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
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Finally some pictures!!
We can play Catan again! This is the living room, behind the curtains is a sort of sunroom. The plan is to have another table there for me to prepare stuff for the orphanage, write, read etc.
Front of Palm Meadows, 59 Phase 1......our house!With the driver I went to some nurseries to buy some plants. Everything grows very fast now the dry season has started. We have to find more plants.
Our house with the car on the side. The car drives like a tank, according to Bastian. I have not yet driven it although we do have our driving license now. Just had to fill in papers and pick it up. No test or whatsoever.
The kids from the orphanage where I go every Wednesday afternoon for about two hours. Most of them are adopted by people from France, Italy and the US. But those kids(and the parents!) often have to wait years before all the paperwork is okay. They live with foster parents where they stay for the night. The day is spent in the orphanage building where also babies and toddlers have a place to live. These children have school in the orphanage.
The two pictures show the kids doing their crafts. They love it!
We always make sure that we have one for them.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
November Update 2007
September 15th we moved from the apartment to our house in Palm Meadows! We were so happy! So much earlier then expected. Shell rents the house from an Indian guy whose daughter lives across the street with her family. She has been very helpfull so far. When we got the key, about 10 days before we moved in, I came to the house almost every day to clean. It was supposed to be clean but that was sort of difficult to see.......even now I have not done everything really well but I am making progress. The 14th Bastian took the day off, we brought Tim to the school bus and drove to the house to wait for the movers. They came around 11 am with 4 small trucks loaded with our stuff. We were wondering how it all would look like when it would come out of the boxes........Piece by piece was transported inside to the different rooms. We tried to direct it all as good as possible. Most of it was okay but we have found kitchen stuff in the garage after days........Tim's desk was broken and also a few small things were good to be thrown away.
The crew of movers worked very hard, they were 14 in total.
After lunch they unpacked most of the big things like the couch, the beds and the table/chairs. that helped a lot to get rid of piles of plastic and carton already. In fact they wanted to unpack everything but we did not want that.............please, let me do my own stuff and put it in the cupboards and closets! Also all the books from the bookcase we'd rather did that ourselves. Bastian put the bookcase in order the next day and most of the books were on their place a few days later.
We love the house a lot. The quality is not that of Lakes on Eldridge in Houston but for here it is a palace compared to where lots of people live. We see many tents built of leaves and plastic were people live in.
Our house has a small terrace at the front and a garage where we have plenty of space for folding chairs, coolers, christmas decorations and so on. The car will be outside so this garage is really luxurious; to have this extra space.
When you enter the house you step into the dining room straight away. There is a small living room, kitchen, laundry place, one guestroom downstairs with lots of closets, no walk in closet that we were spoiled with! Also a small bathroom with sink and shower. Upstairs 2 bedrooms, both with the same bathroom/shower. There is also a study room. All floors in the house are grey/white/greenish marble. The walls are painted in a soft yellow colour. All the windows in the house have small glasspanels and iron bars everywhere. Outside colour is white, red tile roof. Two balconies upstairs. Around the house is a small pathway and on one side is grass with different plants. On all sides are creepers on the white stone fences around the house and also bamboo and palmtrees. Very colourful plants. I need to buy some huge plants to have a more private terrace. Tomorrow I am going to try again..........have been to some nurseries already but two were not much at all and one was good but we saw nobody there.........
Something we really have to get used to is that people walk around the house all the time........a gardener, sometimes two, who sweeps, picks dead leaves, gives water to the plants..........Because of leaks (the rains have been very heavy sometimes, now it seems to be over, end of the rainy season) in the house people came to check, sometimes there were three men. Then there was a temporary fix of this problem, they will come back soon and take the tiles of the balcony, put new ones in............will be dusty and noisy, I expect.
Then there is our housemaid, she comes three afternoons a week to do floors, bathrooms, ironing and she loves to do dishes...........so I keep as much as possible for her to do...........but then we must be careful not to attract ants and cockroaches!
Also because of the rain we had water almost coming into the house at the back. So over the last two weeks there have been countless guys and girls(!) to work on a drainage pipe that hopefully directs the water to the road or so.
Then the door bell rings because of delivering of some not so important mail........needs signature.
What else..........sometimes we have a crew of 6 or so sweeping, cutting grass and bushes........
With Diwali we got ladies at the door who asked for money.........well, so it goes on and on.........there is always someone coming! Maybe it will get better when all the work is done at the back of the house and when we are not so new anymore.........I bet they tell each other that there are some new white dummies around who know nothing about life in India...........so they give it a try to bother and ask for money!
Trouble...........Oktober 20th Bastian moved around some of the last boxes in our maidsroom. In this small room with shower/bathroom housemaids can live with families. We use it for storage. Old schoolstuff, childrens vcr's, Shellpapers, and so on..........I repacked it over the weeks, wrote on the boxes what is in which box and Bastian piled them up so that our driver would have a place in that room for a nap or just to relax if he would want to. Well, picking up the last box went wrong......something in Bastian's back did not feel right and the poor guy almost fainted. He sat down and was quit pale for a while. So there was pain but not too bad. That Sunday night he flew to Kuala Lumpur and from there to Miri on Monday. The pain was still there and had not really become less! Monday night was really bad, Tuesday he saw a doctor there, got pain killers and some vitamines. Well, the whole week was not so pleasant during the course. He came back Friday night and, like almost all the nights before, did not really sleep well and on Saturday morning we called a Shell doctor and told him the story. He told him to go for an MRI scan. He had twisted a disc. After a long day (gone from 11 till 7.30 in the night) he came home with the message that he was supposed to check in at the hospital the next evening. Monday: surgery! He needed a microlumbar discectomy. His left upper leg had become numb for almost the whole week already and the doctors did not want to take any risk by waiting longer to 'release' the nerves. So there we went on Sunday, end of the afternoon, to the Wockhardt Hospital, almost an hour south from our house. Sitting such a long time in the car was not a real pleasure for him but what could we do about that. The hospital is one and a half years old and is proud to have Harvard connections. At the check in desk Bastian could make a choice in whatever room he would like to have, varying from 800 rupees to 5500 rupees(800 rupees is almost 14 Euro's and 20 US Dollars). And this is for one day + night, food and care. Interesting rates! Well, Bastian will tell more in detail, I am sure, because it was all quite an experience. Anyhow, when he finally laid down on his bed he was glad to be there. That night was the worst so we were happy the next morning that he was taken to the operation unit for the surgery. I was not there, by the way, had gone home straight away. Later on we understood that it is very common to stay and take care of the sick loved one. Well, they must have thought that I was a monster because I only came again on Tuesday afternoon to pick the poor guy up! Anyhow, they removed the soft stuff (have no idea what it is called) that pushed against the nerves in his back and leg. Later on he could take it with him in a plastic container. Now we are almost two weeks further. The pain is much less thanks to a huge pile of pills! Last week he went to the office a few times and this week he hopes to be there again sort of full time. All our 'new' friends here tell him: be careful, take the time te recover............and of course I am the one who tells him most of all................The doctor has told him that the pain will be there at least three weeks, so another week to go now. And total recovery should be in three months. It was amazing to see how people here stand around us. Prayers, phone calls, flowers from two couples that we know from the home group, flowers brought by his boss with cards signed by collegues. Also emails. We were touched (even Bastian!!!) by this a lot!
The crew of movers worked very hard, they were 14 in total.
After lunch they unpacked most of the big things like the couch, the beds and the table/chairs. that helped a lot to get rid of piles of plastic and carton already. In fact they wanted to unpack everything but we did not want that.............please, let me do my own stuff and put it in the cupboards and closets! Also all the books from the bookcase we'd rather did that ourselves. Bastian put the bookcase in order the next day and most of the books were on their place a few days later.
We love the house a lot. The quality is not that of Lakes on Eldridge in Houston but for here it is a palace compared to where lots of people live. We see many tents built of leaves and plastic were people live in.
Our house has a small terrace at the front and a garage where we have plenty of space for folding chairs, coolers, christmas decorations and so on. The car will be outside so this garage is really luxurious; to have this extra space.
