But let's talk "old money"...the hotel that we stayed in, Chapslee, was bought in 1938 by Maharadja Raja Charanjit Singh of Kapurthala from an English Lady (Hermione M.), and it hasn't changed since. This means the wallpaper shows signs of wear and tear, but also that the rooms are filled with antiques (some of fitted with a paper that says "not for use") and the butlers still wear uniforms and white gloves. They serve you "bed-tea" in the morning, and in the afternoon you can have your tea where you want it: in the garden, in the morning room, or in the salon!
In the evening the giant antique table in the dining room is laid with the silver cutlery, and after your gin-tonic you (and the other guests) are served a lavish dinner, after which you have your coffee in the salon...then the lady of the house might join you for a chat and a coffee, and you talk about how India has changed and how rude and selfish everyone has become. They obviously have seen better -and more elegant- times.

In our bedroom there was a painting of all the princes of Rajasthan, and we found not only the Maharadja of Kapurthala (the grandfather of the present owner) but also what must have been the grandfather of our landlord in Delhi (they are also of royal descend). We also had a fireplace in the bedroom, but no airco and fan, which suggests that Shimla gets cold but never hot. We had old carpets, and a dressing room with an old drawer...and T is sure he heard squeeking of floors all night while the room above us was empty, which means the house may have a ghost as well (I never heard anything).

As we have understood by now, the Old Money has good education and a good and respectful upbringing; they regard their servants as part of the family and treat them well and they try to to good for society. The wife of the Maharadja of Kapurthala for example started a school for the middle and lower class in one of the adjacent buildings of the house; it is still run by the current lady of the house (and can be overheard in the morning when the students are drilled into line on the sound of drums), and it has grown so much that the tennis court and the croquest lawn are now the school's playfield. Mrs. Singh told us that even the streetvendor who sells his sweets on The Mall sends his kids to this school, which is fantastic. This is where India's future lies, education and eradication of corruption.

The glamour of the Old Money may have faded somewhat, like their wallpaper, but I'll prefer it any time to what it was replaced with: the rich, spoiled, arrogant youngsters that you can see in all the stylish shops and restaurants (and the Oberoi in Shimla, with their little spoiled kids) and who treat everybody like shit...clearly, money can't buy everything!

It was Ghandi's birthday and a long weekend, so T and I decided to go to Shimla, the summer capital of the Raj. They would pack up in march (packing EVERTHING, files and all) and move the entire government from Delhi and Kolkata to Shimla, where they would stay until october. Naturally, their families would follow, taking the little railway which was constructed in 1903.
Not surprisingly, Shimla (at least the old part of it) is predominantly British in style, with lovely old houses, small streets and little shops.

The center (called The Mall) seems to be build on a hilltop, stretching for about 7 km and ending on one side with the Viceregal Lodge which looks like a combination of Harry Potter's castle and an old cathedral. In Shimla's old center one can still find old english mansions that display the grandeur of old times...on the sides of the (very steep!) hill 4 story houses are scattered, having (according to the Lonely Planet) "a chaotic appearance of a temporarily arrested landslide of buildings cascading down the hills". Indeed, one does not want to imagine what will happen if an earthquake should occur...the houses are built with the thinnnest floors possible, on tiny concrete pillars, no cross connections at all...according to the lady of the House that we stayed in it will be the effect of giant domino: one house falling on top of the other, and so on...and no access for rescue parties as there is only one main road which undoubtly will be covered in debris...let's hope it doesn't happen.

Anyway, T and I had a lovely time. The people in Shimla are defenitely more relaxed than in Delhi, with the typical appearance of mountain-people....suntanned, weather-worn faces, lighter skincolour, many with the strange amber coloured eyes that one can see in the north. They wear sleeveless jackets made of sheepwool, and little round hats; winter is very cold and it shows, as all the houses have fireplaces (but no fans or airco's!). Shimla is a tourist destination for the Indians as well, and there were many of them, strolling about on the mall, snacking on sweets and letting their children ride horses or buy balloons. No beggars, relatively little dirt and apart from the honking not so much noise...and most of all, crisp clean fresh mountain air! What a treat!

