a bread by any other name would smell as sweet

I must say that despite my disdain for Indian food in general (and lentils in particular, regardless of the cuisine that attempts to use them), Indian naan is pretty awesome. For those of you who don't know or who share my disdain for Indian food, naan is a sort of flatbread, and I believe that it's grilled on the sidewall of a tandoor oven. In some respects it replaces the fork (or rather, the hand was never replaced by the fork, instead merely covered with bread), since most foods can be scooped up with it and eaten.

Anyway, naan makes just about anything better, and is delicious by itself as well. I mentioned the giant naan last night, and I have to correct myself; the giant naan has a diameter approximately the length of my entire arm, not just my forearm. That's maybe 2 feet or a little less, but obviously rather sizable for a circular piece of naan. They also had garlic naan last night, which was great, and I had naan at lunch at the hotel this morning. I may never love most Indian foods (again, I must mention lentils), but naan will always hold a special place in my heart. In fact, just about any form of bread I have ever had has been great--naan, cornbread, wheat bread, the sweet breads they made in Uzine, Ukraine, the homemade bread my mother made when we were in Ukraine (we'd eat a whole loaf of it straight from the oven, and save the other loaf for peanut butter sandwiches), even the Safeway bread that stays 'fresh' for three weeks and so is perfect for junk-calorie bologna sandwiches. The only bread product I ever recall hating was made with...lentils. Ugh. Thanks for nothing, Vidya, the lentil bread at the Ethiopian place you took me to a couple of months ago was gross.

After having worked in yet another mention of lentils, and a gratuitous shout-out to Vidya (who has shamelessly asked for as many of them as possible), I'll move on. As I said, I had lunch at the hotel, then went over to the apartments and hung out with some coworkers. Some of us went shopping; the girls I was with were in search of silver, and it was rather fruitless because the first shop we went to didn't have silver, the second one we tried was closed, and the third specialized in gold and pearls and so had a low selection. I did pick up a pair of earrings, however, so all was not in vain for me. My first attempt at bargaining (in the first shop, over a photo album) ended in failure, but I did get the earrings for less than the original price--the guy said Rs1650 (about $38), but I told him I didn't have that much cash and so got them for Rs1400. I undoubtedly still got ripped off, but I'd had my confidence shaken by the first experience and so didn't start lower but instead offered him all the cash I had, which he took immediately. Ah well, live and learn...but I don't feel too cheated, since I saved $6, they're nice, and they cost me about as much as the tank of gas I would have put in my car this week if I were driving. Yippee!

After shopping, we went back to the apartments, and the chef had made pasta w/eggplant, some chicken, and some tuna salad. Interesting combination, no? The pasta was really good, though, and the apartments look amazing; I didn't see mine, but the apartment below mine (where the chef cooks) has this cool swing-loveseat hanging from the ceiling. Then we watched 'Goonies', which I had unfortunately never seen before; I did not have the violently angry reaction to it that I had when I first saw 'The Princess Bride', so I think that I'm getting better at handling movies that I should have seen during my childhood.

I'm really looking forward to going bedding shopping sometime soon, probably next weekend; I'd try to go tomorrow, but I feel like I should at least wait until I move into my apartment. After all, one less weekend of bedding shopping is probably one less box that I'll have to ship home at the end of this. I'm thinking that I'll go for magenta and pink in my room here, or maybe even magenta and orange (which can work if they're the right hues, although pretty risky), but we'll see what strikes my fancy.

Okay, this was really long on boring detail, but if you're reading this I assume you knew what you were getting into. Happy May Day, everyone!

cricket, giant naan, habib

Jet lag is a killer; I woke up at 4am today and couldn't get back to sleep. Every time I'd get out of bed and think that I should just get ready to go, I'd suddenly feel tired again, and so I'd go back to bed thinking that I'd finally fall asleep, but it wasn't happening. So I got another late start at the office this morning, but since I don't have a defined role yet and am still incredibly tired, I think it was okay. I didn't do much at work, but after work we played cricket! The office has an actual club set up, but today they decided to set up some more informal matches with people of varying degrees of skill (i.e. one dude used to play for the state team, and he was playing with/against a bunch of expatriates who've never even seen a game before, let alone played). I did my best elementary school job of keeping out of the way of the ball and not batting, so I guess 'played' is a bit of an exaggeration, but I had a lot of fun despite that. Cricket's a very weird game; I suppose it's technically as boring or more boring than baseball, but today at least was fun.

