Home!

What a lackluster blogging performance. After being denied by the DSL folks in Ponkunnam for a home line, and fewer trips to the internet cafe than I have fingers, my intentions to write the most interesting and intensive Indian travelogue have amounted to jack.

So, without further ado, I'm home.

Reached Wednesday at 11:45pm in the familiar Frontier Airlines baggage carousel. Had an uneventful ride ALL the way home, meaning even from the moment of pulling out of the driveway in Kerala - and if you haven't been able to tell from previous posts, few drives in Kerala are uneventful. But apparently they saved the best for last, and we wound our way back down out of the golden hills and rubber estates of Kottayam district towards the airport without incident. Shed a few tears, but had to collect myself in order to take a photo of the huge "AMALA BHARAT GAS - Cook Food Serve Love" sign that is painted on a building just around our corner of the KK road. (good friends of ours have a shweetie baby named Amala)

Mummy fell asleep on the drive, and I stared out the window trying to recognize anything from the first drive back from the airport that had brought me home back in November. We were retracing that route, and it was a road that we never had been down since I had come there. I remembered it seeming very small coming in... but now it was just another road, same size as all the others I had come to know.

I started taking pictures out the window with the flash, but stopped when the driver flipped his side mirror out at the exact angle to give me a steely death stare.

Reached Cochin Airport (which is actually in another city, Amalagam or something like that... Amalgany? Angary? There's an A and a Y in there somewhere) and packed my two 52 lb bags onto a trolley. Knowing I had the potential to stand there and bawl for hours if given the opportunity, Mummy and Daddy both bravely said "okay! safe trip!" and we hugged, I kissed them both, said I'd see them in a year, and headed tearfully off to run though the airports hoops that would eventually get me on board a plane headed towards the U.S.

One neat-o thing about the airport... it's always cool to see "white" people again :-) Usually you're bound to see a few... more often than not hip Europeans, Brits, or Californians that seem to be on family vacation. There will be a chic granny type in capris, with hair that she's proudly let go gray and reading glasses on a chain, and following her will be a 12 year old who is probably thrilled to get back to cheeseburgers, but sad to go back to having to wear his seatbelt in his home country. There'll be a balding dad who looks lost and always a younger, more sunburned version of granny as his wife.

On my three occasions at the airport, none of my honky brethren have ever made eye contact with me. Bloody fellows ;-)

Whereas, when we dropped Saby off to the airport, I had the ultimate pleasure of properly earning OMS (open mouth stares) as opposed to just getting them for being a firenge (foreigner). Our little farewell committee was myself, cousin Vinod and his "awezzum" wife Cynthia. Saby was stressed about clearing security in proper time for his flight, and he was getting noticeably anxious as we stood there now waiting for Anil, the driver, to return with some ibuprofen... as Vinod, before leaving the house, had accidentally shut the end of Saby's ring finger in the hatch of the SUV.

(When the hatch slammed shut and Saby screamed, I had thought he was joking... but poor Vinod said the image of his finger and the door coming down on it was stuck in his head)

So the time comes to go, and he gives us all a hug and tries to walk off. Lame! I scampered after him, grabbed his hand and hammed my best kissy-kissy face saying, "Come on... make a scene with me." He shoo'ed me away like I was a street kid asking for rupees. So I grabbed him and pulled him down for a wet one... which I think the crowd of Indians behind us appreciated more than he did. Their giggles and smiles (and OMS) lasted until long after he had disappeared into the airport.


Saby flew back Cochin to Dubai (United Arab Emirates), had a 13 hour stop and hotel room in Dubai, and then went London Gatwick directly back to Cincinnatti. He says Dubai is amazing, and has sung the praises of Air Emirates endlessly.

My flight route was Cochin to Singapore, a brief 2 hours there and then off to Japan for fuel and food to get us across the Pacific to Los Angeles. From there I would be flying domestically on Frontier (our favorite, hubbed in Denver - they have a super frequent flyer program!!) to Denver and finally Detroit.