We had a lavish lunch at the Cecil Oberoi hotel, The uptown hotel, with a view over the valley...and were amazed by some rich Indian parents who shamelessly let their kids dance ON the table...with personnel standing around helplessly as it is not their place to say anything. Apparantly these nouveau riche also wipe their shoes with the curtains in their rooms -they are paying for it after all- and extinguish cigarettes onto the carpets...?! Welcome to the new money in India!

Bombings in Delhi!

No, not inside this refill-station (and yes, this IS actually how someone has set up shop).
But it could have been....on september 13, 5 bombs went off on busy marketplaces and near a cinema. Three more bombs were found that didn't go off...all planted with the intention of causing "the maximum damage". They were hidden in garbage bins and trees. The "damage" was 40 killed, 100 wounded....

Another bomb went off two days ago, killing two people and wounding 10...this time, it seems more like a personal vendetta. This bomb was thrown into a shop by two men on a motercycle...and this is just Delhi, because bombs are found on trains, on garbageheaps, in taxis...everywhere in india blasts seem to be more and more commongood.

Not surprisingly the big bombings were organised by the Indian Muhajedeen, who have close links to Indian Islamic organisations and universities. The majority of the Muslims in India condemn the bombings, as does the government, but no-one seems to be able to stop it. I heard someone say on tv last night that airline companies are now planning to install anti-terrorist measures on commercial planes because of the increasing terrorism and risk of attacks on civilian targets; as he put it: "terrorism is here to stay and without these measurements we are lost".
Who said that in 2012 the world as we know it will come to an end? Will we last that long?

Life here in India is increasingly getting restless. The papers are full of murders, rapes, bombings, attacks, robberies and protests. It seems as if there is a primitive energy released, getting the worst out of people. The masses here (and unfortunately they are the uneducated masses who never learned to judge for themselves) are easy to arouse and there are many who use that for their own gain. This is a thing one does not change easily; T and I often say that the only way to change India is to ruthlessly fire everyone who is corrupt (especially governmental figures like ministers and policemen) and send every kid to school (and fine the parents if the keep their kid at home because begging or working makes more money than school does!).
But this is a thing one cannot say openly, although more and more higher educated Indians seem to agree.

There is nothing I can change about this except notice it and stay alert. The only thing I can do is hope that I, and my beloved ones, will not be in the right place at the wrong time...and choose a different path, should the situation arise.

The rains are over and the temperature is going down; soon, it will be nice to sit outside and enjoy fall before it gets cold again. It is hard to imagine for the people who have newly arrived (to still 34 ºC) that winter really can be cold, but there you are.

I have now taken to pimping my terrace...when we moved from our house in Pushpanjali I took plants with me (mostly from the vegetable garden) but they haven't survived the summer and the heat at the terrace, so finally I went and bought palmtrees, shrubs, and my favorite, a Frangipane (guaranteed to bloom within two weeks...but this being India, I think that is a bit optimistic).
I painted my weather-beaten wooden shoes (we ARE dutch...), the stands for the sunshades and a very ugly little sidetable in Algarve blue - a sunny happy blue that goes really well with the plants and the once-white of the walls.
Everything looks crisp again (the ugly sidetable is still ugly but at least in a happy blue)...I am starting to adhere to the Indian tradition of painting everything fresh just in time for Diwali!

Inside the house also walls need to be painted; we have had serious leakages due to the heavy rains, and the whole hallway, part of the study and the guest-bathroom look rundown with big fungus patches on the wall. According to the landlady it has never happened before and she therefor blames the Noisy Neighbours who have been knocking at walls ever since we moved here (and a year before that). Personally, I am wondering, because the quality of Indian construction leaves somewhat to be desired. Still, it will need to be fixed at some point. Then, next monsoon, we will probably start all over again. But that is then...

Now, as soon as the pain in my back from trying to lift too heavy plants and pots has gone, I can enjoy our sunny Algarvian terrace with the sound of a stone quarry in the background!

Just been to Thailand with Roos and Niek...boy, what a holiday!

