Chennai Chicken Center

Yesterday it was an almost cold 70 degrees and I was in the mood for white chicken chili. I've been able to find frozen, packaged chicken breasts a couple of times, but the grocery store by our house doesn't always have them in stock and yesterday they were out. Faced with a half hour car ride to the grocery store that always has chicken in stock I mustered my courage and headed down the street to a place that I'd only seen through a thick cloud of flies: the Chennai Chicken Center.
Even though the chicken center is just steps away from our house, I never knew what went on there. To really see this place you have to get right up in front of it. From there you can peer over the plywood barrier seperating the store from the street and see a man holding a rusty blade, a couple of buckets and ten or so chickens, clucking around in the back.
I would have turned around, made a bean chili instead, but our driver, determined to be helpful, was already placing an order. I told him I wanted white meat and he just gave me a quizzical look. "You have a knife?" he asked.
"Here?"
"At home."
I could only just reply with a little head bobble because my mind was racing, "A knife? What the hell?"
My worst fears were put to rest when the man behind the plywood pulled an already dead chicken from a big bucket on the floor.
Again the driver turned to me, "One kilo, 100 rupees. Ok?"
I wish I could say that I handled myself with complete composure, but really I just stood there, mouth hanging open, eyes wide, "Sure, yes. Ok."
A few strokes of the knife later I had my chicken, stuffed into a tiny plastic sack. I held it out in front of me a ways and took the ten or so steps back to the house. Once inside I checked the recipe, which called for 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cooked and cubed.
Hmmm, how about a chicken that's been pulled from a bucket and hacked to pieces with a rusty blade?
My rationale against all the illness and disease I was up against was threefold:
1. I can't imagine conditions are any better in the slaughterhouse where the frozen breasts come from
2. I've already come this far
and
3. I want chili
So in to the frying pan it went, but just to be safe, I cooked the shit out of that thing.

Goa

Our first year teaching abroad we got some good advice from an unlikely source. Our principal, whom I affectionately call PP Fartos, told us that the best way to save money is to travel in-country the first year and then branch out after that. We followed his advice in Colombia, which not only saved us a little money, but also helped us learn a lot about our host country. When we found out we were to have a week off in October it wasn't hard to decide on an Indian destination, Goa's beaches were first on our list.
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to stay in Baga beach in north Goa, but almost as soon as we got there I realized just how not good of an idea it was. Baga beach is gross. It's packed with people and is so loud. Brad and I tried to make the most of it, but my bathing suit was the cause of a lot of unwanted attention and swimming in the ocean meant cramming in between two flags that marked the designated swimming area with hundreds of Indian tourists. After one day in Baga beach I told Brad that the place got its name because it makes you pull your hair and yell, "Bah! Gah! Get me out of here!" like some Indian Ebeneezer Scrooge. I was depressed, thinking we'd have to spend a whole week there, but we soon discovered that the Goa of our imagination: quiet beaches, cold beers, and other bikini-clad sunbathers, existed just a few minutes north in Anjuna.
We made two great discoveries in Anjuna, the hotel Laguna Anjuna and the place where we spent most of the rest of our vacation, the Shore Bar. Spending almost an entire week in a bar might sound to you like a problem, not a vacation, but it was more than a bar, really. It was an open air hangout/restaurant with steps going straight down to the beach. They had great food, the best I've had in India, good music and a huge wine list. Needless to say, once we found the place and knowing the alternative, we thought it best to just stay put.
We strayed from the beach a few times to take scooter rides around the countryside and go shopping in the famous Wednesday market. And one time we went to Curly's, a little ways up the beach from the Shore Bar, but that place was a little too seedy for our taste.
I think that we may not be able to follow PP's advice for a whole year. Traveling in India can be kind of a headache. But even with the rough start, it was an altogether excellent vacation.
Shore Bar









