First Thanksgiving in Bangalore

I'm a big fan of Thanksgiving. I've missed it two times in the last seven years and was pretty bummed both times. Fortunately, we decided to close the office for Thanksgiving and have a proper feast. We spent several hours on Wednesday doing prep and cooking and managed to sit down for dinner at 4pm on Thursday.

I find that cooking really helps me to unwind, so I signed up for four dishes. The first was a chocolate-zucchini bread (cake is probably more accurate) from my old Peace Corps cookbook. It did not start off well. As I grated the zucchini, I quickly realized that I had actually bought cucumbers. Ah well. I asked someone else to go to the vegetable stand and get the correct produce. It came out pretty well (the zucchini makes it very moist), although it tastes better when it has more orange zest. I was surprised by how poor (and expensive) the oranges were.

I also made mangosauce, which is basically applesauce except that it uses sour (unripe) mangoes. This one was pretty straightforward (after peeling, chopping and then boiling the mangoes, you just add sugar and cinnamon) and I liked it. Normally I would add more sugar, but the desserts were already pretty sweet.

The only non-dessert that I made was the mashed potatoes. Since one of our party is lactose intolerant, I replaced the milk/butter with coconut cream (canned, which is a little hard to find here). It gave the potatoes a nice texture, but had a hint of sweetness that was somewhat out of place. Still, I added enough garlic to even it out.

And then it was time to prepare the most important dessert: the apple pie. I found Granny Smith apples which was a big break (there are plenty of apples, but most are mealy and not great for baking). I made the pie crust, which I hadn't done in about four years, but it turned out pretty well (I made the base and cover for the apple pie as well as a base for the pumpkin pie, but I didn't do much for the pumpkin pie other than the crust).

Whoops, I guess I should have made a little more pie crust. Still, it had a nice finish after baking.

All in all, it was quite a feast. We had a guest from the US who brought canned cranberry sauce (though we also found some frozen cranberries which meant that we got homemade cranberry relish as well). The turkey came out really well and the stuffing was wonderful. We even had green-beans in a sesame sauce (well, there's always one semi-healthy dish at Thanksgiving). And the first course (pumpkin soup) was a great way to start the meal after many hours of cooking.

I think that I'm still full from the meal. Oh, and I was way too tired to get a picture of the dessert table with seven desserts (to feed nine people). I made one mistake on the apple pie, which was not adding anything to thicken the juice from the apples, which made for a lot of liquid in each slice. I guess I'll just have to keep making pies until I get it right.

My Frisbee Team

I've been playing Frisbee [1] in Bangalore for about a month now. There are actually a handful of teams around the city, and fortunately one of them practices at a field about two miles from my house. The teams periodically play one another and then there are tournaments here in Bangalore as well as in other cities in south India (recently in Goa and Chennai, and one coming up in Ahmedabad).

The team (our name is Air Traffic Control) practices at 6:00am four times per week (weather permitting), which means that I leave my house at 5:30 to make it on time. Fortunately, our office has a shower, so I can go straight to work and grab a quick shower before the rest of the staff arrives.

The field doesn't have any grass, it's just sand. This is what it looks like at 6am:

By the time we finish at 8am, it tends to look more like this:

We usually do an intense conditioning routine, which is good, since I haven't done much cardio in the last few months. It'll be a while before I can keep up with the rest of the team. And after conditioning, we usually scrimmage which has been lots of fun.

There are two big challenges with the field. First, there are lots of shards of broken glass all over the field. No one has gotten hurt on them, but it feels dangerous. (There's also a decent amount of cow manure, but that's par for the course here.) The other problem is the crowds that you can see above. Typically different games will encroach on one another's space. Usually there's a mix of cricket, soccer and field hockey players running through our games (plus the occasional middle-aged person who is walking laps around the field). Today's game was particularly difficult, since there were players from not one, but four cricket games standing in the middle of our field.

The Japanese guy is the only Frisbee player in the picture. The rest are playing different cricket games.

The team is mostly Indian, but there are currently three international players (one from Japan, one from Switzerland and me). We are typically the only expatriates on the field. Frisbee is also usually the only sport on the field that has female players. Normally 2-4 women out of ten players--there are about 20 people on the team, but it's hard to make it to every practice.

