My Neighborhood

We live in a part of Delhi called New Friends Colony. It's about the halfway point between the American School in Chanakypuri and the Ericsson office in Noida. New Friends Colony is divided into blocks and we live in C-Block. Your address is your block and house number, so we live at C-731. We live adjacent to the road that divides B-Block and C-Block, so we often take the B-Block entrance.




   The entrances to all the blocks are gated and have guards. We have a gate right on our corner that is locked 8pm to 7am. We have to come in via another gate if we come home after-hours or leave early in the morning. The locked gate means less traffic and a safer location.



We live just behind this gate. There is a little door on the side that we go thru to catch the morning bus because the gate is usually still locked when we leave. It says the gate is open at 6am, but it's more like 7:30am.



There are quite a few parks and green areas in NFC. There is a small walking park located about 5 houses down on our street. I walk there in the mornings after I take the kids to the bus stop.



It's quite shady!





Another view of the park





All the parks are locked to keep naughty children from picking the flowers. Also, it's too hot to walk in the middle of the day. Some people use the parks as shortcuts through the neighborhood, so the locks cut down on that, too.




There are several tiles depicting Hindu gods set into the walls of the park. This is Ganesha and his parents.


Our neighborhood has a mixture of new and old buildings. I've been told there was a recent change to the building ordinances which now allows buildings higher than 3 floors. Therefore, builders are tearing down a lot of the older buildings and putting up newer, taller ones that can hold more tenants. Typically, an apartment occupies one complete floor of a building. It seems like they are building or rehabbing a unit about every 4 or 5 houses along the streets.



A new, modern building next to an older one on our street.



Our building has 3 floors. The landlords live in an apartment on the ground floor and we have a 2-story apartment (called a duplex here) on the 1st and 2nd floors. In the US, we would say that our apartment is on the 2nd and 3rd floors. But here they are counted as ground, first and second. That actually makes more sense but we got pretty confused our first few days of apartment shopping.



Our apartrment building. The large balconies are off our living/dining room. The man you see at the top is the garder on our terrace.

Every home has a gated entrance and a guard out front. The guards keep uninvited people away and let you know when you have a visitor. They also check any service people who leave to make sure they didn't steal something. When we order pizza, the guard will come up with the pizza and bill, then we pay him and he gives the money to the pizza guy. It's pretty handy and helps cut down on the number of strangers in your house. Some expat friends of ours were robbed when they lived in Brazil and they believe the thieves may have been somehow related to repairmen who were in the house the day before.





This is our guard booth, just outside the gate.

 




Our gate

 



This is our driveway. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it's made of marble - like every horizontal surface here.

 



The door to our apartment building. It leads to an interior staircase that goes to the 2 units.

 



The staircase up to our apartment.



We have a total of 4 entrances to our apartment. There's the main door, the fancy door for company that leads into the living room, the gardner's door to the terrace, and an internal door to the terrace.



Main door on left, guest door on right.




Gardner's door to the 3rd story terrace.




Windows in the staircase.



The third story has a small garden terrace that overlooks the street in front of the house. Our washer and dryer are up there, too. There's also an external staircase that leads to the rooftop.



View from the terrace




View from the terrace, looking towards the park.



There are service alleys that run behind all the homes. Looking out my bedroom window, I can see the backs of the homes on the street behind us. Directly behind us lives a disgusting man who goes on his balcony to hack up phlegm and pick at his skin after he showers. It's quite a sight to behold. I just keep the curtains closed in the back.



View from my bedroom




The alley behind us





Little Differences

We live in a very "westernized" Indian apartment, but there are still quite a few little differences between here and the US. I think they are interesting, though they certainly caused a bit of confusion my first day here.

We can't drink the tap water here because of our delicate American tummies. It's not that we're total wusses, but we haven't been introduced to some of the bacteria here. Plus, I've heard that the tap water isn't safe for anyone to drink due to the piping system used to get it to your house. Well, drinking and cooking with bottled water would get expensive pretty quickly, so we have a reverse osmosis ultra-violet water filter mounted to the wall in our kitchen. It has 2 tubes coming out that attach to our faucet. After I dispense some water, it will draw in more water to clean and release the waste water from that process directly into the sink. A picture is below. You can also see our dishes drying on the rack. No dishwasher here.

The water filter only dispenses room temperature water. We also have a water cooler if we want hot or cold water. (You could also fill up a pitcher of water and keep in in the fridge). One of those huge bottles of water costs about 50 cents and lasts a week.

We don't have central a/c, so each room has it's own air conditioner. This is one of the units in our living/dining room. It's mounted high up on the wall, which is useful since hot air rises and cold air descends. We have a little remote control that works the a/c unit. The temperature controls are in Celcius, which took a little converting on the first day we turned on the a/c. It's about 95 degrees Farenheit here during the day, so the a/c runs almost constantly now.

 

We don't have one big hot water heater for the entire apartment. Each bathroom, plus the kitchen, has it's own hot water heater (called a geyser here) that mounts on the wall near the ceiling. You have to turn it on about 30 minutes before you want hot water. If you leave it on constantly, you will burn out the wiring. That's a lesson we learned the hard way! We had to get a plumber to fix two of our geysers. Total cost for the house call, parts, and labor was about $3.50. Try getting a plumber at home for that!!

We don't have individual closets here. Instead, there are floor to ceiling cabinets in all the rooms. I was told this is because property owners are taxed on the number of rooms and closets count as rooms. There is more than enough closet space. In fact, we don't have dressers in any of our rooms because there is so much cabinet space. The picture below are just the cabinets I use in our bedroom. Steve also has his own on another wall. So, each bedroom has twice the number of cabinets you see below. The kids use about a quarter of their cabinet space; I use the rest for toy storage.