I was blessed with a seat in the 5th row on my first leg, only to find it wouldn't recline because the exit row was behind us. The two computer engineers on either side of me were headed back to their jobs in Singapore after their first year of work abroad, and were intent on getting loaded with the excuse that it would "help sleep." I worried what damage two lightweights from Calicut could do on a 4 hour flight, but all ended well, especially after our conversation:

Computer Engineer: Did you enjoy India?
Me: Oh yes, Kerala is beautiful.
CE: For how long you are here?
Me: Forty days.
CE: (dismissively) Oh, four days.
Me: No, four-teeeee.
CE: (more impressed) Ahh, fourteen!
Me: NO. Forty. Four-zero. Forty.
CE:(looking shocked) Oh my God, what for?!?

Then I got to drop the "visiting my in-laws and family" which is my favorite secret code for "I'm married, and what's more I'm married to a Mallu and he's much bigger than you, so don't hit on me or he'll kick your scrawny programmin' ass."

Singapore passed by without much fanfare, although I did buy 27 Sing dollars worth of Tiger Balm and Brit export Thera-Flu in a pharmacy to battle the cold I felt coming on, plus Melatonin to counter jet lag. Since leaving India my watch had been set to Eastern Time and I was determined to only sleep at appropriate times. And sleep I did... slept through takeoff from Singapore and woke up only for food. Mmmmm, food.

My flight was apparently the birth control flight. I was packed into the back section with what seemed like hundreds of spoiled Indian babies and belligerent, equally spoiled ABCD adolescents. (ABCD being the less than complimentary anagram "American Born Confused Desi", with Desi meaning Indian) The babies cried, the children whined and yelled and fought, and the adolescents all told their parents to "shut UP!" straight through our stop in Japan and back over the big blue ocean. I disembarked in LAX vowing to never have children.

In LAX I had already been flying some 27 hours and was totally confused as to where I was... and almost missed my flight while I sat in a Burger King talking to my hubby on the phone. (I wanted to smell fast food, but wasn't brave enough to eat any of it yet).

In the mile-high city I bought some peanut M&Ms and a new Sudoku book, mostly because I needed an excuse to get up and move far far away from the girl telling whoever was on the other end of her cell phone that "yeah, he stayed over last night and in the morning, he was like telling me, 'I have strep.' So now, like, I'm all paranoid, and my throat feels all like, junky and stuff..." AHHHHHHHHH!

Strep free I reach Detroit. Cold as hell, it is... get picked up by Windo and deposited in the humble and empty abode of Rams and Lalee, who are currently still in India, and that's where I've been ever since. The last human being I saw in person was Windo around 1:15 a.m. on Thursday morning - since then, I feel like I'm in some sort of decompression chamber or quarantine. But it's been nice... rather than being flung back into the good ol' American hustle and bustle, I've been sleeping lots, listening to Malayalam film songs on my iPod shuffle, doing sudoku, and prowling around their house hunting for things to eat. (Rams and Lalee, let me replace the Maggi noodles, parathas, and oh-so-tasty crackers on top of the fridge before you return)

Today, actually in about an hour, Saby should be back from Dayton, and we'll be having lunch with Liz and Matt and then Sunday is our big moving day down to Dayton. Technically, we still don't have a place to move into, but that should be settled by 9:30 am on Monday morning.

I'll be writing more in retrospect as I get time... but to anybody who actually has been reading this stuff up til now, THANKS.

See you on da flip side...

Ko-taim-ah = good time-uh... but not really

So remember I said I was going to church every morning?

That faded fast... I attended diligently for 3 whole consecutive days (highest church per day ratio ever for me) Tuesday, Weds and Thursday of that 2nd week here, and then Friday lost my enthu under the guise of health - I had gotten a little cold/cough/sniffle and wanted to just lay in bed til the "late late" hour of 8am or so. But in my daily dose of Mallu Gospel, I was seeing Christy Aunty of eyebrow threading fame every day on our walk home. She caught me humming the mass to myself (or sometimes I'd be getting a kick out of humming the "om jai jagadish" that I've learned from attending EMU's Dandiyas and watching Kuch Kuch Hota Hai too many times) and asked me in sort of pidgin english what I was singing... then though for a moment and released a stream of excited Malayalam to Babi. She then relates to me that Christy Aunty has organized a program of sorts, a big get together... it will be on Friday at 6pm and would I please come and sing a song?
Shyness set in... I thought "oh haaaaiiill no" and then realized I
a.) am living the most utter stress free life over here
b.) have nothing to lose
and c.) might benefit from a little purpose to life

I agreed to sing a christmas carol and promptly retired to my bathroom to yodel out "Little Drummer Boy" and some other carols, testing my knowledge of words and all... finally determing that it might be okay to do "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" but wishing I knew the latin words instead.

