Weekend at Home

I've been fighting jet lag since I got home from India on Tuesday.  I went to bed between 7 and 8 every night this week.  But in between sleeping, I've been enjoying some fantastic time with my little buddy.  In anticipation of our Fourth of July visitors,  we have been doing lots of grocery shopping.  I bought ice cream cones for the first time.  Will found the cones and wanted to see what they were about.   So, I let him make his first ice cream cone which he loved.   He didn't eat the cone; he licked out the ice cream as far as he could and then used a spoon to get the rest. 

On Sunday we played in the yard, then cleaned up to go to the Children's Museum.  Will wanted to take a try at the workshop.  He didn't cry when he hit his little finger with a hammer.  I didn't see the hit, but I did see the scratch on his pinky.  He seemed to forget about the finger until an hour later at the park when he fell face first off the swing.  I don't know if he caught himself with his hand again (in addition to his forehead) or if he just remembered his day's worth of ouchies.  We decided it was time to retire home for Elmo Boo Boo and a Lightning McQueen band-aid and a movie.

Hyderabad - Charminar

The day before I left Hyderabad, I had a few more rupees burning a hole in my pocket!  Actually, I used my last Saturday and my last Sunday doing a little souvenir shopping.  On Saturday I joined a Cincinnati colleague on her shopping itinerary at a nice clothing store; Handicrafts de India store; and a jewelry store. 

On Sunday I joined Andrew on his search for bangles for his wife and sister-in-law in the old part of the city.  I had been to Charminar on my first trip to Hyderabad and  found it very overwhelming.  This time wasn't as bad.  It helped that rain had just stopped, so crowds were thinner. 

 I tried to get a few pictures to capture the street scenes.  I snapped the picture above while standing in the street.  The one below is from the backseat of the car.  I took a lot of pictures from the car but they weren't always great since I was trying to be respectful of not taking anyone's picture.

Hyderabad

It has been 7 years since my last trip to Hyderabad, and I've been eager to see the changes.   The first change is that we stay at a hotel instead of corporate apartments and sit in a different part of our office park.  So, basically I cannot make a "how it's changed" comparison.  One change I really like is that the hotel provides regular car shuttle to/from the office and other errand points.  I prefer this to having a designated car/driver like last time.  It always felt weird to know that someone was sitting around in a hot car all day, every day waiting for me.

The hotel is nice.  More Doubletree than W but it has a substantial breakfast buffet and excellent room service dinner.  After eating lots of Indian food my first few days, I am decidedly homesick for American food.  Dinner last night was a delicious margherita pizza from room service at 10 p.m.   Breakfast today was corn flakes, blueberry muffins, banana and cappuccino.  Oh, how wonderful that morning cappuccino is!   Especially since I've been sleeping only about 5-6 hours per night - both due to insomnia and being busy with work. 

The pictures in this post are ones I took on my ride into the office this morning.  The first one is just outside the hotel compound.  And compound is the right word.  It's far off the street and has a big convention center attached.  The rickshaw picture was one I snapped as we drove through rush hour.  Today I went to the office around 9 a.m. so the streets were much busier than the day before when I went closer to 11.   

This photo is from the second floor lobby of my office.   The juxtaposition of green and sand; new and old; construction and demolition; polished and trashed is everywhere here.   In the same line of sight you can see pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, rickshaws, sub-compact cars, luxury cars, and shuttle busses.  I still need to get a better picture of the shops on the street.  It's amazing there, as well, how beauty and squalor are mixed together.  The best visual picture I got was in Jaipur when a row of bright, beautiful parisols were displayed in front of a shop and betwen my car and the shop was solid trash.

 

I took this picture of the outside of the office immediately before noticing the sign that said, "No Photos."  The last day in the office we ordered Indian buffet for our team from a local restaurant, Ginger Court, that is popular with the ex-pats.   I tried all sorts of chicken and veg curries and rices that my team picked out. (I avoided the mutton for the most part.)  For me the most amazing part was that I ate an entire Indian meal without a drink!  I had left my water bottle at my desk upstairs, so I just had to mix plenty of rice and naan in with the spicy sauces!



Father's Day

My boys got to celebrate Father's Day doing their favorite things:  playing golf together and having dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings.  I think Will's descrption of his Daddy is pretty spot on (except that 9 years old, 10 feet tall, 40 pounds thing).   "Play downstairs" is something that only Daddy and Will do.  They play ping pong together or Will plays Legos while his Daddy works out.  They've also started watching movies.   So far this summer they've watched Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of Star Wars. 

