And the WINNER Is.....

The winner of the surprise package from India was commenter #8. That is Molly! Thank you Molly! Please e-mail me your full address (so I can confirm I have it) and make sure it gets to you safey! Congratulations! And thanks so much for you involvement on our blog! More of these lil giveaways to come!
-Miles & Jenny

40 More Facts About Our Life In Chennai, India—Plus a Giveaway!

A few weeks ago we posted “50 Facts about Chennai” (which you can read here if you missed). Well, we’ve been here a while longer now, and we are always learning or noticing interesting things about this place, so we thought we would do another one.

51. Road and lane direction are not set in stone. One of the roads I take to work is two ways most of the time, but one way in the morning and early evening.

52. Stoplights often have timers that count down how long a light will remain green or red.

53. This seems like a good idea, but everyone here starts going on red once it the time gets down to 5 seconds.

54. Traffic cops are often in the middle of the roads directing traffic even when there are stoplights.

55. Policemen here all have the exact same mustache. We joke about it being a requirement to be a cop because we have yet to see one without it.

56. Traffic cops pull people over by waving them to the side of the road.

57. We know this because our driver in Delhi (not Rama) ran a red light, and we got pulled over (oops).

58. India is a very overcrowded country.

59. This overcrowding spills over into customer service too. Grocery stores the size of an AM/PM will often have about 12 employees working and offering to help you find something.

60. Even automatic ticket machines in parking garages have someone standing there to press the button and hand you your ticket.

61. The overcrowding causes people here to have no concern for personal space.

62. In a line it is common for a man to be standing directly behind us pressing up against us. Not out of any strange intentions but simply because of lack of the sense of personal space.

63. There is a sign on the elevator at Amnet’s offices that says only 8 people to an elevator.

64. I’ve been in that elevator with 12 people.

65. It is common to see men holding hands or walking with their arms around each other.It doesn’t mean anything. They are just very comfortable showing physical affection here with each other.

66. However, it is not common to see men and women (especially older) holding hands or showing public displays of affection.

67. Most marriages in India are still arranged, although that is starting to change in the bigger cities.

68. Marriages that are not arranged are called “love marriages”.

69. Our Driver in Delhi was very curious about how marriage works in America. He seemed shocked to find out that virtually no one practice arranged marriages.

70. Different trees are in bloom and flowering all year round as create more color and beauty to this place we call home.

71. There are three seasons in India: Hot, Hotter, and Rainy.

72. We are currently in the monsoon season (October and November), although it hasn’t been too bad yet.

73. Chennai has the best tropical storms. When the lightning is far away it will flash several bright flashes in a row like a strobe light. When it is close the streaks are visible and the thunder is instantaneous and deafeningly loud.

74. Apparently, it is not required to turn off your car when stopping to fill it up with gas. We have seen several cars with their engines running while their gas was being pumped.

75. When someone dies there is no embalmment. They are laid in a glass coffin and wrapped in some sort of thin paper like tissue paper that covers their neck down to their ankles.

76. We know this because we were stopped in traffic next to one of these dead bodies.

77. For the funeral the streets are filled with a huge procession of drummers and dancers in a parade and petals are flown into the air.

78. Hindus are usually then cremated (more than one body at a time) and then the ashes are spread in gardens and in the local rivers.

79. It is strange being minorities and also tourists while living here. We are usually stared at wherever we go.

80. We also get many requests for pictures. It seems like locals take more pictures of us than we do of them.

81. Obama is currently visiting India, but not Chennai. He is only going to Delhi and Mumbai.

82. Indians follow American politics a lot more than we follow anything in India.

83. The front page of The Hindu’s (one of India’s biggest national newspapers) website today: “Republicans take House”.

84. Trash build up is also a problem in India both in and outside the city.

85. There are some very pretty looking forested areas, but the ground is still covered with garbage.

86. We often see wild pigs, stray goats, or even cows eating the garbage in the forests or on the side of the road.

87. Public urination is not really frowned upon here. We see men peeing on the side of the streets all the time.

88. People here prefer to drink room temperature water because they think cold water will make them sick.

89. People also often drive without headlights or turn them off at stoplights because they think it will save gas.

90. Our driver in Delhi told that Hinduism is the best religion because they get to choose their own god. In other words they have a lot of gods but they can choose which one they are most devout to.

That last one is especially sad, but we love it here regardless and are having the time of our lives soaking it all in. This place and the people here certainly have their quirks, but all in all it is fabulous, and we are loving the process of learning and growing and the adventure that each day brings.

