Last week before the holidays

FINALLY! The school holidays have started.

It has been a busy week the past week. On Monday and Tuesday there were still exams, on Wednesday we went to the FRRO (Foreigners Regional Registration Office), to extend our residence permits for another year. Simon had his long awaited performance as Charley in Willy Wonka Jr. on Wednesday and Thursday night. Yesterday was a half day in school, with an awards ceremony and class parties. The boys have really good report cards, Simon has straight A's, Ruben scored an average of 81% and Joshua was best in class for Chemistry, Physics and PE. We are proud parents.

Last Sunday we had the yearly 'Bitterballen competitie' from the Dutch Club. Bitterballen are a typical Dutch snack, a deep fried ball filled with beef/chicken ragout. Four brave Dutchies made bitterballen and I was one of the three lucky members of the panel to taste and judge the balls.

Now it is time to start packing. First I will have to go through the boys' clothes to see what still fits (they never wear their jeans or long sleeved shirts here) and make a shopping list of what to bring back with us.

(Adriaan is working on the photos he took of Simon's performance, as soon as he is finished I will post some here)

How boring it must be.

Somehow, when the holidays are approaching, I get easily irritated by some of the typical local flavours. It is not that I don't like living there and I am not walking around in a constant state of dislike, but things start to bother me. Things that I usually don't even notice or don't mind as much.
In Australia it was the remote location we were in, in Nigeria it was the confined compound life, in Libya the traffic. Here in Bangalore it is the chaos and noise.

The road just outside Vista has been dug up, AGAIN. It has been so in several places over the last few months to lay new sewage pipes. Huge holes get dug, piles of dirt deposited in the middle of the road and traffic has to find a way through it. It is a small two way street at the best of times, but when work is going on it is reduced to hardly one proper lane. When the work is finished the dirt gets shovelled back into the hole and that's that. No levelling, no resurfacing, just dirt. Bumpy, dusty/muddy dirt, that no one wants to drive on, so traffic keeps pushing each other out of the way to use the small strip of tarmac that is left.

While the road work is going on, there is nobody to organise traffic, nobody to make sure things stay safe for the road workers either. Traffic gets stuck because everybody is pushing to get through instead of taking turns and giving each other some space. One lane, traffic on both sides pushing in or blocking whatever space there could be by standing 2 or 3 wide, so oncoming traffic can't go anywhere. Motorbikes and rickshaws jumping the queue and everybody honking their horns (like that would make the traffic jam magically disappear...).

It always amazes me when I see a closed railway crossing with traffic waiting on both sides standing along the whole width of the road. How do they think this will make things go faster when the booms go up????

If only all road users would play by the rules, if only they would use some logic, if only they would use lane discipline, if only road work would be coordinated and properly announced and traffic guided through detours. If only traffic was more like it is at home it wouldn't take an hour to get through 50 meters of road!!!

India is never, ever, quiet. EVER. Days are filled with traffic noise (the constant honking of horns), people talking at the top of their voice on their cellphones and children screaming at each other while playing in the street. Nights are filled with barking dogs, honking horns, people talking very loudly on their cellphones and children screaming while playing outside.... At home the nights are quiet, honking your car horn is an offence and children are told to keep it down when they get too loud.

This week, while irritated by the noise and chaos around me, and thinking it is so much more organised and peaceful at home, I realised how boring and bland life must be for Indians living in The Netherlands. Everything is overly organised, life is mostly inside the house and you have to stick by the rules. Life for them must be like the Dutch food, bland and colourless.

I am looking forward to our holiday in NL, but I know I will miss India too. When we arrive back the Indian way of live will still be noisy and chaotic, but we will be able to enjoy it again.

O, and the fact that several snakes have been caught on Vista in the last few days, doesn't help make me feel good...... (baby Cobras and Russel Vipers)

Almost done...

We can see the end of the school year coming closer and closer and with that our trip to NL, but before we can pack our bags there is exam week to get through.

I have always been nervous for exams, so much so that I had mayor black outs and had to repeat a year in high school. Those days are far behind me, but now my boys have to sit exams. This week it are 'only' the end of year exams, but next year Joshua will have to sit his IGCSE exams.

The boys don't seem to be too fussed, but I am... Especially after yesterday. They had a day off from school, so a full day to do their revising and studying.
Ruben felt like sleeping and lounging, not at all like putting some serious effort into learning, while Joshua worked hard on his Chemistry all day.

So I forced Ruben into doing some work by threatening to take all his electronic devices away, while I tried to help Josh with things like mol and the Avogadro number. Boy, I had to dig deep into the dusty parts of my brain to remember what it was all about! Thank God my brother studied Chemistry, so there was some elaborate texting and emailing going on.

I emailed Adriaan about all our hard work and my brother helping us, and he was disappointed we hadn't asked him. So he emailed a long explanation for Joshua. I love how involved he is with the kids, even when he is slaving away over sushi in Japan.

With some breaks for drinks and snacks and a longer break at the pool, we managed to get a lot of work done. Now it is up to them, but I am sitting at home being nervous.

Will it ever stop this exam stress of mine?

6.022 141 99 X 10²³

This large number is approximately equal to the number of protons in a gram of pure protons. It is customary to introduce the term 'gram molecule' into explanations of the importance of this number:

a gram molecule is a mole of the molecules:
y grams of a molecule whose relative molecular mass is y, will contain 6.022 x 10²³ molecules.

Thanks to Wikipedia

Bad Timing

Adriaan sent me a text this morning: 'to Japan this weekend'. 

Apparently there is a delegation from China coming to Japan and A has to accompany them. He will be away for a whole week. The week that we are supposed to go to the FRRO (foreign registration), the week that Josh and Ruben have end of year exams and need dad to help them with revising their Math and Sciences.

