Family Travel

It's been a while since we updated our blog. Anyway, we have skipped several noteworthy entries of our travels in Bali, Indonesia. And also of our road trip from San Diego to Corpus Christi via many beautiful areas of Texas Hill Country. Hopefully we will soon include them here.

We are doing mucho bien here. And yes, we are learning lots of Spanish. We arrived here (the city is called Heredia, which is just north of San Jose) on Sunday and our spanish school picked us up and dropped us with our host family. Our host, Senora Miriam, is a very friendly and hospitable lady. She is constantly conversing with us in espanol, so we get total exposure to Spanish. And she cooks wonderfully.

Our Spanish school is about 6 min walk from our host family's house. We are all in different classes, Thane and Aidan are together in a class by themselves with a teacher. She is keeping them busy with lots of art, games and songs, of course interspersing it all with Spanish. I am in a class with two other people that are about same level as me. Tomasz who is more advanced is getting a private lessons. After the first week, I think we all have learnt a lot.

The food here is very delicious. Last night, we had a Costa Rican cooking lesson at our school as part of our immersion program and we made some very yummy Empanadas.

For this weekend we are taking an guided excursion to a live volcanic region called Arenal Volcano. According to the guide books and speaking to others, we are in for a treat. The kids are excited to see the hot lava flow, hope the clouds won't cover the show for us!

Next week, we are moving to another home where there are children, so Thane and Aidan can have more immersion experience. They have been resisting learning another language.

I will post some photos next week.

There are no metros/subways in Hyderabad because the public transportation system is based on the world's greenest car - the ubiquitous AUTO. You see them everywhere, and although the old ones still puff their 2-stroke oil, the new ones are LPG or CNG (compressed natural gas) and burn very clean. How does it get 660 passenger miles per gallon (p-mpg)? Take a look at some of the photos:


The auto can also be configured for different jobs...

Most of you are well aware that traffic rules are largely voluntary in India so I won't bore you with day to day transgressions. But there are degrees to everything and even the jaded world traveler is apt to raise an eyebrow when traffic goes the wrong way on a freeway - especially when it appears to be quite the done thing. Check out the following video of a truck going the wrong way on our lane. One shudders to think what would happen if our driver is not alert while overtaking a car. [In the US we call these "ghost" drivers because their life expectancy shrinks to a few minutes... in India my co-passengers didn't even notice anything unusual!]

I took the previous video quite smugly, hoping to post it on the internet to show how badly other people drive. But then our driver missed a turn and my father in law directed him to go back. The next legal turnaround was very far away so the driver simply did a U turn and started going the wrong way. Now we were the culprits, and here is the video ...

One thing that takes getting used to in India is that the "customer is not right". First time this happened I thought it was an anomaly. Gouri asked a tailor to make a dress for her with a modestly revealing neckline.

The tailor told her it was morally inappropriate, to which Gouri responded with characteristically-liberated-California-woman indignation that she is paying for the work so he should do what she asks. He nodded solemnly, but when Gouri got the dress back, the neck cut was 2 inches shorter than she asked for. At our new apartment, she asked a different tailor to make a dress from a design she found on an Internet site (yes, yes, that's how she spends most of her time...). She asked the guy to make a cut on the trousers from the ankle halfway up to the knee (not all the way up to the knee, mind you, just half way, thinking this time she would respect local prudishness). The tailor looked bewildered and said that this is not the done thing in India. Gouri said that the design was taken from an Indian website so how could it be inappropriate. The tailor said that those clothes were worn by movie stars and not normal women (I guess that means Gouri is not movie star material - shucks, I guess I was wrong). Eventually, though, after some discussion about how customers should be right, the tailor agreed to take the job. However, when Gouri got the pants back there was no cut at all - none whatsover!

The props for each building level and scaffolding are made of "renewable" materials. Amazingly, most buildings turn out pretty sturdy because you don't hear about anything collapsing. It all seems to work and provides a lot of manual labor opportunities for the uneducated masses, so I've come to appreciate the ingenuity of the local economy.