Hi everybody, As many of you know, Beth and I got married on August 2, 2008. Check out some of our wedding photos from our photographer's site here and more on our wedding website.
Last weekend, my (Beth) work threw Chris and I a surprise Indian wedding! It was amazing - complete with mehendi (henna), red saris, flowers, sweets and a stand-in Hindu priest (my colleague, Himanshu). We were so touched that they created something like this for us, and will forever remember this as our other wedding anniversary.
Chris and I just returned from a fabulous visit to the IT capital of India, Bangalore. I had to go to Bangalore for a work trip, so Chris accompanied me for the journey. Bangalore is surprisingly very different from Mumbai. While perhaps from an international perspective, Bangalore still delivers the chaos, pollution, traffic and general sensory overload that many Indian cities do, for us - who have grown very accustomed to Mumbai (which includes Mercedes sharing the roads with cows/donkeys, interminable construction, jarring potholes, colorful nightlife, Bollywood parties, a profundity of gray/weathered buildings, etc.) - Bangalore seemed much more, well, orderly. Huge glass & steel-constructed IT parks frame wide, tree-lined roads. There are few potholes in sight, much green space, fantastic food (this is similar to Mumbai) and we even saw people in Tevas frequenting the nightclubs (as opposed to the high-heeled, sunglassed-Bollywood aesthetic)! Sadly, there is a 11:30 pm curfew so the city does not quite deliver on the night life in the same way that Bombay does (10 - 11pm dinners, etc). Anyway, the differences were noticeable - granted, we only spent a few days in Bangalore, but it was a fantastic time...
Anyway, we are now getting ready for the next phase of visitors! Chris' family comes this week for an exciting two weeks in Mumbai, Rajasthan (Jodhpur and Jaisalmer) and Ajanta/Ellora, and then many friends to follow...
It's been a long time since our last post! We've been busy with visitors here -- Beth's brother Robert and his wife Laura came out to visit us among other folks. We traveled together to Varanasi to spend New Year's on the Ganges.
It's "winter" in Bombay, which means I (Chris) can actually wear pants for several hours without sweating.
And it's holiday season, but up until now -- Christmas Eve -- the streets have been strangely, pleasantly devoid of the Christmas madness which descends upon the US starting the day after Thanksgiving. I didn't realize I missed some of it until I heard some Christmas carols playing in a coffee shop today and our neighbors strung up some lights in the courtyard outside our apartment.
But Beth gets major points for surprising me with a fully decorated Christmas tree in our apartment when I returned from a business trip to Chennai last week. She got everything from a street in our neighborhood that has tons of Christmas gear for sale -- tinsel, ornaments, fake trees (of which ours is one), Santa hats, etc.
The cats have gone predictably barmy having a tree in their house. It's their new favorite spot to hide under, and they have figured out that if they bat ornaments off the tree, they can chase them all over the house. Which they do.
Merry Christmas everybody!
UPDATE:
What's this? The cats have left us a present under the tree...
Potsticker, you shouldn't have!
Thanks to the SF girl posse for sending Beth a birthday care package in the mail. Unfortunately, getting things in the mail is not quite foolproof here. It was almost four weeks after Beth's birthday when the package finally arrived.
But arrive it did!
We had totally forgotten it even existed when a knock came at the door...it's the package!!!
Inside were many fun presents, including a sweet miniskirt that Beth can wear...inside the house.
Last, came this mysterious...thing in a ziploc bag.
At first I thought it was an eggplant. It was as large as a big eggplant and was blackish in color and about the same consistency (slightly firm, slightly squooshy) as an eggplant. But that didn't make any sense. What could this possibly be? I felt something hard in the middle when I pressed in on the eggplant thing. No. Idea. What. This Thing. Is.
Beth finally called Desiree to ask. At first she didn't have any idea what we were talking about. But then she said...
"Oh, you mean the Papalote salsa?"
Yes, that...thing...once was a jar of fresh salsa from Papalote on 24th & Valencia. I'm not exactly sure what possessed the SF girls to stick it in the mail, and I don't know what happened to it over the seven or so weeks in the mail, but it sure wasn't good. But, hey, it's the thought that counts...
We're just glad there wasn't a super carne asada burrito in there!
Another belated post -- many of you may know it was Beth's 30th birthday on November 22...
Well, we celebrated in style in Bombay. We had a get-together at a bar in Bandra, with many braving the traffic to come up from South Bombay to celebrate before we cut the night short a bit around 12:30. Why so early? Because we were basically pulling an all-nighter -- our flight to Sri Lanka was at 3am!
Check out photos of the night here on Facebook.
Catching you all up on some old news...did you know 50 Cent came to Mumbai back in mid-November? and that we were there?
It was a great show -- at an outdoor stadium type of venue, but with the population of a club show. we were way close to the stage without even trying.
In classic Bombay fashion, the rickshaw driver took a wrong turn trying to get us to the fairgrounds, just outside of one of the biggest office complexes in Mumbai -- Bandra Kurla complex. Within a couple minutes, we were at the end of a dark dirt road with no streetlights, no buildings, no people, no nothing. And then the rickshaw gets a flat tire. Here we are -- less than five minutes from 50 Cent and thousands of screaming fans, and we're basically in rural India.
We pay the guy some money, pile in the second of our caravan of rickshaws and speed off in search of civilization, finding it pretty quickly. Within a few minutes we are being frisked at the entrance and I'm hearing "What up Mumbai???!!!" from the stage and 25 ft. video screens. What a trip.
Hi everyone,
We just got back from a long weekend in Sri Lanka where we rode trains, relaxed in the cool green hills, went for hikes, saw tea plantations, and visited ancient Buddhist monuments and caves. All in all, an excellent but brief four day trip. Beth's friend Nina from DC, who had been staying with us in Bombay, accompanied us on the journey. It was the first trip to Sri Lanka for Nina and I, and Beth had a great time showing us some of the places she had been to when she spent some time working in Sri Lanka years ago.
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Devin said:
[this is good]The photos look really good. She's vignetted them and pulled the reds to give it an old school look that... read more
on Wedding photos -
reneena davidson said:
how did you survive in such atmosphere? just thinking about it makes my head hurt. nonetheless i think India is... read more
on Bangalore: no cows in sight
Hi Chris, Beth,I was just idly browsing your blog (after googling for apartments in Mumbai and Khandala) and loved it.We... read more
on Hiking in Khandala