Dad is here!

Hey all,

The past two days have been pretty busy! Tuesday night I headed over to the airport at about 11:15PM and waited there for about an hour and a half to pick up dad. Fortunately the taxi ride back from the airport was significantly less eventful (and much cheaper) than the last one. We got to my place around 2AM and went to sleep soon afterwards.

The next morning I woke up before Dad (he slept in a bit). Once he woke up and while he was getting ready I made a slight breakthrough in part of my research (saw a new way of looking at a problem I was working on the previous day) ^_^. Once we were all ready we wondered around the neighborhood a bit, I showed him Basham circle (again, "circles" in Bangalore are more often just intersections), and we went to the dosa place that is near my flat. I'm not sure why, but the people at the dosa place treated me more like a tourist than usual: even after I told them what we wanted they tried to give me food advice, which was rather irksome (I totally related to Elaine getting upset when people thought she was a tourist in Martinique).

After breakfast we checked out a guest house just a block from my flat and checked Dad in there after looking at a few rooms (and I canceled the reservation I had already made for him in another place in Malleshwarm). Once we brought his bags over and got him settled in I went to work and put in a few hours of work and grabbed a light lunch before leaving work again at 1PM to take Dad around. We wandered a little south of Basham circle, had lunch and a nice chat a Chinese place I've been to before with Nels. After lunch we wandered back, attempted to get a cellphone set up for Dad (it is proving to be very difficult to unlock his phone to use other SIM cards, and I think we have given up now. We have the Hutch SIM card, but they already took his phone for a day and wanted two more! I think we're cutting our losses and giving up [note: this is from the perspective of 'now', which is Thursday, breaking from the rest of this post which is on 'Wednesday'], and stopped by the nice bookstore that I found in our neighborhood.

After that full afternoon Dad went back to his hotel and I worked for about an hour, then we were picked up by Ravi (a researcher in my group) to head over to the wedding reception (which comes before the wedding here, as an announcement of the impending [the next day] marrage to the world)of a Nikhil (another guy in my group, who sits next to me). The reception was all the way across town, and on the way there we picked up another guy in my group, Deba, who was buying some gifts fro Nikhil and his bride. It took about an hour to get across town and it was very nice chatting with Ravi and Deba on the way.

The reception itself was rather incredible. The entire building was covered in lights and there was a massive and colorful sign announcing it outside. There were literally several *hundred* people there with all sorts of colorful saris and nice clothing. We initially looked around the huge (and again, colorfully decorated) room, than sat down and relaxed in one of the many chairs facing a stage in the front of the room that had a pair of (I kid you not) *thrones*. I mostly listened to Ravi and Deba discuss the similarities and differences of Indian wedding traditions (though I did learn something about red dots on the forehead. A bindi is the dot that women wear on their forheads and it is really just a style and fashion thing, when a woman is married they start putting a certain coloring on the place they part their hair and do so till their husband dies, and finally a tika is the red powder I've had on my forehead in Hampi and it means "god's grace"). Nihil and his bride eventually came in, had a small ceremony for either the bride's or the bride's mother's birthday (complete with the really weird, slightly mutated Indian version of "Happy Birthday"), then they started greeting guests. Every single one of the people came up in small groups, greeted the bride and groom, and had their picture taken (another major feature of the wedding reception is that the bride and groom stage a bunch of pictures for the photographers... who seem to really be the ones that control weddings nowadays...), which makes me feel bad for the bride and groom who have to keep smiling for pictures! Fortunately we got through the line early and went to have some of the *delicious* food, of which their were copious amounts of!

After we had eaten we headed out (receiving an exit gift of a coconut ^_^) and took Ravi's car back across town. The chatting was even more interesting on the way back. Deba is from eastern India and his family is originally from Bangladesh but migrated during "The Partition" when India and Pakistan became separate countries. We got to hear some about the partition, about east & west Pakistan (which were one country until east Pakistan succeeded and became Bangladesh), and some interesting and relatively unknown bits of history (the eastern side of the partition is less well known and less well studied). The ethnic group of Deba's grandparents apparently has a language and a script all of their own, but it is now really dieing out (pretty much all of the people left Bangladesh, either for England or for India [there are many Indian stores in England run by people of this group whose name I can't remember]). Anyway, lots of other intersting things were discussed, research, the state of some institutions in India, transportiation (Deba had the priceless quote about autorickshaws, "They're the fastest way around because that guy [the driver] doesn't care about his safety or yours!"). In conclusion, the ride back was a lot of fun ^_^.

Once we got back Dad came over to my place for a little bit and met Tracy (Nels still wasn't back!). After he left I got to talk to Mom and Brandon for a while (Brandon just got back from a month-long, spectacular-sounding trip to Spain and France!), which was really nice. After I got off the phone with them I called Elaine, which was also *really* nice! ^_^

Wow, and that was only Wednesday! I think I'm going to do another post for Thurday!

Cheers,
Jason