India's Final Word

I should have known that India wouldn't let me go without a fight.  Like, "Hold on there a minute, Missy.  Just where do you think yer going?" 

This story starts on Wednesday.

I left a note for our maid asking her to please take anything she wanted from the refrigerator, and throw away the rest.  Everything, that is, except the top shelf.  The top shelf held the spices and teas that we brought back from our visit to Istanbul's spice bazaar.  Vacuum sealed spices and teas, that becomes important later.

So, when we get home, the refrigerator is full, and everything on the top shelf is gone.

Of course!  What did I expect.

So I call Subbu, the maid, "Subbu, please bring back the spices.  Those you were supposed to be leaving, the rest taking (this is how Indians talk)."

Subbu says, "Madam, I threw them away."

"Threw them away?!  NOOOOOOO!  Where?!"

"Near the chicken center, madam."  She really did say that, I'm not just trying to embellish this story to emphasize the full-circleness of this particular Indian experience.

Then, I bolt out the door.  Straight to the dumpster, which is covered in flies, surrounded by the new batch of street-puppies, and dripping a Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle-like ooze, a greenish colored, bubbling and steaming ooze.

Now, I'm going to tell you the rest of this story, but you can't read any further unless you promise not to hold this against us.  I mean, if we invite you over to dinner, you can't use this story as an excuse not to come.  OK?  Deal.  Because these are nice spices and teas, that's why I went through the effort.  You'll see, you're gonna love their taste.

Our garbage bags are right on top.  The first is full of our normal garbage, the second has our (remember: vacuum sealed!) spices and teas.  The puppies are licking me and trying to crawl up my leg, the ooze is seeping over my sandal, I reach in, grab the bag, and run it to the sink. 

You will have peace of mind knowing that not a single drop of water got in those bags.  They were sealed up tight.  They're OK.  BUT, I'm not.  I think something might have seeped up from the ooze, into my foot, then my guts from there.  Because since that day I've been plagued with violent and endless diarrhea.  Which is fitting, really.  This blog should basically be renamed, The Diarrhea Blog, since I've had almost nothing but for the last four years.

So, yes, a little memory of India will live on in my colon, for who knows how long.  At least, I'm sure it will last the 36 hours of travel it takes to get home.  From there, maybe Iowa will cure me.

At any rate, India can't hold on forever.  In just 8 short hours we head to the airport, and no amount of diarrhea could keep me off that plane.  

packed

How to pack up your house:
1. Call the packers to arrange a time for them to come
2. Open the door
3. Take a nap

Getting our house packed was the easiest thing ever, for me.  For the packers, it was a little more strenuous, it took them nearly seven hours to wrap, pack, arrange and haul our 26 boxes out of the house and into a moving van. 

What's really incredible to me is that we came here with six suitcases!  I honestly don't know how we managed to accumulate so much stuff.  Especially since we've already sold/given away a lot. 

We'll see our things again in six to eight weeks, when the packers arrive in Cedar Falls to unpack everything while, probably, I'll take another nap.  Pretty sweet arrangement, huh?

In the meantime, our house is EMPTY!  But we're not spending much time there.  We're spending our last days (could I say hours now?) eating our favorite Indian dishes and seeing friends.  Won't be long now till we're on the plane, in the air, our big adventure over, for now. 

results

Well, the results are in, and it looks like you've chosen to keep reading this thing.  Most of you that is.
One person voted for me to knock it off, and I just want to know WHO?! Who exactly, is making you read this blog?  YOU HAVE RIGHTS!  You don't have to read this.  Tell that person to knock it off, "Hey!  Stop making me read this blog. I hate it."  That's what you should do.

Another three of you voted to stop reading until I have a baby, and I suspect that all three of those people are my mother-in-law.  And I just want to say, for the record, that sometimes mother-in-law is an ugly word, but not for me.  My mother-in-law is a wonderful, beautiful person, who will have her baby wish in about two years time(ish).

I think until then you can look to this blog as the place where Martha Stewart's replacement got her start.  Recently, I've become obsessed with knitting and crocheting, so you might hear a lot about that.  So far I've crocheted cows for the middle school dance (a night at the O'Cows, some crazy pun on India and the Oscars) and a bee-hat for the winner of the 8th grade spelling bee.

