Time and patience are my two biggest bugbears, don't get me wrong I can be so very patient with other people especially the children I work with and time, well time in India is a strange concept that I kind of cope with. Those two words though, when it refers to me personally, I struggle so much with them. Around 18 months ago during one of my meditation sessions and then again in my mentoring session with my mentor, these two words came up for me, as clear as day, as if someone had spoke them in my head and since then, I've realise that time and patience are a real bug bear! When it comes to me, what I want and what I want to do, I want it all now and I don't want to give it time and have patience to wait for it to come around and finally be sorted out. I guess I think time is precious and it's precious how we use it. If we waste so much time in the wrong situation or in procrastinating are we not missing out on so much whether that is true and real happiness or achieving what you wish to in life and making changes that could have a positive impact on others.
India for me has always been a challenge but not in the usual ways that people would assume such as issues with staring or attitudes towards women which although can be a bit of a pain, I tend to take it in my stride and love the challenge of defying the odds or walking and acting confidently. However I guess it challenges me on my time and patience as I have realised that in India things are slow to get going, not in a negative way but that it just takes time to get sorted, to make connections, to build businesses, to learn all that you need to and find out the information that you want.
I have lived here just under five months and I guess in a way that I thought I would be fully settled with my business established. I think I basically thought I could pick up my UK life and naively thought that it would work out just as well. It hasn't but I am glad of that, i'm glad of the random opportunities that pop up, that you never know who you will meet that will provide you with a snippet of information, a helping hand, some wisdom or a new job prospect. I really do love that about here, that it is so random and one thing often leads to another, but at the same time I feel like I am being taught the lesson of time and patience. The reality is that jobs which I would work on in the UK and could get solved in a week can take up to a month to sort and a large proportion of that is not knowing where to look or how to get hold of something. I was hoping my massage business would be fairly well set up by now but I keep hitting snag after snag whether it is issues with google verification process or my website failing to find it's way up the search engines and I once again have to have time and patience. I almost feel like a draw string toy being held back whilst I am stood there trying to run forward and I am reminded that in India I need to have time and patience, to allow things to develop as they naturally should without overly forcing or becoming too stressed, particularly as new opportunities open up all the time.
I am forever trying to be two steps ahead, running along but India teaches me that you can try and be like that and waste a lot of energy or you can go with the flow and let things work themselves out. For example last time when my sim card was cut off, the joys of being a tourist! It took around a week to get sorted and put back on again, including the fact that they said it would be done by the end of the Saturday and it wasn't. I could of kept stressing and wasting time and energy on the situation including the Sunday when the phone shop was closed or I could let it be, focus on other things and return on Monday to see what the issue was, which was caused by a power cut. I guess sometimes we have to have the time and patience to weather the storms and allow situations and people the space to work things out.
Deep and reflective post for the week! Which reminds me, I am signed up to do the ten day Vipassna meditation retreat here in Jaipur. I really enjoy meditation and find it so beneficial to quieten the mind, go within and listen to the heart and soul, it usually has the answers! It is a ten day silent meditation, that I can cope with ok...the bits that I cringed at were that phones would be taken from you, gulp! Worst of all though, no food after mid day except fruit!.......I don't know how I am going to cope on that! If I don't eat I get ratty and I get headaches and I don't feel good, so going several hours without proper food does not fill me with joy, still it should be a good experience......if I can smuggle a few food bits in with me;-)
For the past three months I have been attempting to learn Hindi. As with many things, I am not naturally gifted at Hindi or learning languages, my one strength is I have a lot of perseverance! Which is just as well when it comes to learning Hindi which I actually secretly love.
A few years ago I attempted to learn Spanish, I had done it badly at school, mainly due to the rest of the class spending the lesson constantly messing around! I was enjoying learning Spanish but there wasn't the same need as there is with Hindi. Some of the people I interact with on a daily basis only speak Hindi and a fraction of English so I have to speak Hindi which is what fascinates me. I'm a Gemini, I love to communicate and I try to solve everything with communication in one form or another, so I love the fact that I am conveying a message and that by speaking in my broken Hindi I am conversing with someone I wouldn't be able to otherwise.
