Going to India to cool down and other upside-down notions

Greetings everyone. I hope you are keeping well and enjoying life. It’s always good to hear from you, so please keep sending your news as well. Shout out to brother Neil Fordham today. It’s his birthday this weekend and he tells me that he’s making his own birthday cake. Now that’s taking control of one’s own destiny!

Glenn and I are doing well: we’ve just passed the three month mark in Doha and feel that we’ve been here much longer. We can’t quite figure that out; perhaps it’s because we’ve settled into a routine and everything feels pretty normal for us now. But let’s talk about “normal,” shall we?

I’ve already mentioned that the new normal means that Friday is the new Saturday and Sunday is the new Monday. Tuesday, not Wednesday here is “hump” day (the day at work when you feel as though you’re half-way through the week). But there are many more things that seem, well, a bit different here, even to the point of seeming upside down.

For example, the “cold” water that comes out of our taps is from storage tanks that are exposed to the sun. So this means that, in 40+ degree weather, the supposedly cold water in the storage tanks gets pretty darn hot. Too hot for showering, in fact. We also have a hot water tank inside the house. So, we learned, what we have to do is turn off the power to the hot water tank and use that as our cold water supply. As a result, to get hot water, we turn the cold water tap on, and to get cold water (okay, not scalding hot water; it’s not exactly what you’d call cold), we have to turn on the hot water tap. Are you following? It’s a bit of a mind-bender to think about this first thing in the morning, but we’re getting used to it. 

Another thing we’re getting used to is to staying inside in the summer! As Canadians, we are used to spending every possible moment outdoors enjoying the warm days of a short summer season, and it’s rare that it gets too hot to make that possible. And, of course, we spend most of the winter in Canada rushing between house, car, and office (or the Caribbean) to stay out of the cold. Well, it is the opposite here. June is already hot enough. July and August, we are told, will be unbearable. So it’s dashing between house, car, and office...but in the summer, instead of the winter! Yesterday, for example, Glenn and I walked to Lulu Hypermarket to shop for groceries. This was 9:15 in the morning (on a Friday, of course—as you know from the blog entitled When Did the Chicken Cross the Road, Friday morning is the only day we dare to do that). We toughed out the slightly over 1 kilometre walk in the above 40 degree temperature, and, of course, we took an Uber home with our groceries. I had already gone out dragon boating that morning, and it was pretty hot even at 6 AM.

So, this brings us to Bangalore, India. Yes, Glenn and I escaped to India last week...to cool off! Well, and for another very important reason: to visit some dear friends, and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Bangalore is India’s “garden” city. For a city of 12 million people, it’s also an amazingly lush green oasis. I’ve been to Bangalore 8 times, but this was Glenn’s very first time to India. We both enjoyed the cooler weather, the huge green trees, the flowers, the rain that somehow managed to hold off until evening almost every day, and riding the new metro line and discovering new areas of the city. We both loved the respite from the Doha heat and enjoyed the amenities at our hotel, including the pool, which, I have to confess, was a little bit cool compared to the compound pool in Doha.. 

Most of all, though, we were so fortunate to spend time with Shashi and “friends,” at a wonderful lunch hosted by Malavika. Thanks so much, Mala, for a lovely afternoon and some of the best, freshest Italian food we’ve experienced! (Glenn was a little under the weather (so to speak) at the time, and he thanks Mala so much for taking such good care of him.) Glenn and I also enjoyed time with Shashi and Dr. Deshpande (at a very strange Afghani restaurant that was fitted out to be the inside of a cave and in which the wait staff wore pith helmets and British khaki!), and a visit with Shashi at the storied Bangalore Club. Thanks so much to all of you for your warm Bengalurean hospitality!

A real bonus was meeting up with Premila Paul, who happened to be visiting Bangalore from Madurai to support some friends in hospital. Premila was my supervisor during my sabbatical in Madurai in 2007-8 and is a dear friend. It was so good to see her again.

So, as upside down as our world may be now, it felt just right to visit India to cool off—and to receive the warmest possible welcome from some very special people.

May you be so blessed! 

Now, as we brace ourselves to experience furnace-like temperatures and high humidity for the next month or so, we really look forward to seeing many of you when we come to Canada to cool off in August.

Take care and enjoy your weather, whatever it may be.