Also, you might hear some things about cooking.  Or at least you should, because I now have an obligation to my husband to cook.  A lot.  One night, you see, Brad woke up from a deep sleep.  He could sense that I was up to something, call it husbandly instinct.  When he walked into the living room he found me there, in front of the blue glow of the computer, filling my Amazon shopping cart.  Mixer, knives, pots, pans, aprons, measuring cups, spoons, blenders, crockpots, cookbooks....
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" he thundered.  "How much did you just spend?"
But you know, I've been living the life of a monk these last four years.  We own almost nothing.  Right now, we don't even have a can opener.  And I guess I just went a little nuts, I snapped.
So, yeah, I'll be cooking, putting that stuff to good use.  That's my solemn promise.

But right now, and for the next two weeks, we're gonna be all about India.  Incredible India. I think I might actually miss it. 

Old Mother Hubbard

went to her cupboard,
and found only cockroaches
and rat shit.

That's the Indian version of that nursery rhyme, at least in our house anyway.  We're in the process of selling off/ giving away the things we're not taking with us, leaving us with...not much.

Anyway, speaking of the end of things, I thought we'd try something new.  A poll!  What should become of the blog?  Only you can decide.  You've got six days to do it.  

Poll to the right =====>

Athens

If you ever have to choose between going to Athens and going to Istanbul, choose Istanbul.  No contest.  Athens is expensive and a little gritty, also FULL of other tourists.  And the cops there wear the craziest, scariest looking uniforms I've ever seen.

I guess you can probably tell I wasn't entirely impressed with Athens, but it didn't really matter since we were only there a few hours.  Just long enough to take the subway from the airport to the city center, climb up to the Acropolis, have a snack and head back.

The snack was the highlight really, a delicious pork gyro, full of tzatziki and fatty goodness.  With a decanter of house white wine.  Yes, that was wonderful.  The acropolis was pretty cool too.

amazing race

 I’m in a weird place right now, mentally.  I remember how excited (and really, really worried and nervous) we were to come to India.  And now, with a month left (less!) in India, which will most likely be my last time ever in this country (INDIA=I’ll Never Do It Again), I’m torn between enjoying our last days here and just waiting for it to all be over, finally. 

Last Friday was a particularly dreadful day.  It was SO unbearably hot, I hid in my darkened classroom, counting and calculating the days and hours left before June 11th.  Once we got home from school, things were worse.  The electricity was off, there were ants everywhere and I was done, just done.   And then I thought what the hell? What’s wrong with me?  People plan and save for years for a trip to India, and here we are wasting it!  So we hopped in the car and headed down to Pondicherry for some Indian enjoyment.   Good shopping, good food and pink sunsets behind palm trees were just enough to make me love this place again.  And should sustain me in a blissful India haze for at least another week.  We’ll see. 

Last night was a test, though.   The night before, I was lying in bed and noticed that there was an unusual amount of ants crawling on me.  One or two ants at any given time on your arm, leg, or in your ear, is normal in our house.  But the other night I looked at my arm and saw five of them.  I followed their trail to underneath my pillow, which I lifted and found, to my horror, hundreds of ants, right there in the bed.  I started flailing wildly, crushing ants and roaring.  Brad came in and helped, but there were just too many, and they just kept coming.  That night, we slept in the other bed. 

So, yesterday the school came to spray, and it smelled toxic and horrible, but what was worse was to see the hundreds of dead bugs piled all over the house.  Ants, cockroaches, baby cockroaches, horrible, horrible, horrible. 

Anyway, I’ve said all this to say that in the battle between enjoying our time left and yearning for home, I’m still right in the middle.  Torn.  Torn like a cockroach corpse, dissected by ants, taken apart piece by piece, and marched off, back to the nest.

That’s enough of that, let’s go back to Greece.  

At our wedding my dad gave a super great toast, and said, among other nice things that our lives are like an episode of The Amazing Race, and in fact our trip to Rhodes was much like that: full or roadblocks and untimely messages, helpful locals and gloriously, a final pit stop.

To begin with there was the issue of the locked luggage, the first of our roadblocks.  As you know, we conquered that one, but not without enormous effort and stress.  The ferry ride was uneventful, windy, but nice.  We stopped to let people off at another island that looked really small and cute, but we had our mission: Rhodes.

