Hotel Delhi: Saturday

My husband’s work has taken him to New Delhi, and I was joining him for a week of hotel adventures while he worked entirely too hard.  I had arrived at the hotel Monday and by Saturday was desperately hoping for more time together than the week- all we did was eat breakfast together.   

Despite being a Saturday, my husband had another all-day meeting.  I woke up at six, or whatever ungodly Saturday morning time that he got up; I ordered more choco flakes and cold milk; I made him a cup of tea for his sore throat; I carefully side-stepped the dying cockroach that was about to crawl into my shoes; I went back to bed.   I woke for the second time around ten, the sound of construction even louder than before.  I can’t sleep through anything, so even the sound of other people’s doorbells and the quiet ‘housekeeping’ announcement from down the hall kept me up.   

I was hungry again, so I turned off the ‘do not disturb’ button (someone has to clean up that nearly dead cockroach), turned on my computer, and opened the thick and thin gold curtains to peer out of the window.   My goodness.  I think it rained last night.   I was absolutely shocked!  I was so excited, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up in case I was mistaken.  But if I wasn’t, I couldn’t wait to run out and smell that grassy space by the pool.   The roads were wet.   The roof of the building next to us was wet.   The pool area was wet, but that was probably from their cleaning…. but would people spray the road?  

It isn’t monsoon season, so any rain is mostly unexpected.  This place is like living in San Francisco- you don’t have to check the weather report before leaving the house.  You never need to keep an umbrella in the car.  In short, it is absolutely nothing like living in Michigan, and this unexpected rain had me absolutely delighted and I even momentarily forgot my hunger to check whether it had indeed rained or not.

Of course, while I was waiting for my computer to load, I realized it was May 21, 2011; the date that the nutcase said was the day the rapture would occur.  So I got a bit sidetracked making sure people in time zones where it was already 6:00 pm weren’t ascending to heaven without me.  Unfortunately, despite being in India, I still live by Eastern Standard (or Daylight) Time, so it was a bit too early for any of my friends and family in the Americas to know whether or not they’d been saved yet.  I figured I should check my friend’s status from Asia.  It is a bit like the Santa tracker, and people in China and the east get to ascend first, and then the people on the west coast of the Americas.  Regardless, the cloudy weather was negatively affecting my web browsing, so that was frustrating that I couldn’t more fully enjoy reading up on the rapture.

When I had convinced myself both that it had rained, and people weren’t yet breaking the laws of gravity in Delhi, I went to lunch.  I sat for an hour and a half while I drank jasmine green tea and ate steamed veggies with chicken (I have to eat healthy so I can later eat a lot of cake).  I finished Philippa Gregory’s The Queen’s Fool. I think it is my favorite book she has written so far.  Of course, I’ve only read six of them.   What, twelve more or so to go?   But I like it.  A commoner instead of a princess or nobility tells it, so it is a bit different. 

I came back up to the room, hungry still (I ate so slowly I think I finished digesting and should have stayed for my next meal), and was disappointed to see that they didn’t restock my mini-fridge.  No bar of Swiss chocolate waiting for me to consume.   I felt like I’d look like an idiot going back down to the empty dining hall only ten minutes later for cake, so I went back to reading on the bed….   Only five hours to go until the rapture!

I napped, and awoke when housekeeping tried to enter my room with the replacement chocolate bar.  It was spoiled and bad.  I called for a new one.  It was stale, too.  I ate half of it and took a shower.

I stared at my eyeballs for a while.  I have very awesome eyes, I think.  They are hazel, and change colors, and I stared at them for so long, I can understand creeps in the TV show like Law and Order who do weird things and pick eyeballs for their collection.   They are really pretty.   Can you tell that I am getting bored with my environment?

Eventually, at some awful time for a Saturday, nine or ten, my husband came home.  We ordered pizza this time, it was cold, and I enjoyed watching the thunderstorm from the window. 

What a boring Saturday.