After a long hiatus, and much demand, Seven on Saturday is back (for good!). Our apologies to the readership that checks for this post regularly each Saturday (mom & dad vw), we are sorry we have been failing you.
We have hired a couple people here in Bangalore that are going to be integral to our survival, and happiness, for the next two years. Because they are such a big part of our day to day lives, we thought this might be a nice time to share a little about them with you:
1. Ramesh is our driver. He is also magic. First, a few fun facts: he is getting married this December, is very proud of his "native place" where the best mangoes are found, he loves cricket, and he has a really good sense of humor. He is not the first driver we were assigned, and wow are we glad we asked for a new one. At first Ramesh just drove for us: he drove us around the city, back and forth to work, and out on errands. Since we have moved into our apartment, he is starting to do so much more for us, and it's amazing. Typically your driver is "your right hand man", your main way to interact in a world where you don't speak the language, so he can be much more than a driver. Just in the last two weeks Ramesh has helped orchestrate the delivery of all of our stuff, helped watch over to make sure nothing was stolen during the deliver of our stuff, in one day fixed our cable issue (after we tried ourselves for 7 days to fix it), paid the electric bill after we lost the actual bill which left us not knowing who to pay or how much to pay, and had a birthday! Yes, he is magic.
2. Violet is the woman we have hired to cook and clean the house for us. She is also magic. Violet grew up in Bangalore, is married, and has two boys. She is not shy about sharing her opinion, and she keeps telling us that the front of our house needs more decorating and it looks like nobody lives here. She is a remarkable cook, I mean really really good. Each week she makes sure we have a few delicious Indian dishes, and she cuts/preps tons of fruits and veggies for the week, so we always have fresh chopped fruits/veggies in the fridge and meals in Tupperware! And, she is fast, both with her cooking and her cleaning - we can't keep up!
3. Alan and I have been working our way (painfully) through a 13 week 10k running program (hence all the posts about Cubbon Park). We started just after we arrived here, and are now in week 9. Everything has been going great, until this morning, when we looked at the plan and thought certainly we'd missed a week or two. But we did it, survived, and are pretty proud of ourselves. Maybe next year we will run in the Bangalore TATA 10k.
4. We are dorks. Most of you should know this by now. Our most recent dork-dom will occur next weekend, when we will have our first official Offsite Planning Meeting. We are going to spend a day brainstorming about the trips we want to take, researching costs, and deciding the best time of year to travel, and then creating our adventure plan for the next year. We have realized that there is so much we want to do, and time is going to fly by while we are here. We really want to make sure we spend time thinking about, well, how we want to spend our time. This alone might just sound like we are organize or like to plan. What takes it to dork level is that we have made an agenda, have assigned ourselves pre-work, and there will be multiple spreadsheets and flipcharts involved. Dorks.
5. We are in fact starting to feel settled in this new home of ours, and that is in part owed to Violet. Recently she shared with us that she would buy flowers for us and put vases out through out the house (although she also let us know that we needed to buy more vases!). We thought that was a brilliant idea! We sent her off with some rupees, and she filled the house with three lovely vases of flowers that were a variety of colors, smells, and sizes. All this for about 250 rupees, which is the equivalent of about $4.50. Yes, we will be doing this on a regular basis.
6. Overseas Women's Club (OWC) of Bangalore. Guess who is the newest member of this very helpful group? None other than our own Alan. The OWC is a great local "club" of expats who are living in Bangalore with working partners/spouses. Their membership provides all sorts of perks and discounts to a lot of great stuff - food, hotels, etc. On the downside, Alan spent most of his time at the first meeting introducing himself by interrupting conversations about either kids, schools, or mother-in-laws, so he felt a bit out of place (because he has a fabulous mom-in-law).
7. Drum roll please......And now, a video of our new home, with our stuff in it!! For those of you not interested in seeing how we decorated our apartment, you may not want to click the play button below.
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