in Houston

Howdy Folks! Well, I am in my favorite city in the world, enjoying A/C, family, friends and lots of great food. I think I am going to gain 5-10 pounds on this trip.

I never realized (until living in K) that Houston is a BEAUTIFUL city! It also has gorgeous blue skies, hardly any people and not much traffic. I love it here. And even though it is is in the low 90s and HUMID, it does not really bother us. However, there are not zillions of people milling around you, no stench of urine, no constant sound of horns honking, no cars about to run you over, no exhaust blowing in your face and no trash everywhere. That really makes a difference in how hot/uncomfortable you feel. So, I totally understand K's discomfort index of 150+ degrees in the summer.

Another thing that I did not realize I would appreciate about being back in the USA is air-conditioned bathrooms. In S Asia, residences do not have central A/C, so if you want A/C in your bathroom, you have to install a unit in there and that would be be sort of ridiculous. So, we end up sweating when we have to go potty or brush our teeth. Not so here! In fact, at my parents' house, the bathroom is the coolest place in the house in summer.

I had forgotten that my old room gets the hottest in summer, so our first night in Houston Jerry and I were sweating. I was thinking, "I did not come all the way to the US from K to sweat in my sleep!" But problem solved - my dad put in a fan the next day. And on a related note, we are back to sleeping in a twin bed for the duration our of time here.

One of our friends relocated to England for five years and is letting Jerry drive his Mini Cooper this week. Not only is the Mini one of Jerry's favorite cars, it is bigger than the car we drive in K!

More later...

in Frankfurt

I have always wanted to visit Germany and now I am here, but confined to the Frankfurt airport. However, it's been nice so far! We walked off the plane down the stairs to the airport buses and were greeted with cool, crisp, clean air as well as nice, clean, not-broken-down buses.

A little bit of reverse culture shock is setting in as I am having a hard time not staring at all the white people and pointing them out to Jerry. Speaking of Jerry, he feels that Germany is too sterile and the jury's still out on whether he prefers this kind of atmosphere to the more "colorful" one in S Asia.

Well, we will be back in S Asia soon enough, so for now, I will enjoy the German efficiency and delight I experience going into the bathrooms here. The one down side, we wanted to eat sausage and kraut during our layover, but alas...

I would also like to say, that so far, I recommend flying Lufthansa. The food is decent, the plane was MUCH nicer than British Airways and the inflight entertainment is the kind where you have a choice of lots of movies that you can start and stop at your leisure. We saw The Other Boleyn Girl, Dan in Real Life and Definitely Maybe. I liked TOBG the most. Juliette Binoche was miscast in DIRL (in my opinion, and therefore reduced my enjoyment of the film). I still have 15 minutes to go on DM. I will catch the rest on the flight from here to Houston - my favorite city in the world!!!

Rain Rain Rain

Monsoon season is here!!! Hooray!!!

Monsoon season in S Asia means cooler temps. The high this week is only 97 degrees!!

putting things in perspective

I have a kitchen infested with ants...
I have been waiting all day for an A/C repairman who did not come...
I have just discovered that most of the cards I got for my birthday were partially ruined...
I have sweat dripping down my face after just a couple of minutes in my kitchen, trying to kill the ants...

BUT

I have A/C in my bedroom that mostly works

AND

I am not a sex slave wondering if someone will ever rescue me

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 !!!