It makes me smile when I come out with some broken sentence in Hindi and the person responds. I'm like, wow! They understand me! The hate relationship comes in because the language is mushkil....hard! There are days where I feel like I make progress with it and my vocabulary is improving and I probably know around 200 words in Hindi but my sentences leave a lot to be desired! I tend to get by with a mixture of English and a couple of words of Hindi chucked in there. With the exception of one Uber journey I took, whereby when the driver heard me speak a fraction of Hindi he felt this was a perfect opportunity to converse with me for twenty minutes in Hindi! Whilst perhaps not focusing too much on the road either! Despite me informing him I knew 'toda Hindi' (little Hindi) this didn't seem to matter to him and he persevered with 'But madam Apka.....for the next twenty minutes. Firstly it was actually very good of him as we did have a conversation and I actually understood most of what he was saying purely from understanding just a few words and bless him, more importantly he understood what I was saying back to him.
The ones who are probably the most forgiving of my Hindi are the children at school who despite their being a huge language barrier, speak in short sentences for me and try hard to understand me. There are a few children who understand me better than others and so they end up being my translators! I have a long way to go when it comes to learning Hindi but working with the children and being surrounded by it helps a lot, certainly for the listening part.
My speaking of Hindi though, well that involves mashing Hindi and English together in the most interesting sentences! So although I love learning Hindi because it opens up a new way of communicating, I also hate it because it's taking too long for me and often when I try to construct my sentence I still have it wrong. The world loves a trier! Fortunately so do my Hindi teachers who I see twice a week, who are patient with me and determined to teach me despite me forgetting things from week to week!
A chunk of my weekend usually involves Hindi practice and making these little flash cards that you can see here! Thank goodness for breakfast cereal boxes.....they make great flashcards!
Then it's going through my books and reading something from a previous class that I realise I hadn't taken in at the time.
I'm hoping that by the end of the year, along with being able to make amazing roti's that are soft and puff, I will be semi fluent in Hindi and be able to hold a good conversation together and understand most of what people say. Who knows if i'm being over ambitious.....but then I have just mastered how to make soft roti's, thanks to my friend, who speaks almost no English, so there is hope;-)
The downside of moving to another country and giving up everything you once had means you get rid of a lot of stuff before you leave and I really did get rid of everything save a few boxes my mum is looking after for me, plus you no longer have the well paying job to be able to afford anything! I was fortunate to grow up in a family where we learnt the value of money and how to get by on very little. At a young age we learnt how to make money by doing odd jobs for people within the town and by age 11 I had a paper round. I digress! It also taught us to make the most of things and how to turn what may be seen as rubbish in to something and to enjoy second hand things. My brother and sister in the garden where we spent many hours pretending soil was ice cream and tried to make bow and arrows out of tree branches!
I am fortunate to have a beautiful terrace here, which I absolutely love and am sat outside here right now writing this. I spend most of my time out here as I love watching the birds, being in nature and listening to the bats as they flutter around at night. I also love gardening and as my terrace is my own little haven, my own place to escape when I face any difficulties out here, I wanted to put my own mark on it. However, that's a little difficult when you don't have any spending money and so I knew I had to employ some of those skills to turn my terrace around. I began to plan my ideas and here is an example of what I will do, once I have drank all my beer! Once I've cleaned up the bottles and removed the labels I'll put candles into the bottles to create lighting.
I do have lights on the terrace but would prefer this kind of lighting. I'll also get people to collect glass jars so I can put tea lights in to create further lighting! I already made my own plant pots out of an old plastic bottle! My lovely Hindi teacher kindly gave me an Aloe Vera plant so that I can try and grow one eventually as big as the one I used to have back in the UK.
I really wanted to decorate my terrace with some plants but when I heard the cost of plant pots, which are significantly more than in the UK, I was wondering what to do instead. Fortunately my lovely bhai had already offered to let me have some plants when the weather was cooler for planting out....but that left me still needing to get pots....until the universe answered my query for me! Thanks to the local expat group on Facebook and someone choosing to give away her unwanted pots due to a house move, I not only got some plant pots but five plants too! They look lovely on my terrace and it is so uplifting to see them and makes me feel even more at home. My bhai will bring me two curry plants tomorrow which will be great for cooking with and another wonderful addition to my garden.
Soon though the plants will have to go indoors as it is too hot here and they'll not be able to cope with the heat.....not really an issue I have had to deal with when it comes to plants in the UK. It was truly wonderful having my dilemma resolved and receiving this wonderful free gift of plants, I love it when the Universe answers!
Next freebie and thing to be grateful for, was receiving some books! When I came out here I was allowed to bring around 55kg of belongings and seeing as I wanted my shoes and clothes and hair dye there was no room for heavy books! Sadly a friend will be heading back to her own country after having lived here for the last nine months. No longer needing things like books, she thought I might like them. It's lovely to receive some books as although I am not a big reader it is nice to have the option there and some of the books are about India and so I'll enjoy reading them.
