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.