It’s the middle of the day, and both my parents and my brother are asleep after going to the gurdwara. My expectations of a holiday are gone from being hectic sightseeing to being lazy and slow paced. I can see the idea of being in “holiday mode” when coming back to work. It’ll be hard to adjust.
Having said that, I’ve been getting up earlier in the morning than I ever did when going to work, 7 – 8 am being the latest. I’m also shaving more regularly. Shaving doesn’t take that long if I do it every other day, but my beard grows so fast that if I miss a day, it takes half an hour to shave. This is why people see me with a beard at work. Half an hour in the morning isn’t a lot when I’m on holidays, so I’ve been shaving more often, which means it doesn’t take half an hour to shave. Hopefully this means I’m making a good impression on my relos.
All of whom have beards
I get up early here in part because the weather is freaking fantastic. It’s never too warm or too cold, and it hasn’t rained whilst we’ve been here. The wind is also perfectly still (in part, this is why the smog stays for so long, because the wind doesn’t carry it away). I used to wonder about all the fans in India, where Australia doesn’t really have any. Now I know – you need the fans to move the air around.
In Australia, in summer it’s so damn hot that I get no sleep until it cools down a bit, which is right in the morning. This means I wake up later. In winter, it’s so cold that when you’re supposed to get up, you don’t want to get out of bed and freeze your balls off.
The fact that I don’t have to go to work might also work in my favour when I’m on holidays.
Everywhere I go, I realise more and more that all my relatives are awesome. Attractive and smart, the nicest thing is that they’re all that and they remind me of… well… me! It just goes to show that my loserishness isn’t due to genetics, it’s just me that’s at fault.
In other news, if I was a girl, I’d be totally hottt! One of my cousins looks like a girl version of my brother.
I saw some old photos of myself and my parents when they were kids. It’s a strange emotion, because in Australia we have just us 4, and here my parents are showing off all their uni friends and where they studied when they were kids. My baby photos are… interesting. There’s a photo of my mum’s family, and you can tell where I get my eyes from. This might sound strange, but I can see myself in them, so it feels like I’m going to grow old and die. It’s not an entirely bad feeling.
What makes it bad is that all the relatives in my age group are getting married. Not an excellent benchmark to set for myself. Also, as close as I feel to them, there’s this unsettling thought that I don’t quite fit here either. Maybe that’s just normal. My brother is a hero wherever he goes.
I am in a special kind of hell when it comes to food. Before I left, I packed only tight fitting pants so that I wouldn’t eat too much. However, every meal here has been special for one reason or another, and I’ve gotten into the habit of finishing what’s on the plate. I’ll eat so much of my meal that I’ll go over into my ice cream stomach. Dinnertime arrives before I’ve finished digesting, so I’ll go into my second ice cream stomach.
Then they serve ice cream.
I’m writing this after the fact, so my memory may not be so good here. We arrived in Jamshedpur on the 30th, and as I write this we’re going back to Chandigarh. I hate the train system and the dodgy people who run it. Along with bad bookings, bribes, lies, hilariously late trains (over an hour at times), slow going, and bad hygeine, the fact that it soaks up so much time is the killer. We’ve spent perhaps 4 days of our trip so far on trains and in taxis.
One of the things you notice as you train through the country is that there’s a lot of arable land which is farmed. There are villages and cane and wheat fields all through the country. The villages still have houses made of straw. Visibility in these areas is good. The whole village probably smells like gober.
On the way up to Jamshedpur, we were continually fed. On the way back, we have to buy our own food in 2nd class. I’m sort of glad, because my habit of cleaning the plate means I ate way too much on the way over. I’m even more glad we don’t get fed a lot because in second class, the toilets are completely unmaintained. No TP, and the seat is broken. I’ll have to hold it for 30 odd hours.
Jamshedpur has a nicer city design than Chandigarh. It has fewer “city features” than Chandigarh, but the features which are there seem complete. Sidewalks have grass on them as opposed to wasted concrete and bits of the old sidewalk. The nicest thing about Jamshedpur is the fact that it has hills, and the city feels less like a grid city, although decent city planning is still not all there. This makes it seem a bit like Sydney, but with more smog and crappier standards. The house we’ll be living in at Jamshedpur is larger and better maintained than the one in Chandigarh, complete with a nice large garden and better watered house.
The relos here are from my mother’s side, and they’re pretty awesome as well. Each relative we go to meet we start off all “oh do we have to meet them?” and then we go and meet them and have a great time. My mum’s sister looks a lot like my mum, and shares some of her habits as well. She pretty much treated us as her own sons. She’s married to a doctor and has two sons who are in various stages of studying medicine.
Conversations aren’t quite the same as on my father’s side, where a university lecturer who teaches medicine (ish) used anal sphincter multiple times in conversation, while we were eating, but the chatter is still pretty good. We also have relatives who are of a similar age to me and my brother. They also seem a bit more “modern day” than my father’s side, who’s kids seem more traditional.
Comments
Leave a response