Jan's Birthday in India

I don't even know what day it is.

But since it's somewhere near Jan's birthday - Happy birthday, Jan! Be glad you're not in India. Lovely place, if you can stand the bizarre contrasts. But the infrastructure could stand some work.

It took twenty hours and a few airplanes to get here, which totally messed up the ol' sleep pattern, followed by a week of even more confusion caused by a complete inability to stay in bed more than three hours at a time. Getting up at six a.m. local time, heading down to the breakfast buffet and forcing something down (although all my body needs is more caffeine), jumping in the cab for the thirty minute drive through the insanity of Indian traffic, being stuck in a conference room for the next ten hours attempting to answer all manner of technical questions, as well as making decisions on budgets and schedules, finally getting far enough along to justify our departure, spending another hour in traffic (to go about five miles), getting to the hotel too tired to eat, falling asleep til midnight (about four hours sleep), then getting up again because the brain just won't stop.

I haven't taken a single picture.

Maybe next trip (tentatively scheduled for July).

If Cheryl could come, too.

{I miss you, sweetie, more than I can say. I'm just sitting here in the hotel room counting down the hours til I arrive back home and see your face again. It's like an eternity!}

It's difficult to describe this place because it goes against my idea of what makes sense in the world. I'm staying in a tourist hotel which rises ten floors above the ground, and when I look out the window, I see an empty high-rise covered with mildewed plaster surrounded by acres of squalid shacks enclosed by a huge block of fancy buildings which seem form a facade of modernity around the reality of ruin.

The road is filled with traffic night and day, pedestrians and bicycles and carts and three-wheeled taxis and automobiles and trucks and buses who zip through the un-lined streets in completely random manner like ripples on the surface of a stream, meandering left and right and back again; it seems as though there should be an accident occurring every minute, yet there have been none so far. The noise is constant. Everyone honks in order to warn others of their immediate proximity, which means that everyone honks about once every ten seconds. We sit in our taxi going to work in the morning or coming back to the hotel at night and look out at the traffic and the buildings and the people and don't think about it. For some reason we feel safe. Perhaps it is because the driver gives off no sense of alarm.

The city is dirty and random and appears to have no consistent building code. Garbage is left piled along the road. Shop owners come out in the early morning and sweep in front of their stores with little hand-made brooms. Oxen and dogs walk freely through the streets. People mill about in endless variation (although they all blend together into one ambiguous blur after a while). There is great beauty here and there, filled in-between with unbelievable filth.

I'm tired all the time. Everyone is frustrated because there is so much work to do, and so many eager young faces out here who want to do the work, but not enough back in the States to give them the knowledge and training needed to do the job right.
And I can't move to India right now.

{Although I don't care where I live so long as you are with me, Cheryl!}

We leave in less than twenty-four hours. Twenty-four more after that, and I'll be home.

I can't wait.