Amour

Johnny made me this card in French class. I melted, of course.

Johnny had a foreign language class this year that was an introduction to Spanish for half the year and an introduction to French for half the year. Next year he has to choose which language he wants to focus on all year. We encouraged him to choose Spanish, thinking that we'd probably be heading to a Spanish-speaking post next. Well, the bid list is out, and there's NOT A SINGLE Spanish-speaking post on it that works for our time schedule. NOT ONE! It's so bizarre. The good news is that Johnny's teacher says he has a real talent for languages, so he'll do great wherever we go.

Mango season

Mmmmm ... mangoes ....

Four months in photos

Now that every electronic device we own has a built-in camera, I occasionally have to sit down and do a little organizing. Here are some random photos from the last four months. They're of varying quality, as they come from our digital camera, friends' digital cameras, our two cell phones, and my iPod. You'll also notice by Evie's changing hair length that they're sometimes out of chronological order. Oh, well. Enjoy!

Samuel and our neighbor Alex like to help with the gardening. We're lucky that our downstairs neighbors have boys that line up in age with Samuel and Johnny. I just found out that the two new families coming into our compound have 2-year-olds, as well. Fun times ahead!

Tamil lettering on the sign outside our church. It reads "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Visitors welcome." Well ... the Tamil equivalent of that.

Our church building is brand new. This is what greeted visitors to the open house in January.

Missionaries working the church open house in January. Most missionaries here are from India, but there are a few Americans here and there. You'll recognize "greenies" by their shell-shocked look.

Artisans working at a crafts exhibition at Valluvar Kottam.

Tapestry at a textile exhibition at the Kalakshetra Foundation.

Papier mache puppets ready for a performance at Kalakshetra.

The white board outside Alphabet Playschool, where Evie and Samuel have been attending preschool. There's a new quote every day.

A "salon" is a "saloon" here. I don't know why I find this so hilarious.

This is hard to see, but it's a Spiderman coloring book packaged with Barbie crayons. Who is the target consumer? Not sure.



Indians love to decorate their vehicles, and baby Krishna (and here) is a favorite image.

The kids have been building elaborate forts in the living room.

Evie as a fairy bunny rock star.

Samuel and one of his preschool teachers talking to the fish in Alphabet's little koi pond. I like Alphabet's indoor/outdoor setup.

Samuel playing hard at Ideal Beach.

Johnny (on the right) and his friend Anand Beh at Ideal Beach. Those are fishing boats in the background.

This year's Easter Bread turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

Johnny's started piano lessons, but Samuel's the one you're most likely to find practicing.

Evie loves to turn on the Disney playlist and dance.

Evie's the green blur on the left. This was at a birthday party last month, where the parents all sat around sweating to death while the kids went nuts (with frequent water breaks).

This enormous vegetable is called a snake gourd. Those potatoes underneath are fist-sized, to give you some idea as to how long it is. I have no idea how to cook with it. 

Samuel is still as fascinated with auto-rickshaws as ever. This one has Spidey decor.

We hardly ever see sandwich meat here, and when we do the price is unbelievable. This package costs 700 rupees. At 50 rupees to the dollar, that's ham worth $14! The salami next to it is 1400 rupees, or $28.

Nothing like an after-playground ice cream pop.

 

Samuel on the playground at the American school.

Waiting for the bunny buns to bake

Evie putting the final touches (sprinkles) on the bunny buns.

Check this out

Look at the size of the thing that landed on our windshield yesterday! It was about the size of my hand.

Some thoughts on Bollywood

With his characteristic love-it or hate-it passion, John is all about Bollywood. He's even taken it upon himself to organize monthly movie nights for the Consulate, just in case there might be an American in Chennai yet to be introduced to the sheer awesomeness that is Indian cinema.

My admiration is more measured. Yes. It's fun. Random dance numbers in the middle of your crime drama? Awesome. Lots of romance but no sex? Awesome again. (Though there's plenty of skin in those dance numbers.)

We've seen some great movies. One of my favorites, 3 Idiots, is a comedy that tackles a serious issue: the insane pressure on young Indians to succeed in a broken education system. That one stars Aamir Khan, who's a fantastic actor, and mixes goofiness with hope. I like it despite some low humor. For all of the following links, you have to click on the caption, not the photo.