After cricket, the expats went out for dinner at Peshawri's, an Indian restaurant in the Sheraton hotel. I agreed with others that some of the dishes are better elsewhere (not that I've had much of anything here, but I've enjoyed versions of these things in California so much more). However, Peshawri's does have a few things going for it. 1) The interior is well-decorated and posh. 2) The Coke tastes great. 3) Most importantly, the giant naan is indeed giant; it comes on a huge platter, the diameter is longer than my forearm, and the whole thing is drenched in butter. Mmm, delicious. Since all I had for lunch was a spoonful of rice w/garbanzo beans (ick), dinner was very much welcomed.

Now I'm back in the hotel, and falling asleep over the keyword. However, I just wanted to point out that there is at least one person named Habib somewhere in Hyderabad. As we were going to the restaurant, I noticed that a store we passed along the way was labeled 'Habib's Beauty Parlor.' If Habib could be as hot as Jason Bourne was when he chopped off the girl's hair in the hotel room in 'The Bourne Identity', I would go to get my hair cut every day. Alas, though, I do not know where this place was located, and I don't really want to ask around and find out.

P.S. For those of you not in the know, some of my friends are convinced I'll come back to some dude named Habib. I'm working on it, but right now I need to work on falling asleep instead.

Slightly decorated desk at work. 

Construction in Hi-Tech City. 

can i smell your gasoline

I managed to sleep until noon today; I woke up around 8am and thought, 'I'll sleep for another fifteen minutes,' and the next time I woke up, it was time for lunch. So, after showering, having lunch, and taking the half-hour car-ride from the hotel to the office, I didn't make it to work until 2:30. Not that I really have that much to do yet, which is a good thing, since by five p.m. the jetlag was really getting to me.

The terrain in Hyderabad is surprisingly, overwhelmingly rocky. There are rocks *everywhere*, especially around Hitech City where the office is. The head driver picked me up this afternoon and speaks really good English, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the scenery on the way to the office, but the driver tonight didn't really encourage conversation. Instead, he put in a tape of Red Hot Chili Peppers' 'By the Way', which I found to be an almost surreal experience. Granted, I was desperately fighting off sleep on the drive back, but given that I listened to that album obsessively back in the day, the contrasts between my current surroundings and California were heightened by the familiar lyrics. As some of you may know, my favorite lyrics from that whole album are 'can I smell your gasoline, can I pet your wolverine', and I can assure you that it's completely different listening to your favorite songs from a tape deck in the middle of Indian rush hour than it is from your CD player on a drive to a California beach.

For one thing, Indian rush hour is a slightly harrowing experience. Once again, my experience in Ukraine is paying off, so I'm slightly accustomed to drivers not following any real lanes or traffic rules. However, it's much worse here; there's a ton of traffic, a lot of it is motorcycles with four people on them or small autorickshaws (who seem to care even less about traffic rules than car drivers), and everyone uses the horn rather than the turn signal. It doesn't help that they drive on the left side of the road, so I get confused in my tired state and think that we're going to die when we're really somewhat fine. There were less than five traffic lights all the way from the office to the hotel, and they weren't even really obeyed; this is in a city of over five million people, so you can imagine the chaos.

I could continue to discuss traffic patterns, but I think it's time for bed!

'welcome to abroad!'

The title of this post was the subject line of an email I got from Walter; it's funny to think that we're both in the same situation ('abroad'), since the difference between Scotland and India is probably night and day. Or haggis and vegetables. Or something.