When you enter the house you step into the dining room straight away. There is a small living room, kitchen, laundry place, one guestroom downstairs with lots of closets, no walk in closet that we were spoiled with! Also a small bathroom with sink and shower. Upstairs 2 bedrooms, both with the same bathroom/shower. There is also a study room. All floors in the house are grey/white/greenish marble. The walls are painted in a soft yellow colour. All the windows in the house have small glasspanels and iron bars everywhere. Outside colour is white, red tile roof. Two balconies upstairs. Around the house is a small pathway and on one side is grass with different plants. On all sides are creepers on the white stone fences around the house and also bamboo and palmtrees. Very colourful plants. I need to buy some huge plants to have a more private terrace. Tomorrow I am going to try again..........have been to some nurseries already but two were not much at all and one was good but we saw nobody there.........
Something we really have to get used to is that people walk around the house all the time........a gardener, sometimes two, who sweeps, picks dead leaves, gives water to the plants..........Because of leaks (the rains have been very heavy sometimes, now it seems to be over, end of the rainy season) in the house people came to check, sometimes there were three men. Then there was a temporary fix of this problem, they will come back soon and take the tiles of the balcony, put new ones in............will be dusty and noisy, I expect.
Then there is our housemaid, she comes three afternoons a week to do floors, bathrooms, ironing and she loves to do dishes...........so I keep as much as possible for her to do...........but then we must be careful not to attract ants and cockroaches!
Also because of the rain we had water almost coming into the house at the back. So over the last two weeks there have been countless guys and girls(!) to work on a drainage pipe that hopefully directs the water to the road or so.
Then the door bell rings because of delivering of some not so important mail........needs signature.
What else..........sometimes we have a crew of 6 or so sweeping, cutting grass and bushes........
With Diwali we got ladies at the door who asked for money.........well, so it goes on and on.........there is always someone coming! Maybe it will get better when all the work is done at the back of the house and when we are not so new anymore.........I bet they tell each other that there are some new white dummies around who know nothing about life in India...........so they give it a try to bother and ask for money!
Trouble...........Oktober 20th Bastian moved around some of the last boxes in our maidsroom. In this small room with shower/bathroom housemaids can live with families. We use it for storage. Old schoolstuff, childrens vcr's, Shellpapers, and so on..........I repacked it over the weeks, wrote on the boxes what is in which box and Bastian piled them up so that our driver would have a place in that room for a nap or just to relax if he would want to. Well, picking up the last box went wrong......something in Bastian's back did not feel right and the poor guy almost fainted. He sat down and was quit pale for a while. So there was pain but not too bad. That Sunday night he flew to Kuala Lumpur and from there to Miri on Monday. The pain was still there and had not really become less! Monday night was really bad, Tuesday he saw a doctor there, got pain killers and some vitamines. Well, the whole week was not so pleasant during the course. He came back Friday night and, like almost all the nights before, did not really sleep well and on Saturday morning we called a Shell doctor and told him the story. He told him to go for an MRI scan. He had twisted a disc. After a long day (gone from 11 till 7.30 in the night) he came home with the message that he was supposed to check in at the hospital the next evening. Monday: surgery! He needed a microlumbar discectomy. His left upper leg had become numb for almost the whole week already and the doctors did not want to take any risk by waiting longer to 'release' the nerves. So there we went on Sunday, end of the afternoon, to the Wockhardt Hospital, almost an hour south from our house. Sitting such a long time in the car was not a real pleasure for him but what could we do about that. The hospital is one and a half years old and is proud to have Harvard connections. At the check in desk Bastian could make a choice in whatever room he would like to have, varying from 800 rupees to 5500 rupees(800 rupees is almost 14 Euro's and 20 US Dollars). And this is for one day + night, food and care. Interesting rates! Well, Bastian will tell more in detail, I am sure, because it was all quite an experience. Anyhow, when he finally laid down on his bed he was glad to be there. That night was the worst so we were happy the next morning that he was taken to the operation unit for the surgery. I was not there, by the way, had gone home straight away. Later on we understood that it is very common to stay and take care of the sick loved one. Well, they must have thought that I was a monster because I only came again on Tuesday afternoon to pick the poor guy up! Anyhow, they removed the soft stuff (have no idea what it is called) that pushed against the nerves in his back and leg. Later on he could take it with him in a plastic container. Now we are almost two weeks further. The pain is much less thanks to a huge pile of pills! Last week he went to the office a few times and this week he hopes to be there again sort of full time. All our 'new' friends here tell him: be careful, take the time te recover............and of course I am the one who tells him most of all................The doctor has told him that the pain will be there at least three weeks, so another week to go now. And total recovery should be in three months. It was amazing to see how people here stand around us. Prayers, phone calls, flowers from two couples that we know from the home group, flowers brought by his boss with cards signed by collegues. Also emails. We were touched (even Bastian!!!) by this a lot!
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Zoo on the streets!
One Sunday after church we headed home by car and decided to count all the dogs and cows. There are so many of them out there so it was a fun game to count them. We ended up adding camels, sheep and monkeys as well!
After about 40 minutes in traffic we counted 26 dogs, 27 cows, 1 camel, 2 sheep and 4 monkeys!
We hardly see monkeys so we were thrilled!
Cows, by the way, can be sleeping, walking or eating in the middle of the crazy traffic and of course they cross the streets now and then as slow as possible.
Dogs are everywhere, regularly we see the most adorable puppies playing on the sidewalks.
Camels and monkeys make us really excited when we see those because they are rare.
After about 40 minutes in traffic we counted 26 dogs, 27 cows, 1 camel, 2 sheep and 4 monkeys!
We hardly see monkeys so we were thrilled!
Cows, by the way, can be sleeping, walking or eating in the middle of the crazy traffic and of course they cross the streets now and then as slow as possible.
Dogs are everywhere, regularly we see the most adorable puppies playing on the sidewalks.
Camels and monkeys make us really excited when we see those because they are rare.
Snake!
Tuesday morning, womens bible study. We meet upstairs in Erna's house to discuss our study about the tabernacle. Around 11 o'clock there is some noise downstairs. Erna checks it out and calls all of us to come quickly to see a huge snake! Just outside her frontdoor is a huge, almost dead, snake. The driver almost managed to kill the monster with a spade.
It is still moving a bit and all of us look scared and amazed.
Later we realize that it was a Russell Viper, one of the four most poisonous snakes in Asia!
Erna's and our driver had been chatting close to this guy. Praise the Lord that just in time they saw it moving. It came from under some bushes with dead leaves.
Lots of frogs were in the grass around the house lately and probably the snake came to have a good meal! They seem to be all over that area with houses, in this same garden were a while ago two cobra's.......
It is still moving a bit and all of us look scared and amazed.
Later we realize that it was a Russell Viper, one of the four most poisonous snakes in Asia!
Erna's and our driver had been chatting close to this guy. Praise the Lord that just in time they saw it moving. It came from under some bushes with dead leaves.
Lots of frogs were in the grass around the house lately and probably the snake came to have a good meal! They seem to be all over that area with houses, in this same garden were a while ago two cobra's.......
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Part II of India Update #1
Disclaimer: “#1” does not necessarily mean that a number 2 will ever follow.
More or less a contination of our previous blog entry.
Dear friends and family,
Our air-freight also arrived that day (Mon, 13 Aug) – three huge boxes – so we had enough stuff to survive for a while; the idea was that if house-hunting would take long, we could last until December with it. That afternoon I went to the office for some introductions and paper work, and the first impression was very good. A lot of really young colleagues, who compensate their lack of experience with enthusiasm to learn and to have fun – and with the ability to keep you busy like crazy. And the best part is that they come to you with questions and problems because you know everything, have invented geophysics, know how the world works, are a genius, and are simply fantastic to listen to … I tell you – that’s an experience, worth working your butt off for. Just the dark and evil idea that within two weeks they’ll know better is a little depressing – but then I’ll cry on Mieke’s shoulder, who will then enjoy the idea “I know what is best, and how to keep a middle-aged man out of depression”.
So far I haven’t used the words noise (UFN – you figure it out), garbage (UFG – you probably got it by now, otherwise re-read part I), and I won’t do now. But you get the idea (the Yankees among you may require some more hints – feel free to ask). I mentioned the cows already, but some more on the theme. They are funny, and have guts; lying in the middle of a busy road, without food or whatever, just some garbage to nibble on, takes character, and an enormous amount of stupidity. Tim counted more of 40 of them on our way back from church last Sunday. Talking about animals, we had to get rabies shots (three each; they are funny shots – particularly kids and teens really like them; I easily won all sparring against Tim the days after he got them). And not for nothing … There are thousands of dogs roaming everywhere; almost all of them without a collar (Dutchies: that means they are wild), and without any fat. Normally when I see an animal, I always think of how many of them would be required to feed me. Normally, dogs – the bigger ones – score fairly well on my efficiency scale. Not the ones in B’lore, though – no give me the Texan ones any time of the year. They normally don’t attack people, I think; maybe only the little kids who throw stones – and then it is fair. Definitely not TaeKwon-Do black belts … I think. Anyway, I love those rabies shots. By the way, apparently those shots are particularly to protect against bites of bats, rather than dogs. This started making sense when we picked up our residence permit: In some large trees around the building where hundreds of bats hanging in the branches, making noise like a thousand teenage girls – and they where huge! Some of them where flying around, and I think that some had a wingspan of around 70 cm (US: 27.559055 in). I checked with Mieke because I tend to exaggerate for dramatic effect, but she agrees this time.
