India!

India

As long promised, here are some of my pictures from India.

At a Hindu wedding, there is fire.
Also flowers.

Afterwards, we went on a trip to a temple important to Himself's family; no pictures at the temple itself, but my Picasa album (first picture in this post should take you there) has pictures I took along the way.
That's my favorite car -- the Ambassador. The British were making a style of car when they were in India, and they left, and it seems not to have occurred to anyone until about fifteen years ago that there would be any reason to change the design. They come in any color you want, so long as it's white. They're quite comfortable (think British taxicab -- same concept, really), but everyone in Himself's family thinks I'm silly for loving them, except his father, who's tickled and indulges me by requesting them from the chauffeur company.

The billboard (aka "hoarding") behind the car? Political ad. You have to see the hand-painted portraits of everyone in the whole party! My favorite candidate from the region, purely because of his name, is M. K. Stalin -- yes, named after Uncle Joe. (Naming's different there -- the "last" name is your given name, functionally your only name; initials before the name might point to your father's name or place of origin, and you might mention your caste at the end of your name. M. K. Stalin's father is the breathtakingly skilled orator Karunanidhi, hence the "K." Why I'm so hot on Karunanidhi? Tamil is an excellent classical language, but most people speak it in a nasty nasal manner dropping syllables all over the place and using compressed grammar; when he speaks, you can tell how beautiful it really should be.)

Of course, if you haven't got a driver, or even a car, you can fit the whole load on your scooter. Didn't get any pictures of it, but they do that with families too -- family of six on one motorcycle, with only the father in a helmet -- which is still an improvement over the last time I went for any period of time (2003), when helmets were almost unknown in this region.

It's a land of caste and economic distinctions, but most people overlook one or the other. Sometimes both.

Here, a fine house is next to a pretty low-end one (there's more pictures in my album of true huts, made of twigs -- there's very little true homelessness in this region, as you can always drag some sticks and palm fronds together and make a very basic shelter). In the towns where I've lived, that could mean either that the person in the low-end dwelling (who has a shop affixed to his house, and has sold a wall for advertising -- people everywhere are enterprising!) is high-caste but in reduced circumstances, or, more likely that the person in the fancy house has come into money, but is low-caste or "scheduled caste" and will not be made to feel welcome in a nicer part of town. (You can see that a bit in Houston -- I've gone out in some odd areas on Google Street View (I always like to check out where such-and-such a murder happened, mainly), and there'll be no sidewalk or curb, mostly abandoned houses or trailers, and then what would be a million dollar house in the middle of town, but has a tax value of $100,000, due to the $10,000 lots nearby.) Less common in the smaller towns, but more in the bigger cities (like when I was living in Madurai, or especially this time in Madras/Chennai), people, especially the younger generation, won't care about caste (sometimes even overlooking it when it comes to marriage, although that's less frequent), and will hang out with and live near people of the same economic standing, education level, and job type.

In any case, people today are more likely to live like this:
than like this:
But I suppose some things do have to change over time.

One thing I'm glad has changed? Medicine -- levaquin is nasty while you're taking it, but pneumonia, even when young and otherwise healthy, is no fun. Just don't want to do anything for a few weeks; without the medicine, apparently, it would have dragged on for months. But I'm all better now :)

Pneumonia!

So, I had a great time. The wedding was exciting, and I did get half a day to do some very rushed shopping in. I've been to India several times before, twice for 3-4 months each, so I'm familiar with the area, and know what shopping to do. (It's like when I go back to London, where my family lived for three years when I was in high school -- it's a shopping trip, not so much a sightseeing one, although, with London as with India (to a greater extent, as changes are more massive), it's also a "look how much things have changed!" trip.) Photos to come, when I get around to retrieving the camera.

Paris was a blast -- the Michelin guide my parents picked up on their honeymoon was printed in 1976, before the Louvre had pyramids and when the Orsay was still an abandoned train station, but it's really excellent. (I took a Let's Go guide (I won't get Lonely Planet, as they're Let's Go's main rival, and Let's Go is written by my old classmates) for things like modern opening times, etc.) It has a guide to how you can do all of Paris really fast in four days. I thought, "Great, we'll skip Montparnasse and Montmartre, and add in the Musee d'Orsay, and moving quickly we should be able to make it in three days."

That's until Himself says, wistfully (he's never been to Paris; I have, twice -- once with family, doing the full tour, and once on a one-day hit-the-Orsay-and-the-Eiffel-and-the-restaurant airplane layover), "can we go see Versailles?"

Ok, so we skip the Champs d'Elysses, as well (it's just the view down to the Arc de Triomphe, really -- we saw that in the shuttle back to the airport and while walking through Tuileries, anyhow), and do Michelin's Paris in Four Days, adding in the Orsay, in two days! And spend a day at Versailles, which was actually quite fun -- since I went (in 1995), they've added audioguides, which were most informative; and, we got to go out to see Marie Antoinette's fake hamlet where she could pretend to be a peasant, which I hadn't seen before.