We went for dinner on the evening we left with our friend Yvonne who unfortunately had to leave India...a kind of pre-vacation farewell. Then, on the way back, T stepped into a hole and ended up bloody and scratched...he was lucky not break his toe!!! And this was an hour before we had to leave for the airport!

But things got worse...in the plane, Niek got sick...some bug that he caught which made him throw up...in the plane...in the taxi to the hotel...in the hotel (well, it was more diarrea in the hotel)...and then Roos also started... in the top picture they are waiting in the lobby until the room is ready. Poor kids.

Niek was ill during our whole stay in Bangkok, running from table to toilet - still, he seems to have had a good time anyway as the hotel had lots of illegal DVD's that could be watched free of charge..quite a good deal and very amusing as most DVD's have been filmed illegally in the cinema, and subtitles have been deducted from what can be understood, which allows for very unusual translations!

Roos got better after a day and went sightseeing with me the first day. We did Wat Po, we did MBK and we wanted to do Wat Arun but needed to cross the river for that and nearly were ripped off at the ferry where the boatman wanted 300 bath for a return ticket to the other side (the ferry actually costs 3,5 bath for one way, so it is not hard to see why a return would cost a hundred times more). We had a good time anyway and managed to NOT get ripped off!

The second day Roos went sight-seeing with T, as I also caught Niek's bug and stayed in bed. Then,at the Grand Palace, T's wallet got stolen, with everything in it...credit cards, drivers licence and diplomatic identity card. One credit card was abused almost immediately; 20.000 Bath were withdrawn WITHOUT pin code! According to the Postbank this is not possible but there we are! (we have not written the last word about this!)

So the last evening in Bangkok T spent at the police station trying to find an english speaking police officer in order to file the case; I spent the evening in bed being sick and Roos and Niek spent it in front of the tv watching dvd's with funny translations....not quite what we had in mind for our final night in Bangkok!

But then on saturday we flew on to Krabi, where we were met by our good friend Marcus, and all changed for the better. Apart from the occasional shit-experiences (which we started sharing at breakfast) nothing desastrous happened and we went kayakking, elephant riding and snorkelling. Especially the latter was great; one day we rented a longtail boat which picked us up from the hotel and took us to Poda and Chicken islands, with their clear waters, big reefs and many tropical fish. Apart from a sunburn on our backs we came out fine from that and really really enjoyed the hours we drifted face down! In the evening we would hop on our rented scooters and drive to Marcus' restaurant to enjoy fish, fish, fish and for the kids, schnitzel...the only remaining incident was T getting caught in a tropical shower which ruined his shoes and his telephone...oh well. Somehow it was to be expected.

Thailand 2008...shit, fish and schitzel...what more could you want?

The advantage of having guests is that you go and do things you normally do not do...we went to the Nigamboth Ghat with our friend Peter, and as our new driver dropped us in a different spot than normally we had to walk through an unknown area. But what a discovery! The area itself was filthy, wet and lined with people sleeping on riksha's, but we also found little shops selling flower beads to honour the deceased (the Nigamboth ghat is where the Hindu's cremate their dead).

And what beautiful people can one find in such a little remote place! they all wanted us to take their pictures and then showed our camera's around to everyone (leaving us to wonder if that was the last we saw of our camera's, but luckily it was not).

Now that we have moved to a more livable house (although the neighbours are still extremely noisy) India is actually starting to become fun!

All good things must come to an end!

Now is a strange time in Delhi; apart from the fact that everybody (everybody!) seems to have left the city for their summer holidays, the people that are being transferred are packing up and leaving one by one... a lot of saying "auf wiedersehen" as many of the people leaving are the ones that welcomed us here, took us around and helped us adjust to India.
I will miss many of them very much...especially my friend Tanja who was the first to show me around, who has been my shoulder to cry on over all those personnel problems that we have had, who always knew all the good places and adresses and with whom I spent many shopping experiences (she is, like me, not a shop-until-you-drop-person).