We can't do the FRRO without A, so it has to be postponed. The tricky thing is that we are travelling on the 18th and the FRRO has to be sorted before that. Unfortunately the rules, regulations and requirements tend to change overnight, so there is always the possibility that we have to submit even more paperwork and proof of whatever they want proof of.... With our luck....

Having a haircut and then some...

I have had some traumatic experiences when it comes to having my hair done. I remember a perm that my mum set at home, leaving me walk this earth like a cloned sheep. We also did some hair colouring at home that turned out dramatic.

I still cringe when I see the photos that were taken on Schiphol, when we arrived back in The Netherlands after 4 years in Australia. From the back you can't tell my brother and me apart (and no, my brother did not have long hair!).

Living abroad makes going to the hairdressers a leap of faith. It is a lot harder to explain what you want exactly if it is not in your mother tongue or even in your second language. When we lived in Nigeria, on a small Island, I only went to the hairdressers on our home leaves in The Netherlands. The Nigerians have such different hair from my thin, straight, straw, that I didn't trust that they could turn it into anything representational.

In Libya it was hard to find hairdressers at all, since the women should not be seen from the street without their head scarf. We went on home leave 3 times a year, so I coloured it myself and had my haircuts in NL. Men on the other hand could go to the hairdressers in Libya for a cut and a shave and all sorts of skin treatments and massages too, on almost every street corner. One of the first outings my father had in Tripoli, was to the hairdressers with Adriaan and the boys.

Here in India I do go to the hairdressers regularly. Not just to have my hair cut and coloured, but also to have my eyebrows treaded and coloured and to have a manicure and pedicure. ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!
The first time I saw an Indian lady at the hair dressers with 4 people working on her at the same time, I thought it looked ridiculous and not very relaxing. I could not see myself like that. I couldn't even remember the last mani/pedi I had had. But now, just a few months later, I have turned into a proper Indian lady:

Look at me acting the real upper class Indian lady the typical expat wife

We went with 5 women and we had so much fun! Lunch before and coffee after, what a tough life we have.

PS

My hair turned out nicely! ;-)

Maybe, just maybe, it will all turn out well.....

Adriaan arrived back home Wednesday night, after 2.5 weeks in Australia. He visited our friends in Perth and worked in Karratha, the town we lived in for 4 years and where our eldest two were born and no.3 was conceived, so a place with fond memories. The first few days he kept sending me texts with updates on our old neighbourhood, the shops and restaurants. It made me home sick for Karratha again. It was our first posting and we had such a great time there, that it took me a long time to get used to living in NL again after that. So he came home with stories, photos and gifts, sooooooo nice.

It has been over a month ago now that we found out (by coincidence) that our belongings might still be in Tripoli. We have been in contact with the company to ask for clarification and got the promise they would look into it, but that was followed by silence.
Last night we decided we would not wait any longer and called the moving company to ask if they knew anything about the whereabouts of our goods. They called us back within the hour and told us they had just been informed our things are indeed still in Tripoli.... Good news is that the container will leave this Sunday, Inshallah, and should be in NL in about 3 weeks. So with another week or so for customs etc, it might just be possible to get it all delivered while we are in NL for the summer holidays. They told A there are 210 boxes with our name on it (but A said later it could be 110 too). Sounds great, but let's wait and see before we celebrate.

Looks like this emotional roller coaster is slowly coming to a halt, let's just hope the photo with the scared faces, that always gets made while plummeting down, will be one we can laugh about when we finally get out...

How to explain this?

One of the positive things about having to take bed rest (besides making my back feel a whole lot better) is that I read a lot. At one point I had read all the books I have, all but one. That one came with a bunch of Dutch books that were on sale for a local charity. It is called 'De Waterspuwer' in Dutch, but the original title is 'The Gargoyle'. It is a book from 2008, written by Andrew Davidson. According to the cover it is "The International Sensation" and the blurb promises a good read, but as the saying goes: never judge a book by it's cover!

I started reading it while waiting at the hospital for one of my daily physiotherapy sessions and within a few pages I felt like throwing it in the bin. I didn't like the style, I didn't like the subject and I disliked the main character too. I closed it and stared out the window and then opened it again and continued reading. I had several of those episodes over the next few days, but somehow I continued reading. Why?
I finished it in four days and was sorry it ended. Why?

I can't tell you why, I can't even tell you exactly what the book is about...

The main character, the narrator, is a man. He is a, drug using, porn star, who gets severely burned in a car crash (and looses he penis, Ha). In the hospital he gets a visit from a schizophrenic and manic, woman from the psych ward. They become friends and she claims she has known him for a long time, since she was a nun in the Middle Ages in fact, and starts telling him stories of her life and his (he gets burned in every one of his lives).

There is not a lot that makes sense about the book and yet there is a lot that does... To me the book is about as schizophrenic and manic as the female character. There are some beautiful stories and some horrible ones. I never got to like any of the characters in the book and usualy the characters are what makes me want to read on.

I have read the whole book (all 475 pages of it) and I haven't thrown it in the bin when I finished  it, it is back in the book case. Why?

Somehow it has affected me and made me want to continue to read it, that has to be a compliment for the author. It can't have been that bad and it wasn't really, but I didn't feel at any moment like I liked reading it...

How to explain that?

The Gargoyle: the mesmerizing story of one man’s descent into personal hell and his quest for salvation.
On a dark road in the middle of the night, a car plunges into a ravine. The driver survives the crash, but his injuriesconfine him to a hospital burn unit. There the mysterious Marianne Engel, a sculptress of grotesques, enters his life. She insists they were lovers in medieval Germany, when he was a mercenary and she was a scribe in the monastery of Engelthal. As she spins the story of their past lives together, the man’s disbelief falters; soon, even the impossible can no longer be dismissed.