I'm especially grateful for the Hindi dictionary and book about learning Hindi. Both will be incredibly helpful resources for me and the dictionary will be a great too guide. Again it would have been nice to have one but I hadn't bought one as yet as it wasn't a necessity and I could make do without, but i'm really glad to have it....and will probably constantly have my nose in it finding out how to say the latest word that has popped in to my head!
It's lovely when you get rewarded one way or another and receiving the books was a nice bonus and helpful and receiving the plant pots and plants to go with it was a real blessing. I'm on my way to making my terrace look fantastic.....I soon won't need to live inside, just outside, or at least until the rains come!
I love Indian food, it's full of flavour and has such a satisfying taste, very different from the typical UK food which is much more bland although we do seem to eat a lot of Indian dishes back in the UK too, but you can not beat the food out here! Down side is, I always preferred to get my Indian food as a takeaway or straight from a jar, rather than to actually make it from scratch and all those spices terrified me....what was i meant to do with them?! I confess that for the first few months I would go to the local supermarket here and steer clear of the whole spices section and make the most random concoctions of food instead....and eggs have been a life saver! However along with my determination to learn Hindi, I was also determined to learn how to cook Indian food properly, that and if I want to stay living here I need to be able to cook the local food. One day my intention is to be able to have friends over, serve them Indian food and it almost be as good as theirs! I'm a long way off from that though!
However a friend and i decided to take a couple of cooking classes to learn how to make some basic dishes which would hopefully see us on the way to becoming culinary experts! Or at least be able to make Dal....Our first week of cooking we did learn how to make Dal, Dal Fry and Garlic Dal....the Garlic Dal was delicious or at least it was at cooking class....I've since made it a few times and still haven't worked out quite where I am going wrong. Sadly, with every new skill, you have to practice in order to improve and like many things, I am not naturally good at cooking and i'm having to eat the not so great versions on my way to becoming a better cook!
We also made paranthas and roti's. Now the roti's I have done OK with keeping the shape to a certain extent and they come out tasting nice.....but then I realised I was making hard roti's/chapati's and they ideally need to be sort so you can bend them and break them and that's what a good roti is....soft! So it has now become my mission that by the end of the year I will be able to make soft and completely round roti's! This is no easy task, but I need to get this accomplished, I need my roti's to be soft and to rise when they should rise. I've tried making roti's 6 or 7 times now and they never rise and their not soft, fortunately they taste good so that's at least my saving grace.
My work friends tell me it will take only two months under their supervision and so I am going to my friend's house tomorrow to begin the soft roti process. It should be fun, my friend speaks hardly any English and my Hindi is still very much beginner's stage but somehow we always seem to manage to communicate. I'm realising the best way to learn is to go ahead and practice myself.....but with a little supervision from friends who have been making these dishes for years.
One recipe I seem to be managing fairly well is brinjal stuffed with masala. I've made this twice now and both recipes I used were different and so produce slightly different results.....but dare I say it, they were both nice! I love aubergine and so it was nice to be able to cook with them and such a tasty recipe like that.
I tried my hand at Paneer Butter Masala but over did the cream and had issues making the masala because you need a grinder/blender and at the time I didn't have one so although it was a good attempt on my part it did not quite turn out as expected. Fortunately I have a sweet tooth and love cream so it tasted fine to me! It also give me hope when I have an idea where the recipe went wrong as it gives me an opportunity to improve it next time round. Then there was Jeera Aloo that I made which is a dry recipe, that turned out good, but I overdid the salt! Slight adjustments need to be made to most of the foods that I am cooking and then I am hoping they will taste a lot better and I will be eating them because I want to to and not because I refuse to throw it away and waste food!
So cooking Indian food is a learning experience and as I found out today, the soft roti situation, well if I make roti's three times a day like my friend does, i'll have it sorted.! With a task like Indian style cooking, i'm not going to have time for much else.....gone are the days of my spinach and ricotta pizza bunged in the oven for twelve minutes and instead there is the 60 - 90 minute task in front of me, of reading the recipe and finding a way of cooking it without crying my heart out over the onions which incessantly sting my eyes or when I accidentally rub my eyes having just handled red chilli powder, to add a bit of extra sting there!
Watch this space and in the near future.....or at least at some point this year, you will experience the rising roti!
Life in India is always interesting, probably because it is so different from the UK! In the UK we do not have peacocks wandering around or making a cat call every night as they settle down for the evening, we do not have parrots flying over us each day (unless your in a certain area of London!), we do not have cows wandering freely everywhere, or elephants running red lights or camels pulling carts to work. Nor do we have cheeky monkeys that break in to your house because you forget to close the gate and steal your bananas!