WELL... it comes to be that day, Friday, and I do NOT attend church, and I sink into the comfortable antisociality of my room, do some reading, take a shower and start hoping that nobody will stop by and remind me to attend. On cue, Jopu, a cousin next door at Appapan and Jose Uncle's house, pops in the window to remind us that we have to be there at 6pm. I feel bad because I gave my word, so Mummy agrees to go with me... then corrals Ruby Aunty as well (Valsama Aunty will already be there because her son Jopu is performing in a group skit) so that I've a lil' cheering section. Mum helps me wrap a sari (nice black one with some embroidery that Leelama Aunty gave me from her collection in LA) and we chuck off down the road to the home of Dr. Thomas Mathai, where this shindig is being held.

WELL! (I am saying "well" a lot) This was no small function, singing in some living room. In the back yard of the doctors home, he has set up not only about 50 plastic chairs, but also a full blown stage, curtain, and soundsystem. Microphones are there... and with my apologies to those Indians who do know better, I must say that generally Indians should NOT, under any circumstances, be allowed to have access to amplified sound. SABU (as the chairs and PA system were labeled, so I assumed that's the name of the fellow renting the equipment) was going nuts with a fancy 1994 tape deck that was playing Christian songs in both English and Malayalam. That's great. The only thing was the tape sounded like it had been left on the dashboard of a car for most of the Rajasthani desert summer... it squealed, squelched and wavered while Sabu made adjustments by increasing the volume. Ahhh!

6pm rolls around... Sabu flips the tape and I begin to hum along with the squealing, it's now as familiar as the song I intend to sing. Mummy and the Aunties and I all take seats, and get introduced to a few people around us. All are from the neighborhood, and all are from the church. (Which is why Daddy did NOT come) I get asked how I like it here a few times by girls who look younger than my 12 year old niece and then inform me they're doing their masters in Physics and Math at a local college. Another asks me "You prefer India or the U.S.?" Mummy sorts of giggles next to me, and says "you've only been here one week..." and I stammer out the same reply, wondering if this was going to get political. Luckily a giant bug came flying down from the top of a coconut tree and scared me sh*tless, giving a perfect excuse to stop making chit chat.

6:30 rolls around and the Aunties are looking at their watches. 6:40 rolls around, and someone... presumably Dr. Thomas Mathai gets up and makes a giant speech to open the show. He says something that sounds like "Kottayam" a bunch of times, and I wonder what he's mentioning the next town over for so frequently... but it is actually "kotaiyma" he's saying... which means gathering, or get together. And then the dreaded words.... "(dreadfully long something or other in Malayalam).... Lina Sebastian.... (malayalam again)... *pause*.... Welcome!"

(note: Wives over here take their Hubby's first names as their last name after marriage, because of how names get passed down from father to son. If I were Lina George, they would think I was married to Saby's dad. Which actually one sales lady who came to the door did. But that's another story.)

When I was getting up to the stage I heard only comments on the fact that I was wearing a sari. I shakily sing "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful" and then go back to my seat, sweating like a whore in church... or rather, like a girl wrapped in 8 feet of chiffon sitting in a backyard on a 85 degree breezeless evening.

The night went down from there. By 7:15 there's been a parade of utterly amateur talent including small girls dancing in front of another girl dressed as the Virgin Mary, a stand-up comedy routine about 7 minutes too long, a group song in Malayalam that resembled banshees after an Irish bus crash, and a one finger keyboard recital of malayalam film songs set to cheesy Casio background rhythm. As another speech begins, Mummy and Ruby Aunty stand up and herd me towards the exit. Our less-than-stealthy retreat is barred by a frantic Christy Aunty, who gives Mummy a talking to in unsmiling Malayalam and without even registering my existance, much less "thanks" or "Bye" - apparently she was quite miffed that we were leaving, when they had "made coffee for 100 people!" Well, the 20 people remaining in the crowd were going to need that coffee, as we could hear (thanks to Sabu's magnificient, or rather mangled, speaker system) that the torture went well into the night.

But it wasn't a totally lost night... I got to wear a sari, meet some neighborhood folks, and by comparison, I felt my song went over quite well.

(Sexy) Back!