On Tuesday and Wednesday (14&15 August), Mieke and I went with a lady on house-hunting trips. The very first house she showed was a direct hit; the sub-division was superb – away from the noise, with great facilities in the (gated) community, called Palm Meadows (Google’able for those interested). We loved that first house, but went to other places as well, which was a good idea, because we changed our first love on the second day – that’s how shallow we are – for a somewhat larger house with some garden, also in Palm Meadows (#59 – you can Google it up). It fell within our (Shell) budget, and Mieke started looking happy already by only thinking about it. I liked it a lot as well, but on the house, Mieke would have the final and dominant say (on most things, anyway). Shell entertains me most days, Indus does the same for Tim, but she has to start a life from scratch, so a good house helps. Unfortunately, the negotiations with the landlord (not done by us) are not going smoothly, and it is far from sure that we’ll be able to secure the house. Shell has some conditions regarding the contract that some landlords don’t feel comfortable with (like a 4-year lease, and not shorter). Anyway, we hope and pray for the best. Mentioning landlords – they are bandits for the rents they ask (like 2.5 times the mortgage we paid in Houston); but international companies are willing to pay.
It is incredible what is being built here – B’lore is the second fastest growing city in the world! Lots of international companies are already here, or are coming in – and B’lore is called the Silicon Valley of India. This boosts prices for houses dramatically; I believe 20-fold in the last 5 years. Building those buildings is a very interesting process. On a large one, there are hundreds of construction workers (50 Rupees/day). Each one carries a pot to carry cement, stones, or whatever is needed and by a mass human labor effort the building will be completed. I have been told that apart from the supervisors, the workers cannot read or write. They are born in the laborers caste (class), and are doomed from birth to follow in their parents steps. Coming from the office, I see them coming out of the work place at 6pm – hundreds, men, women, teenager boys and girls, most with a yellow helmet that can also be used to carry stuff in and on. Walking back home, or wherever they stay. Many also stay with their families in small tents next to the construction sites, or in the sites themselves. I try to observe their faces, and even though I am an emotional zilch, it really hurts to see many among them showing in their expression and way of looking that they would possibly end up being doctors, teachers, and whatever if born at another place on the planet. It frustrates me when Radju tells me that these workers do not send their kids to school to get out of the ongoing circle, and that they as well as the government at large apparently accept the status quo.
This workers thing was one of the three things that appalled me so far. The second was the presence of men dressed in women’s clothes begging at certain corners of the street. These men were given to the priests and the temple after their birth, were castrated, and dedicated for a life-long service to the temple. Many Indians give them money, because they believe that those guys could otherwise put a spell over them. How can parents ever do a thing like that to their kids?! The third thing that shocked me was the presence of young girls (around 4-12 years old) who perform tricks – salto’ing, turning with hula-hoops, etc. – in the middle of large, very busy junctions when traffic has to wait for a traffic sign or cop. When the cars, scooters, and tuk-tuks start to accelerate again, they run to the side of the road for safety. Mieke had a girl the other day who was so small that she could not even look into the car when she knocked on the window asking for money. It suffices to say that we need to get our mind and behavior around this. Giving money is not a good idea – only motivates them and there masters / parents to do it even more – and giving sweets or something may get such a small girl in trouble at the end of the day.
So far my whining part. After two weeks in the Royal Orchid we moved to a neighboring apartment complex (“Diamond District”). This meant moving 3 huge boxes, 3 suitcases, 2 duffel bags, 3 back-packs, and some more stuff. Mieke organized this, since I was at work – and I would have loved to see this! She had asked the previous day if the hotel could provide help, and of course “Okay, no problem” (we should have known better, by now). So when Mieke, after some waiting, went down to the reception to ask about where everybody was, one guy finally turned up at our rooms with some sort of trolley. He managed on his own (normally you have at least 20 people helping, but not today) to load the crazily heavy boxes on his trolley, and bring all the stuff down to the lobby eventually. And there it remained. Imagine all that junk in the lobby of the 5-star hotel, and then … nothing. So Mieke asked “So what now, I had asked that you guys could transport the stuff to the Diamond apartments?”. Lot of talking back and forth; there was no large enough car – well, there was nothing. Finally, one of the senior staff members picked up her own car, and all that mess was stuffed into it and brought to the Diamond in a few rounds. All the time Mieke was standing there as the Iron Lady giving orders, checking that nothing was taken or opened, and at the same time for sheer life hanging on the back-pack with all the really important papers like passports, money and stuff. Oh, and many of the workers were not particularly English majors, thus making the giving orders bit pretty funny (from the perspective of the husband drinking coffee while sitting on his lazy chair in the office with young ex-college kids standing around him to suck in his wisdom).
Finally, all stuff was dumped into the lobby of the Diamond – here the lobby was completely full. Luckily, there where a lot of Chiefs, but even more Indians, and all luggage was eventually taken to our apartment on the second floor. Mieke’s only flaw was that she got confused a bit about giving the right amount of tips, so there will be a lot of celebration in some homes for the weeks ahead (not my home, though). On the Diamond, even I can be short. It’s okay, old, dirty (Mieke’s view), and a pretty good place to leave as soon as possible (Mieke & Tim’s view – I don’t see the dirt so much, like it took me 6 months periods as a student to see enough dirt that it encouraged me to vacuum clean my dorm room again). In my view the apartment is fairly large, has a television in each room, and has two beds, so Tim doesn’t have to sleep between my wife and I. So I’m good.
Man, this is getting long; and all typing done with two fingers. It’s probably as painful for me typing as for all y’all reading. There are so many impressions here – important for us, and boring as heck for most of you – so it’s hard to call it quits, and I’ll ramble on some more. After 2.5 weeks, Tim’s school goes okay. Still chaotic (e.g., he got his laptop after over two weeks, and he hasn’t received most of his books yet). He gets along well with the other kids, so our concern that he as minority white-face and only red head would have trouble mixing has not come true. In actual fact, we think they sort of like him as some sort of specialty. I’m already thinking about how much dowry I want to get in a few years. Mieke has joined a Women’s Bible study and the Overseas Women Club. And she goes already shopping on her own (with Radju) to all sorts of funny places – she will make it here. She is becoming good friends with a number of other ladies, and I’m not afraid that Radju and she will come too close; their communication and fellowship seems to stop at a fairly shallow level. So I’m good again. A few days back, an Indian friend from Oman, Kavitha, called us, and it was a lot of fun hearing a familiar voice after a long time again. She invited us for her wedding in December (in Chennai, on the East Coast), so that will be our first Indian wedding and likely a lot of fun (provided the food is enough and good, but I bet it will be). Last weekend we visited friends of friends of ours from Houston. Notwithstanding that they were Americans, the visit was really great, and we hope to stay in regular contact, although we’ll live in different parts of the town. That’s part of the attractiveness of being an expat – you meet a lot of very interesting people from all over the world. Imagine, meeting mostly Dutch people all your life; we Dutch ourselves could only handle that with difficulty, but for humans that must be horrible.
Some more stories – what the heck; those who continue reading this far have nothing better to do, or have deep faith that somewhere, near the end, it may become readable (that’s a lost case, my friends). The Hydes had their roof repaired by at least two men. After a period of four hours one of them went up (the house is huge, so it takes some action to do this) to have a look at the progress. The workers were all fast asleep on the roof. Almost as funny as in a recent Shell conference where in the back of a meeting room a colleague also fell asleep and started snoring (no, not me). Gerda Epping had two guys working to clean the newly build house. She ended up cleaning herself, while the fearless warriors were watching TV in her own house. Again a Hyde’s story – their maid nicely ironed all laundry in order to put it nicely back into the cupboards. Funny thing was that it was dirty laundry (you can imagine the smell coming from under the ironer). They also had two cobras in their garden – these are kinda deadly. That’s the kind of neighborhood where you ask rowdy neighbor kids to come play in your garden.