The rest of my time in Singapore was uneventful, the flight to Hyderabad was uneventful (although I did finish romance novel #3 during that flight), and going through customs/immigration in Hyderabad was uneventful. I was greeted at the airport by Chris and Ishmail; they had a huge wreath of fresh flowers for me that was actually taller than I am (the ends were dragging on the ground), and they brought me to the hotel I'm staying in for the next few days. Perhaps I shall post pictures soon, but for now I need to sleep!

me and errol (aka sarrol the barrel of death) vs. walter in the inaugural round of loro dorm wrestling 

singapore, sleep deprivation, and skipping tuesday

I'm currently in the Singapore Airport, and have been for the past five hours or so. I left San Francisco very early (1:20am) on Tuesday morning, after a prolonged goodbye in the food court of the airport with Claudia, Tammy, Terry, and John. That was about as much of Tuesday as I feel like I experienced; I was in the air for 12 hours, then landed in Hong Kong just in time for the dawning of Wednesday. It's really weird to spend eighteen hours in constant nighttime; despite the fact that my elementary school teachers in Iowa were unnaturally obsessed with teaching us about Alaska, I do not think that I would do well if I lived there.

I was only in Hong Kong for a couple of hours, and very ill-advisedly ate some chicken tenders despite the fact that the airport had periodic announcements advising travellers to see a doctor immediately if they thought they were coming down with bird flu. However, chicken tenders barely qualify as meat, so I think I'll be okay.

Now I'm in Singapore, at the tail end of a seven-hour layover. The Singapore airport, like everything else I've seen of Singapore, seems impossibly clean and very nice. For starters, they offer a free two-hour bus tour of Singapore for people with long layovers; hence the photos I've uploaded below. The bus tour also included ~fifteen minutes on a boat in the Singapore River, which was nice. Then, I came back to the airport and paid to take a shower and sit in the premier lounge (w/snacks and internet access).

However, there is something just a little bit scary about Singapore. I thought the city was breathtaking--they're working hard to preserve the rainforest within the city, which is strange and simultaneously very cool. Everything is clean, historic buildings are restored to their former glory and used for new purposes (museums, art galleries, hotels), they're reclaiming land from the sea, etc. I'd really like to come back for a long weekend while I'm in India, since I love museums and Singapore has some interesting history.

The flip side, though, is that my paranoia about totalitarianism hits its zenith when I'm in places like Singapore. The idea of a planned city, with ample green space, buildings that make sense, affordable housing for all citizens, etc., has huge advantages--the tour guide said that something like 94% of the population owns their own apartment, which is huge in a place where apartments easily start out at S$700000 (~US$425000), although the government subsidizes some apartments. The city planners are apparently planning up to forty or fifty years in advance, projecting growth, land reclamation, and building developments for a population that will mature long after the planners are dead.

But, with intense city planning comes an added level of governmental control that I am personally uneasy about. I think city planning itself is innocuous enough, and I know that many urban areas in the US could benefit from massive public works projects that would drag up the crumbling sectors of the cities. Unfortunately, the same process that clears out the slums also makes everything exactly the same. We drove past row after row of identical apartment high-rises, which replaced the slums of a couple of decades ago, but it wasn't clear to me whether this was actually a tangible improvement, or if it was just a high-rise slum village w/better plumbing and a nicer exterior to show the tourists on the airport road.

City planning aside, Singapore also has compulsory military service, incredibly harsh laws, and scholarship programs that, in my opinion, push kids so hard to achieve perfect grades at American engineering schools like Stanford that the students never have time to experience everything that college has to offer. The goverment has the right to demand perfection; they're selecting the students, they're writing the checks, and they're hoping to improve their overall workforce through education. But, the more rights the government has to make demands of you, the less actual freedom you have.

I don't think it comes down to one 'right' answer, however. Singapore has incredibly low crime, a rapidly-diversifying economy, a major position as one of the world's most important harbours, a populace that can own their own homes, and therefore has a lot of security to offer its residents. I personally would rather have less security and more freedom, but that isn't a preference shared by everyone. I guess I'm confident enough in my abilities that I wouldn't feel much of a benefit from a state-sponsored safety net, and would simply chafe at all of the restrictions, rules, and obligations that such a safety net would provide.

At the end of the day, I'm too passionately opposed to totalitarianism in any form to tolerate an aspect of it, even if that manifestation seems benign. Singapore has a long ways to go before it turns totalitarian (as far as I know, the government doesn't attempt to isolate individuals and destroy faith in humanity), but there are enough classic symptoms to make me slightly wary.

Next stop...Hyderabad!

merlion...(cough cough cough)...merlion!

