Lana returns...

Well, we're back from seeing the wonderful wizard of Oz and I'm pleased to report India hasn’t changed while we were away*. It’s still dodgy. The power’s been on the blink today. On and off all day, which is unusual, because we normally only have one outage a day. And we've got one tap in our kitchen with an intermittent water supply. There are three taps in our kitchen. If we can’t get water out of one of them but the others still have water, you’d think it was no big deal. But the only tap that has had interrupted water since we got home is the only tap that is the right shape to feed our washing machine. Unsurprisingly, I’ve wanted to do washing since coming back from holiday. Unsurprising, because I need to wash most days normally. My machine is a front loader, so once there’s some water in it, the door locks so I’m really rather committed to the wash. When I say committed, I don't mean like as in a mental asylum, well, not yet anyway...

Thursday the machine got halfway through the cycle before the water turned off, and the clothes sat for five hours before I got bored waiting for the water to come back on, turned the machine to a spin cycle and hung them out. Friday I got up at 8.30 and checked we had water coming out of that tap before loading the machine. In the time it took to get the clothes in, the water turned off and it took until 6pm before it came back and I started the washing. Just to confuse me, on Saturday the water ran perfectly, so I thought everything had gone back to normal. I should have done LOTS of washing on Saturday, because Sunday morning I checked we had water, filled the machine, started it and it got a whole two minutes into the cycle before the water ran out. At 8pm I gave up and opened the machine door, to air my slightly soggy, not clean clothes. Got up early this morning, checked the water was on and got 30 minutes into the 38 minute cycle before my water window disappeared. Decided these clothes were clean enough, so I turned to a spin cycle and hung them out. Who knows whether we'll have water tomorrow...I know I could find something to wash!

* because if it had changed and gone all predictable on me I'd have nothing to write about!

update

Hi not from India but the Perth Hills. I know I'm not in India because it's not blistering hot, and the water and power supplies have been constant

:-) . Upon opening the newspaper at sparrows fart last Tuesday morning we discovered why we had no water. A major pipe had burst in Vasant Kunj, and most of South Delhi had been without water for two days. We must have more water storage tanks on the roof than we thought, or all the rest of the building must have been away on holiday for our water to have lasted as long as it did. Anyway, that was restored midway through last Tuesday and Rod was free to wash again. Phew...

The landlord turned up later that day with an electrician to sort out the electricity supply. Rod had used his multimeter to determine one of the feeds coming into the fuse box was dead. To do the same thing, the electrician used a lightbulb with two (bare) wires attached. We had no lightbulb moment - there was no flicker at all, so the electrician, the landlord and Rod trooped down to the building's fuse box around the back. One of the fuses feeding our floor had died. This wasn't one of those lovely, easy to fix, flick the switch back into the up position fuses. This was one of those old fashioned, wire ones. Being a typical Indian tradesman, the electrician had turned up with no tools. All he had was his lightbulb with two wires, so he had to use Rod's screwdriver and one of his wires to fix the fuse. But light, and AC were restored to the entire house, and Rod was able to reduce the "health and safety" nightmare D59 had become.

p.s. Passing through Indira Gandhi Airport was actually a breeze. The information boards didn't want to tell us the right information, feeling we'd like to check in at blocks G-H. We could have, possibly, but the check in staff at block D had our booking. They also weren't busy, probably because everyone was wandering down to the wrong set of desks!

AWOL

Lana in India will be a little quiet for a while. For at sparrows fart tomorrow (an incredibly specific time India is generally incapable of acknowledging), Thalia, Keir and I will fly to Singapore to begin our six week summer holiday, in Perth. The fact that it is wintertime in Perth is, as far as I'm concerned, an absolute bonus. For tonight I sit in my supposedly posh New Delhi suburb, with no water, and only half a house of electricity. The back half of the house has power, the front has none. And it's not a circuit that's tripped - that's the way it's going into the fuse box. Answers on the back of a postcard...which may or may not get stolen by the mail service. Rod has miraculously gerry-rigged a collection of extension cords and power boards, with UK and Indian plugs and a fair bit of insulating tape, from the back power point of the dining room, where there is electricity, and artistically draped them across the hallway into the front room, so I can type on this computer, we can recharge the enormous battery that powers the TV, DVD player, Satellite TV box, modem (life's essentials, obviously) and have a floor light. Unfortunately we can't gerry-rig power to the AC or the ceiling fans, so this post isn't going to be long... our bedroom, in the back of the house has electricity, AC and a TV/Satellite box on a small battery. Guess where I'm going? At least until the entire suburb loses power...

