talkin’ about shootin’ and huntin’ - often going by the name Billy Joe Bob). This is probably not true, but I irritate Tim with it, so Bubbabook it is.
Normally I at least entertain myself with writing this type of update, but that hasn’t happened for the last half hour, so this must have been particularly tough going for normal humans. I’ll take a break until sarcasm levels are up again. Otherwise this will be both not entertaining and not therapeutical for me.
Last stretch of story road. Last time I wrote something about snakes. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen one yet, so have to pass on juicy stories pretending I was close by to have some of the coolness rub off on me. Some time ago Mieke had a women’s meeting at Erna’s house (the one with cobra’s in the garden). When there was some joyful noise from outside, the ladies went out to find a half-dead Russell Viper on the front porch. Two drivers were sitting next to a bush near the front door when they detected this thick (8cm diameter) and one of Asia’s most poisonous snakes in the bush. Well, they started killing it before the snake got them, and they were so courteous to get the women out of the house to enjoy the snake still wiggling. Well, I missed the fun again, and a chance to demonstrate my ultimate snake-killing bravery (throwing a small neighborhood kid on his ugly head – the snake’s, not the kid’s – probably while wetting my pants).
When we still had Radju driving us, he picked us up for church one Sunday and brought his wife and little daughter to introduce them to us. When he rang the door, I opened, and before I realized what was happening, he had brought them into our house and started giving them the grand tour, starting upstairs in my bedroom. Funny. And a little embarrassing. Not for Radju, or his bride, though. I should have asked them to help me cleaning out the mess of the bedroom, but I forgot.
Tim and I have started training Taekwon-Do again since late December. There is a nice sort of aerobics room at the club that we can use in the evenings, while Mieke goes to the gym next door. My back is holding out well – for an old fossil (Tim’s classification scheme). Doing the straddle-split isn’t back to standard yet, but according to Mieke that looks ridiculous anyway. As in Houston, I’m the fanatical one, so am putting way more training hours into it than Tim, although he has had some problems with his knees lately. So far nobody has joined us, but who knows what will happen when we start sparring; teenagers in the subdivision may be drawn to the chance of having an opportunity to kick an adult in the head and be granted points and respect for that. That’s Tim’s dream as well, obviously. Of course, if I would find out that Tim kicks my butt, I’ll remind him that I was in a hospital not too long ago, and that I’m his dad, thus deserve respect, particularly since I own the money for his future allowance. If I would lose the physical edge, I would at least preserve the moral high ground. Through exercising, we all get rid of calories, though not as quickly as during the first weeks when we had a much more effective way for that. On that theme, none of us have been really sick anymore. That sounds like a good parting note – sarcasm levels won’t go up anyway (so maybe I become even nice).
Warm regards from sunny Bangalore,
Bastian & the pretty ones
May first Bastian was off. We decided to do a short trip together to Nandi Hills, about 60 km north of Bangalore. On flat plains this hill is a giant, 2000 ft monolith that seems to appear from nowhere. For long time royalty has come here to escape the summer heat. The Brits built many bungalows which are still there. This monkey loved the roof of our car, I guess. We were lucky not to be attacked! 