When you ask experts about B’lore, they say all more or less the same: “the traffic is horrible, and the climate is fantastic”. Both are true. Now it’s rainy season here (Jul-Oct), and it rains only a few days a week, and mostly at night, so that’s not bad at all. The temperature now is great – somewhere in the mid-20s deg C (70s deg F). Humidity is low, so it feels just good. Summer is not too warm, and winter is not cold. Year round temperatures are roughly between 20-34 deg C. B’lore is at a height of 3000ft/1000m, and that helps.
Today, 29 Aug, it’s Tim’s 16th birthday. As a present, I did nice to the kid for a whole day. And he got a really nice mobile phone – without a SIM card yet, so it’s only nice to look at. Well, he got some other stuff as well that already does work (like a book). Another two years and he’ll leave us and go to college (or whatever). I’m already working on damage control with Mieke, with the main tactic that two years is still fairly far away, and that after that she can always join me on trips irrespective of school holidays. And Tim may even go to Honolulu Institute of Higher Learning – and that happens to be a place that we still want to visit. Also today we heard that the house seems to work out after all. Until all is signed, everything can still go wrong, but so far we’ll sleep happy and dream about cobras in our own garden, workers sleeping on our own roof or watching TV while we are cleaning.
If you made it reading all the way down, you’re either family, a real friend, or in desperate need of counseling. In any case, warm thanks! For the rest of you who started reading here again, you’ll never know what you’ve missed and how enriched your life could have been. But I sympathize with you. We hope to meet all y’all again, and to stay in contact! And whoever of you happens to be in or near B’lore, chances are that you are the category that can stay in our house, if you wish.
God bless,
Bastian, on behalf of the pretty members of our gang
Last remark: Since 4 days our Hotmail account has been closed for some obscure reason. We are trying to get it resolved, but in the mean time bmtblonk@hotmail.com doesn't work.
More or less a contination of our previous blog entry.
Dear friends and family,
Our air-freight also arrived that day (Mon, 13 Aug) – three huge boxes – so we had enough stuff to survive for a while; the idea was that if house-hunting would take long, we could last until December with it. That afternoon I went to the office for some introductions and paper work, and the first impression was very good. A lot of really young colleagues, who compensate their lack of experience with enthusiasm to learn and to have fun – and with the ability to keep you busy like crazy. And the best part is that they come to you with questions and problems because you know everything, have invented geophysics, know how the world works, are a genius, and are simply fantastic to listen to … I tell you – that’s an experience, worth working your butt off for. Just the dark and evil idea that within two weeks they’ll know better is a little depressing – but then I’ll cry on Mieke’s shoulder, who will then enjoy the idea “I know what is best, and how to keep a middle-aged man out of depression”.
So far I haven’t used the words noise (UFN – you figure it out), garbage (UFG – you probably got it by now, otherwise re-read part I), and I won’t do now. But you get the idea (the Yankees among you may require some more hints – feel free to ask). I mentioned the cows already, but some more on the theme. They are funny, and have guts; lying in the middle of a busy road, without food or whatever, just some garbage to nibble on, takes character, and an enormous amount of stupidity. Tim counted more of 40 of them on our way back from church last Sunday. Talking about animals, we had to get rabies shots (three each; they are funny shots – particularly kids and teens really like them; I easily won all sparring against Tim the days after he got them). And not for nothing … There are thousands of dogs roaming everywhere; almost all of them without a collar (Dutchies: that means they are wild), and without any fat. Normally when I see an animal, I always think of how many of them would be required to feed me. Normally, dogs – the bigger ones – score fairly well on my efficiency scale. Not the ones in B’lore, though – no give me the Texan ones any time of the year. They normally don’t attack people, I think; maybe only the little kids who throw stones – and then it is fair. Definitely not TaeKwon-Do black belts … I think. Anyway, I love those rabies shots. By the way, apparently those shots are particularly to protect against bites of bats, rather than dogs. This started making sense when we picked up our residence permit: In some large trees around the building where hundreds of bats hanging in the branches, making noise like a thousand teenage girls – and they where huge! Some of them where flying around, and I think that some had a wingspan of around 70 cm (US: 27.559055 in). I checked with Mieke because I tend to exaggerate for dramatic effect, but she agrees this time.
On Tuesday and Wednesday (14&15 August), Mieke and I went with a lady on house-hunting trips. The very first house she showed was a direct hit; the sub-division was superb – away from the noise, with great facilities in the (gated) community, called Palm Meadows (Google’able for those interested). We loved that first house, but went to other places as well, which was a good idea, because we changed our first love on the second day – that’s how shallow we are – for a somewhat larger house with some garden, also in Palm Meadows (#59 – you can Google it up). It fell within our (Shell) budget, and Mieke started looking happy already by only thinking about it. I liked it a lot as well, but on the house, Mieke would have the final and dominant say (on most things, anyway). Shell entertains me most days, Indus does the same for Tim, but she has to start a life from scratch, so a good house helps. Unfortunately, the negotiations with the landlord (not done by us) are not going smoothly, and it is far from sure that we’ll be able to secure the house. Shell has some conditions regarding the contract that some landlords don’t feel comfortable with (like a 4-year lease, and not shorter). Anyway, we hope and pray for the best. Mentioning landlords – they are bandits for the rents they ask (like 2.5 times the mortgage we paid in Houston); but international companies are willing to pay.
It is incredible what is being built here – B’lore is the second fastest growing city in the world! Lots of international companies are already here, or are coming in – and B’lore is called the Silicon Valley of India. This boosts prices for houses dramatically; I believe 20-fold in the last 5 years. Building those buildings is a very interesting process. On a large one, there are hundreds of construction workers (50 Rupees/day). Each one carries a pot to carry cement, stones, or whatever is needed and by a mass human labor effort the building will be completed. I have been told that apart from the supervisors, the workers cannot read or write. They are born in the laborers caste (class), and are doomed from birth to follow in their parents steps. Coming from the office, I see them coming out of the work place at 6pm – hundreds, men, women, teenager boys and girls, most with a yellow helmet that can also be used to carry stuff in and on. Walking back home, or wherever they stay. Many also stay with their families in small tents next to the construction sites, or in the sites themselves. I try to observe their faces, and even though I am an emotional zilch, it really hurts to see many among them showing in their expression and way of looking that they would possibly end up being doctors, teachers, and whatever if born at another place on the planet. It frustrates me when Radju tells me that these workers do not send their kids to school to get out of the ongoing circle, and that they as well as the government at large apparently accept the status quo.
This workers thing was one of the three things that appalled me so far. The second was the presence of men dressed in women’s clothes begging at certain corners of the street. These men were given to the priests and the temple after their birth, were castrated, and dedicated for a life-long service to the temple. Many Indians give them money, because they believe that those guys could otherwise put a spell over them. How can parents ever do a thing like that to their kids?! The third thing that shocked me was the presence of young girls (around 4-12 years old) who perform tricks – salto’ing, turning with hula-hoops, etc. – in the middle of large, very busy junctions when traffic has to wait for a traffic sign or cop. When the cars, scooters, and tuk-tuks start to accelerate again, they run to the side of the road for safety. Mieke had a girl the other day who was so small that she could not even look into the car when she knocked on the window asking for money. It suffices to say that we need to get our mind and behavior around this. Giving money is not a good idea – only motivates them and there masters / parents to do it even more – and giving sweets or something may get such a small girl in trouble at the end of the day.
So far my whining part. After two weeks in the Royal Orchid we moved to a neighboring apartment complex (“Diamond District”). This meant moving 3 huge boxes, 3 suitcases, 2 duffel bags, 3 back-packs, and some more stuff. Mieke organized this, since I was at work – and I would have loved to see this! She had asked the previous day if the hotel could provide help, and of course “Okay, no problem” (we should have known better, by now). So when Mieke, after some waiting, went down to the reception to ask about where everybody was, one guy finally turned up at our rooms with some sort of trolley. He managed on his own (normally you have at least 20 people helping, but not today) to load the crazily heavy boxes on his trolley, and bring all the stuff down to the lobby eventually. And there it remained. Imagine all that junk in the lobby of the 5-star hotel, and then … nothing. So Mieke asked “So what now, I had asked that you guys could transport the stuff to the Diamond apartments?”. Lot of talking back and forth; there was no large enough car – well, there was nothing. Finally, one of the senior staff members picked up her own car, and all that mess was stuffed into it and brought to the Diamond in a few rounds. All the time Mieke was standing there as the Iron Lady giving orders, checking that nothing was taken or opened, and at the same time for sheer life hanging on the back-pack with all the really important papers like passports, money and stuff. Oh, and many of the workers were not particularly English majors, thus making the giving orders bit pretty funny (from the perspective of the husband drinking coffee while sitting on his lazy chair in the office with young ex-college kids standing around him to suck in his wisdom).