Jaipur

Delhi, Agra and Jaipur are known as the Golden Triangle.   This was my first visit to Jaipur, and I loved it.   It was absolutely beautiful.   We arrived in Jaipur after a nearly 5 hour drive from Agra on a sweltering, 100-degree sunny Saturday afternoon.  Unfortunately our vehicle's air conditioner stopped working after 2 hours.   We then had to roll down the windows on stinky backroads while our driver (who didn't speak much English) tried to find places along the road for the a/c to be fixed.  After the second fruitless stop, I finally told him to just press along to the air-conditioned hotel in Jaipur.

On Sunday morning our driver (and the still broken car) picked us up at 8 a.m. to start our Jaipur touring.  First up was an ascent to Amber Palace on the back of an elephant!   While on the elephant, all sorts of hawkers were trying to sell us things.  Thanks to some miscommunication that made wood carvings seem like a fantastic deal (he was quoting Euros and I was hearing rupees), I did in fact buy something:  a carved elephant for Will.  I loved the idea of buying an elephant while riding on an elephant!  

We enjoyed touring all around Amber Palace.  It was high above the city, so we had a fantastic view of the old and new parts of the city.  Jaipur (also known as the Pink City) is very green and mountaineous.  And it also had a wall built along the mountains.

One of the items on our itinerary was "Snake Charmer."  I'm not sure if that's something that the tour guides devise for a laugh, or if there was actually a tourist at some point who requested that.  We just said "tour of Agra and Jaipur" and the tour agency filled in the rest of the details.  I wasn't impressed, but Andrew ended up touching it.  I was sure to email his wife that photo right away; she thought it was pretty cool! 


Afterwards, we were driven to what felt like a strip mall where you could ride a camel up the street and back.  That whole process is one I don't need to repeat.  First, I had intentionally worn long skirts during all my touring in India (it was too hot for jeans and I thought it was disrespectful to wear shorts or a short skirt), so getting on and sitting on the camel was awkward with the skirt hitched up to my knees.  Then the process of the camel standing up and sitting back down left me hanging on for dear life.  And finally, the camel wranglers were the worst tip soliciters of anyone we encountered.  We planned to give them a tip and did (after we were safely off),  but there was nothing pleasant about the ride.   

We stopped at an observatory of sorts (imagine 12 versions of sun dials to tell the time and astrological sign).  It was cool, but definitely held more symbolism for a culture where they follow horoscope more.  The tour guide was estatic to hear that it was Andrew's birthday.  I got additional photo requests here and agreed to have my picture taken with an 8 year old boy.  Andrew was also engaged in conversation by a little boy who was very polite and thanked him for having a conversation.  We also toured City Palace which had clothing and tapestries and weapons through the ages.  Pretty impressive collection of museum quality items.

Like in Agra, we stopped at a local shop where we could see the local specialty handicraft being demonstrated.  Here it is stone cutting and polishing.  I bought a beautiful jade necklace that looks like green marbles.   We passed up whatever the second handicraft was since we were shopped out.  Afterwards we headed to the airport to await our flight back to Hyderabad. 

I don't have any pictures of the flight, but I will mention that pre-monsoon rains create fantastic turbulence!  Our flight was direct but not nonstop.  We lost at least two hours:  one circling above Ahmedabad waiting to land in the storm and another hour sitting on the runway waiting to take off again while runway priority was being given to the planes attempting to land before running out of fuel.    The flight and the pilot were very professional but I have never bumped around so much inside of an airplane.  It was also obvious that others on board were having trouble keeping their dinner down.  After that we finally landed in Hyderabad and made it to our new hotel just before midnight on Sunday.   

Agra

My first weekend in India started very early with a 4:30 checkout from the Delhi hotel.  Andrew (my Chicago teammate) and I had arranged for a weekend tour of the "Golden Triangle" and a tour guide car picked us up at the hotel to take us to the New Delhi train station to board the Bhopal Shatabadi Express to Agra in the air-conditioned "executive class" car.  The train wasn't fancy but it did include a three course breakfast (tea and biscuit; cornflakes with hot milk and white bread with jelly; and veg cutlet and mixed veggies) to pass the time.    

We arrived at Agra around 8 a.m. and were met immediately on the platform by a representative from the tour company.  We were escorted out to the waiting car and started on our way to the Taj Mahal.  Our tour guide, Ali, asked us where we were from.  When we told him Chicago, he said four years ago he toured Rahm Emmanuel and his family when they were in the city.   He also told us that thanks to the heat (100 degrees) in the pre-monsoon season that not many tourists were in town and he was going a week to 10 days between tours since they were being rotated between all the tour guides in his office. 

 

This was my second trip to Agra, but I did learn some new things and am glad I went again.   This picture above is back to the gate while standing next to the Taj Mahal.    The picture below is a close up of the outside wall (no pictures are allowed inside of the masoleum) to show the inlays of semi-precious stones in the marble that Agra is known for.