I'm really enjoying the group and am definitely getting back into shape. I look forward to joining them for a tournament in the coming months. I also look forward to my circadian rhythm adjusting to this, but so far it's been a hard slog. At least it's easy to get out of bed at 5:15 to play Frisbee.

[1] Yes, I know, I've actually been playing Ultimate, but I typically refer to it as Frisbee. If that offends you, you should probably question your priorities in life.

How long does it take to get a sim card?

3.5 months.

At least that was my experience. Thankfully, my friends let me borrow a sim card for all this time. The card was on the bad network (Aircel) and I was happy to switch to a much more reliable network (Airtel--yep, just one letter different).

The last time I traveled to India (2007) I managed in a couple of days. Back then, I was staying in a hotel, and after a few trips back and forth between the phone store and the hotel, I got all of the paperwork that I needed for my sim card.

This time, I've been living in a house, so I needed to get documentation from my landlord. All in all, it took more than three months to cancel the previous rental agreement and obtain a new one that includes my name on it (plus getting all of the requisite stamps to make it proper and official). I took all of this to the Airtel store along with a copy of my passport, visa and a passport-sized photo. They asked me for my proof of residence, which apparently is not my rental agreement or my visa. When I told them that I didn't have any, they told me that I could only buy a prepaid sim card (as opposed to a postpaid), which was fine with me.

During this time, I've been hesitant to give out my number since I knew it was temporary. Several people suggested that I just download some paperwork online or use Photoshop, but I declined, though if I went back and did it again, I'd almost certainly go for that shortcut. I also had to hold off on getting business cards, which made things awkward at a couple of meetings since business card exchanges are important here. Now I feel much freer and am very happy with the service so far.

Also, I bought a new phone. My old one cracked a couple of months ago when I dropped it on our hard floors. And then it cracked much worse earlier this month when I dropped it off the roof while hanging my laundry on the line. It's the right time to buy a phone though, since lots of stores are offering big Diwali sales. (So that's one thing that I like about Diwali.) My new phone is amazing and I'm really happy to have a good camera and lots of other upgrades.

Apparently I'm becoming crotchety

So Diwali celebrations have started here in Bangalore. This is my first time in India for Diwali and I'm not exactly getting into the festivities. In the last week or so, there have been more and more children running around shooting cap guns.

Today there have been fireworks all day. All day. From early morning to late at night.

I haven't seen many of them. For one thing, fireworks set off during the day are not particularly visible. Also, my house is in an area with lots of apartments, so even nearby fireworks may be obscured by buildings. Fireworks are much more unsettling when you can only hear them but not see them.

There are lots of people setting them off nearby. The booms and pops have been setting me on edge all day. Fireworks are part of most festivals here (and there are plenty of festivals), but I am excited for the end of Diwali and might just plan to travel someplace else next year at this time.

Load Shedding

On Wednesday morning I got a call at 10:01am. It took me a moment to understand the voice on the other end of the line. It was one of my co-workers and he was saying something about the lift. And then I knew what the problem is. Most mornings, the power in our office goes off at the stroke of 10:00am. That means that if you arrive at 9:59am and climb in the elevator, it just might get switched off while you're between floors. I ran down to tell the security guard that someone was in the elevator and he hurried to turn on the building generator. Two minutes later, my co-worker was in the office.

Load shedding are planned power cuts to manage electricity demand. For most of the city, power is cut for four one-hour blocks during the day (at our office, we usually lose power from 6-7am, 10-11am, 2-3pm and 6-7pm, but different parts of the city are on different schedules). Since the building staff doesn't like to use the generator during the day, that means that we don't have power for two hours of the workday. Fortunately, the office has a UPS which serves as a power backup (check it out on wikipedia), so that runs the wireless router and we stay connected to the internet during that time. In general, we just need to make sure that we have our laptops charged before the power cuts out. It can be a little uncomfortable without the fan on, but other than that, I barely notice the cuts. Unless, that is, I'm still at the office for the 6pm power cut, since it's usually pretty dark by 6:30, sometimes we use a solar lamp to light the office.

