I bought my sister a birthday card. I was hoping for something very Indian, maybe with elephants and sparkles and dangly tassels. The only cards I could find at the big department store (which has great reviews online) were cards that looked like rejects from America. And based on the quality of greeting cards in America, it must take a lot to be rejected as a card. Anyhow, I decided to pick an appropriately gaudy card, and found one that, among other things, tells my sister she is evergreen. I'm not quite sure what it means, as a human, at least, to be evergreen, but I figured I could look it up in the urban dictionary when I got home. Apparently, evergreen means marijuana. And thus, a person who is an evergreen has ' A condition stemming from profuse marijuana use'. The card also tells her that she is a magician who's wand makes worries vanish. So maybe that is code for describing the hallucinations. Oddly enough, the pictures on the birthday card are a lot of very dressed up porcelain dolls hugging teddy bears, and they do have very odd expressions. Perhaps they are suffering from evergreen.
The employees at Baskin-Robbins are very nice. They are trying to teach me Hindi, although I have already forgotten what they taught me. But they do know (and tease me) about my order each time- that bucket of mint chip. Today, they ran out of mint chip before it reached the required 530 grams (it is something close to that, they measure it out on a scale). I told them to fill the rest with whatever they wanted, and they put 'milk chocolate chip' aka vanilla chocolate chip. It is amazing how boring that flavor tastes after the mint... I wonder who would voluntarily get it...
I also bought a loaf of bread, and some really yummy looking pieces of chocolate flake cake. I found a bakery, so I didn't have to buy it in the disgusting store. And it all added up to less than $2. CAKE and bread. Only $2...amazing.
It is our 5 month anniversary today (which is, of course, the excuse for the chocolate flake cake and mint chocolate chip ice cream). My husband is going to work in the office until at least 10 still. But Rocky is on tv, and I've been working on my lesson plans, so I've been keeping busy.
The curriculum provided for this school is interesting (I will be teaching 5 days a week for 2.5 hours). I mean, it all looks quite good, until you take a close look and then it is quite obvious that it was all written by a non-native speaker of English and it is full of grammatical errors. Now, my blog is probably full of errors, too, but this isn't a teaching guide. I think the worst error was the lesson on haiku poetry. It states the 5-7-5 syllables rule in a haiku, and then promptly gives an example that is 5-8-5. I don't want to start criticizing all the hard work that has been put into the text, because it is good. I have also only been working for one day...and already had an argument over how to do long division... that have this dumb 'add a friend concept' rather than just saying 'add a decimal' so I don't want to be a trouble maker right off the bat. But they now, thanks to me, have to add two friends- they were forgetting a zero in all the problems...
The accents here are very difficult to understand sometimes. When driving to and from Bandra, there is a new bridge, called the Worli Sea Link (Worli is a neighborhood), and it costs Rs 50 to cross. So each time I take a cab, they ask me 'sea link?' to make sure I will pay for it. And I get so confused because it sounds, to me, like a Russian saying ceiling. Sort of like 'ceilingk'. Every single time. You'd think I'd be ready for it now.
It is a big no-no to have public displays of affection here. My husband and I walked past a couple holding hands the other day, and the couple was stared at more than me. And I am stared at constantly. I noticed two nights ago, while on the way home from the volunteer work, that apparently the place to 'park' in Mumbai is right along the sea link! There must have been 20 motorbikes parked, with very intimate couples on each bike. I thought that was funny.
I tried to watch Glee on Fox.com.... But Fox blocks all the good video for India :( So you can't watch TV on the networks here. Isn't that sad? I want to send them an e-mail telling them I'm an American so they should give me a magic password so I can still watch... maybe Carrie's magic wand can do that....Seriously, though, I just wonder what else I am missing. And now, all the darn computer keeps switching me to google India instead of just google. So when I start to type words, all the search words that come up are Indian phrases instead of American. Who knows what I am missing...I never had really thought about it before (with the whole google and China thing) but it is just so WEIRD that you can block this stuff that is out in public domain like that. Well, block, not make it come up in a search, etc. But it is all odd.