In this picture she is showing me the secret stairways to the rooftop amidst the spice market, from where you can look over the city, the chaos below, the people drying rose leaves on the roofs and the spiceboys turning over...yes, what? We have tried to distinguish whatever they were turning but it could vary from beans to camel-dung....?!
Anyway...my future guests will thank her, because the stairs are hard to find and quite exciting to walk on...but what a lovely view! The "guru" in the other picture is Tanja's friend. He has a little shop, somewhere in the middle of the Stairs to Spiceheaven, and he likes to be photographed...and no, I don't think he actually is a guru, but who cares. He has this pair of glasses that look as if he saved them from the 70ies (probably did) and he wears traditional clothes, and sitting on the floor the way he does he might as well be a guru...Spiceguru in Spiceheaven.

I have decided that now that my friends are leaving I should get busy doing other things (as I said, I am not such a shopper) so I will be trying Yoga! After all, I AM in the land of yoga! Still, I am not sure if yoga is the thing for me, but I have been recommended a teacher who actually does private classes in your home, so I'll give it a try.

Unfortunately, in my home, some things have NOT changed....the noisy neighbours are STILL hammering the walls down (you would think there is nothing left to hammer by now, after they have been hammering non-stop for 4 months, but they seem quite capable of finding that last piece of wall still standing). I am waiting for the moment when I open my closet and stare into a face of a Rajasthani with a hammer!

And suddenly we are out of personnel!!!

Mr. Gill, our driver (here taking his shoes off after I dragged him on a walking tour...but unfortunately he was wearing new tight shoes...), has stopped working for us on april 30th. He will start a guesthouse because he, as he puts it, cannot leave his service with us to his son.

I have spent many hours with him talking about India and its problems, the things that bewilder me, the differences between India and the Netherlands, arranged marriages, bargaining, Hindoe customs and what have you...he taught me a lot about India and its customs, saved us from cheaters, helped us arrange the necessities of life (like getting a gasconnection, water delivered or broken electricity wires repaired) and pulled our leg at april 1st...we will miss him and we hope to stay in touch!

And then Bishnu, our cook, who came with us after we left the old house and moved back to the city...she also left, but not in the dignified way we said "auf wiedersehen" to mr. Gill. Unfortunately, Bishnu had to be removed from our house after we fired her because we caught her stealing. As it turns out, she had been taking money from my purse for quite a while, thinking I would not notice. Stupid of course if you are the only other person in the house.

Obviously I DID find out, and as she broke the one rule T and I have (don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal) it was bye bye Bishnu...except that she wouldn't go, once she found out I was serious, and clung weeping and pleading to the bannister of the stairs, kissing my feet and telling I was like a mother to her and could we please give her another chance, she would return all the money and never do it again....horrible. I felt guilty, I felt betrayed, I felt misused...because I liked her and I wanted her to have a chance at a good life, which she could have had, because she is a great cook and -if she doesn't do things like this- a wonderful cheerful person. Strange as it may sound, i will miss her too, even if I never want to see her again. I just hope that she learns the lesson and if ever she is given a chance again -and I hope that will happen- she will not screw it up like she did with us.

So here we are, no personnel, new house, fresh start.
T's contract will be prolonged with another three years and I really hope it will be a period of less stress and more fun...we are working on it! And for the meantime I self-cook, I self-clean, I self-drive...and I'm lovin' it!!!

And then T won the embassy's annual tennistournament!
So now we are stuck with this wonderful trophy, which obviously has a prominent place in our interior! It's a good conversation piece....people eye around our appartment and then carefully suggest that this thing is a little bit inconsistent when it comes to what seems to be our taste...thank god we get to keep it just one year! Our ambassador suggested that if you win the tournament for three years in a row, you MUST keep the trophy so I am now planning a mysterious mishap to T around the time of the tournament ;)

One morning, just after waking up but still in bed, I heard a thump in front of my bedroom window and when i opened it I saw...a monkey! Or actually, a bunch of monkeys sitting on the fence below eating whatever they managed to scavenge from our garbage bin, and a few of their young swinging from what seams to be the cable of the cabletv of our downstairs neighbours.

They actually behave like lttle kids playing, but my camara apparantly scared them because they started screaching when they saw me...and mommy (a big ugly mama with a very red ass) came checking what scared her kid! Mommy didn't like me for she bared her teath, and for a moment there I was scared whe would smash the window...she didn't, but had I given her a hammer she might have. The kid in the meantime, needless to say, continued swinging on the tv cable. No wonder our internet is out all the time.

