Our worst S. Asian night

I know I said my next post would be positive, but I have not uploaded my birthday pics, yet, so you get to read about our worst S. Asian night instead.

We moved to a new flat several days ago. More on that in another post... Our new bedroom has a king-sized bed, an A/C that mostly works and a ceiling fan. The night of my birthday I woke up around 3:30am sweating. The power had gone out and it seemed it had been out for about an hour. No A/C and no fan. I was miserable and could not get back to sleep. We decided to open a couple of windows to catch a breeze and all we got were two mosquitoes that ended up biting me. So, we closed the windows and tried sleeping in our sauna bedroom. Well, the mosquito bites were itchy and because of the heat and my sweat, my eczema started acting up and itching, too. It was horrible. I really needed the sleep b/c I had to get up at 6:30am to leave for a trip to a village. I could not take it anymore and after some more whining, "I'm hot! I'm itchy! I can't sleep!", at 4:30am we decided to pack some things and go back to our tiny flat and sleep there on our twin bed since we still have the key. The power might have come back any minute, but we did not want to risk it. Fortunately, there was power and A/C at our old flat and we slept for two hours until it was time to get up and start another day.

I commented to Jerry that I am not tough enough to live here. The next night that proved to be true when I tripped/slipped (but did not fall) and ended up with a bad bruise and big bump on my leg. It was so bad that it hurts to walk!! (Incidentally, even before all of this happened, Jerry and I had been tossing around ideas on how to make me tougher after watching Die Hard 4 where Bruce Willis keeps on getting up after repeatedly getting knocked down. If it were me, once I got knocked down, I would never get up. I would just wait for Jerry to pick me up and then nurse me back to health in A/C comfort.)

Back to the power outage... the power goes out here once or twice a day - even at the 5-star hotels - for usually 30 minutes to an hour. It is annoying, but not too too bad because the lingering A/C keeps things cool and once it gets really hot and we start really sweating, the power usually comes back on. Not so the night of my birthday. We talked to our neighbor and he said the power did not come back on until 6:15am! He also said that the building had not experienced a long power outage like that since the mid-80s!!!!

WHAT have we gotten ourselves into??

I just have to keep remembering, "His grace is sufficient for me."

Argh!

It took us 50 minutes to drive to a place that should take 5 minutes to get to. First, it was the rush hour traffic, then it was the vehicles who decided to make a two-way street a one way, then it was a huge crowd of marchers blocking all the streets we wanted to turn onto, and finally it was half of those marchers who then decided to SIT ON THE GROUND in the middle of the street, forcing all the cars to reverse and find alternate routes. Jerry commented that most of ground-sitters probably did not even know why they were marching/protesting/sitting in the first place. I must say that I agree. And what were the police doing? nothing.

I will try to write something positive next time.

weather report

So, it cooled down to 102 degrees today (one site said it was 105), down from 106 last weekend. And it should cool down even more to 98 by the beginning of next week. This heat is crazy.

From the local newspaper today:

Damned if you go out, damned if you stay in.

“You can’t get out because of the sweltering heat and it is difficult to stay indoors because of power cuts. It can’t get worse than this,” said 63-year-old Anima Banerjee...

The maximum temperature read 38.6 degrees Celsius and the discomfort index shot up to 66.4 degrees Celsius, 11 notches above normal, on Tuesday...

The discomfort index, calculated by taking into account factors like temperature, wind-flow pattern and humidity, bore evidence of the misery.

So, instead of heat index, we have the discomfort index, which is a pretty good moniker if you ask me. Anyhow, do you know what 66.4 Celsius means in Fahrenheit?? 151.52 !!!

Free Home Delivery

Both in Houston and here, whenever Jerry and I are out and see an interesting restaurant, we stop and ask for a menu to take home for future reference. We did just that tonight while on our way to a birthday party. Jerry got a menu from a modern-looking restaurant named Kalimpong. At the bottom of the menu were these words, just as they appeared:

Free Home

Delivery upto

walking distance

I am afraid this blog won't be quite as interesting/entertaining when we move back to the USA.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

It is getting HOT here.
Friday's high according to weather.com will be 106 degrees
accuweather.com projects 108 degrees
and it is not even May, yet.

This coupled with the pollution and power outages that occur 1-2 times a day lasting from 30 minutes to a few hours does not bode well for my eczema and allergies

PRAY for us!

alterations

There is a lady who sets up a sewing machine on the sidewalk a block from where we live and makes clothes and does alterations. Yesterday I picked up a pair of pants she had hemmed along with another pair of pants that she had not only hemmed but also replaced the zipper and button. My cost for alterations on BOTH pairs of pants: 87 cents. AND it was next-day service.

Something you would not see in the US

First, I do plan on blogging about Thailand and Cambodia and I did figure out how to post vertical pictures, BUT blogger is having technical difficulties with uploading pictures, so here is an anecdote that has no pictures...

Last night (around 10:30pm), as Jerry and I were walking home from a restaurant, we heard some loud talking/chanting. We turned to see where it was coming from and saw that it was coming from a group of young men in the distance walking in the street in the same direction we were going. (We were on the sidewalk)
As they got closer, we could see them carrying something.
Well, they were carrying a bed.
And do you know what was on the bed? A DEAD BODY!!!
We tried keeping up with them to take a picture, but they broke into a run, still carrying the bed with the dead body on it. After a little while they stopped, put the bed down in the street and started more chanting and throwing of flower petals. By this time we had caught up and I could see the body - a man - clothed in white with a white flower arrangement on top of him. I had already decided not to take a picture out of respect and just watched. It was surreal.