- Miles and Jenny

*******************************************************************

Well it is November! And you know what that means! It's Giveway time, as promised! One lucky commenter on this post will come away with a secret surprise gift from India. So comment away!!

The winner will be announced on DIWALI ~Friday, November 5th (your time).

Good Luck and have a great day!*******************************************************************

Mastering the Art of Home!

Don't you just love the weekend? I love the time-slowing phenomenon of weekends. Because life flows a little more gently and the hours of time pass a bit more smoothly…allowing for magic that can only happen on days like this. There is no where that we have to be so sleeping is a pleasure and additional magic where it is allowed to stay in pajamas until after breakfast, sipping on coffee, and perhaps even eating something more special than the ordinary and boring daily cold cereal.

Perhaps PANCAKES! I love Saturday morning pancakes. Growing up in my house my dad always made pancakes for us kids on Saturdays. I love this memory of my dad. He was so great at making the coolest shapes too, you know the ones, like Mickey Mouse, or Pooh Bear…I remember a bunny…it was a mess up but like a cloud it changed and became something else even better! Memories are formed and treasured. Saturdays are sheerly magic!

This delightfulness all happens during the weekends…when we begin to master the art of HOME! Love it! The house for me is usually a wreck and we let it slip because it is the weekend and who wants to clean when the air is filled with lazy enchantment? .....(by 'clean', you do realize I mean the house is at the point where you consider if it's really worth the effort of cleaning or rather light a match and watch it burn) Instead we can lounge and watch silly shows on Hulu and catch up on Facebook and world news. I love these days, don’t you?

Soak in these days....just drink them in and enjoy the small things within them. This is where the memories are formed and the true magic happens.
Enjoy!
-Jenny

Orchestras, Operas, Musicals, and Plays Oh My!

The past couple weeks we have been able to enjoy some of the arts here in Chennai. India in general and Chennai in particular does not place much emphasis on the arts. Plays, musicals, and symphonies are not important part of the culture here. So, we were very excited to be able to see four different shows all at the same theater over the course of two weeks. All four shows were at the Sir Mutha Venkattasubba Rao Concert Hall (say that three times fast). It is a very comfortable theather with nicely padded seats that fully recline (with cupholders).

The first thing we saw was a matinee of the musical "Joseph and His Coat of Many Colours". It was a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat". I have never seen the original version, so I am not sure how much they changed it. It did seem to have a little more of an India flavor in the choreographed dances. It was very over-the-top acting and dancing, but it was well done. Overall, an entertaining afternoon.

The next week we were given tickets to Day 2 of a Western Classical Music Festival. We missed Day 1, which was a piano soloist and a string quartet. Day 2 was great. It was a performance by The Madras Chamber Orchestra, a string orchestra. They are an all-Indian string orchestra that played on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack. They played a great selection of classics from Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and others as well as two original compositions. The original compositions (composed by the first violinist) blended Western Classical with traditional South Indian Carnatic. The performance was really excellent.

During the intermission of the Madras Chamber Orchestra's performance, it was announced that they would be giving away tickets for "An Evening at the Opera" that would be taking place a few days later. Naturally, we decided that the free tickets would be too good to pass up. "An Evening at the Opera" featured a Swedish tenor and pianist. They first sung a selection of Swedish songs then a selection of more familiar Opera arias. After a piano solo, they finished off with some Broadway classics. Overall, it was a great performance. The tenor had a powerful voice with great control.

The next night we went to the opening night of "The 39 Steps", a comedy based on an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The play only makes use of four actors who end up playing a total of over 150 roles. It was really well done and quiet funny. The actors did a very good job. Their timing and choreography were solid. Their accents (which included British, Scottish, German, and French) were not great but were probably as good as can be expected from an Indian cast. We enjoyed it a lot.

Our arts experiences in Chennai has been good. Audiences here are a little different than we are used to. None of the performances we went to were full. In a couple of them, we were originally sitting in the balcony, but were brought down to the lower section to fill it out. Before both the play and the musical, a projector played commercials from the sponsors before the play began and again during the intermission. Cameras and recording devices are not banned and don't even seem to be frowned upon. People were holding up cameras and cell phones videotaping each song during the Madras Chamber Orchestra's performance. During all the performances the occasional flash came from the audience (although we didn't bring our camera to any). We also heard more cell phone rings and text message dings than we would in a typical American theater. None of that lessened our enjoyment of the performances. We feel lucky that we were able to experience such a variety of quality performances, and we hope that we are able to experience more of the arts during our time here.

-Miles

Fall Fest

Here in India the air might not be getting crisper nor the leaves changing colors but we are celebrating regardless. Tonight is our party where we will celebrate October and the season anyway....who says we can't?