Finally, all stuff was dumped into the lobby of the Diamond – here the lobby was completely full. Luckily, there where a lot of Chiefs, but even more Indians, and all luggage was eventually taken to our apartment on the second floor. Mieke’s only flaw was that she got confused a bit about giving the right amount of tips, so there will be a lot of celebration in some homes for the weeks ahead (not my home, though). On the Diamond, even I can be short. It’s okay, old, dirty (Mieke’s view), and a pretty good place to leave as soon as possible (Mieke & Tim’s view – I don’t see the dirt so much, like it took me 6 months periods as a student to see enough dirt that it encouraged me to vacuum clean my dorm room again). In my view the apartment is fairly large, has a television in each room, and has two beds, so Tim doesn’t have to sleep between my wife and I. So I’m good.
Man, this is getting long; and all typing done with two fingers. It’s probably as painful for me typing as for all y’all reading. There are so many impressions here – important for us, and boring as heck for most of you – so it’s hard to call it quits, and I’ll ramble on some more. After 2.5 weeks, Tim’s school goes okay. Still chaotic (e.g., he got his laptop after over two weeks, and he hasn’t received most of his books yet). He gets along well with the other kids, so our concern that he as minority white-face and only red head would have trouble mixing has not come true. In actual fact, we think they sort of like him as some sort of specialty. I’m already thinking about how much dowry I want to get in a few years. Mieke has joined a Women’s Bible study and the Overseas Women Club. And she goes already shopping on her own (with Radju) to all sorts of funny places – she will make it here. She is becoming good friends with a number of other ladies, and I’m not afraid that Radju and she will come too close; their communication and fellowship seems to stop at a fairly shallow level. So I’m good again. A few days back, an Indian friend from Oman, Kavitha, called us, and it was a lot of fun hearing a familiar voice after a long time again. She invited us for her wedding in December (in Chennai, on the East Coast), so that will be our first Indian wedding and likely a lot of fun (provided the food is enough and good, but I bet it will be). Last weekend we visited friends of friends of ours from Houston. Notwithstanding that they were Americans, the visit was really great, and we hope to stay in regular contact, although we’ll live in different parts of the town. That’s part of the attractiveness of being an expat – you meet a lot of very interesting people from all over the world. Imagine, meeting mostly Dutch people all your life; we Dutch ourselves could only handle that with difficulty, but for humans that must be horrible.
Some more stories – what the heck; those who continue reading this far have nothing better to do, or have deep faith that somewhere, near the end, it may become readable (that’s a lost case, my friends). The Hydes had their roof repaired by at least two men. After a period of four hours one of them went up (the house is huge, so it takes some action to do this) to have a look at the progress. The workers were all fast asleep on the roof. Almost as funny as in a recent Shell conference where in the back of a meeting room a colleague also fell asleep and started snoring (no, not me). Gerda Epping had two guys working to clean the newly build house. She ended up cleaning herself, while the fearless warriors were watching TV in her own house. Again a Hyde’s story – their maid nicely ironed all laundry in order to put it nicely back into the cupboards. Funny thing was that it was dirty laundry (you can imagine the smell coming from under the ironer). They also had two cobras in their garden – these are kinda deadly. That’s the kind of neighborhood where you ask rowdy neighbor kids to come play in your garden.
When you ask experts about B’lore, they say all more or less the same: “the traffic is horrible, and the climate is fantastic”. Both are true. Now it’s rainy season here (Jul-Oct), and it rains only a few days a week, and mostly at night, so that’s not bad at all. The temperature now is great – somewhere in the mid-20s deg C (70s deg F). Humidity is low, so it feels just good. Summer is not too warm, and winter is not cold. Year round temperatures are roughly between 20-34 deg C. B’lore is at a height of 3000ft/1000m, and that helps.
Today, 29 Aug, it’s Tim’s 16th birthday. As a present, I did nice to the kid for a whole day. And he got a really nice mobile phone – without a SIM card yet, so it’s only nice to look at. Well, he got some other stuff as well that already does work (like a book). Another two years and he’ll leave us and go to college (or whatever). I’m already working on damage control with Mieke, with the main tactic that two years is still fairly far away, and that after that she can always join me on trips irrespective of school holidays. And Tim may even go to Honolulu Institute of Higher Learning – and that happens to be a place that we still want to visit. Also today we heard that the house seems to work out after all. Until all is signed, everything can still go wrong, but so far we’ll sleep happy and dream about cobras in our own garden, workers sleeping on our own roof or watching TV while we are cleaning.
If you made it reading all the way down, you’re either family, a real friend, or in desperate need of counseling. In any case, warm thanks! For the rest of you who started reading here again, you’ll never know what you’ve missed and how enriched your life could have been. But I sympathize with you. We hope to meet all y’all again, and to stay in contact! And whoever of you happens to be in or near B’lore, chances are that you are the category that can stay in our house, if you wish.
God bless,
Bastian, on behalf of the pretty members of our gang
Last remark: Since 4 days our Hotmail account has been closed for some obscure reason. We are trying to get it resolved, but in the mean time bmtblonk@hotmail.com doesn't work.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
First update from India!
Update Blonks – 19 August, 2007
Dear family, friends, and undecided category,
The last couple of months have been kind of hectic for us, and therefore we have probably forgotten to mention to a number of you that we were moving from Houston, Texas, to Bangalore, India. Well, we did. Apologies for this mass update; we’ll do our best to answer all personal emails, but hereby we can at least share our status in an efficient way. We intend to send something every couple of months – but we also intended that when we moved to Muscat and to Houston. So don’t hold your breath. For some of you this is already long enough, so feel free to move down to our best regards. For others, below some highly irrelevant news, that will still beat CNN on a bad day.
The last weeks in Houston were occupied with saying goodbye to friends, finalizing the sale of our house and cars, and completing all preparations for the move, like getting Indian Visas, packing and shipping of the household (suitcases, airfreight, and container stuff). The saying-goodbye part was the most difficult, and we will greatly miss our personal friends, friends from Bear Creek Community Church, Global TaeKwon-Do, and from Shell, and we’ll try hard to visit Houston again in the years ahead to meet with them again. When we moved to Houston five years ago, many people told us that that city would be horrible. They were so wrong. We have loved the place, as well as we have loved just living in Yankee Country, and for a long time to come we will think of it as home.
After a week of vacation in Banff National Park (Canada), we flew into Houston for one more night, where around 01:30hrs we found out that perfectly open junkfood joints serve you only if your butt is placed on a car seat, and that walking past the drive-through counters really doesn’t work; Taco Bell lost valuable customer points that night. Later that morning, Richie Martin picked us up in our motel bringing the additional suitcases we had left at the Martin’s after which she dropped us off at Bush International for the flight to Amsterdam (21 July). While on job transfer, Shell puts the whole family in business class, which for Tim is as close to heaven as it gets on earth (food, drinks, and movies for 10 straight hours – all in a big easy chair) – he doesn’t relate to “On Earth, as it is in Texas”.
We stayed for just over 2 weeks in Holland – all the time in the house of Anne (Mieke’s brother) and Marcelle, who were on vacation with their kids at that time. It was good to meet a lot of family and friends after quite a while again. Luckily Anne & Marcelle & kids came back home a night earlier, so we could even spend a last evening with them before we took off to Amsterdam Airport at 04::00hrs Thursday morning, 8 August. We flew uneventfully via Frankfurt to Bangalore (yes, again the food and the movies for the teenager – and for his dad) and arrived there Friday morning just after midnight. Getting all luggage and going through customs went fairly smoothly, and we were in our hotel around 01:30hrs. We had expected a mad house at the airport, but it was not bad at all – only a number of friendly men flocking around us to help us pushing our carts with suitcases. I know that I (B) look whimpy, but they also believed Tim needed help. So they ripped us of for 60 Indian Rupees (1.5 USD) – I’m still recovering from this financial disaster. Realizing that many construction workers earn 50 Rupees a day, I really felt too generous. Okay seriously, we’ll need some time to get a handle on how to deal with money, tips, gifts, and whatever – will be one of my stress factors I already foresee (yes, that whimpy part again).
