Saturday, March 22, 2008



Happy Holi!

The Indians generally do not celebrate Eastern (except for the Christians, of whom many are converted people from the South and from lower castes...) but they found an alternative to the painting of eggs...they paint themselves!

Holi is the festival which marks the end of winter; on the night before Holi bonfires are lit and the pictures of the demon Holika are burnt to symbolise the victory of bad over evil. On Holi itself the streets are full of people throwing water and coloured powder (gulal) at each other....shocking pink seems to be the favourite, we noticed when coming back from a game of tennis. Our guard Harka had been caught off guard ;) and looked like a shocking pink eastern egg!
Holi is next to Diwali the most important Hindu festival. Now that we are living in the city, we have actually seen people roaming the streets with paint, and there is screaming everywhere... we escaped with some foam on the car (but we DID keep the windows closed, because once the paint gets into your hair you will look coloured for weeks!). My drycleaner told me they do good business after Holi...I believe them!

Monday, March 17, 2008




And in we go!
On this picture, the fridge is being towed inside the house, the Indian way...5 people on the roof pulling what seems to be fabric "ropes", 2 people inside the house pulling the fridge in and the other 10 standing in the street yelling instructions. Obviously, there was a dent in the side of the fridge... another thing we'll sell before we leave (we have decided to sell all our electrical equipment...whatever is left of it after 5 years powercuts and voltage-fluctuations anyway).
They have towed our very big bookshelve in like that as well, and the wine-fridge (yes...we have an official fridge for the wine only)...the rest was wiggled in via the stairways, which now of course will need repainting.

Somehow the movers, all 17 of them, managed to stuff everything in the house; the heap that was supposed to fit into the kitchen was larger than the kitchen itself...at a certain point I couldn't stop laughing when yet another box labelled "kitchen" was stacked onto the heap, and you could see them wondering how the hell I was going to stuff everything into that tiny kitchen! The kitchen is not so tiny after all (or I am a genius at stowing) because it DOES all fit quite neatly, but it was quite funny.

The cats seem to be allright now, although Vriendje has -literally- stayed in bed for a week, safely underneath the covers (bottom picture). We were joking that he was depressed and for all we know he was, but now he seems to feel fine and quite happy with watching the guard from behind the window. Olly has a harder time, he wants to go out. Every morning he greets us with his "ok, now show me the door"-miauw...poor thing. But no can do, for in India they hate cats and if they don't try to kill him they'll throw stones at him or scare him away...so he'll just have to wait until our roof-terrace has been made cat-proof.

Almost all boxes are unpacked now, most of our paintings are hanging and the washing machine is working, so life is almost normal. Not that it went like this without the typical Indian complications though. The washing machine, for one thing, turned out to be connected to the hot water pipe tapping into the same boiler as the kichen tap (so we couldn't simply turn the boiler off, as the technician suggested). T now has several baby-size socks... still, the house is in a much better shape than our old house was, despite the fact that it is probably older. Personally, I love the style..terazzo floors, real wood and a "greek" terrace. And what we love most is the absolute privacy! No one can look inside or onto the terrace so if we want to be left alone and see no-one, finally we can. Here in India, that is a must, for life is so demanding and intens that a place to rest and not be disturbed is vital.

We are not completely undisturbed though, as our neighbours are have their house redone and that means that there is a group of workers who knock down walls and make all other sorts of noise 12 hours per day, 7 days per week. T went over to complain and to tell them to not work on sunday please, and found out that the poor guys are actually LIVING in the house as well! They sleep on top of the bags of concrete, cook in between the chalck dust and drink (we think) from our watertank on the roof...their families are in Rajasthan and they have nothing else to do but work so that's what they are doing. Can't blame them really. So we have decided to give them some money and tell them to go drinking so at least we'll have an undisturbed easter sunday!

All in all moving to this house was a good decision. No more traffic jams, no more sleepless nights due to the noise of various weddings held around us, no more stealing personnel so no more having to lock everything away, no more airpollution from the airport (here, the dust is dry...in our last house it was sticky! We can only imagine how our lungs have suffered) and no more getting up at 5.30! No more swimming pool either, but we gladly gave up that one (it was leaking anyway).
Hopefully we will now have a little more time and energy to start seeing something of India!