The monkeys visit our roof almost every other day. I have been warned not to provoke the males as they will not be scared of me (being a female...that seems to be a particular Indian thing anyway). To be honest, looking at their red asses, red balls and scruffy furs, I feel no need whatsoever to provoke them or even notice them. Better to ignore them.
I have also been told that scaring them away will only result in broken pots, shit on the terrace and turned over garbage bins, neither of which I fancy. So the monkeys do their thing and I do mine and als long as they don't slam through my bedroomwindow that is that!

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!

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!

The move to the house with the 1000 doors!

It's final...we found an appartment in Malcha Marg, app. 3 minutes from the embassy, and the plan is that we will move in the first week of march! It doesn't really have 1000 doors (that's only T's perception) but is is a weird house with many (yes...) doors, windows, little rooms, corners, niches, hallways and stairs. But it also has a fireplace, lovely private roofterrace, tiny kitchen with a door that opens 2 ways (and a little window so you don't slam into someone's nose when you push it open) and a very good feel wich is after all the most important thing!

For the cats it will be difficult that they cannot go outdoors anymore (although currently Friend is glued to the heater, so maybe he'll adjust quite easily...as long as his heater and little pillow come along), the chickens can live with new collegues who will soon move into a farmhouse, and Bishnu is coming with us. She will have to find her own place to live though because apart from the fact that our servant quarters will be way too small for them (especially for Bishnu's daughter Bumeka who is now a lively two-year old), they are also next to our future bedroom...and as we move to get some peace, quiet and privacy at last having our cook and her two year old living literally on top of us does not seem like a very good idea. In fact we have decided that this time, we want NO disturbance of personnel whatsoever...the past 1,5 years were a nightmare in that respect and frankly I have really had it with staff...the fewer the better!
(The Jewish curse IS true!!!)

Yesterday the movers brought 100 boxes so the coming weeks I'll be packing, sorting and driving back and forth to measure curtains (luckily I still have some extra 100 meters of curtain or so...), move fragile stuff and paintings and clean the place. And then...it will be bye bye to Pushpanjali, its noisy partyhouses, increasing traffic, noisy train and nightly honkikg, stealing personnel and greedy landlord! To name but a few reasons for us wanting to live somewhere else....

Holiday in Thailand!
We have just been to Klong Muang Beach in Krabi, Thailand, to visit our good friend Marcus Häberli and his lovely wife Supranee, who run a little restaurant called Balini. Marcus entertains the guests while Su cooks the most fantastic meals...needless to say that we didn't loose any weight over the holidays!
Klong Muang is still unspoilt territory; no highrise buildings full of tourists but little resorts and guesthouses, little local restaurants and for the rest beaches, peace and quiet and the occasional Mullah calling for prayer (and I must admit, it sounded quite nice actually). We stayed in Krabi Sands, another one of those treasures...little bungalows, fantastic pool and breakfast on the beach! We rented a scooter and spent many hours on it trying to find the Tiger cave, which is apparantly on top of a hill. Hiking up will take you across 1200 stairs...we didn't find it and I am suspecting T did that on purpose! We found waterfalls instead, and rubbertrees, strange hillsides and lovely little eateries. The Thai are wonderful gentle people whith great food and terrible english...and in Thailand there is, as we both wrote (independently of one another) on our postcards...no honking, no begging, no dirt. What a difference with India! We spent the first four days sleeping, sleeping and sleeping, as if all the energy we ever had was completely drained. I guess to a certain extent it was; India is terribly intens and very intruding, wether you want it or not.
The last days we spent in Bangkok, riding the skytrain to the river, taking a longtail boat from there and for the rest we did a LOT of walking. It took us past the amulet market, the flower market, the river, the Wat Pho (the temple with the golden recling Buddha) and the Palace, which we couldn't enter as mourners were praying for the deceased sister of the King. The King is God for the Thai and his picture is everywhere (I mean everywhere...even in our hotelroom!); one is not allowed to lick a stamp for the protrait of the King is on it and one doesn't lick a king...I think I missed a golden opportunity to find out what a king tastes like!
Anyway, it was lovely and far too short! And we have taken the decision to not take vacations longer than 3-4 days in India anymore as in india one never finds any rest. There are things I want to see but I'll do it in short trips; holidays we will plan from now on in the neighbourhood countries...

