And what do you do all day?

Bangalore traffic: Holy Cow!

"And what do you do all day?", that is the question that every trailing spouse gets asked on a home visit. I am never too sure what to answer. My life is very mundane, even though I live in India, but it is far from what most people consider 'normal'. Take last Monday for instance, I only had to do two things: go to the bank and go to school. In the Netherlands that would have been done in a few hours max, but in Bangalore it took me a whole day.

My bank card didn't seem to work anymore, so I suspected the magnetic strip was damaged. When the card got swiped at a store it couldn't be read and I had problems getting money from the ATM. At first it was just occasionally, but it got worse and worse and last Friday it stopped working altogether. So on Monday I went to the bank to get a new card. Adriaan had the same problem about a year ago and he got a replacement card straight away, so I knew it was possible.

I explained the problem to the lady at the counter, she checked my details on the computer and then sent me to the Relations Manager (our personal banker). I explained the problem to him and he starts to laugh and says: "But you have to give your pin code!" I never got to the part where the code is needed, the card can't be read.... So he checked the system and tells me my card is activated. I know that, but it is not working.
To be sure it was indeed not working he asked me to go to the ATM next door and get some money out. If it didn't work I would get a new card.

I had tried 3 different ATMs on Friday without success, so you can imagine my surprise when I got money out of the machine without any problems... So I went back to tell it did work, but I was still worried about using it in the shops, because swiping the card gave a lot of problems.
We decided I would go to the super market down the road to try. If it didn't work I would get a new card.

Hyper City is a huge supermarket but I don't like to go there. They play the same music over and over again, there is something about the light that gives me a headache and things ALWAYS go wrong at the check out. I decided to man up and do my shopping as fast as possible. It took 45 minutes! Not because of HC messing up this time, but because I ran into friends and had long conversations with them ;-)

With a full shopping trolley, and enough cash just in case, I went to the check out and sure enough, the card didn't work.

Back to the bank it was and I was promised a new card. The choice was between a personal card (with my name on it) or a nameless card. The first would take at least 6 days (in India that translates to 3 weeks), the second could be issued immediately, BUT I had to go to another branch because they had no cards left in this one. My personal banker called their Relations Manager and the card would be ready for me to pick up immediately.

It was only a short drive to the other branch, but nobody knew anything about my card, so I had to explain everything all over again. Guess what their response was? "But you have to enter your pin code!"...........
I kept my calm and explained it all again and told them the whole action plan we went through that same morning and that I really, REALLY, wanted a new card.
Long story a bit shorter: I walked out with a new card after 20 minutes and with the promise it would be activated within 24 hours. That was Monday at 13:00 hrs. it is now Wednesday 15:00 hrs. and I have yet to receive the confirmation. I called my friend at the bank this morning and he promised me to look into it and call me back. I texted him a reminder just now.

So that was a visit to the bank and it took me from 10:00 till 13:00 to get that sorted. Just enough time left to drop the shopping off at home and drive to school for a meeting at 15:15.

From my house to the Canadian International School is a 50 minutes to 1 hour drive. My poor boys have to endure that twice a day on the school bus. I keep telling them they are lucky, because I had to ride my bicycle to school for 45 minutes one way and I always had head wind and the wind would always turn while I was in school, so I had to battle against it on the way home again. Those we tough times! ;-)

On the way back from the meeting I picked Adriaan up from the office and we arrived home at 18:00 hrs.

So the two errands took 8 hours altogether!!!

When you ask anyone in Bangalore how far away something is, the answer will not be in kilometers or miles but in hours. Traffic takes up most of the time. The roads in Bangalore are full at the best of times and congested most of the time. The condition of the majority of the roads is dismal, with potholes galore, there are speed bumps every 300 meters, cows stand or sleep in the middle of the road, buses and rickshaws seem to stop anywhere they like to offload passengers, trucks take U-turns and block all the lanes and two lane roads are used as 4 lane roads.

Yesterday we had to wait at a railroad crossing and as always I was surprised at what happened. There is this phenomena in India that drivers of any kind of vehicles can't deal with waiting in line when there is no traffic in the oncoming lanes, so what happens at a closed railway crossing is that the whole width of the road gets occupied by vehicles. This happens on both sides of the track and when the gates open again everyone wants to be the first one to cross. But both sides are fully blocked for oncoming traffic, so it comes to a standstill on the middle of the tracks. It takes forever to untangle this mess and nobody seems to realise that it would have been a lot faster had everybody stayed on their own side of the road... it blows my mind.

Waiting for the train to pass

I will never forget the time when the traffic got stuck in the middle of the track, with a big truck that couldn't move for lack of space amidst the chaos, and the booms went down again. The whistle of the train could be heard and nobody was able to move out of the way. Thank God I was only passing and we were able to drive along, but that is the stuff nightmares are made of!

So the answer to "What do you do all day?" should be "I spend most of my time in the car, stuck in traffic."