The trailer's in Hindi, but you might still get the general idea.



I really enjoyed Kahaani, the only Bollywood film I've seen without a dance number. It's a straight thriller full of great characters, symbolic references to Hinduism's divine female, and with an unexpected twist at the end. If you ever get a chance to see that one, you should.



Again in Hindi, but you'll get the gist.



I even admit to kind of liking Don 2, starring the current No. 1 Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan (and here), though the violence was a bit more than I can usually handle. It's hard not to like this kind of cool, though.




This links to an illicit recording of SRK's entry at the beginning of the movie. It's terrible quality, but you have to watch it for the audience reaction alone.





However, not even the eye candy that is John Abraham can make me feel that I didn't waste a good three hours on Housefull 2. To be fair, it did have some funny moments and some fun dance numbers. If you had taken the best parts and smashed them into 45 minutes, I might have appreciated it, but this movie was over 3 hours long. I was looking at my watch before we even got to intermission. Most of the audience was thoroughly enjoying the slapstick, based on the roaring laughter I heard and the blissfully contented smiles I saw on my fellow theater-goers' faces. It was just too over the top for me.




This trailer has English subtitles.

As our friend Nick Manring said during the interval, if you're going to learn to appreciate an art form you have to explore it in all its iterations. So Bollywood's not perfect, but it's definitely fun.

Some Bollywood dance for your viewing pleasure:

Chammak Challo, from Ra One. This one's all the rage right now. The fifth-graders at Johnny's school even performed their version of it during the elementary music concert. It was hilarious.

Zoobi Doobi, from 3 Idiots. Goofy and fun.

Do U Know, from Housefull 2. Typical song and dance scene from a romantic comedy.

Papa toh Band Bajaye, from Housefull 2. Typically fun, wacky production number. I feel that I need to explain all the white faces. The movie takes place in the UK.

Kilimanjaro, from Endhiran. This is actally not Bollywood, but Kollywood. Bollywood is based in Mumbai and makes films in Hindi. Kollywood is based in Chennai and makes films in Tamil. There's also Tollywood (Telugu) and Mollywood (Malayalam), but maybe we'll go into all of that another time. The point is, John thinks I have to include this one because it takes absurdity to new heights of awesomeness. In the movie, they're driving from Chennai to Pondicherry, when suddenly we're swept away to Macchu Picchu for this number, titled Kilimanjaro. Who can understand the complexity of this situation? Prepare to be amused.

Entrepreneurship

Toy salesman outside Evie and Sam's preschool:

Olive Ridleys

I've noticed that we often have several days of nothing much going on followed by frantic bursts of activity, usually on the weekends. The day we went to Kanchipuram was one of those overstuffed Saturdays.

Johnny and I were scheduled to go on a "turtle walk" that evening. Johnny is getting to be pretty wise about his own limitations, so after a full day of exploring temples and silk shops he decided to skip the turtles and go to bed. I, on the other hand, frequently thumb my nose at my limitations. So I went on the turtle walk anyway, knowing full well that I'd be a zombie the next day at church. (I was.)

Chennai's beaches are a nesting ground for endangered Olive Ridley sea turtles (and here), and an organization called the Tree Foundation is among several groups working on turtle conservation.

The group is tied to Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots organization. That hooked me. Dr. Goodall came to my high school in the late '80s, spoke with us about her conservation work and helped us set up a service club (a precursor to the Roots and Shoots clubs). I was really impressed by her ... normalcy. I'm not sure how else to put it. She was down to earth, obviously passionate about her work while at the same time clear-eyed about what can be expected of people.

So we met at the Tree Foundation's headquarters, where we saw some injured adult turtles the group had rescued. Most injuries come from fishing nets or boat propellers.

this one's missing most of its front flipper

We also saw a film about the turtles and the foundation's work. One thing I like about them is the way they work with the fishing communities to help them come up with local solutions to the problems. Youth groups (this is where Roots and Shoots is involved) meet with the fishermen and help them see why the turtles are good for the ecosystem and, therefore, good for the fishing village's livelihood.