New year, new directions!

T and I have finally decided that we will start looking for another house.
Our current house - beautiful as it may seem - actually has so many disadvantages that the balance no longer tips the right way, and as we are due for another 3,5 years we think it is worth looking for something else for the remaining time.

The biggest problem we are facing strangely enough has nothing to do with the house itself, but with a situation that we have been manouvred into: the fact that our garderners (who live on our premises) are actually not employed by us but by our landlord. This means that in case of situations where repercussions are needed, we are powerless. We cannot fire them or withhold their salaries, which in India unfortunately enough seems to be necessary. Their loyalty lies not with us but with their landlord (who doesn't give a shit about them, us or anybody else, as long as he makes money) and so they feel free to cheat us, lie to us and steal from us, our friends and our other personnel. The "incidents" have been going on for more than a year now and are starting to occur more frequently...Bas! (=Hindi for Stop). Enough!

I do not want to live in a house where I have to keep my handbag with me always because money otherwise disappears from it, where I have to warn my friends to put their valuables in our safe, where I have to lock my washingpowder away and where I have to buy something for my cook which she can lock her money and other belongings into....no more!
As we cannot fire them we have no choice but to either put up a fight with the landlord to change the contract (with the risk he will terminate the contract as he will probably be able to get 30-50% more rent for the house now) or to move.

As other factors are also starting to make living "in the country" less attractive (partyhouses that mushroom around us, a new landingstrip 500 m from our garden and the fact that 1000 new cars enter the roads every day, making our trip to "the city" longer and longer) we thought that moving back into the City would be a better option, despite the higher levels of pollution, noise, and the fact that I may not be able to take the chickens.
New year, new house, new chances....

From a sunny New Delhi, happy new year!

We are actually having lunch in our garden as during the day we hit the 20ºC...during the night Delhi is very chilly though, going as low as a watery 3ºC...we have one room that we can keep relatively comfortable, and that is where our lives evolve at the moment. Still, being in India makes me realise every day how lucky I am that I was born on the "right" side of the world...as new year is the time to give things a deeper thought, below is an exerpt from an article published in The Hindu, written by Harsh Mander, called Whose land is this?.
It left me silent...this too is India. Having lived here for more than a year now I have seen this on the streets, unable to describe it, unable to understand, unable to close my eyes to it, unable to accept it but understanding that change has to come from within:

" It was a remote village in Bolangir in Orissa that we met an ancient grizzled couple, Champo and minzi. They have for many years cut down to eating one meal a day. It is usually baasi, a small quantity of rice left overnight to ferment, with wild leaves from the forest. At night they drink black tea to kill their hunger, if there are no leftovers given to Champo when he begs. [...] Today, they can both barely walk but still, if on any day they are too sick to set out to labour, they just do not have food to eat. Yet when we met them, they often laughed and Minzi, while parting, tried hard to press into my hand a precious pumpkin, which she had grown on the roof of her thatch hut, as a gift to a guest from a faraway land."

" One night when we met deepak, he was engrossed in his mathematics textbook under a street light. He sleeps on the grimy unkempt pavements of Patna next to his father Ganesh, a rickshaw puller. His father's fondest dream is that one day his son Deepak would become a "sahib". He brought Deepak with him from their village to share with him the rigours of the city only so that he could sent him to a local school. He ensures that his son gets a cup of milk each day, and nutricious food, even if Ganesh himself sleeps half fed."

"education is the dream for their children of most people who are exiled to India's margins, even if it is in government schools that run without the sunlight of joyful learning, creativity and freedom. [...] But millions of parents are too poor to afford even free government schools: legions of children work, hundreds of thousands of others escape poverty and abuse and make the streets of cities their homes, still others are compelled to migrate with their parents each year to construction sites and mines. [...] There are reports from many corners of the country of Dalit (=the lowest caste) children who cannot sit with their classmates when the government statutory mid-day meal is served or other who boycott school meals if these are prepared by dalit cooks. An estimated one million children, women and men still carry human excreta on their heads as the onely livelyhood that society opens up to them."

