The Spicy Indian Blog

Got the radiator of the car replaced today. The radiator cost 92$, and the labor cost was 150$ . Plus the coolant etc... Man... It certainly is an expensive country... Wished I could take the car back to India to get it reparied... If wishes were horses, the labor would have been cheaper... :-) ... Wish there was some way these things too could be outsourced to India... :-) ...

It is getting unbearably hot in here. 41 degrees today…Probably the highest so far, this season. Expected to get higher over the next couple of days. Nagpur madhe aalyasaarkhe vatte. Also, the days are getting very long now… It becomes dark only around 9.30pm. And is brightens up between 4.30 to 5.00 in the morning. In July August, it will probably get dark only by 10-10.30 at night. Or probably not, since today is supposed to be the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Yesterday I had gone out for a walk at 7.00pm in the evening. It was so hot and bright, as if at 3.30 4.00 in the afternoon. By the time, I returned, my clothes and shoes were unbearably heated up. And I to take a cold shower to regain some sanity. All this was amusing and interesting to us earlier, but now its beginning to get on our nerves.

(...continued from 'The Eagles have landed...' ) The dash from the LA Terminal 1 to Terminal 14 , and the infuriating care-a-damn of UA notwithstanding, we boarded the UA flight to San Francisco (SFO). In the flight, I met a friendly gora gentleman (he was a medical techno intern, if you get what I mean) living in the Bay Area, and spent some time chatting him up. He had come to India to to attend a college friend's marriage. From him, I did get some starter pointers like that of Craigs list. We were quite full of the long journey, and wanted a place to rest ourselves asap. Except for an hour at Frankfurt, we never had much of a chance to freshen up... We wished we were already at the Residence Inn, where we were to be put up. And the progress of the last part of the journey LA onwards, seemed like a tiring eternity. It was like the colloquial Indian saying "Hathi gaya, poonch nahi jaati..." ... Or may be it was a crooked application of the Pareto's principle...

We put our feet on the pious land of America on the 6… “…thamba THamba WAIT… did I hear you say pious land of America …“, you are probably interjecting just about now. Yes, you did hear correct. Arre baba, Doesn’t everybody want to be in the US at least once, or see their wards there atleast once in a lifetime…Does any one talk of Kashi nowadays? I think I saw some bulb flash. So we re-begin the beginning, I would say. We put our feet on the pious land of America on the 6th Of Jan 2006. I was familiar with this land due to earlier exposures. However Mugdha was breathing American air for the first time. So all the more, I would have liked to add the epithets ‘cool crisp’ to the American air. However we landed in LA, and I felt exactly as I feel when I land at the Mumbai airport. Hot under my collar, mostly because of the sultryish weather. We did not have to wait much at the LA airport. After much consternation about the connecting United Airlines flight, we did manage to catch the next...

This is one of my favorite photographs, taken from above the lighthouse at Point Reyes, California. It surely is an exotic place, an ethereal setting, and jutting into the Pacific... And yes, the climb from the lighthouse is pretty steep. (This Photo Is Not to be copied.)