While in Kos we booked an apartment using VRBO, a vacation-rental site we’ve used with great success many times.  In Kos, though, we only had intermittent internet service (there wasn’t any internet at the crazy people’s house).  With VRBO the owner sends directions and contacts after booking is complete, but we had no easy way of checking our email to find those directions, so we figured, well, let’s just head to Rhodes and see if anyone is waiting for us at the ferry.

There wasn’t. 

No problem, we thought, we’ll find internet here.  We easily found the town-center (an obscene tourist trap), but full of friendly waiters who wanted us to come in!  Sit down! Have a drink, please!  We asked around and found a place with internet, up a steep flight of stairs and on a tiny balcony.  There we logged in and saw this message:

Hello,


OK, please call +22410 xxxx talk to Galatia,


take a taxi to Napoli in Ixia tel. 22410 xxxx


email or call me at 001340 718 xxxx


best


Hera

What the hell kind of message is that?  Anyway, we chose the second option.  Taxi to Napoli in Ixia, wherever that was.  The friendly waiter was a little helpful, but not so much.  We asked, “Do you know Ixia?”

“Ixia! Yes! That is near my house!”

The taxi driver was more helpful, took us right to Ixia, a town! and to the door of Napoli, a restaurant!  We were on track.

We pulled our suitcases through the door, then stood at the entrance wondering what would be next.  A small, round man greeted us, asked how he could help.

“We rented an apartment online.  We were told to come here?”

“Yes! Yes!”  he cried, throwing up his arms and ushering us in.  “I am Nicholas!  I am the one you’re looking for!”

And so, we made it. 

After all that we were rewarded because Napoli turned out to be a pizza restaurant, a pretty good one.

One pizza later, we were taken to our apartment, a tiny one-room place that was our home for four days.  Four days of swimming, walking, eating, drinking, just generally getting fat and lazy.

I'm tired of all this writing.  Here are some pictures:

Lindos beach

I went swimming even though it was so, so cold.  I just couldn't resist this water!

One day we went wine tasting

After eating this meal, we were sure we would have heart attacks.  

Next, back to Istanbul, via Athens.  And probably some more whining about the heat.

Kos, Greece

At the risk of sounding like I have bad attitude, I am just going to say that I'm a little fed up with our current situation.  I feel like I'm living in a bowl of soup.  The air is hot, the water is hot, my skin is hot, everything is just HOT.  and gross.  Yeck.

But one thing I do love about living here is the access to Indian newspapers.  Those things are a hoot.  Today's paper highlighted the scandal of chemically-ripened mangoes, but didn't really give anyone any tips about how to avoid them.  Apparently these chemical-mangoes are all over the place.  Below that there was an article about a woman who served her husband lunch, and then before eating his lunch, the husband went off to do something, and while he was gone a dog wandered up and ate his lunch.  So he came back to see his lunch mostly eaten and got upset with his wife for not minding his lunch.  This next part isn't funny, but anyway, she swallowed a rubber bullet in protest and then later died.

It's a good thing that I still have our trip to blog about because otherwise we've been up to not much, reading newspapers and sweating.  That's just about sums up my days.

So for now, let's go back to Greece:

To get to Cappadocia we flew from Bodrum to Ankara, then rented a car and drove to Goreme.  Then, we did everything in reverse to get back to Bodrum.  We stayed the night there in another crappy hotel, but it didn't much matter since we had an early boat to Kos the next morning.

The boat ride was quick and we were super excited to get our first taste of Greece.  Right when we got off the boat there was a man asking us if we needed a room, saying he had one available at his house.  Now, I know that this sounds creepy, but we've stayed in peoples' houses before on vacations, usually with great success.  At least, it's always cheap.  The idea behind these arrangements is that people who own a large house rent out the rooms they don't use for extra money.  Usually, the rooms are decent and sometimes awesome.  Once in Croatia my friend Kelly and I stayed in the upper level of a house where we each had our own bedroom and bathroom, and shared a kitchen and a huge balcony overlooking the ocean.  All for 9 dollars a night.

So, with past luck in mind, and the fact that we would only be in Kos for one night, we took the room.  It will not be cataloged in home-stay successes, but will always be remembered for the great adventure it provided.  More on that later.   