Greetings humble readers.
Greetings from a net cafe that smells like the top I wore for two consecutive days... yeeeeccch.
I haven't had a chance to come down and do anything for quite a while. It's not that I or we have been particularly busy or anything... and NO, I have not been laid up because one of those "things" got into my intestine, mother :-) - just have been chilling around the house and Babi, my escort, has been busy with wedding preparations.

So what is happening? I keep a really lame journal over here, especially compared to the prolific writings I did back in Mexico in 2003. Mostly I am too lazy to write, knowing I'm just going to type it up later. It's hot and writing gives me a cramp. Anyway I'm oh so busy doing Sudoku puzzles like it's my job ;-)

Oh, back to lame journal - I basically just keep a diary of what all happens each day. So I am going to look through that and see if there's anything I can either add to or totally exaggerate in order to make for interesting reading material...

Cheers!

One week down...

I've been in India for one week!
Today I don't really know what to say... it's like that commercial where they say "oh, he didn't get his snack." I had "puttu" and banana for breakfast (pronounced "put" as in "foot") and then lots of toast and Goober Grape that I brought from home... but again I'm hungry already. My purse has a coveted granola bar, but that was left behind on this ad libbed trip to Kanjirapally for "browsing"...

Puttu, btw, and I'm not sure if I'm spelling that (or many things) correctly, is steamed rice and coconut. Very nice with coffee.

One exciting thing is that I've gotten a cell phone. Babi, our saintly and cheerful cousin, took me not only for "browsing" and shopping, but we stopped at a Reliance India dealer where I was able to purchase a SIM card for my phone for 200 rupees. That's less than $5. It allows me to take free incoming calls from anywhere - US or otherwise - plus make local calls rather cheaply, and international calls at a not-too-bad $.25/min. Considering the phone people have not come to fix the landline as they promised (2 days has turned into 4, and going on 5... meaning it will almost be a month that my inlaws have been without a telephone) this cell is a godsend.

While standing in this shop to make the transaction, I started to think I was losing my mind, because just outside my periphial (sp?) vision was a swarm of gnats. As Babi listened to the sales pitch, asked the necessary questions, and translated certain segments for me I was swatting... twitching... and looking around to see if it was only me under attack. That's what made me think I was mad - everyone else was as docile as cows... blank, tranquil stares from the fellows on the bench behind us... a sort of "what's wrong with you, whitey" look from the fellow in the doorway. I tried to ignore it... well, I thought "maybe swarms of gnats are everywhere and people are used to it..." and then that made me think of the little starving kids in Africa with flies crawling all over their faces. But kudos to those little kids, because finally I could not take it any longer and Babi sent me out to sit in the car and wait.

So that was my biblical swarm in Kerala.

Another thing I'm thankful for is Sudoku. Finally found and bought a book in LAX before heading off to our boarding gate. I was finding it hard at first, but then I removed my head from my bum and read the instructions properly... so that combined with my sister's tricks and tips are making me a supah sudoku mastahhhh. At least in the Easy level ;-)

I've taken up going to church in the mornings... as Daddy said, it's a combination exercise for the physical and spiritual as it's about a 3/4 mile walk up and down hills to get there. Today is my third appearance... I've been able to learn the tunes of the mass, maybe to about 45%... and in some places I may even know a word or two. But what that word means I am still clueless - I realized today I'm going to church, a Syrian Catholic church, and not even knowing what the words for God or Jesus are in Malayalam. One thing I've noticed is something that sounds like "Catawba" (Which is where I grew up, whooopie!) and that comes alot after Communion.

So the altar boys are almost always changing, minus one "husky" (as Old Navy would call him) boy who always seems to be there. There today, one new fellow was there. Big huge eyes, kind of a goofy fellow... and as he came over to our side of the altar after Communion to sit and look pious (usually you can see all the alter boys start to whisper and giggle with each other after about a minute of looking pious) he saw me. He turned around and was looking at me through the little fence thing that separates the altar area from the seating area. So he stares for about 5 seconds, and I stare back... and I give him one umma-zumma non-Church-suitable grin - CHEEESE!!! His eyes got all wide for a second, and he grinned back... then turned around to his alterboy cohorts and I saw him stage whisper "Ma-dam-ah" in a very lip-readable way. Very cute. It's hard to try and focus on the mysteries of Christ while you're flirting with the 10 year old altar boys :)

I am thinking of bringing chocolate Hershey kisses for them all.

More in a second...
Lina