Scootering







Shopping

grrrr

I know I've been a bad blogger, but it really can't be helped. We haven't had internet at home since we got back from Goa. Brad and I have both been sending emails to the apartments manager asking him to help us fix the problem, but yesterday he wrote me an email saying that when he checked on Friday the internet was "working perfect". So he must think that writing emails about a fake internet problem is just my idea of a hilarious game.
Anyway, we hope it will be fixed soon.

back

We're back from the beach. We were relieved to find our house and car in good condition, I was convinced that we would be ransacked and robbed, but everything's intact. I am going to to great big Goa post as soon as I can but the internet at home is fussy and midterm grades are due Wednesday, so I might not get my act together until the end of the week.
In the meantime here's a happy thought: Thanksgiving is just one month away and you know what that means....Christmas is right around the corner!!!
Oh, AND, we taped the Iowa game and watched it yesterday. Even in far away India it feels good to be a Hawkeye!

Happy Diwali!

Today is Diwali, which as far as I can tell is the celebration of light, or the celebration of good over evil, and is the Hindu equivalent to Christmas. As you know, I don't know much about anything here, but it didn't take me long to figure out the Diwali is celebrated with pyrotechnics. After going to sleep to the sound of firecrackers last night I awoke to the same sound this morning sometime around 6. But I'm not complaining because it was great to sit on the roof last night and watch the sky light up in every direction. We even lit up a few rockets of our own.
So happy Diwali to you! We're off to the beach, I'll see you in a week.

call me if you ever need a soccer coach, travel agent, or a good book

I'm now the assistant coach for the girl's middle school soccer team. I made sure the person in charge of putting me in this position knew that I know next to nothing about soccer. But she didn't seem to mind. And for 500 bucks and a trip to Sri Lanka, I'd do just about anything, plus it's a really fun group of girls.
Soccer practice ended with a scrimmage and then a shootout that finally ended in a draw so, I got home late. After handing me 50 rupees to pay the rickshaw driver Brad told me he had bad news: our flight to Goa this Saturday has been canceled. I was pretty upset about this because I've had the trip planned for over a month and was feeling ready to just go on it. The people on the phone from the airline were, not surprisingly, extremely unhelpful but they were able to convey the information that there were only 9 seats on the next day's flight. We also knew of at least 7 other people on our same flight, so we pretended we were on the Amazing Race and got really stressed out. I think if I actually did get on that show, I'd probably be one of the villains. The real stress was that we didn't want to wait another day to leave, what's worse than waiting around to go on vacation? So, we looked around and got an outgoing flight on the same day from a different airline.
Our new itinerary isn't great, we have an almost four hour layover in Bangalore instead of the direct flight that we were going to be on. But I figure while we have 4 hours we might as well step out and see the city.
So, we are going to Goa and we hope to be there around 5 pm on Saturday. I'm not packing much for the beach, which is good because my book is going to take up a good chunk of my suitcase. Right now I'm reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, a book I would never attempt to read if I didn't care a lot about learning more about India. You might think that learning about India wouldn't be hard to do since I'm living here! But it seems like the only thing I ever learn is that I don't know anything.
A Suitable Boy is the third Indian book I've read in my knowledge quest. The first was Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors (an Iowan!) which was recommended to me by my brother's first grade teacher, via my mom. It gave a really nice, but mostly fictional history of the Taj Mahal, which I can't wait to see! Anyway, I think this is turning into a book blog, so my recommendation is that you go immediately to your library and read it.
The second book I read was White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Still fiction, this was, as far as I can tell, a more realistic depiction of life in India and by that I mean that it managed to be both depressing and uplifting. So, check this one out too.
I absolutely do not recommend reading A Suitable Boy. I just wikipediaed it and found out it's one of the longest English-language novels ever written. Yeesh. Maybe I'll bring a backup for the beach.
Anyway, congratulations to you if you got through one of the longest blog posts ever written. I'll write again once we get back from Goa!

Where's Waldo?