 |
The local greengrocer |
Starting to get the house straight |
 |
Getting settled
You can't afford to miss a week on this journal lark when you're at Woodstock. Trying to think back over the last fortnight everything kind of melts into one. Let me try and sort out the highlights/lowlights.
Health
Mmmm. It's not easy living here. For the past fortnight one or other of us, sometimes both, has been suffering one way or another. I've had a few days' heavy cold and sore throat, followed immediately by a week of dyarr.. diorr.. stomach upset. Dot has just got over the best part of a week of stomach ailment - hardly eating, feeling sick and empty. The fact that we didn't get told about soaking all fruit and veg in iodine water for 20 minutes might possibly have something to do with it. Apparently by coming a few days late we missed "orientation", where these perfectly obvious local details would have been shared with us.
Food
Not yet sorted. We've been eating lunches in the staff dining room every day and cooking or preparing snacks in the evening. We've decided to move back to what we did in the UK - snack lunch and cook in the evening. Trouble is, there's certain limitations, like, very few butty options. There's tinned processed cheese (better than it sounds), bananas, er, cheese, peanut butter (don't much like it), Marmite (ditto), bananas, cheese.. When we get into it, we'll be able to cook up some chicken breast, and apparently there's reasonable boiled ham available from somewhere, but it's all a bit constrained at the moment. I am NOT going to mention Tesco's deli counter or the cheese selection in French supermarkets.
We also haven't quite sorted the fresh fruit and vegetable situation. There's a fair selection of local produce in season, but getting down to the bazaar to buy it is a problem, as is carrying it all back if we're doing a major shop. Groceries are no problem - ring your order to Ram Chander or Sardaji before 5.00 and a porter arrives at your house around 6.30. You can't always be sure what you're getting - tonight I ordered chicken breast and got a bag of roughly chopped chicken, with some barely identifiable bits of the sort that the nice butchers in Asda kindly dispose of before they reach the freezer. Bread deliveries, too, at 7.30 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He says he's even got garlic bread. If we get fed up of that, we can climb to the top of the hill and visit Prakash - he has a delicious selection (have I already mentioned his pizza delivery service?).
House
Getting more settled. My main interest has been in getting the electrics set up. The supply is very hit and miss here - apparently when a lot of people switch off their appliances the voltage can go up to 350 from the normal 220. At the best of times it fluctuates and spikes all over the place and, of course, there's the occasional power cut. You can't do much about the last of these problems, but the others are soluble - you don't have to wait until a lightning strike fries all your microprocessors: just get a CVT . For about £35 you get a nice heavy constant voltage transformer which emits a very comforting hum. Actually, a very annoying hum. Still, it will drive all the delicate equipment, so it was a question of finding a cupboard in the bedroom to house it away from earshot, drilling through the walls and laying cable around the walls and into the study and the sitting room. I think it's quite an elegant solution, with the added benefit that the heat keeps our shoes and medical kit nicely aired.
Which brings me to the other bit of electrical work. The advice for monsoon is - find a suitable big cupboard and fit 40-watt lamps in it to store all your electronic equipment and musical instruments away from the pervading damp. So I've done that as well. Pete Unsworth would be proud of me! The plugs and sockets are a bit, well, not quite BS standard, but two plug tops, two batten lampholders, two bulbs and 6 metres of wire only cost £1.80, so you can't complain. I even ended up replacing a wall socket that had broken inside. An interesting system: a switched unit has two separate bits - the switch and the socket; you have to connect the live to the switch and patch it across to the socket. A bit technical... We also bought two bedside lamps, and within a day the plug had literally torn off one of them - the wire is about as thick as dental floss. Another bit of rewiring for Wildy. This time I managed to bridge a two pin plug with my finger as I was putting it in, and to propel myself noisily across the room. I'm sure Indian electricity hurts more than British.
Fun
Yes, there's plenty. "We used to make our own entertainment in those days". There's a really good guy here from Belfast, John, and he had a birthday on Saturday. It started with a pancake breakfast before we had to shoot off to different things (more later). It ended with volleyball and ice-cream in the quad by the light of a couple of floods, with clouds and mist rolling in and occasional drizzly showers. The middle part of the day (for me) involved an hour's rehearsal for our Independence Day Bollywood routine and a shopping trip to the local city, Dehra Dun, an hour's drive down the mountain. The main object was to buy my Indian outfits for the dance and the rest of the day - national attire compulsory! I got a really cool-looking grey Punjabi suit for the dance, and a quite classy bronze-gold number for the flag-raising in the morning and the evening dinner. Dot meanwhile was - working: a student leadership retreat. They sent someone out for pizza to Dehra Dun at 10.30, and he got back at 2.00 p.m. Just so they could have a Domino's! What's up with Prakash?
Music
Just as well I brought my gear. So far in less than four weeks I've hosted an afternoon of jammin' and singing (mentioned in a previous entry), got involved in coaching the bass player and guitarist from the school jazz band (half an hour a week), and performed two songs at a high school student's leaving do (he has to go back home to school). I'm also organising a monthly evening jam session with the musos - first one a Beatles theme. And then there's Ridgewood chapel...
Church
Our problem of which church to go to was solved when we were encouraged to join a small team which runs a kind of youth church in one of the dorms. Yesterday about 35 students and about 15 staff were there, so it's already quite a well-established meeting. We sing lustily for 20 minutes, then break into small groups for a Bible study prepared by Jenna, who has been involved in the chapel for a year or so. Yesterday's was really good - we started looking at Philippians, and she did a comparison between Ecclesiastes 1 and Philippians 1: 1 - 12 - the different attitudes to life displayed. There's then a five minute summary by one of the team, and we go home. For us that means a 40 minute walk straight up the hill, about 700'.
Work
Oh, that's enough for now. Surviving and thriving on the Hill is enough without having to work as well..