The hotel we stayed in for the first two weeks (Royal Orchid, 5 stars – nicknamed by some as the Not-so-Royal-Orchid – they have a Web-site for those who want to check it out; it’s the one at Airport Road) was pretty good, including the food. They had a special, complimentary weight-loss program, so by Monday afternoon (after 4 days) I was down 5 kgs (around 11 lbs for the Yankees among you) – just 80 kgs more to go. Tim didn’t join the program, but Mieke – loyal as ever – did, but was not as efficient as I was. After a week, we got some tasty pills because we had reached our target, and after that we said goodbye to our new best friend the toilet.
Friday afternoon, the day of arrival, our Shell driver took us for some sight-seeing. Our driver, Radju, is a friendly, small-sized man, who is pretty good in speaking Kannada (the local language in the Karnataka state Bangalore is in), and a little limited in English. Great conversations we have – real deep. He imitates an automatic transmission car with a manual gear one, and is able to do most actions in third gear, apart from accelerating on the steeper slopes of a bridge; then even he needs to go down to second or even first gear. I can almost physically feel the pain that the engine must have.
Traffic is interesting here, a little chaotic – like UFC (Ultimately Freaking Chaos) – where it feels if everybody gangs up on pedestrians since they weight least, and they look funny when they jump. Heavy rules, provided it has four wheels. Being a cow rules even more. Those creatures wander everywhere on the road. They are sort of holy, so even if you are heavier, you still stop for them, and suppress the thought about a nice steak on your bbq. Tim saw one lady cleaning the behind of one of those cute animals next to the road, showing that people really care for them. At the end of this story some survival tips for the traffic here. They are sort of funny, a little exaggerated, but still surprisingly close to reality.
To make some of you happy who like to see us again some day, traffic is chaos, but not aggressive; you hardly see people angry, or shouting. Generally it’s like “you’re heavier than I and let me live, so I still love you notwithstanding that you cut me off, make the whole flow of traffic stop, and are ugly”. In actual fact, people are extremely friendly and polite most of the time, even more than in Houston – not at all like Holland…
Saturday (11 August) was interesting (no, don’t worry that I will write about every day – even I wouldn’t have the illusion that anyone would then keep on reading), and we encountered some cultural differences. We had a 10:00hrs appointment at Tim’s school (Indus International School Bangalore) with a lady called Cornelia to finalize Tim’s admission documents and pick up his uniform and books. We left with Radju at 09:00hrs. We couldn’t find real directions with a lot of street names, but knew from Google Earth where it was. Radju didn’t know the place, but after our explanation attempt, he says “okay, no problem”, and we took off. It took us a while to realize that he had no idea where to go, apart from the general direction.
Anyway, after quite some asking and more “okay, no problem”s, we arrived at 09:57 (Yes - in time! Our Dutch souls were at peace.). Instead of a one-on-one with Cornelia, there seemed to be an open day with 100’s of people, so we ended up listening to 2.5 hours of rather boring presentations (one by a General, a few by Colonels, who were likely pursuing second careers) – with no Cornelia in sight. Finally, we were able to track Cornelia with the help of one of the Colonels who had an enormous mustache (probably kicked out of the Army because he was too much of a target). To make a long story not extremely long, at 16:00hrs (instead of 11:00hrs as we had expected) we left the school with only two books, and a bag full of sports clothes – but no uniform, rest of books, and laptop that was also supposed to be there.
So we took away two valuable lessons: 1) “Okay, no problem” means “I have not the slightest idea what you are talking about, you stupid Dutchman, but you pay me, so I’ll be nice”, and 2) an one-hour private appointment means that they would really like you to have a 6-hour period of ultimate fun with another 300 persons. Anyhow, it was sort of a fun day. We met the Dutch Epping family at Indus, who had recently also moved from Houston, and we met a girl from Tim’s class at Awty in Houston, who had also relocated to B’lore during the summer. It’s nice to see familiar faces all of a sudden at the other part of the world; makes me cry less.
Saturday night, Tom Hyde, a Canadian Shell colleague, took us out to a nice Indian restaurant, and he answered many of our questions relevant for survival here, like what to do with people begging, and what type of food is safe or not.
Sunday (12 August) – be strong, not too many detailed days to go – Tom picked us up and took us to his church. Tom drives himself during the weekends, and he impressed us a lot. He considers driving a sort of a dance – I guess with the car horns as the music – and there is something in it. By the way, he told us that his new driving style was less appreciated when he was back in Canada. He goes to a local non-denominational church, with a small group of international people, mainly younger ones connected to some mission organizations. The church was on a crowded first floor of a building in a busy, noisy, rather narrow street – and we would never have found it ourselves. When we entered, the band was playing a song from one of our favorite Christian rock bands, Casting Crowns (Tim and I had listened for hours on end to their CDs when we traveled to our TaeKwon-Do classes almost every day while in Houston). The service started with singing, and it happened that we knew almost all songs with quite a few of them on our favorites list. Those of you who are Christians and have been in other churches will understand the feeling of “home-coming” when you are away from home, pretty far away in our case, and you find that the Christian church is not just something only in your own place and with people you know and from the same culture and color, but a world-wide movement centered around Jesus, irrespective of nationality, social status, and background. We will carefully look around at different churches before we will commit to one, but we will never forget Hope Chapel Bangalore, who helped us starting to get roots in B’lore on our third day here.
These were roughly the first three days, and so far, pretty good. I’ll now just mention some miscellaneous activities and impressions. Monday (13 August) Tim went to school with the school bus, and without uniform. All three of us were nervous. We didn’t precisely know where the school bus would stop, and Tim thought he would be the only one without uniform (not true) and with red hair (true) at school. I had already started my intense weight-loss program, Mieke was getting there, and we were concerned that Tim would go on the program while on his first day at school. Although I enjoyed roughing him up a bit at TaeKwon-Do (as long as it lasts), I would hate that to happen to the kid. We didn’t hear from him that day, so no news is good news. And in fact, just after 5pm he came back and had actually a good – and solid J – day.
Survive…
So before you step in any vehicle, there are a few things you should know about the traffic; just a few hints for survival. Actually, they are applicable to every place in India, except Bihar, where life outside the vehicle is only marginally safer.
India road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best, and leave the results to your insurance company.
The hints are as follows.
Do we drive left or right of the road? The answer is: both. Basically you start left of the road, unless it is occupied. In that case, go to the right, unless that is also occupied. Then proceed by occupying the next gap, as in chess. Just trust your instincts, ascertain the direction, and proceed.
Adherence to road rules leads to much misery and occasional fatality. Most drivers don’t drive, but just aim their vehicles in the intended direction. Don’t get discouraged or underestimate yourself except for a belief in the reincarnation; the other drivers are not in any better position.
Don’t stop at pedestrian crossings just because some fool wants to cross the road. You may do so only if you enjoy being bumped in the back.
Pedestrians have been strictly instructed to cross only when traffic is moving slowly or has come to a dead stop because some minister is in town. Still some idiot may try to wade across, but then, let’s not talk ill of the dead.
Blowing your horn is not a sign of protest as in some countries. We horn to express joy, resentment, frustration, and romance and bare lust (two brisk blasts) or, just mobilize a dozing cow in the middle of the bazaar.
Keep informative books in the glove compartment: you may want to read them during traffic jams, while awaiting for the chief minister’s motorcade, or waiting for the rainwater to recede when over the ground traffic meets underground drainage.
Night driving on Indian roads is in a way like playing Russian Roulette, because you never know who amongst the drivers is loaded.
What looks like premature dawn at the horizon turns out to be a truck attempting a speed record. On encountering it, just pull partly into the field adjoining the road until the phenomenom passes.
Often you may encounter a single powerful beam of light about six feet above the ground. This is not a super motorbike, but a truck approaching you with a single light on, usually the left one. It could be the right one, but never get too close to investigate. You may prove your point posthumously.
Of course, all this occurs at night, on the trunk roads. During daytime, trucks are more visible, but…there are the UFO’s. They have blinking coloured lights and weird sounds emanating from within. This is an illuminated bus, full of happy pilgrims singing “bhajans”. These pilgrims go at breakneck speed, seeking contact with the Almighty, often meeting with success.