"For all of these, there seems no light even in the far distant end of the tunnel in which they find themselves trapped. A day must come when this light is lit, when this land truly belongs to all who are born to it and nurtured its soil".

....!

We wish you a thoughtful and grateful new year.

YES!!!
After 5 months of building chicken-pens, feeding, chasing chickens out of the vergetable garden, more feeding, building more chicken-pens, feeding, etc...one of the little black hens actually started laying eggs!
She managed to lay these four just in time for our sunday-morning and they tasted absolutely lovely. As it turns out the eggs taste of the food the chicken gets, which in our case would bee a subtle leeky rucola bolognese flavour...with the wine of course. So here's to our laying lady and her two sisters who hopefully follow her example soon!

Finally!!! After one year in India I finally went to see the Taj Mahal!

It took a friends visit to take the time and go there, and it was worth every minute of it!
My friend Rian came to visit me and as it was her first time in India we tried to experience all sides of India within the week she was here. Luckily she has a very open mind and thinks everything is exciting and intreguing, and that quality is immediately grasped and understood by the Indians...I have never seen so many people that wanted to take a picture with her!

The weekend we took it easy...shopping in Hauz Khas in my favorite shop (Country Collection, always good for something beautiful) and then a South Indian thali for lunch on saturday, and on sunday a walk and lunch in Lodi Garden. Monday we had booked the "Nigel Tour" - Nigel is a 86 year old English gentleman who came to India whilst in the Army and never left. As he puts it he "wanted someone to bring him tea and a newspaper at 7 in the morning", and in India he could have that. Nigel knows everything about Delhi and its (British) history, and took us on a very comprehensive tour through a Sikh temple, a step well in the washerman-quarter, the ghats at the banks of the Yamuna River where bodies of deceased are burned, the old expat neighbourhoods (this is where the Europeans lived around 1900) and the place where Delhi began...King George the 4th announced here in 1911 that Delhi would be the new capital of India, only to have his architect decide one year later that the spot wasn't good because it flooded during the monsoon...there you are. After lunch we visited Old Delhi, with its bazaars and narrow streets, its crowded alleys, its (literally) breathtaking spice market and glittering wedding street. At the end of the day we were exhausted, only to find that Nigel would happily have continued!

Tuesday was Ghandi's birthday and this year we spend it by the pool...the weather was perfect, the water still bearable (winter has started and it is now rapidly cooling down) and everywhere it was quiet...perfect!

And finally wednesday we went to Agra. We took the Shatabti express at 6 in the morning and arrived in Agra at 8...the train ride itself was an experience, with all the food and tea being handed out and Rian eyeing every package with curiosity...and the gentlemen sitting in front of us eyeing her with curiosity....
We were met by a Bollywood star (not really, he works for the travel agent, but he COULD have been a Bollywood star) and taken to our car with our driver for the day, Yugesh. Yugesh (we named him You Guess because we couldn't remember his name otherwise) took us to the Taj...and there we were, at 9 in the morning, with glorious views on the biggest monument for love.
The Taj Mahal is obviously a tourist destination and often these attractions are overpriced and overrated, but in this case it was worth every Rupee...in one word, perfect!
By the time we left the crowds were coming and we became a tourist attraction ourselves (mainly Rian, I must admit)...many people wanted to take our picture (or basically, their picture with us in it posing as their longtime friends from Australia) and this time I let go of my "here we go again" and followed Rian's enthousiasm, and laughed my head of!

Then we went to the Fort, which actually was as beautiful as the Taj. From the Fort you can see the Taj, lying in the distance at the bank of the Yamuna river, like a painting from long lost days. It was in this Fort that Shah Jahan was emprisoned, looking at the grave of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal for 8 years, until he died. Serves him right...rumour has it that he chopped off the hands of the craftsmen who build the Taj so they would never again build something so perfect (and looking at India as it is now, it seems he succeeded...).
Still, the Fort is the most beautiful Fort I have seen since I arrived in India, with the Amber Fort in jaipur coming second.