I got together with Ann several weeks ago and we determined to have a Fall Fest! We settled on a date, location, and the food. This fall bash will be complete with all the comforts of the homey seasonal decor and food that we typically see and consume this time of year. There will be pumpkins, leaves, apple cider, cilli, cornbread, home made applesauce, peanut soup, pumpkin cheesecake, apple crisp, caramel apples, made from scratch pumkin spiced latte's, and so much more.

I am so excited. I went to the local Landmark store where you can find pretty much anything and found some fall colored table napkins in stiped orange and burnt orange. I even made napkin rings. Oh yeah! Tonight is going to be fabulous!

I need me some fall...and I'm gonna get me some!

Pictures of our evening...
Yummy apple crisp with imported brown sugar! (Thank you USA!)

Celebrating with my fresh homemade wassail-apple cider!

The silly faces are due to us playing the peanut M&M game. So hard not to laugh!

Thank you Lord for all these wonderful ladies (from all over the world) you have brought into my life to celebrate FALL with! Thank you for fall and friends...even in India.

-Jenny

A Birthday For Me!

October 5th. The most popular day of the year for babies to be born. Did you know that? I must share my birthday with so many people. I only know of two people my entire 28 years of existence that shared my birthday. Not sure how that is possible. I suppose regardless of how popular the day is, it still marks a day in history that I arrived and amazingly enough, we celebrate that day. :)

Birthdays are great. I don't remember tons of parties growing up but I enjoy them now. I so far have not had any trouble with the thoughts of growing older as each year brings new experiences, and adventures and that is always a good thing. Right?

This particular year I got to celebrate more than one day even. October 5th came twice this year. A miracle! Ok, not really . I got to celebrate it in two time zones so once in India and the other in the Pacific time zone. That is pretty exciting. In India birthdays are a little different. It is tradition and very widely practiced that on your birthday you give gifts to your friends and if you go to eat with friends YOU pay for the meal. Isn't that funny? I found that very interesting.

The day itself was an ordinary day. In all truthfulness I had been quite sick so the day was not filled with bustling activities as I did not feel well enough and could hardly move. Feeling a little more rested and drugged Miles took me out that evening to one of our favorite restaurants. Azulia. Mediterranean food. YUM! I had garlic chicken kabobs and a brown rice and grilled vegetables. We especially love the tiramisu dessert you might remember from Miles birthday post. Well, they were out of the tiramisu so we had a brownie and ice cream instead. It was a huge disappointment for sure. But still a lovely dinner with my husband.

The following day I was doing better. I got up early and even put on my new birthday dress Miles had bought me i had been saving until my actual birthday. ( more on the dress later. ) My fabulous Mother in law bought me a muffins tin that fits in my toaster oven and muffin and cake mixes for my birthday so I was pretty excited!!! I mixed up the blueberry muffin mix as fast as I could. I could barely stand it as the entire house filled with the intoxicating aroma of blueberry muffins! They were absolutely perfect! We devoured most of them but Miles reserved one and insisted we light a candle. It was the best birthday breakfast dessert I could have asked for. Take that tiramisu!

The day got better and better too. Wednesday is my typical meet up with Ann day. Our weekly tradition is that I usually pick her up from Sparkys in the afternoon and we get to visit and go to Gloria Jeans for coffee inside Express Avenue. EA is a brand new swanky mall that has all sorts of Western (USA) brand stores and expensive Italian leather goods. Today we decided to go for ice cream and invited some other Friends. There is a whole bunch of IJM (International Justice Mission) interns that we have met. They work above Sparkys and we go all go to the same church. A few of these interns met Ann and I for ice cream at Sandy's Chocolate Laboratory. We ordered the OMG dessert. It lives up to its name as we said OH MY GOSH as soon as we saw it!

It is a layered style dessert that came in a huge planter- complete with chocolate cake, brownie, choc chip cookies, chocolate ice cream, and about 8 inches of whip cream on the top. Delightfully delicious! It even had a firework inside. That is one thing that India has gotten right. Fireworks! They are apart of every celebration here. My birthday dessert with the ladies from IJM and my friend Ann was no different!

Well
I wish I was fast enough to capture the picture with me next to it...but I think you get the idea....

It was a great birthday all in all. And being able to celebrate it here -twice- priceless!

So keep away thoughts of wrinkles, gray hairs and life not filled to the brink of overflow... I am here,and right now enjoying the minutes, soaking in that now, drinking in this place, and overflowing....so to another year and more adventures ahead....bring it!!!!