Speaking of the Indian Roads, Auto Ricksaws have to be mentioned. An auto-ricksaw is the result of a collision between a ricksaw and an automobile. This three-wheeled vehicle carries iron rods, gas cylinders or passengers three times its weight and dimension, at an unspecified fare. After careful geometric calculations, children are folded and packed into these auto rickshaws until some children in the periphery are not in contact with the vehicle at all. Then their school bags are pushed into the microscopic gaps all around so those minor collisions with other vehicles on the road cause no permanent damage. Of course, the peripheral childres are charged half the fare and also learn Newton’s laws of motion enroute to school: auto rickshaw drivers follow the road rules depicted in the film Ben Hur, and are licensed to irritate.
If, after all this, you still want to drive in India, have your lessons between 8 PM and 11 AM – when the police has gone home and the citizen is the free to enjoy the “freedom of speed” enshrined in our constitution.
Summarized, there are a few rules you should remember, starting with the assumption that Indians believe in reincarnation:
Road Rules for Driving in India
1. The assumption of immortality is required of all road users.
2. The following must always be given right-of-way, in descending order of importance: cows, trucks, buses, potholes, elephants, camels, cars, pigs, dogs, motorcycles, goats, bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians.
3. It is illegal to drive a vehicle without one of the following: Elaborate shrine to Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Guru Nanak, or a detailed reproduction of Mecca on your dashboard, "OK-Tata-Horn-Please-Use-Dipper-at-Night" painted somewhere on the vehicle, or flashy red fringe across the length of the windshield.
4. Functioning brake lights, turn signals and headlights only distract other drivers. For safety's sake, do NOT use them.
5. Looking at other vehicles to the side or behind you will only distract you. Remove the side-view mirrors and adjust the rear-view mirror so that you can constantly admire your own good looks while driving.
6. All vehicles shall be driven in accordance with the maxim: To slow is to falter, to brake is to fail, to stop is defeat.
7. USE OF HORN (also known as the sonic fender).
For cars:
Single blast (casual) means "I have not blown my horn for several minutes" or "I blow my horn, therefore I am."
Short blasts (urgent) indicate supremacy, such as in clearing birds, dogs, rickshaws and pedestrians from path.
Long blast (desperate) denotes supplication, as to an oncoming truck, "I am going too fast to stop, so unless you slow down we both shall die." In extreme cases this may be accompanied by flashing of headlights (frantic).
For trucks and buses:
All horn signals have same meaning, "I weigh 12.5 tons and have no intention of stopping."
8. RIGHT OF WAY: Traffic entering a road from the left has priority. So does traffic from the right. And also traffic in the middle.
9. All traffic at all times, regardless of direction of travel shall occupy the center of the road.
10. In the absence of seat belts, car occupants shall wear garlands of marigolds.
Having said all this, isn’t it true that the accident rate and related deaths are less in India compared to other countries?!
Enjoy India.
Dear family, friends, and undecided category,
The last couple of months have been kind of hectic for us, and therefore we have probably forgotten to mention to a number of you that we were moving from Houston, Texas, to Bangalore, India. Well, we did. Apologies for this mass update; we’ll do our best to answer all personal emails, but hereby we can at least share our status in an efficient way. We intend to send something every couple of months – but we also intended that when we moved to Muscat and to Houston. So don’t hold your breath. For some of you this is already long enough, so feel free to move down to our best regards. For others, below some highly irrelevant news, that will still beat CNN on a bad day.
The last weeks in Houston were occupied with saying goodbye to friends, finalizing the sale of our house and cars, and completing all preparations for the move, like getting Indian Visas, packing and shipping of the household (suitcases, airfreight, and container stuff). The saying-goodbye part was the most difficult, and we will greatly miss our personal friends, friends from Bear Creek Community Church, Global TaeKwon-Do, and from Shell, and we’ll try hard to visit Houston again in the years ahead to meet with them again. When we moved to Houston five years ago, many people told us that that city would be horrible. They were so wrong. We have loved the place, as well as we have loved just living in Yankee Country, and for a long time to come we will think of it as home.
After a week of vacation in Banff National Park (Canada), we flew into Houston for one more night, where around 01:30hrs we found out that perfectly open junkfood joints serve you only if your butt is placed on a car seat, and that walking past the drive-through counters really doesn’t work; Taco Bell lost valuable customer points that night. Later that morning, Richie Martin picked us up in our motel bringing the additional suitcases we had left at the Martin’s after which she dropped us off at Bush International for the flight to Amsterdam (21 July). While on job transfer, Shell puts the whole family in business class, which for Tim is as close to heaven as it gets on earth (food, drinks, and movies for 10 straight hours – all in a big easy chair) – he doesn’t relate to “On Earth, as it is in Texas”.
We stayed for just over 2 weeks in Holland – all the time in the house of Anne (Mieke’s brother) and Marcelle, who were on vacation with their kids at that time. It was good to meet a lot of family and friends after quite a while again. Luckily Anne & Marcelle & kids came back home a night earlier, so we could even spend a last evening with them before we took off to Amsterdam Airport at 04::00hrs Thursday morning, 8 August. We flew uneventfully via Frankfurt to Bangalore (yes, again the food and the movies for the teenager – and for his dad) and arrived there Friday morning just after midnight. Getting all luggage and going through customs went fairly smoothly, and we were in our hotel around 01:30hrs. We had expected a mad house at the airport, but it was not bad at all – only a number of friendly men flocking around us to help us pushing our carts with suitcases. I know that I (B) look whimpy, but they also believed Tim needed help. So they ripped us of for 60 Indian Rupees (1.5 USD) – I’m still recovering from this financial disaster. Realizing that many construction workers earn 50 Rupees a day, I really felt too generous. Okay seriously, we’ll need some time to get a handle on how to deal with money, tips, gifts, and whatever – will be one of my stress factors I already foresee (yes, that whimpy part again).
The hotel we stayed in for the first two weeks (Royal Orchid, 5 stars – nicknamed by some as the Not-so-Royal-Orchid – they have a Web-site for those who want to check it out; it’s the one at Airport Road) was pretty good, including the food. They had a special, complimentary weight-loss program, so by Monday afternoon (after 4 days) I was down 5 kgs (around 11 lbs for the Yankees among you) – just 80 kgs more to go. Tim didn’t join the program, but Mieke – loyal as ever – did, but was not as efficient as I was. After a week, we got some tasty pills because we had reached our target, and after that we said goodbye to our new best friend the toilet.
Friday afternoon, the day of arrival, our Shell driver took us for some sight-seeing. Our driver, Radju, is a friendly, small-sized man, who is pretty good in speaking Kannada (the local language in the Karnataka state Bangalore is in), and a little limited in English. Great conversations we have – real deep. He imitates an automatic transmission car with a manual gear one, and is able to do most actions in third gear, apart from accelerating on the steeper slopes of a bridge; then even he needs to go down to second or even first gear. I can almost physically feel the pain that the engine must have.
Traffic is interesting here, a little chaotic – like UFC (Ultimately Freaking Chaos) – where it feels if everybody gangs up on pedestrians since they weight least, and they look funny when they jump. Heavy rules, provided it has four wheels. Being a cow rules even more. Those creatures wander everywhere on the road. They are sort of holy, so even if you are heavier, you still stop for them, and suppress the thought about a nice steak on your bbq. Tim saw one lady cleaning the behind of one of those cute animals next to the road, showing that people really care for them. At the end of this story some survival tips for the traffic here. They are sort of funny, a little exaggerated, but still surprisingly close to reality.
To make some of you happy who like to see us again some day, traffic is chaos, but not aggressive; you hardly see people angry, or shouting. Generally it’s like “you’re heavier than I and let me live, so I still love you notwithstanding that you cut me off, make the whole flow of traffic stop, and are ugly”. In actual fact, people are extremely friendly and polite most of the time, even more than in Houston – not at all like Holland…
Saturday (11 August) was interesting (no, don’t worry that I will write about every day – even I wouldn’t have the illusion that anyone would then keep on reading), and we encountered some cultural differences. We had a 10:00hrs appointment at Tim’s school (Indus International School Bangalore) with a lady called Cornelia to finalize Tim’s admission documents and pick up his uniform and books. We left with Radju at 09:00hrs. We couldn’t find real directions with a lot of street names, but knew from Google Earth where it was. Radju didn’t know the place, but after our explanation attempt, he says “okay, no problem”, and we took off. It took us a while to realize that he had no idea where to go, apart from the general direction.