Two noteworthy things happened at Taj Mahal:  the first is that I was requested to take my first photo.  It was with an adult man, so that was creepy and I walked away.  The second is that I noticed all of the signs for "High Fee Ticket Holder Route" (i.e. foreigners).  Since our ticket was 750 rupeees (approximately $15) instead of the Indian resident price of less than $1, we had shorter routes we could take into the masoleum.

 After our tour at Taj, we went to Agra Fort where the royal family lived.  The Shah who commissioned the Taj Mahal for his favorite wife, had this view of it above from Agra Fort when he was held under house arrest by his son.  Agra Fort had a combination of Hindu and Muslim architecture, and it was a beautiful scene for picture taking.  But by this point in the day were were practically melting, so the tour was relatively quick. 

Our last stop was the "Baby Taj" which was beautiful - and had the lovely inlay pictured below - but just too much.  By this point I was tired of handing out 200 and 300 rupees on additional admittance fees, and it felt like the tour guide was trying to find "just one more thing" to tell us. I was tired and the wind was blowing dust in my eyes, and the bathrooms were swarming in flies.  But, had I known what awaited me in the next part of the day, I may have not been so concerned about a quick exit from Agra!

 

Delhi

My second trip to India started on Wednesday the 12th with a comfortable but long flight to Delhi.  It was about 12 hours from Newark to Delhi.  I watched a few movies; read a newspaper; ate dinner and breakfast; and listened to music.  I slept some but not much.  My chair reclined completely and I had a pillow and blanket.  I just wasn't super tired I guess.

We arrived in Delhi around 8 or 9 p.m. local time on Thursday.   Not sure why but I was surprised it was dark.  Probably because I had just eaten breakfast an hour earlier.  The hotel had a porter and driver ready for us (I am traveling with a co-worker).  I should have known how nice the hotel would be based on our car service being in an Audi A6!     In the morning when I opened my shutters, this is what I saw:

Friday we went to our newly opened offices in Delhi and met part of the team that is working on our project.   I only knew a few people in Delhi previously, so almost all of the introductions were to new colleagues.  The office shift is 11 a.m.-8 p.m. which is 12:30 a.m.-9:30 a.m. central time, and the hotel provides the car service to and from.   When we checked into the hotel, we had packets from the office already waiting that included converter plugs and loaner mobile phones that are already programmed with important phone number like the cab desk.   

After work on Friday, we had a nice dinner at the hotel restaurant.  This was one time where the food prices were as expensive at the U.S., but it was delicious!    After dinner I went right to sleep: the tour agency car was coming to get us at 4:30 a.m. for our weekend of adventures!

 

First Cubs Game

Since I was leaving town on Wednesday for work travel, we treated Tuesday night as a fun night instead of a school night and took Will to his first Cubs baseball game.  (Wednesday morning was unfortunately still a school morning; rather impressed the kid still made it!)  

One of my co-workers gave me the tickets for the game, and the seats were awesome!  We were the first row on the terrace level, so no one was in front of us and our section was elevated from the one below.  We also had great access to the stairs for snacks and bathroom breaks. 

Jason and Will met me at Ryan's house and we walked to Wrigley.  We arrived during the third inning,which was good, because I wanted to make it the the 7th inning stretch so we could sing Will's favorite song:  Take Me Out to the Ballgame.  We made it into the 6th inning with hot dogs, ice cream and beer (for the older boys).  Will was ready to leave as the 6th dragged on, but we persevered until celebrity guest Arsenio Hall led us in song.

Pretty cool for a mid-week family fun night!

School Zoo Party

The daycare had its annual anniversary party on Friday.  This year's theme was It's A Zoo In Here!  Each class had an animal; the preschoolers were bears!  Each child brought in a bear from home (of course we had to take Little Bear) for their closing number.

Will sat out the first two songs, but he joined in the closing number and delivered the lines with real gusto.  (There might have been the promise that we couldn't go back out to the bounce houses without some singing. . .)

Before a hot dog dinner in the classrooms and the kids' shows, there were bounce houses and a gated off petting zoo in the parking lot.  Will spent most of his time going back and forth between the two inflatables for the big kids, but he did spot the petting zoo eventually and was brave enough to check it out. 

Thursday Fun

When Daddy's away, Mommy and Will eat ice cream in our pajamas for dinner!

We probably would have done that anyway, but we went to the health club for a swim after school/work, and we happened upon the family carnival!  We had a quick swim, showered and put on pajamas (well, I was wearing yoga pants, but same difference!) and then went for ice cream, balloons, and bounce house fun!