Below is a picture of the light switches in our kitchen. They work all the lights, plus the stove hood and the fan. Our living/dining room has 22 switches and 4 dials to work all the lights and fans. It took a long time to figure out which switch worked which light! That orange mushroom-looking thing is mosquito repellant. It works like a glade oil plug-in. You replace the container underneath when it runs out, which is about every 3 weeks. We have at least one in every room and they make a big difference. I didn't realize how well they were working until they ran out of repellant fluid. We are careful about the mosquitos because they can spread Malaria and Dengue Fever. It's just the beginning of April and I'm told the mosquitos will get worse.

This is an example of a bank of outlets. There are a few different sizes of plugs, so they tend to be in pairs - one large, one small. Every outlet has it's own on/off switch attached to the outlet, itself. I don't know if it conserves energy to keep unused outlets turned off. Energy is at a premium here, so I keep them off just in case. The power will go out a few times a week. We have a back-up generator on the roof, so the lights are only out for a minute or two. We have emergency lanterns that power up by plugging into the wall and come on automatically when the power cuts out.

Addressing American Stereotypes

There's a commonly held belief among Indians that American women are, well, slutty.

And that really makes me mad because how could they think...

oh.

Okay. Sure. That's one but...

*sigh*



Well, yes. There's Britney, too. But two trashy women hardly makes ...

*facepalm*



Okay, You've made your point. There's no need to ...



Tara Fucking Reid! Come on! She's ... probably Canadian.



Well, surely India has their share of celebrities with questionable morals.

A simple Google search should clear that up ...





Fine. You win this one, India.

Wally

So most mornings, Babita cleans the apartment while I walk around with a coffee mug trying to look like I serve some kind of purpose. Which makes me this guy:

The resemblence is uncanny! I even wear glasses!

Holi Moli

Yesterday was Holi, the festival of colors. It is celebrated by throwing colored powders and water at one another. In the morning, the kids and I went up to the terrace and threw waterballons at the pedestrians and cyclists in the street below. I thought it was amazing that every single person laughed when we threw the balloons at them (probably because we missed every time) and one guy even threw a waterballoon back at us.

In the afternoon, we got a call from our landlord/neighbor, Guncha, to come down and play holi. I'm starting to have a Pavlovian response to her phone calls ... because it's always something awesome! She has someone to clean my house, or they want us to come fly kites on the roof, or there are monkeys in the driveway! We threw colored powders and shot waterguns. Eventually, just started dumping buckets of water on each other. The kids (and grown-ups) had so much fun!

Katie's nose is still pink.

Playing Holi

More Holi fun in the driveway



Sana



Sanjeeve

Group Shot

Watch out for that one! She's sneaky!

The kids - dirty and happy!

Family Portrait

This was after we started throwing buckets of water.

The dirtiest player gets the dirtiest. I think that's how karma works.

The Monkey Dances at Midnight

At 5:30 tonight, I get a call from my landlord/downstairs neighbor: "Casey, come down. The monkeys are dancing in the driveway." I had her repeat that to make sure I heard it correctly, and yes, she said there were monkeys dancing in the driveway. Then I thought, "Is that code for something? Like 'The crow flies at midnight'? What does it mean????"

Oh, she meant, "The monkeys are dancing in the driveway." They had hired a monkey trainer to put on a show in the driveway!

The trainer narrated a story while the monkeys did their thing. According to the story, the monkeys are married. The girl monkey wants nicer clothes and tells the boy monkey that she's leaving him unless she gets better duds. Well, the boy monkey's not gonna take her shit, so he threatens to beat her with a stick unless she comes with him. Then he gets a gun and drags her out by the tail. It was so great, we had him do it again because Michael and Katie missed the first show due to after-school activities!



Pictured: Marital "bliss"



She even hates his car.


 

This is where he prepares to pop a cap in her ass.



Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

The kids loved the show! Things like this make the adjustment to a new country a little easier. I asked Michael "Have you ever come home from school to find a monkey play in the driveway?" He said "No! India is awesome!" I have to agree.

Not a Joke

Q: How many people does it take to hook up a washing machine?

A: 5!
    1. A delivery man to bring it in.
    2. An electrician to plug it in.
    3. A plumber to connect the hose.
    4. A representative from the manufacturer to give a demo*
    5. A supervisor to watch them all.

*The demo was absolutely the best part! The manufacturer sends someone to show you exactly how to use the machine. The guy came up and stared at the washing machine for a good 3 minutes. It was like he had never seen a washing machine in his life ... not just *this* washing machine, but *any* washing machine! After pacing around the machine a few times, he proceeded to read aloud all the temperature settings from the front panel. So the demo went like this: "Uh, this is 30 degrees. This is 40 degrees. This is 60 degrees ..." Just for fun, I'd ask him to repeat them. "Wait!?! What was that last one?!?!" "This is 30 degrees. This is 40 degrees. This is 60 degrees ..."

So, it took 5 days from the time the washing machine was delivered until it was finally hooked up. I put in a load of clothes and came back about an hour later to move them to the dryer. When I reached in to pull out the wet clothes, I got quite a shock! It turns out that the outlet wasn't grounded. (Electricity + Metal Washer + Wet Clothes = Ouchie) When I looked at closely at the outlet, I could see that the plug had started melting. We got an electrician over and he fixed the wiring. After the repair, he told me to touch the washer to check it. Eeek! That's when the housekeeper stepped in. She insisted on checking it first to make sure it was okay before I touched it. Apparently, there is an order to things here, and I die second, after the housekeeper. I'm cool with that.

The offending washer is on the left. It just stares at you with it's one cold, unfeeling eye.
If I knew how to photoshop, I would have made it glow red, like the Terminator.



View from the outdoor laundry room. Glad this was fixed before monsoon season.