We've walked about 8 miles (by Michelin's approximations) a day for two days, after several days of standing up barefoot for several hours in India, and spent a day doing a lot of walking at Versailles, and we get back and are sitting under the Eiffel Tower (it sparkles now -- didn't do that back in 1995 either!), having french fries and hot spiced wine (that's the good stuff), when I finally feel completely miserable and give in to miserableness. I've been coughing (in India, you can see the little black particles dancing around in the air -- never a good sign), and my throat hurts, and my feet hurt, and I'm finally losing my voice ... and then I get chills and am just feeling awful. We walk back to our lovely hotel, Himself kindly having given up his lovely and so-sweet idea of getting wine and cheese from little shops along the way and having an in-room picnic, where I try to check out with my French (Rosetta Stone was good -- helped a ton, and especially made me confident), with no voice, and feeling like I'm burning up -- turns out I have fever, too.

The next morning at the airport we get some cough syrup ... on the plane home, I feel like I'm dying -- turns out codeine's over the counter in France, and it's the only medicine I'm allergic to. So we didn't think to check the bottle... that's one miserable flight! After two days home from work sick in bed, I go back to work, just coughing a ton and feeling so tired, but not really thinking much of it (the pollution in India has had me cough for six months once before -- although then it may actually have been pertussis, I've since learned). My mother finally made me go to the doctor today ... turns out I have pneumonia! So, that's why I haven't made a thing, haven't read anything except one mystery novel at the doctor's today, and haven't had the energy to post.

Not to make it picture-less, though, I'll put in a few of the Margaret Bag from Oh, Fransson! that I made for my sister at Christmas. She loved it, and Himself said I should quit work and just make bags :)

The outside fabric is scotty argyle, and the inside is little scotties on brown fabric. Very cute.

(My skinny sister ... used to be a model, eats like a horse, 5'10" and 117 pounds or so... she got the Irish side (including the red hair), and I got the stocky German side!)

Didn't it turn out nicely?

Now back to resting... I'll be doing a lot of that for the time being!

Traveling

I'm off to India and France on Friday. (The above is a picture of me on my birthday in 2004.) Himself's cousin is getting married, hence the India; and we didn't want to spend the entirety of his only week of vacation that way, so we're rejoicing in a three-day stopover in Paris on the way back. Staying here. Have a list of book-arts-y places to go in Paris, as well as the Orsay and the other tourist spots (I've been a few times, but always quite quickly, and he's not been much if at all), and my uncle's favorite restaurant.

I've been doing Rosetta Stone French through the library (free!), and have learnt to say such useful things as, "my husband has drunk much and has fallen down" :) -- hardly likely! But we'll have a grand time, I'm sure.

Last of Christmas

Yes, I put away Christmas stuff on January 6 or 7. But I didn't post pictures until now!

These are those little houses ... I have to admit, while all snobby and classy in other respects, I confess to a weakness for Thomas Kinkade (in moderation) and little Dickensian houses that light up at Christmas.

(Peeking out under the drawer you can see the edge of some University of Texas demitasse cups my fabulous grandmother gave us, as we've each gone -- Himself for undergrad, me for my MA.)


And I got a gingerbread house kit in the secret santa at work, so ... house! It was truly a merger -- Himself had never made one before, so he was a novice, while I ... well, let's just say, the last one I made was a scale model of the Stephansdom in Vienna, with colored M&M's making up the patterned roof. So we compromised! I think it was sufficiently happy, anyhow!

Aunt Cushion

This is a cross-stitch cushion I made for my aunt. It's entertaining -- she has such specific likes in colors, ones that no one else has, that everyone who saw this in progress knew exactly who the intended recipient was.

It's about four inches across; as mentioned below, I don't like finishing, so I had my lovely mother (who's finished pillows for me before) make it up for me -- she added some ribbon around the needlework to make it a bit larger.

Sweet, don't you think? Pattern's from this book.

Christmas Quilt

A bit late, eh? Well, here's a little lap quilt I made for Himself, who gets cold. It's a silly cold -- he wants to sit around in light cotton clothing in January. I want to dress like it's January, and am actually doing stuff around the house (plus I have some extra natural insulation he doesn't have), and see no reason why I should be in a summer sundress and sweating to keep him comfortable sitting still in summer clothes in the winter ... so I refuse to turn the heat above 60, and make him put on blankets if he refuses to wear socks and sweaters!
Bizarrely, blogger seems to have rotated my picture ... but, as you can see, the back is poinsettias, with gold diamond-shaped quilting, and the front is santa toile (so funny!) with shaped quilting around each vignette. My first complete quilt! I tried to piece things when little (my mother's an accomplished quilter, and actually had to sew the bias tape around the edge here after I gave up, so I of course wanted to do what she was doing), but never actually completed one before. It was modeled after Erin's three and a half hour quilt, but it took me a bit longer ... lack of experience, I guess. And that's not even counting the binding. But, I'm pleased! And so was he.

Distractions

Over at Not Quite Vintage, Colleen mentions that she can't concentrate when real people are talking, but can when the TV is on. (Along with cute quilt block patterns.)

When I was writing my thesis, I needed "company," as I was holed up for weeks, but real people were too distracting. I would put the TV on (no cable, but in Boston, so two PBS stations) nonstop. When it got too interesting / my deadline got closer, I switched to only the more boring PBS documentaries (steamboats, anyone?). Then finally to a rotating constant run of High Society and The Philadelphia Story, over and over (it was a year before I could watch them again!), as that provided me with "company" but didn't draw my attention in the least. Only in the last two days was everything turned off (and my dear roommates plied me with bananas and buttered toast).

What distracts you?