Singapore originally meant 'Lion Island' or something in Sanskrit; when an ancient prince arrived to settle Singapore, he reportedly saw a lion at the mouth of the Singapore River and took this as a sign of good luck. This is commemorated by the merlion fountain shown above. It is unclear if the merlion was bred for its magic abilities; I will report back if I learn more.

'art'

Nothing makes for better art than a sculpture of naked boys jumping into the Singapore River. It was entirely unclear why this particular statue occupies a rather prominent location...I don't think I saw any children at all, let alone naked ones frolicking in the river.

passports, packing, pressure

An entertaining event happened on Friday--I found my now-cancelled passport. Where did I find my passport? In my purse, of course.

Before you think that I'm stupid, I did check my purse (multiple times). However, I did not discover that there was a barely noticeable slit in the seam of the hidden inner pocket, and that the passport had slipped through the hole into the nether reaches of the bag between the lining and the exterior. It had then managed to lie perfectly flat on the bottom of the bag, which just happened to be exactly the right width to permit this occurrence. Every previous time that I had searched the bag, I had not found the slit and had not felt the passport at the bottom of the purse; on Friday, however, as I was emptying out some stuff, I felt the passport shift and immediately figured out what it was. Even knowing it was there, it took me two or three minutes to find the hole in the lining and retrive it.

Now I have one new passport that took two days of effort to procure, and one old, cancelled passport that eluded capture for weeks, only to turn itself in after its time had passed. How sad! At least I found the second passport before the security people found it; that would have been an even more interesting turn of events.

The rest of my weekend was entertaining and relaxing by turns, and I have spent the past few hours packing. I think the packing has gone pretty well, and I'm going to bed even though I feel like I probably have more stuff to do tomorrow than I can probably really get done. However, that's a problem for another day (well, a problem for tomorrow). In 24 hours, I will be in the airport! Scary. Then the real fun can begin.

it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me (in four days)

Hello new blog!

I'm leaving for India in about 3.5 days, and I will have arrived in Hyderabad five days from now. How crazy is that? I had lunch with Sri and Vidya yesterday, and Sri periodically looked at me with a puzzled look on his face, as though he could not even picture me in the city of his forefathers. With such reassuring friends, I cannot help but be excited about my upcoming adventures.

Expect more frequent posts about my travels once my travels have begun; until then, I will be busy packing, seeing friends, having dim sum, and generally racing around until the grand finale of my current life at the airport on Monday night. Perhaps 'finale' isn't the right word; rather, my life show is going on hiatus until October as we explore casting and set changes. That sounds much less final.

But, you'll all be happy to know that I have a new passport and a new visa, so I will be able to leave America. The bureaucracy at the passport agency was surprisingly efficient, and the Indian Consulate exceeded my wildest hopes (it only took half an hour at the consulate to drop off my application, and ten minutes to pick up the completed visa, although I had to wait five hours in between). So as long as I don't lose my passport in the next four days, I'll be good to go.

previous top tens

Top Ten List: 4.18.05 - 4.24.05

1. Loro Special Dinner

2. Saying 'Timmy...Tammy...Timmy...Tammy'

3. Hanging out in Los Altos Hills w/the boys

4. Dim sum/Peter's Cafe

5. Tetris Attack

6. 'Babieeeeee!'

7. Goodbye lunches at work (and lunch w/Sri and Vidya)

8. Passport procurement

9. Dinner in the city w/John and Katie

10. Touching farewells w/friends (would be higher, but sounds too sappy)

Top Ten List: 4.25.05 - 5.1.05

1. Naan

2. Trying not to visibly clench my fists while the drivers navigate Hyderabad rush hour

3. Channel-surfing to see highly-amusing Indian commercials

4. Goodbye party at the SFO airport

5. First experience w/dirty bathroom and hand sanitizer: fifteen minutes after arriving in Hyderabad

6. Watching/playing in my first cricket match

7. Bus tour in Singapore

8. Shower in Singapore after travelling for a whole day

9. Baskin Robbins chocolate ice cream in 100 degree heat

10. Meeting everyone in the office!

vishal trying to kill waxman, spring 2003 

dan and in-n-out, yosemite trip o' fun, spring 2003 

oniel, adit, and chris 

me and walter, halloween 2002. 

ritu