Notes and Observations

I have been here more than a week now and some things have not escaped my noticed. I thought I would share a few observations.

Indian TV
Since I tend the have the television on all the time for company, I have been exposed to quite a bit of it. The first week I stayed in my bedroom for much of the time and realized that the channels in the bedroom are not the same channels in the living room. I don’t think there are as many in the bedroom. I don’t get HBO or ESPN in the bedroom. I wish I did, even if there are commercials on this HBO.

I did get to see quite a few Indian music videos and have determined that most of what I saw falls into one of 3 categories.

1. There’s the male singer, singing his heart out and dancing in front of a group of men that I can only describe as line-dancing. Everyone is in sync and doing the same moves.

2. The next is very similar except the singer is female and her dancers may also be also female. I have been told these first 2 are Bollywood style videos.

3. The third category is a couple, usually out in a field, near a tree, singing and dancing.

The first 2 are not too far off many US videos where there is either a male or female singer with a whole group of people dancing behind them. In the US video though, the dancing is more like grinding and it’s anything but synchronized.

Power
Power here is nothing to be taken for granted. It comes and it goes, but that fact is barely noticeable to those that live here. The lights often dim at IBM. All but one light in the room will go out, but the computers are not affected. Neither are any of the folks in class.

At the apartment we usually have power blips in the late mornings and early afternoon. I figured I would be fine because I can run the laptop on battery. The wireless router doesn’t run on battery and it wreaks havoc with my network connection! Argh! Once I lose my VPN connection, it’s nearly impossible to reconnect, even after several reboots.

With no VPN access and a limited number of network connections in the training rooms at IBM, I am bothering everyone at the Sentinel with questions I could answer myself, if only I could get in!

Laundry
Ok. I confess. I gave up. I tried to do my laundry, but there were so many obstacles. First there was the washing machine. It is obviously not automatic. You have to switch it from one cycle to the next. Not a problem, if I remember. If not, my wet clothes can sit for hours. Steve, you know how good I am at remembering that, don’t you?

Then there are those mysterious brown blobs of something that show up on my clothes after I have “washed” them. I have no idea what they are. I tried running the clothes through the rinse cycle again, but that only resulted in more blobs. Hmmm.

Handwashing! I grabbed a bucket from one of the bathrooms and poured a very small amount of laundry detergent and some warm water from the shower. (I haven’t figured out how to get warm water in the kitchen yet.) I swished and agitated and swished and agitated. The water was turning murky, so I dumped the water and started again. I did this several times, and then did the same thing to rinse. When the water wasn’t nearly as murky, I decided they were clean. I wrung them out and hung them to dry. Everything was crunchy when it was dry. Ironing helped somewhat, but who wants to iron socks?

The next time Deepak came over, he offered to do the laundry. I jumped at the offer. Now each day I come home to a pile of freshly-washed and ironed clothing. He seems to be using the same washer, yet he gets no brown blobs. I’ll chalk that up to one of the mysteries of India.