Final Weigh-In

I've been fighting stomach issues since the first few days I got here, and it's finally taken me down. I really wasn't feeling well before the party on Saturday, and I think that pushed me over the edge. I weighed myself at the beginning of last week and again today - I've lost almost 10 pounds in 7 days - not good! Wish me luck on this flight back. Hope everyone enjoyed the blog. :-)

Party Aftermath

This party was insane - I'm about to hit the sack but wanted to give the highlights:

1 - I met some American and Canadian peeps there - something new for me, so that was comforting - about a month late. :-)

2 - we all drank a LOT - the bar was open from 8pm -1 am - not good for me. They had literally 100ft of buffet food set out for everyone in addition to the open bar - craziness.

3 - they had an Indian fashion show there - pretty cool experience.

4 - I got a temporary tattoo of a yin-yang on my forearm - will last about a week.

5 - I got all infection and dead skin eaten off my feet by some crazy Malaysian pedicure thing - I took my shoes/socks off and put my feet in this tank of water. These crazy fish attach themselves to your feet and eat all the dead skin off and suck out all the impurities! Here's the website: http://mysadfish.blogspot.com/2009/04/fish-pedicure.html

It was wild!!!!!

Cocktail Party!

I just got an invite by the hotel to come to a VIP (am I one of those??) cocktail party out by the pool tomorrow night! I was running on the treadmill and a lady came by with my invitation. This will be my first Indian formal party - I'm sure I'll have some things to blog about. :-) Stay tuned...

Wedding

I know everyone is dying to see the Indian garb I was sporting at the wedding last weekend. I will write more later about the actual experience, but here's a quick pic for now. It's about the most unflattering picture I've ever been in (I haven't gained that much weight over here) but it's the only one I have where you can see the entire thing. Enjoy...looking forward to the comments!

Conversation Gone Bad

I was sitting at the hotel restaurant tonight enjoying the chicken dish I described in my previous post and was approached by a new manager there. He introduced himself to me and seemed very "with it" in regards to his english and general understanding of customs/cultures. After exchanging pleasantries, this is where the conversation went:

Manager: "So where are you from - the US or Australia?"
Me (thinking) : uhh oh - I was wrong about this guy
Me: "I'm from the US - North Carolina - it's in the Southeast."
Manager: "Oh, very nice sir. What state is that in - California?"
Me : "No, North Carolina is the State - it's in the Southeast, about 4 hours from Washington DC."
Manager: "Oh, so it's in North America then..."
Me (laughing inside) : "Yes, that's exactly right."

Now I give you a very similar conversation that happened in the movie Dumb and Dumber which was what I was thinking when this was going on.

Lloyd: "That's a lovely accent you have. New Jersey?"
Lady: "Austria."
Lloyd: Austria! Well, then. G'day mate! Let's put another shrimp on the barbie!

Chicken Dish

I feel that I need to write about this because it's such a constant force in my life when I go to India. There is this chicken dish that the restaurant in the hotel serves called "char grilled half country chicken". I discovered it at the very end of my first trip here in 2007. Tonight, as I was dining on this delicious delicacy again, I was estimating how many times I've had it in the 3 trips to India - I think I hit 30 tonight and I never get tired of it.

I've had a lot of chicken dishes in my day and very few are memorable. This one, for whatever reason, is, and I feel would be whether I was in India or back in the US. It's a perfect balance of a deboned, small, half chicken that is butterflied and pan seared with rosemary, thyme, fresh parsley, and a little garlic, then roasted. It's served on top of some perfectly-roasted baby Yukon gold potatoes and pan-seared mixed vegetables. A thin Thanksgiving-style brown gravy is drizzled on the chicken right before serving. I don't think words do it justice - it's that good!

Birthday

My good friend and co-worker Harish celebrated his 30th birthday today at the office. For those of you who don't know, one of the customs here is to get icing from the birthday cake smeared all over your face - I have no idea where this tradition started but it's pretty insane. Dalvir, being the kind person that he is, made sure I was also in the mix. Here are 2 pics from our afternoon. :-)

Change of Plans

There's been a last-minute change in plans for this weekend. I received a surprise invite to attend the wedding of Dhiraj (guy on the FGS team)'s sister!!! Holy crap - I'm honored and am every excited to see an Indian wedding for the first time. I'll be going with Deepak (another guy on the team) on Saturday am to a small town outside of Agra (where Taj is) to attend the wedding Saturday night. It should be wild. I'm headed out to the markets tomorrow after work with Deepak to get an Indian wedding outfit of some sort! Stay tuned...

A Real Indian Village

Suckwinder, my driver, was from Chandigarh and his village is there. As part of our trip last weekend, he took us out there to meet his family! It was pretty awesome to see that part of the world lives. Here are a couple of pics from the outing.

