Weekend retrospect

It’s Sunday afternoon here, around 5:30 or 6pm. It’s 8am in Boston. I know this because my sim card still will not work and my phone is stuck on east coast time.

I didn’t do much yesterday, slept a lot and read “Murder on the Orient Express.” It was also raining off and on with little warning and I didn’t want to be stuck outside when a monsoon hit so I moped aorund indoors and rested. I still don’t have internet. I spoke briefly to Eric on Friday who tried to commiserate with me on the lack of it which was sweet but annoying. “Yeah, I feel so cut off and remote” he says to which I rolled my eyes. I’m in F’ing Mumbai, okay? You’re in maine.

Today was the first day I could actually sleep in and I finally rose around 1pm. Nice thing about India is that you don’t need to shower b/c inevitably you smell better than everything around you. So I threw on some clothes and took a walk around my “neighborhood.” I have a cinema right next door to me which is cool, but there were no american movies playing. Even indian new releases were out as mumbai is shut down for swine flu and theatres are not recommended for people to sit and stew in each other’s virus breath. I wandered a bit more down the block, found a mall and some restaurants. Crossed a street (yay!) and then stopped because somewhere between the street and the mall and normal mumbai I ran right into the slums. Not sure how that happened except that the architecture of Mumbai reminds me a lot of boston – it’s an old haphazard type of city and things are just thrown together due to need rather than any forethought. Went back to the mall, found a TGIFriday and grabbed a beer at the bar.

Here is what I have learned so far: going to an american restaurant for a beer costs you the same as if you were in america drinking that beer. KFC commericals should be outlawed b/c they are so sexually explicit they make me blush. Bugs and other little creatures are something I’m just going to have to get used to. And finally, I need some ex-pat friends pronto, I haven’t had a conversation in 3 days.