I first came across this group of monkeys when at 6am one morning, which is never a good time for Dannie, my friend and I were awoken by a loud banging noise outside. I went out first to investigate and found a little monkey swinging on my neighbours metal ladder attached to the house and getting great fun out of making such a loud racket! There were about nine monkeys. One had clearly stolen a top from somewhere and decided it would be great fun to put the top over his head, but not fully down so he couldn't see and then put his arms through and run around like a little ghost. He seemed to love doing this!
I watched them for a while and then headed in to tell my friend who had also been woken by the noise. As she came to investigate they decided they would come check out my terrace. So next thing we knew there were three monkeys on our terrace, reminding me that it was their terrace and for me to back off! How nice!
The next morning they decided to be our wake up call again but decided to start a little earlier at 5.30am....I was not impressed!
However this particular group of monkeys really proved they lived up to their name when one afternoon whilst sat in my lounge, I wander towards the kitchen and see the back of an animal. It was a lovely grey blue colour and my first natural reaction was, it was a cat! Then I realised no, not a cat, a monkey! Three monkeys to be precise and they were all trying to steal my big bunch of bananas that I had left on the kitchen top! There was no way I was going to lose the bananas I had just bought, so I went charging at them......then realised they could bite so I ran the over way! They slightly chased me and were hissing at me whilst I shouted back at them from the comfort of the half closed door! They had each got a banana and were going back for more, which is when I figured I would chuck the cushion at them. Fortunately this worked and they scarpered, they each only had one banana and one dropped half of his!
After they left I locked the screen door, which is what I should have done in the first place! A few moments later I hear a crying sound and it is the monkey back and crying for his other half of the banana he dropped. So like a fool I am.....I felt sorry for him and chucked the other half out!
Having your bananas stolen by monkeys is not your every day UK experience and although I was down a few bananas for my oat cakes it was a funny experience! These monkeys probably frequent my terrace once a week that I know of, sometimes I can just hear them outside calling.
Today as I walked home from work, down our very quiet residential street i came across a man with his camel and cart, just plodding along as you do. The novelty doesn't seem to wear off......
When i wrote in here almost four weeks ago i was feeling a little down and frustrated and as is always difficult for me, having time and patience, the time and patience to allow things to happen in life rather than rushing through it! Time and patience is something i still struggle with but reading my blog post from 8th March makes me aware of how much has changed in four weeks!
I try to be a positive person, to see the good in situations, to believe things happen for a reason and that some situations require the time to see them through and when we look back we can understand what their significance was.....but i'm only human and there are times when it can weigh me down and that was certainly the situation four weeks ago. I love living in India and to me it most definitely is home. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of frustrations, after three months of living here it annoys me that people still want to come and say hello to me as I walk to work just because I am a foreigner and female, Almost every day for three months, it gets wearing! To be fair I don't get it that much but that's mainly because i stick my music on and block them all out and i'm usually very oblivious to most things! I know they are staring and talking about me anyway so they can do that without my involvement! I guess I get used to the place but i'm still interesting and new to some people!
Then there is the bank account I have been trying to open for the past two and a half months and I still haven't been successful;-) Internet finally got sorted and oh that made life easier for me. Dannie without internet is not good! Things can take a long time to get sorted and once they are you can breathe a sigh of relief and get ready for the next challenge! Just the other day they turned off my sim because I had had it for three months and as a foreigner that's as long as I was allowed it, fortunately my two bhai (Indian brothers) managed to sort that out for me:-) It took three visits to the phone shop but they sorted! Their good brothers to me and look after me well....as brothers should do!
So how does life look at present! Firstly it is hard to believe that it was a year ago that I set off for two months on my travelling expedition with 1 week in Nepal, 1 week in Tibet and 8 weeks planned in India, the one place I just wanted to be in, never realising that I would in fact actually want to make it permanent! Those two months were great because they were very tough, having to deal with many situations and dealing with them on the whole on my own, things did not work out as I had hoped and I had to deal with various challenges and I now realise the importance of them as it seems to make things easier second time round and make me aware of what is still important to me. So if it had not been for those two months of travel and seeing what India was like I would not be sitting in my apartment now, feeling cosy and at home! So time does indeed tell on many situations! It also helps, as having seen a small proportion of India already it means i am not desperate to rush out and see lots of it at present and right now i want to focus on getting settled here and working on helping to educate the children and provide them with the best learning environment.
So from this time in India.......
To this time in India!