After lunch we drove to Fatehpur Sigri, the ghost town build by Shah Akbar. The town was deserted soon after his death due to water shortages, and the buildings remain as a testimony of the time...beautiful, quiet, hot...and unfortunately full of "guides" who attach themselves like flies in the desert, pestering tourists with scary stories that they will never be able to understand the town and all it's monument without their help and guidance. fortunately the Lonely Planet had warned us for these guides and the fact that most of what they tell is made up anyway. Still, we didn't see the Jama Masjid and probably part of the buildings due to the guides following us...suddenly, I was fed up completely with the harassing and the constant whining for money, money, money...in India, everybody wants money. From us, that is, because we have "many Rupees". keep on dreaming.

We ended the day with beer and snacks in the Taj palace hotel, end then were taken back to the station by our Bollywood guy, who literally put us on the train, to be met by T and mr. Gill two hours later at Delhi Station. Wow! What a day!

Busy weeks!
After the initial heavy rains we have had the occasional drips but nothing substantial anymore; I have sown the first seeds -following a new method I have read about, "Square Foot Gardening"- and now I am eagerly awaiting the moment when I can actually transplant the little plants into the garden...
However, the chickens have grown to the point where we dare to let them out in the open (no fear of cats anymore) and as it turns out chickens LOVE everything small and green. They have eaten all the flowers from the pots, all the new little leaves on bushes and have grazed their way through half the spinach in the vegetable garden before we managed to stop them. That means another busy couple of weekends for T, as now we'll need a fence...

But the highlight of the past weeks was the visit of T's children who came over for part of their holidays. It was the first time they came to India, and we were excited to have them! We visited Jaipur which is really beautiful, and worth another visit. They especialy liked the Monkey Temple, which is on a hill overlooking Jaipur, where monkeys gather at sunset. We went with a bag of peanuts and obviously were favourite with the monkeys and an occasional child.
We also loved the Amber fort, which lies at the bottom of a mountain. It is 600 years old and still in a wonderful condition, made of sandstone and marble, featuring beautiful details like rooms with mirror-inlays on the ceiling and beautiful fresco's at the entrance gate. We didn't take a ride on Elephant back though, as the elephants seem to suffer a lot from marching up and down the hill in the hot Rajasthan sun. (We found Rajasthan to be cooler than Delhi though...it is higher and seems to cool considerbaly at night).

Agra, and the Taj Mahal, we unfortunately had to skip as the whole family caught Delhi Belly at some point...we have decided to keep that one in store for a next visit. Instead we went sightseeing in Delhi - the picture was taken at Humayun's Tomb, one of Delhi's most beautiful buildings (and very similar to the Taj Mahal; same layput but different stone).

Now, the kids are back to Holland where school will soon start, and we are back to normal life....trying to shed the xtra accumulated kilo's, building fences for the chickens and looking forward to cooler weather!

The monsoon has started!

It was predicted to hit Delhi on the 28th of june but it came early, and as the scorching 48ºC has now turned into a delightfully 26ºC, it's a relief!
We have thunderstorms every day now - the sky turns into a very dark grey and when the rumbling starts the winds start as well...then the rain comes, as if the gods are turning buckets full of water upside down. The roads and sewer systems cannot cope and streets (especially the ones downhill) turn into rivers, with stranted tuctuc's standing deserted left and right, the occasional car ploughing through. Thank god we bought a jeep-type car!

Our garden turned into a pool, parts of it at least. There is suddenly so much water that the grounds are satiated...I am sure the vegetables will drown (we still have rucola, fennel, leek and sellery in the garden). Oh well, part of the How-To-Grow-Vegetables-In-India experience. I'm learning every day. It surprises T and me that the Indians haven't build large underground reservoirs for the excess rains, as a reserve for the hot summer when there are water shortages. With the enormous amounts of people, and cheap labour costs, achieving that should not be a big problem.

For now we are busy checking the house for the inevitable leakages, making sure the cats and the chickens are dry and safe, and keeping the generator running as frequently trees will fall onto electricity wires, cutting us off. By the time we are ready for a boat to roam our garden, we'll post another blog!