Long time, no blog. And big updates, too!
As you can tell, we survived India and returned to Alaska. The first weekend back proved especially exciting. After not getting more than 15 hours of sleep in total since Monday, I finally went to sleep on Saturday. And there I remained, dead to the world, until Monday night, when I roused myself enough to request medical assistance. One quick ambulance ride to the hospital later, and I found myself hooked to an IV. Diagnosis: Acute dehydration. The result of not eating or drinking for about 60-ish hours. On the bright side, I weighed myself when I got home, and I had lost around 8 pounds in the process! Not the best way to achieve sustainable weight loss, though.
The next two weeks were a whirlwind at work, which concluded with a "Good Luck, Mary!" cake. Yes, I was offered the position I interviewed for from our hotel room in Mount Abu. Obviously I accepted. It was bittersweet to leave ARSC, because I truly didn't want to leave. It was one of the best jobs I'd ever had, with some of the greatest co-workers. However, the DoD contract was gone, and I knew I had to protect myself financially.
Last week, I began my new job as UAF's Intellectual Property and Commercialization Coordinator. So far, the job has consisted of trying to get the office set up. No one has been officially working in the office for some time since it was shifted from one part of UAF to another, so I am the first official employee and am working with the people who had been trying to take care of the IP issues in addition to their regular jobs. To add to the problem, we have set up the office in an off-campus building, in a space not previously used by UAF. This means no phones, no wired network connections. It took me three tries to get a key that actually works in the front door. We're still trying to figure out how much more furniture we need for the office.
Part of the work in setting up the office is moving all the old files from the previous space into the new one. On Tuesday, I got some help and we loaded up 8 boxes of stuff and moved them. After emptying all the boxes, I put them back in my car on Wednesday for Round 2. When I arrived at the building and tried to grab the boxes from the backseat of my car I did something to my thumb. Please don't ask what. I'm not even sure and it's all a blur. All I know is that I quickly found myself staring at my left thumb, which now had half of the nail mostly ripped off. In shock, I got in my car and started driving home to care for it. Just before my road, the shock wore off and the pain kicked in, and I turned around and drove myself to the emergency walk-in clinic. After more than 6 years working at UAF, it took me only 2.5 days in my new job to file a worker's comp claim. Lovely. Fingernail stuff kind of freaks me out, so I'll just say that I will be wearing a splint on my thumb to protect it until the injured area grows out.
Beau and I headed down to Anchorage after work on Friday. 5:30 departure + 6-hour drive = very tired when we got here. He's been busy moving stuff from Kulis to the new base, while I have engaged in some retail therapy. When he's done today, he has to fix a server that blew up, and then we'll be on the road again. Unlike our December trip, we did not encounter any raging blizzards on the drive down. Plus, this time we have random Rajasthani music cds to keep us entertained.
I'd forgotten how comfortable a real mattress can be. The cat is not snubbing me for abandoning her ... yet. She may change her mind in the days to come.
Now it is time for sleep.
Rough calculations have shown that, relatively speaking, we began the trip home around 7 p.m. on Monday. That puts us currently around the 48 hour mark for travel time. We're still in Seattle, trying to get on a plane to Fairbanks.
We made it through a 7-hour train ride, a flight that involved going through exactly 5 security checks (sadly, I'm not joking), and even made it through customs. We managed to do this entire trip without paying for a single checked bag. All was going well.
I am sitting in a bar at Sea-Tac, nursing a dirty martini and shooting dirty looks at what was supposed to be our gate. Our flight to Anchorage has been delayed by many hours due to a broken plane. This will cause us to miss our connecting flight to Fairbanks. I'm uncertain as to when Beau, his new sitar and I will be able to arrive at home.
At least there's free WiFi.
I am falling into the rhythms of Pushkar. We eat late, sleep late, wake up in time for class. Beau goes to study sitar while I meet up with Raki at Colleena's dance school. The Shakti School of Dance is located in the Old Rangi temple. Up on the second floor, I study Khalbelia gypsy dance every afternoon.
Beau and I have developed a real knack for picking buses that dump us on the side of the road, many kilometers from where we need to be. We ended up in Ajmer, 10 km from the bus stand where we needed to be. One Rs 9 bus ticket each, and we were in Pushkar. We arrived a day early, so our room wasn't ready yet and we had to stay in a nicer one. It was easily the best shower of the trip so far: great water pressure and plenty of hot water.