One huge problem for the turtles is that the hatching grounds (which the turtles come back to for generations) are becoming more and more developed. The beach we walked wasn't even out of the city, really. The female turtles lay their eggs in pits on the beach, and then cover the eggs and go back to the ocean. When the eggs hatch, the babies crawl up through the sand and then head toward the nearest source of light, which for centuries has been the moonlight reflecting off the Bay of Bengal. Then they get swept up in the waves and off they go, either growing to adulthood (about 1 in 100) or becoming some bigger creature's meal (the other 99).

The nearest light source now (or at least the brightest) might be the security lights of a beach resort or the street lights along the East Coast Road or some other bright distraction that leads the babies in the wrong direction. The distracted turtles never get to the ocean, and so die.

Even before they hatch, the eggs get dug up by stray dogs or by kids scavenging along the beach. So. Life is lame (and short) if you're an Olive Ridley these days.

The Tree Foundation people try to give the baby turtles a fighting chance by moving nests into clusters and enclosing them with fencing and net roofs, and then by making sure the hatchlings make it into the Bay of Bengal. After that, they're on their own.

After watching the film, we walked out to one of the nest clusters and were just in time to see babies emerging from three or four of the nests. We weren't allowed to use a flash, so the photos are very dark.

It was so amazing! First the sand would begin to boil a bit, and then tiny turtles would claw their way up to the surface. So cool. Digging their way out of the sand helps the turtles gain strength in their flippers.

The Tree Foundation people then gathered the babies into baskets and took them to a spot about 20 feet up from the surf. Then the turtles were released and they started heading toward the water. A couple of people stood in the surf with flashlights to encourage them to keep going in the right direction.

Alas. No photos of turtles heading down the beach. It was fun to see, though. We released around 300 turtles, which means some of them might actually survive to lay their own eggs on that same stretch of beach. It was worth the late night.

Holi

Back at the beginning of March was Holi, the Indian festival of colors. Holi celebrates many things, among them springtime, harvest, pranks and general hilarity.

Holi is a time for letting go of inhibitions, which might explain why it's not celebrated en masse in the ultra-conservative south. But we're lucky enough to have friends from the north, so we got the full effect ... as you can see.

Suyash's dad (known to us as "Uncle"), me, Henna and Rakesh

Cheryl, me, Janna, Henna

Suyash and John

In case you're wondering, I was stained pink for a good two weeks. It's OK, though. People would take one look and say, "You played Holi, didn't you?"

Flower power

One thing I love about India: There are garlands of flowers hanging everywhere -- over doorways, around shoulders, in hair, decorating cars, bicycles and bulls. Often it's for religious purposes, sometimes it's to celebrate a marriage or graduation or acquisition of a new car. It always catches my eye.

Fort St. George

It's too hot to do much more than race from one air-conditioned enclosure to another, so I think I'll take advantage of our travel lull to show you some things I never got around to posting.

Way back in January we took an afternoon to explore Fort St. George (and here), the first British fort in India. The fort was the base of the East India Company for more than a century before the British moved government headquarters to Calcutta. Bet you didn't know that Chennai/Madras was the first British settlement in India! I didn't.

Most of the fort is now used to house state government offices, but there's a nice little museum to explore as well as the first Anglican church on Indian soil, St. Mary's Cathedral.

There are lots of interesting things in the museum, but I was most taken with the porcelain dinnerware decorated with the East India Company crest. These pieces were used for state dinners. At least, I guess you'd call them state dinners. The company wasn't technically its own nation, but it sure acted like it was.

The kids were more interested in the displays of uniforms and weapons. They had British military uniforms and uniforms worn by Indians who worked for the Raj. And the uniforms were made of WOOL. Have I mentioned that today's heat index was near 110 degrees F?

I think Evie took this picture of a cannon.

St. Mary's Church is small and old and fun to explore. I had to talk John down from the bell tower's ladder.

The church is surrounded by old tombstones, which Johnny found delightfully creepy. Here are the kids standing outside the church entrance.

So, fellow history buffs, that's a quick glimpse of Fort St. George. It made for a nice afternoon of exploration.