At home, we have an even fancier set up. My roommate bought a battery system and an inverter which runs the low-power outlets at our house (the battery charges during the times when the power is on). So, the washing machine, refrigerator, microwave and electric cooker don't work when the power is out, but we can run lights [1] and fans, charge computers and phones, and use the wireless. Still, this ends up being a bit of a hassle, since the power is out from 7-8pm, which means that if I'm cooking dinner, I need to either finish by 7:00 or start after 8:00. I like having the electric cooker, but gas would probably better since it's not reliant on electricity. Still, this is much nicer than the 8-12 hour power cuts I used to deal with in Tanzania (those were the scheduled ones--sometimes it stayed off for more than a day). And to date, I have successfully avoided getting trapped in the elevator at our office. ::Knock on wood::

[1] Still, I am a little concerned about draining the battery system before the power comes back, so I've switched most of the light bulbs in our house to LED bulbs. It's better for the planet anyway.

The movie theater experience

A friend recommended that I should read The Martian. Last Friday, I was feeling pretty lethargic after hearing about the Umpqua Community College shooting, so I downloaded the book and started reading. (Friday was an Indian holiday, so the office was closed and I could just stay home and read.) I really enjoyed the book and ended up finishing it before going to bed that night.

Then, last night, I went to a mall in town to see the movie. (I also checked out a grocery store in the mall and discovered that they were selling A&W Root Beer--Victory!!!) It's definitely a different experience than seeing a movie in a US theater. First off, there are no previews for movies. There are about ten minutes of commercials before the movie (things like jewelry, cologne, undershirts, leggings and rice). Then, during the movie they dubbed all of the f-bombs (Matt Damon swears quite a bit during the movie). Also, the movie had an intermission. This was not actually built into the reel, they just seemed to pick a moment about halfway through the movie and stop it so that people could buy concessions and so that they could play more ads (even though the movie was in English without subtitles, nearly all of the ads were in Hindi).

The most annoying part, however, was the assigned seating. This made it easy to get good seats by buying tickets early. However, there were people walking in 10 or 20 minutes after the movie started, shining the flashlights on their phones all over the theater to try to find their seats. That was rather distracting. Still, the movie had good picture quality (we watched it in 3D) and definitely good audio (aside from when the dialogue track was cut-off momentarily so that we couldn't hear Matt Damon swearing). And the ticket was about 300 rupees ($4.50), so that's a pretty good deal.

Long day in the field

Yesterday I woke up at 5:30am and left for the office at 5:45. I got to the office by 6:30 and we started our trip to our field office in the city of Anthiyur. It's important to leave Bangalore early so you don't get stuck in city traffic.

We stopped on the road for breakfast and with that 30 minute stop and made it to Anthiyur right at 11am. I got a two-hour nap on the trip. In Anthiyur, I met with managers from each of Essmart's field offices. It was great to meet most of the team, since most of my work outside of Bangalore has been at the Krishnagiri field office.

The view from the office in Krishnagiri (it's up a flight of stairs, so it mostly looks at electrical wires)

The team had a 3 hour meeting, most of which was in Tamil, so I wasn't really sure what was going on. (My Tamil is coming along slowly, but they mix some English into the conversation, so I knew what was being discussed at points.) Still, I thought it was better to remain attentive than to pull out my laptop and work, so I listened and watched who had the most input and who seemed most likely to disagree with various points.

After that, we went out to get lunch before heading back to Bangalore. It was about 2pm. My colleague from Bangalore couldn't start his car, so we pushed it until he was able to throw it into gear, and was able to run it to the restaurant. While we ordered, he called a mechanic, who said that he was on his way. We finished our lunch and waited for the mechanic (I read during that time).

Waiting to sort out car trouble

After three hours, the mechanic showed up, and said that there was a problem with the alternator. Our colleague concluded that he couldn't drive the car, so he helped us get to the city of Erode. From there, we got a bus to the city of Salem. Our bus left Salem at around 8:30 and didn't reach Bangalore until 12:30am. Then we had to get an auto-rickshaw (they insisted that we pay double the meter price at that hour of night) and didn't get home until 1am. Hopefully next time transport will be a little less complicated.