Time will tell tomorrow if Indira Gandhi Airport is capable of being ready for us at sparrows fart, even if that's the time printed on our e-ticket. Well, not literally...

I saw a sign...and then another one...

A lovely, new, modern supermarket has just opened near us in Saket. It stocks a range of gourmet imported goods and basic foodstuffs, so your bills aren't so high you need resuscitation afterward. But what really sets Le Marche apart from other shops near us is the refrigeration units are actually cold on the inside. Most of the ones in the shops near us no longer actually refrigerate. When you open the glass door to get your butter, for example, it's already at room temperature. Which might not be exactly what you wanted, especially when it isn't butter you were hoping to buy but frozen peas . Rod has a special name for these kind of refrigeration units. He calls them cupboards.

As I was being driven to the supermarket today I passed a couple of signs worth mentioning. The first was on the hoarding alongside the Metro (train) extension. It read: "A care full man is the best safety device". Me, I'm not sure a man with all the worries of the world on his shoulders is really the safest bloke on the building site, but that wasn't the sign that really tickled me. Across the back window of a car, where Indians often add their name, instead of Ram or Adi or Amit and Arushi (Think Kev and Tanya, or Wayne and Raeleen), someone had decided to put a little ditty. It read: "After the whiskey, Rohit is risky". I wonder if Rohit finds he gets stopped by the police more often these days? Maybe he should try adding a red flashing arrow to draw a little more attention to his bad habits...

Adjectively Speaking

Rod and I were watching a TV channel we don't often view last night, because it was showing the final of the Indian Premier League. The IPL is 20 overs a side, so even I, a decidedly non-cricket fan, find it fast, fun and really rather engaging. At the fall of wicket and at the end of every over, there's a commercial break. As the match reached its climax, and the wickets tumbled (Go Deccan Chargers! Adam Gilchrist - what a star!), we saw lots of commercials. But as we were viewing a channel we don't always see, at least the ads were different from some of those we see so often. One, in particular, grabbed our attention:

Lovely Professional University, Punjab. Transforming Education, Transforming India.

It took us a moment to catch on. They're not adjectives. They're nouns. And really, wouldn't you rather tell people you went to Scunthorpe Polytechnic, than Lovely Professional University?

Fixed!

My DSM is fixed! A little man, with limited English, came to my house yesterday and fixed my sewing machine. His English wasn't limited in the same way most Indians I meet have limited English. He understood the phrase "hook timing". Or at least he nodded sagely as he stuck his finger inside my sewing hook and rotated way too much of it. In fact the problem was the retaining finger had become loose, and wasn't "retaining" anything at all. It turns out it's almost as easy to adjust the retaining finger on a DSM as it is on a longarm, but only if you know how to take the entire base off your sewing machine first. I didn't know how to do this, and, having watched him, I'd lay money on he didn't either. But now I do. He overcharged me enormously by local standards, but I can't imagine I'd have got much servicing done for the equivalent of nine quid back in England. Especially as I didn't have to leave home...

Smoke

We're using the new i Google as a home page on our computer, where we can have lots of little useful applications at a glance before we go off to find the webpage of our desires- news headlines; a four day weather forecast in London, Perth and Delhi; the current time in Delhi, London and Ohio (don't ask me why Ohio, Rod set this up, I don't think we know anyone in Ohio...); a currency converter - lots of useful things.

Well the four day forecast for Delhi is really bothering me today. It's not just that it says the maximum will be 43, and the minimum will be 33 (109 and 91 in farenheit, respectively). That's wrong, obviously. 33 as a minimum temperature is just wrong. What's really, really bothering me is that the current weather conditions are described as smoke. I didn't know smoke was a weather condition. I thought it was a question, as in Smoke? - no thank you, it's a filthy habit or a local news item: building went up in smoke, or just a really good way to serve salmon.