Anyway, after quite some asking and more “okay, no problem”s, we arrived at 09:57 (Yes - in time! Our Dutch souls were at peace.). Instead of a one-on-one with Cornelia, there seemed to be an open day with 100’s of people, so we ended up listening to 2.5 hours of rather boring presentations (one by a General, a few by Colonels, who were likely pursuing second careers) – with no Cornelia in sight. Finally, we were able to track Cornelia with the help of one of the Colonels who had an enormous mustache (probably kicked out of the Army because he was too much of a target). To make a long story not extremely long, at 16:00hrs (instead of 11:00hrs as we had expected) we left the school with only two books, and a bag full of sports clothes – but no uniform, rest of books, and laptop that was also supposed to be there.
So we took away two valuable lessons: 1) “Okay, no problem” means “I have not the slightest idea what you are talking about, you stupid Dutchman, but you pay me, so I’ll be nice”, and 2) an one-hour private appointment means that they would really like you to have a 6-hour period of ultimate fun with another 300 persons. Anyhow, it was sort of a fun day. We met the Dutch Epping family at Indus, who had recently also moved from Houston, and we met a girl from Tim’s class at Awty in Houston, who had also relocated to B’lore during the summer. It’s nice to see familiar faces all of a sudden at the other part of the world; makes me cry less.
Saturday night, Tom Hyde, a Canadian Shell colleague, took us out to a nice Indian restaurant, and he answered many of our questions relevant for survival here, like what to do with people begging, and what type of food is safe or not.
Sunday (12 August) – be strong, not too many detailed days to go – Tom picked us up and took us to his church. Tom drives himself during the weekends, and he impressed us a lot. He considers driving a sort of a dance – I guess with the car horns as the music – and there is something in it. By the way, he told us that his new driving style was less appreciated when he was back in Canada. He goes to a local non-denominational church, with a small group of international people, mainly younger ones connected to some mission organizations. The church was on a crowded first floor of a building in a busy, noisy, rather narrow street – and we would never have found it ourselves. When we entered, the band was playing a song from one of our favorite Christian rock bands, Casting Crowns (Tim and I had listened for hours on end to their CDs when we traveled to our TaeKwon-Do classes almost every day while in Houston). The service started with singing, and it happened that we knew almost all songs with quite a few of them on our favorites list. Those of you who are Christians and have been in other churches will understand the feeling of “home-coming” when you are away from home, pretty far away in our case, and you find that the Christian church is not just something only in your own place and with people you know and from the same culture and color, but a world-wide movement centered around Jesus, irrespective of nationality, social status, and background. We will carefully look around at different churches before we will commit to one, but we will never forget Hope Chapel Bangalore, who helped us starting to get roots in B’lore on our third day here.
These were roughly the first three days, and so far, pretty good. I’ll now just mention some miscellaneous activities and impressions. Monday (13 August) Tim went to school with the school bus, and without uniform. All three of us were nervous. We didn’t precisely know where the school bus would stop, and Tim thought he would be the only one without uniform (not true) and with red hair (true) at school. I had already started my intense weight-loss program, Mieke was getting there, and we were concerned that Tim would go on the program while on his first day at school. Although I enjoyed roughing him up a bit at TaeKwon-Do (as long as it lasts), I would hate that to happen to the kid. We didn’t hear from him that day, so no news is good news. And in fact, just after 5pm he came back and had actually a good – and solid J – day.
Survive…
So before you step in any vehicle, there are a few things you should know about the traffic; just a few hints for survival. Actually, they are applicable to every place in India, except Bihar, where life outside the vehicle is only marginally safer.
India road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best, and leave the results to your insurance company.
The hints are as follows.
Do we drive left or right of the road? The answer is: both. Basically you start left of the road, unless it is occupied. In that case, go to the right, unless that is also occupied. Then proceed by occupying the next gap, as in chess. Just trust your instincts, ascertain the direction, and proceed.
Adherence to road rules leads to much misery and occasional fatality. Most drivers don’t drive, but just aim their vehicles in the intended direction. Don’t get discouraged or underestimate yourself except for a belief in the reincarnation; the other drivers are not in any better position.
Don’t stop at pedestrian crossings just because some fool wants to cross the road. You may do so only if you enjoy being bumped in the back.
Pedestrians have been strictly instructed to cross only when traffic is moving slowly or has come to a dead stop because some minister is in town. Still some idiot may try to wade across, but then, let’s not talk ill of the dead.
Blowing your horn is not a sign of protest as in some countries. We horn to express joy, resentment, frustration, and romance and bare lust (two brisk blasts) or, just mobilize a dozing cow in the middle of the bazaar.
Keep informative books in the glove compartment: you may want to read them during traffic jams, while awaiting for the chief minister’s motorcade, or waiting for the rainwater to recede when over the ground traffic meets underground drainage.
Night driving on Indian roads is in a way like playing Russian Roulette, because you never know who amongst the drivers is loaded.
What looks like premature dawn at the horizon turns out to be a truck attempting a speed record. On encountering it, just pull partly into the field adjoining the road until the phenomenom passes.
Often you may encounter a single powerful beam of light about six feet above the ground. This is not a super motorbike, but a truck approaching you with a single light on, usually the left one. It could be the right one, but never get too close to investigate. You may prove your point posthumously.
Of course, all this occurs at night, on the trunk roads. During daytime, trucks are more visible, but…there are the UFO’s. They have blinking coloured lights and weird sounds emanating from within. This is an illuminated bus, full of happy pilgrims singing “bhajans”. These pilgrims go at breakneck speed, seeking contact with the Almighty, often meeting with success.
Speaking of the Indian Roads, Auto Ricksaws have to be mentioned. An auto-ricksaw is the result of a collision between a ricksaw and an automobile. This three-wheeled vehicle carries iron rods, gas cylinders or passengers three times its weight and dimension, at an unspecified fare. After careful geometric calculations, children are folded and packed into these auto rickshaws until some children in the periphery are not in contact with the vehicle at all. Then their school bags are pushed into the microscopic gaps all around so those minor collisions with other vehicles on the road cause no permanent damage. Of course, the peripheral childres are charged half the fare and also learn Newton’s laws of motion enroute to school: auto rickshaw drivers follow the road rules depicted in the film Ben Hur, and are licensed to irritate.
If, after all this, you still want to drive in India, have your lessons between 8 PM and 11 AM – when the police has gone home and the citizen is the free to enjoy the “freedom of speed” enshrined in our constitution.
Summarized, there are a few rules you should remember, starting with the assumption that Indians believe in reincarnation:
Road Rules for Driving in India
1. The assumption of immortality is required of all road users.
2. The following must always be given right-of-way, in descending order of importance: cows, trucks, buses, potholes, elephants, camels, cars, pigs, dogs, motorcycles, goats, bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians.
3. It is illegal to drive a vehicle without one of the following: Elaborate shrine to Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, Guru Nanak, or a detailed reproduction of Mecca on your dashboard, "OK-Tata-Horn-Please-Use-Dipper-at-Night" painted somewhere on the vehicle, or flashy red fringe across the length of the windshield.
4. Functioning brake lights, turn signals and headlights only distract other drivers. For safety's sake, do NOT use them.
5. Looking at other vehicles to the side or behind you will only distract you. Remove the side-view mirrors and adjust the rear-view mirror so that you can constantly admire your own good looks while driving.
6. All vehicles shall be driven in accordance with the maxim: To slow is to falter, to brake is to fail, to stop is defeat.
7. USE OF HORN (also known as the sonic fender).
For cars:
Single blast (casual) means "I have not blown my horn for several minutes" or "I blow my horn, therefore I am."
Short blasts (urgent) indicate supremacy, such as in clearing birds, dogs, rickshaws and pedestrians from path.
Long blast (desperate) denotes supplication, as to an oncoming truck, "I am going too fast to stop, so unless you slow down we both shall die." In extreme cases this may be accompanied by flashing of headlights (frantic).
For trucks and buses:
All horn signals have same meaning, "I weigh 12.5 tons and have no intention of stopping."
8. RIGHT OF WAY: Traffic entering a road from the left has priority. So does traffic from the right. And also traffic in the middle.
9. All traffic at all times, regardless of direction of travel shall occupy the center of the road.
10. In the absence of seat belts, car occupants shall wear garlands of marigolds.
Having said all this, isn’t it true that the accident rate and related deaths are less in India compared to other countries?!
Enjoy India.
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