Monday

Day off work, which I certainly needed if I had any hope of catching up on my running, malignant sleep deficit. It was yet another curiously scheduled Indian holiday. I'm certainly not complaining.

I bummed around in the morning, wandering down Thippasandra to visit the Skanky Internet Cafe and get a bit of sun. I met up with Carli around noon and we proceeded to yet another orientation lunch with the new volunteers. (Apparently I wasn't supposed to attend because I've been here so long but 1. no one informed of this and 2. they fed me anyway, so I was not particularly put out.) Food was usual buffet stuff, although the hotel the lunch was held in was rather luxe.

The new volunteers were all quite nice, and I enjoyed talking to them about the various idiosyncrasies of surviving in India. We now have two Americans - one from Chicago and one from New York - and it is bizarre to hear an American accent again after consorting with exclusively British people for so long. I wonder if I will keep on saying biscuit, crisps and ALLO' WOT when I return home. Probably.

(Of course, I speak AMERICAN and they speak ENGLISH, since they must be superior. Or this is what they tell me.)

The volunteers got dropped off at FabIndia on Commercial Street, so Julie, Carli, Ella and I rickshawed over to meet them. I bought my dad some nice cotton shirts for nothing at FabIndia, then took the new volunteers over to the Natural Ice Cream shop for some delicious sugar-cane ginger ice cream. It was getting hot and I was dead on my feet, so we returned to the Katari Villa and I slept the afternoon away - I had promised to take the new people out that night so I had to sleep sometime.

We had dinner (egg curry will give me screaming nightmares), then proceeded to Styx, which is apparantly Bangalore's only heavy metal bar. It was dark and smoky and they sure as hell were playing metal, but the appeal of the place ended there for me - no one was there but a deeply lonely Frenchman who kept on looking at me with sad eyes and imploring me to speak slower. (Apparently he had been working in steel in a rural town in Southern India and was growing increasingly desperate for non Hindi-accented human interaction.)

We departed and went to that perennial favorite, the Guzzlers Inn, where we drank Kingfisher and listened to Jethro Tull - until the inevitable and always cruel 11:30 kickout time. Finding a rickshaw was mercifully painless, and we got back at a decent hour.