The first thing we did in Kos was eat.  Actually, the first thing we did was I went shopping and Brad got progressively grumpier, but as soon as I stepped off the boat I felt like a shabby mess among the highly fashionable Greeks, so I bought a dress to feel better.  Then we ate.  Oh, boy did we ever.  I had some ideas about how good Greek food would be, but when the waiter asked, "We have fried cheese, would you like to try that?"  I knew I was going to be in trouble.  Greek food is delicious!  The meat!  The cheese!  The yogurt!  Heavenly.  But not so good for the waistline.

Doesn't that look just like you think a Greek restaurant ought to look?

Fried cheese on the right, Greek salad on the left

 We spent the rest of the day wandering around town, sitting by the water, and just generally relaxing.  One hilarious thing about our time in Greece is that everyone there thought we were German.  We couldn't convince them otherwise.  Once, a man asked where we were from and we replied, "The US."
"Oh, so you're Germans living in the US?"
"No, we're Americans."
"Not German?"
"No."
But he still looked skeptical, we could tell he really didn't believe us.  So, we just kind of went along with it, even when people spoke German to me, I tried to reply with the ten or so German words I know.  And it still makes me laugh to think how afterward those people probably thought, "That German lady doesn't speak German very well."

A highlight of our time in Kos was the town-square, where we sat over iced coffees like the rest of the Greeks and watched the happenings.  We hit the very beginning of Greek-island tourist season, so in quite a few places we were the only tourists around.  It gave us the opportunity to catch real-life in action, which on this particular day was a chance to see the town bully bully people and hit on women.  We watched him do that for about an hour, but then my coffee ran out and we didn't think we could afford another round so we had to call it quits.  Two things: 1. the euro is insanely expensive and 2. Greeks can sit over one cup of coffee for a really long time.  We were out-lasted by everyone around us.

Town Square

Coffees and a shot of the bully, bullying someone

At this point I already have a bit of a belly, things only got worse from there

 That night we did some more town-square gawking, this time over wine.  The next day our boat to Rhodes didn't leave until 4pm, so we had the whole afternoon to explore.  To enhance exploring we rented a scooter and went about half-way around the island and into the interior.  It was fun.

scooterers

And now, the adventure, featuring BRAD, channeling the great Greek hero: the messenger of the Battle of Marathon.

Before we left to scoot the island we asked our lady house/hotel owner if we could keep our bags in the locked part of their house and she agreed to keep them safe inside for us.  After returning from our trip, with just about an hour to collect our things and walk down to the marina, we found the house locked up tight, and not a family member in sight.  She had set our suitcases out, but left Brad's backpack with the camera and laptop locked inside.  At first, we didn't panic, but calmly walked around the neighborhood asking people if they had a phone number or knew the whereabouts of the owners.  It was then that we discovered for certain the thing we suspected all along: our house/hotel owners were crazy social outcasts.  No one anywhere had anything to do with them.  One semi-helpful lady suggested that they might be at the marina, looking to rent another room.  And that's when Brad became a hero.  He took off like a shot, sprinting all the way down to the water.  I decided to spend the time he was away looking for a way into the house and acting like a maniac.  I climbed over a wall, rattled doors and windows, looked under every object in sight for a key and eventually started scoping the area for tools we could use to bust down the door.  (If you're wondering about the urgency, the boat tickets were 45 euro a piece and we didn't think they were refundable, though maybe they were.  I don't know, we were just in a state.)

Then...
Brad returned!  Victoriously waving a key!  Or at least that's what I was hoping for.  But really Brad just jogged up, looking worried and really sweaty.  He didn't find the owners at the marina.  The clock was ticking, we had less than 15 minutes before the boat left, and Brad and I were looking at each other, knowing we were thinking the same thing...BUST DOWN THE DOOR!  But then Brad leaned against a ground-floor window, and it opened.

Can I just say that all this happened in broad daylight and in full view of the entire neighborhood and that not one single person tried to stop us ever.  Not even when Brad climbed through the window and emerged with the bag.  Not even when we grabbed the other bags and took off running down the street.  I don't know what that means about that neighborhood, but I do know that we were really glad we didn't break down the door.  Because not five minutes after we showed up at the ferry stop (which was late, by the way) the owner of the house/hotel and her daughter came whizzing up on a motorcycle to ask us how we managed to get in the house.

A brief conversation cleared the air, the owners were just as apologetic for locking up our bags as we were for breaking into their house.  As the daughter started the engine to drive away she said, "Don't forget us!"

Oh, we won't.

And with that we stepped on the boat, headed to the island of Rhodes.