Me with Suckwinder's mom and their buffalo outside their home


On the roof of their home (Suckwinder is on the left)


Me doing some hard work in their mustard field

Current Events

I was reading the paper yesterday during breakfast. I know this is so common back home that it doesn't even make the news, but I guess these things are noteworthy in India - here's the headline:

Gored boy survives critical injury

That's right - a 7 year old kid was walking home from school here and a mad bull gored him in the stomach!!!! That is unbelievable to me. And we get scared at home to leave our kid at the bus stop.

Travel Plans!

Dalvir, acting as my local entertainment planner, and I have finalized weekend travel plans. On Saturday we're going to Chandigarh which is Dalvir's home town. Here's a pic I dug up online. We're going drive drive up Saturday early morning (takes about 5 hours), spend the night, and come back late Sunday.




Our next weekend trip will be the following weekend. I'm headed to Udaipur on an overnight train leaving from Delhi Friday night and coming back overnight Sunday night. Vivek and Deepak from the FGS team are going with me. Here's a pic - it's called the city of lakes. Should be some crazy times!

Monkeys

Every time you go in and out of the office here, there is a security check post. A couple of guys/girls go through your bag and check off the various electronics you bring in and out of the FGS office. I was leaving yesterday and waiting outside for my bag to be searched. Literally a dozen monkeys came out of nowhere and ran right by me. The security guy said "monkeys going to their home too". It was pretty awesome. I didn't take this picture, but these were the kinds of monkeys that ran by me.

Music

There were a few musical selections I've heard here that were memorable. I got my head shaved with a straight razor in the hotel salon over the weekend by the local "barber". There was pretty typical kind-of background music on when I was sitting in the chair waiting for the guy to come in. Literally as soon as he started lathering up my dome to get started, "Unchained Melody" came on - think the pottery scene in the movie Ghost - I was petrified. There were no issues with the haircut, but I was really creeped out.

The second music selection I heard was during dinner at the continental restaurant in the hotel. Again, it was kind of low background non-descript music until I recognized the tune - it was an elevator music version of The Rain Song by Led Zeppelin.

The last was tonight. I walked over to the big mall that is near the hotel for food/kill some time. As I approached the McDonald's in the food court, Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" was blasting out of the speakers - now that's some Americana for ya!

The Cloak Room

For any "new-to-India terminology" peeps out there, that means the bathroom.

I ran a few miles on the treadmill last night at the gym in the hotel. Right when I finished running nature made its call, so I had to bee-line it to the cloak room in the men's locker room. Keep in mind that it's hot and humid as all hell in the gym, so I was pouring sweat. The actual bathroom event was pretty uneventful (especially compared to what your gut goes through typically over here), but when I walked out of the stall there was a worker standing right there and had a shocked look on his face and asked if I was ok - I'm sure he thought I had just recreated the scene with Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber because I was still red-faced and pouring sweat coming out of the bathroom - made me laugh pretty hard.

Slang

I was reading the daily Hindustan paper this morning at breakfast. For reasons I don't understand, there was a completely random article about Pamela Anderson in the "Style" section - complete with a "current" pic of her (looked like it was from 1992). That's pretty typical in the paper here - they dig up some old stuff about a has-been celebrity in the US and that's what makes the news.

I digress - what was funny to me was how they described her trashiness:

"Mutton dressed as lamb"

Gettin' my worship on

Dalvir took me to his place of worship in Delhi on Sunday. It was a pretty cool experience to see part of his normal routine. Here are a couple of pics that show what is was kinda like.

Got the doo-rag going

A couple of pics from inside the Gurdwara

Construction

I snapped this pic Sunday - a little road widening in Delhi

Markets

A couple market pics from my outing with Dalvir

Eggs

I was waiting in line this morning to order my daily omelet. Here was the conversation between the chef and the lady in front of me.

Chef: "Can I help you?"
Lady: "Yes, can I have 2 fried eggs please."
Chef: "Would you like 2 fried eggs or 2 portions of eggs?"
Me: Thinking ...WTF did he just ask her?...
Lady: Looking confused... "I would like the count of my eggs to be 2."
Chef: "Certainly ma'am."

Does anyone know what a "portion of eggs" is??? Holy crap! So after breakfast, I went up to the room and looked it up here. A portion, or serving, is 1 egg!! So he basically asked her: "would you like 2 eggs or 2 eggs?" The hilarity is non-stop.

The Spa

Random Observation:

The spa is pretty typical at the hotel - massages, facials, body treatments, etc. They also offer pretty standard snacks/lemon water/juices. What I found funny was the huge cooler of Red Bull right next to all of that - nothing says unwind and relax like a couple cans of Red Bull!