Naturally my stomach is starting to feel a bit disturbed again, but I hope it will go away quickly this time. Beau has gone to look for a motorcycle or moped to hire, and I am getting ready to head to Shakti School of Dance for my first Khalbelia class. There are also daily Odissi stepping classes, but I don't know if my knees could take the rigor of that.
Beau and I are enjoying a rooftop breakfast of toast with jam and chai. We've checked out of our room in Jodhpur and will be heading for the bus soon, on our way to Pushkar via Ajmer.
We wandered the bazaar last night in search of a bit of shopping. Although the silk bandhani saris were gorgeous, I held myself back and just got a cotton one. How many saris does a white girl living in Alaska need? (At least four, but that's not the point.)
I also found a nice fixed price jewelry store. It was good to just shop without having to haggle. Since the shopkeepers didn't see dollar signs due to the fixed price scheme, I could browse in peace.
Beau just referred to some of the India street cats as looking like Snake Plissken. This is why I love him.
As Beau just linked to my blog from his Facebook page, I thought I'd better write a quick post. This way his friends and family won't start off by reading about diarrhea and vomit.
Ah Delhi belly. We did not make it out of Mount Abu as planned, but spent another night there instead. It wasn't Beau this time - it was me. I started feeling unwell after a mildly strenuous sunset hike on Thursday. It went downhill rapidly.
Any doubts I might have had about marrying Beau vanished overnight. Specifically, around the time we realized that I was very sick and there was no electricity in our room. Beau was using the iPod and cellphone to try to illuminate the room and figure out what the problem was with the switches. As I recall, around this time I came crawling out of the bathroom, went through his legs and headed on my hands and knees for the trashcan under the sink.
For the record, I have not thrown up since moving to Alaska at the beginning of 2003. I have had food poisoning in that time. I do not throw up. Usually. Beau found me a bucket and used the cellphone light to check the level as my illness progressed. With all food throughly vacated from my digestive tract, I spent the next 18 hours in bed. Not necessarily sleeping. Beau went to the store for fresh lemon juice, salted biscuits and paracetamol, and also rearranged our bus tickets and extended our hotel stay.
To add to the fun, I capped off 24 hours of no sleep and sickness with an 11:30 p.m. cellphone job interview. I can only hope I managed to come off somewhat coherent and professional.
We made our bus on Friday and reached Jodhpur. I'm already less than enthralled with this very noisy and polluted city. On the bright side, we waked through the main bazaar to get to dinner yesterday, and I kept saying, "Ooh! Pretty! Pretty!" I must resist the urge to buy lots of shiny things here. (Unlike Beau, who bought an electric sitar on New Year's Day.)
Today we are going to the Mehrangarh Fort for some exploring, then are going to do a 2-hour zipline tour from the top of the fort all the way back into town. I suspect it will be less terror-inducing than the bungee jumping in New Zealand was
We caught a bus to Mount Abu. Beau apparently also caught some illness, as he was quite under the weather when we arrived. He didn't eat for about 24 hours and mostly slept and sweated. I kept giving him Alka-Seltzer and making him drink water. We suspect it was a bit of dengue fever.
He awoke feeling much better today, so we will continue on with our plans. We visited the Dilwara temples today and went on a sunset hike. It was a steep 30-minute scramble up the rocks. That only hurt my knee a little, but then we had to come back down. I'm still on the hunt for ice for my poor knee.
Tomorrow we catch a morning bus to Jodhpur.
We finally got out of Agra. It took 4 days, some fake vomit and a 21-hour bus ride, but we did it. We got through the Gujjar blockade and rolled into Udaipur at around 5:30 last night. Arriving on New Year's Eve was interesting. We just wanted to sleep, but all the hotels on the lake were having parties and blasting music. Exhaustion helps greatly, though.
We settled into our room, I asked Beau to marry me, we ate dinner and went to sleep.
Today we went shopping and Beau destroyed all sense of frugality by buying a sitar. I bargained Rs 6000 off the price by telling the shopkeeper that we were his first customers of the year. "First customers, first sale! Very good karma all year long!" It's got a plug for an amp, so I persist in calling it an electric sitar. We also got a fiberglass case and a bunch of accessories thrown in. Beau goes back tomorrow for an hour-long lesson in tuning, maintenance and the basics of playing.