Military time. It drives me nuts. I know that it makes more sense, as you don't have to worry about whether or not your alarm has the am or pm selected, etc., etc. But I'm American, and so I still uses feet and miles, so I'm just stubborn and sick of the military time on everything (well they call it 24 hour clock here, not military time). I know it isn't even hard to convert between the two. It is pretty much automatic. Much fast and easier than Fahrenheit to Celsius, but still. It drives me crazy for no reason, really. Well, to be fair, it only drives me crazy for half the day. The first half of the day I am perfectly content. That's all I have to say about that :) I am unreasonable.
The employees at Baskin-Robbins are very nice. They are trying to teach me Hindi, although I have already forgotten what they taught me. But they do know (and tease me) about my order each time- that bucket of mint chip. Today, they ran out of mint chip before it reached the required 530 grams (it is something close to that, they measure it out on a scale). I told them to fill the rest with whatever they wanted, and they put 'milk chocolate chip' aka vanilla chocolate chip. It is amazing how boring that flavor tastes after the mint... I wonder who would voluntarily get it...
I also bought a loaf of bread, and some really yummy looking pieces of chocolate flake cake. I found a bakery, so I didn't have to buy it in the disgusting store. And it all added up to less than $2. CAKE and bread. Only $2...amazing.
It is our 5 month anniversary today (which is, of course, the excuse for the chocolate flake cake and mint chocolate chip ice cream). My husband is going to work in the office until at least 10 still. But Rocky is on tv, and I've been working on my lesson plans, so I've been keeping busy.
The curriculum provided for this school is interesting (I will be teaching 5 days a week for 2.5 hours). I mean, it all looks quite good, until you take a close look and then it is quite obvious that it was all written by a non-native speaker of English and it is full of grammatical errors. Now, my blog is probably full of errors, too, but this isn't a teaching guide. I think the worst error was the lesson on haiku poetry. It states the 5-7-5 syllables rule in a haiku, and then promptly gives an example that is 5-8-5. I don't want to start criticizing all the hard work that has been put into the text, because it is good. I have also only been working for one day...and already had an argument over how to do long division... that have this dumb 'add a friend concept' rather than just saying 'add a decimal' so I don't want to be a trouble maker right off the bat. But they now, thanks to me, have to add two friends- they were forgetting a zero in all the problems...
The accents here are very difficult to understand sometimes. When driving to and from Bandra, there is a new bridge, called the Worli Sea Link (Worli is a neighborhood), and it costs Rs 50 to cross. So each time I take a cab, they ask me 'sea link?' to make sure I will pay for it. And I get so confused because it sounds, to me, like a Russian saying ceiling. Sort of like 'ceilingk'. Every single time. You'd think I'd be ready for it now.
It is a big no-no to have public displays of affection here. My husband and I walked past a couple holding hands the other day, and the couple was stared at more than me. And I am stared at constantly. I noticed two nights ago, while on the way home from the volunteer work, that apparently the place to 'park' in Mumbai is right along the sea link! There must have been 20 motorbikes parked, with very intimate couples on each bike. I thought that was funny.
I tried to watch Glee on Fox.com.... But Fox blocks all the good video for India :( So you can't watch TV on the networks here. Isn't that sad? I want to send them an e-mail telling them I'm an American so they should give me a magic password so I can still watch... maybe Carrie's magic wand can do that....Seriously, though, I just wonder what else I am missing. And now, all the darn computer keeps switching me to google India instead of just google. So when I start to type words, all the search words that come up are Indian phrases instead of American. Who knows what I am missing...I never had really thought about it before (with the whole google and China thing) but it is just so WEIRD that you can block this stuff that is out in public domain like that. Well, block, not make it come up in a search, etc. But it is all odd.
Military time. It drives me nuts. I know that it makes more sense, as you don't have to worry about whether or not your alarm has the am or pm selected, etc., etc. But I'm American, and so I still uses feet and miles, so I'm just stubborn and sick of the military time on everything (well they call it 24 hour clock here, not military time). I know it isn't even hard to convert between the two. It is pretty much automatic. Much fast and easier than Fahrenheit to Celsius, but still. It drives me crazy for no reason, really. Well, to be fair, it only drives me crazy for half the day. The first half of the day I am perfectly content. That's all I have to say about that :) I am unreasonable.
Congratulations of the fifth month anniversary. If you are in Bangalore, I highly recommend trying butter biscuits and spicy bread rolls at any Iyengar Bakery. I baked butter biscuits from an Indian recipe website last week and it turned out great.Not much to do when you have a foot of snow outside :-)
ReplyDeleteLove,
Jaya