This n That In Black n White

I am finding it incredibly difficult to sum up our spectacular trip to Northern India in words let alone post the nearly 1000 pictures we took in attempt to capture the jaw dropping moments now memories. So instead of posting all of them we chose a few of our favorites and highlights and changed them to black and white for some contrast. All of our pictures are posted on our blog under the page called PICTURES. Just click HERE it will take you straight to all our albums that we update regularly.

So our trip was a 6 day 5 night extravaganza. We flew into Delhi and had a driver waiting at the airport for us. We traveled around there with our driver and guide for a couple days then drove 5 hours to Agra. Monsoon rains were washing out roads the entire way there so it was a nervous drive and took hours longer in detours. Arrival into Agra it was still raining so we saw many sites from inside the car. Hoping the following day early morning to see the Taj in hopes of beating the rain worked. It was gray but not busy and not raining. We were so thankful! The rest of the time it was wet. We drove then another 5 hours to Jaipur spending a couple more days before returning home. In Jaipur we saw camels and elephants and even got a ride! We rode our elephant all the way up a steep mountainside to a large fort. We then toured the fort and several other castles and buildings before having to pack up, drive back to Delhi and fly home. It was a whirlwind trip but it was so nice to have the same driver the entire time from airport pick up to airport drop off. The guides were overall pretty great too and gave us helpful suggestions for fabulous restaurants, shops, and how to avoid the scary beggars and ridiculous and very annoying hawkers. Well here are a few of our favorite places....enjoy!

Delhi, India

The Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque built in 1656

Standing before kneeling to pray

This mosque was absolutely beautiful with the huge marble slabs and incredibly crafted architecture. It was hard not to walk through with our mouths open.

In the main courtyard of the mosque was an area filled with birdseed and thus filled with pigeons. They took flight and we captured them at just the right moment. Like this pigeons are quite beautiful.

Washing head, hands, and feet before entering the mosque for prayer

This grand iron gate stands proudly in front of the President's House.

This was a monument that had a statue of King George V inside. He was "removed" after Independence was declared for India no longer under British rule on August 15th, 1947.

India Gate which is a World War 1 memorial. Written on the bricks that make up the walls are inscribed with the names of the fallen/missing soldiers.

The Lotus Temple. As you can see they tried to copy the Sidney Opera House in some of its design, but the Lotus flower is important to the Bahai religion and they used it as the main design on top.

Qutub Minar, the world's tallest brick minaret, built in 1193.

Agra, India The Taj Mahal built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a burial place and memorial in memory of his third and Hindu wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Located in the city of Agra also known as the City of Love for the Taj Mahal still stands as India’s symbol of eternal love.

Looking from the platform of the Taj back at the Main Entrance of the Taj Mahal. Even the entrance is spectacular.

We did not want to leave this place as it was so magnificent and became more and more special the more you looked at it. And it was so much bigger seeing it in person and the intricate and ornately detailed marble work and inlaid gemstones make the Taj one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Leaving Agra was actually (surprisingly) difficult as its beauty truly captivated us and we knew it would be highly unlikely that we would never return to see her in person. Good thing we bought a small replica to remind us of how she looks and feels. We also bought a small carved stab of the same famous Indian Marble as the Taj itself and inlaid patters with the same technique and gemstones as in the Taj. It was created by men in a particular shop that hosts the actual descendants of the man who built the Taj, so we thought that was very special. We cannot wait to show that off when we get home.

Goodbye Taj! Thanks for the Memories.

Jaipur, India

Beautiful arches inside an open court of the castle in the fort that hosted important meetings, concerts, plays, and other entertainment for the King.

This castle was built on land and then they created a lake to surround it so the castle was only accessible by boat. Amazing architectural feats and it has been preserved perfectly all these years!

Wouldn't you like your front door to look like this? This was a doorway leading to one the Ladies in Waiting's room.

Astronomical instrument from Jantar Mantar, a large observatory built between 1727 and 1734. This instrument particular instrument was used to measure the sun and where it was exactly in what hemisphere. Makes me realize that for all our technology today we think we are smart but judging from the brain that invented this and carved it from marble and stone to line up the sun, we know nothing.

There are so many more pictures we would love to show off in this post but it would be 200 pages long. Please check out our albums on Picasa and see the details of the rest.

We had a wonderful time site seeing and traveling around. We were tired of driving for sure, but besides some poor hotels we fared just fine and got home safely for which we were thankful and so grateful for the opportunity to see other parts of the country. We saw some amazing things and it has us excited and already planning our next Indian adventure..... what is next to conquer...perhaps Goa?
-Jenny