I can't figure out why India is destroying my pants. I have three pairs in various states of disrepair. I can't blame the laundry-wallahs, because they've only washed one of the pairs. Tomorrow's mission is to find a pair of Indian pants that will fit over my brace.
We're broken down in Agra with the Ranthambhore blues.
And by that, I mean that a strike has closed all the borders into Rajasthan. Our train out to Sawai Madhopur tonight was cancelled. We have no idea when the borders will open again.
Since Plan A went to shit, we've enacted Plan B, which is an overpriced tatkal ticket from Agra straight to Udaipur tomorrow night. If that train is cancelled, we will consider Plan C. Go buy an actual India book and just start taking whatever trains are still open.
We've got a little Internet time left in Agra, so here you go, Mom.
MNB (who will now officially called Beau, as My Old Beau is a weird acronym) and I enjoying both the Taj Mahal and the timer function on my camera.
After the calm of Rishikesh, anything would seem hectic. But Agra was probably a pretty bad choice. This place is like tout central. Our train was about 4 hours late into the station, so our hotel pickup wasn't there.
MNB and I ended up hiring an autorickshaw driver for the day and visited the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, etc. Things were going OK and we were even going to give him a nice tip, and then the stops at stores began. I offered him money to take us back to the hotel, which cut down on our number of stores but did not eliminate them entirely. This also cut down his tip. He should have done the "commission vs. big fat American tip" math. However, I am very good at listening to a sales pitch and then leaving, so we will not be bringing home any carved marble coasters or handwoven rugs.
I've heard rumors that milkmen are on strike and this is shutting down railways in Rajasthan. A few friends are apparently stuck in Bundi. We are hoping that our train to Sawai Madhopur leaves tomorrow night.
We arrived safely. Our taxi driver spent almost an hour trying to convince us our hotel is full. We finally made it there (on foot) to find that - surprise, surprise - it was not all full and they had our room.
All boxes on the "to-do" list have been checked. Paperwork is organized. In just 36 short hours, we'll be in Delhi.
The dirty rat bastard from two years ago struck again! We had our holiday party and gift exchange at work today.
And while I got some beer early on, Jim just couldn't resist his urge to steal it from me. Jerk. To my utter delight, it was stolen from him. And what did he end up with in the end?
A framed picture of our director. Justice!
Ironically, I was sitting next to him in the staff meeting when I observed that whoever got the portrait this year would likely have to bring it to their next job. Our department will regroup as a much smaller unit, but most of us will not be around after the contract is done.
This is not me waffling, BTW. This is the basic facts of the situation foiling me at every turn.
Just so you know.
but he'll get parts again. The man won an Oscar!
Yeah, so maybe my friend's plan to vacation in Cuba is falling apart, but all systems are go for my trip. On Saturday night, MNB and I are headed to the airport for the long journey to India. We'll be there for a month, hopefully avoiding most of the cold winter weather in Fairbanks.
Of course the trip is well timed. On Tuesday, my entire department got laid off. Good times, right? It wasn't unexpected - most of our funding (like 95%) came from a contract that expires May 31. And it doesn't look like the contract will be renewed. So we pretty much all have jobs until May 31, they just gave us 6 months notice.
We first heard about this possibility back in July. And since I'm a planner, I went into overdrive. All additional principal payments on my mortgage and all investing came to a halt as I began moving all extra money to my emergency fund. And I'm confident I'll be able to find another job in my field. So I've stopped tossing around insane ideas like renting out my house for two years and joining the Peace Corps.
The trip to India will be a welcome respite from the office. People are somewhat chipper now, but I can see the mood growing bleak. And we'll be covering quite a bit of ground as we travel mostly in Rajasthan. For perspective, it's like starting in Chicago, then going to Grand Rapids, down to Indianapolis, out to Kansas City, onward to Omaha and then back to Chicago. Or for more visual people, it's like we're traveling around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. It's not necessarily a huge area, but you must factor in bad roads and lots of train rides.
We'll try to check our e-mail occasionally and will update the blog as time and Internet access permit. But you can pretty much imagine that most of the trip will be like this:
Poor MNB still doesn't believe me when I tell him I *will* sing this every time we get on a train.
