Yowling

Every once in a while we hear what we assume to be a cat in heat yowling outside our bedroom window all night long. We don't know what to do about it other than roll over and try to fall back to sleep, annoyed, yet thankful that it's not waking up Muffin. Last night there was yet another cat. Mike and I were both tossing and turning for awhile trying to sleep. At one point it got so frequent and so loud that I thought our cat was yowling back, but she was curled up next to me in bed, also trying to sleep.

Around 4:30 in the morning, at least one tiny little voice joined the chorus of meows.

Great. She had kittens.

We had our share of feral kittens in Bujumbura and any time we tried to help it didn't end well.

Shortly after the sun came up the cats quieted down and we forgot about them. They are still quiet tonight.

I don't want Muffin running up to help every injured or lost animal she sees, because animals are unpredictable and they have diseases. But once she's a little older, I can't see myself teaching her that ignoring crying kittens is an okay thing to do, either. There are just so many of them out in the world beyond the United States, it's exhausting worrying about them all.

This Week

This week I also posted at What I Eat.

Sophie goes Mobile a video by girl_in_bleue on Flickr.

I Booked a Vacation

It may not seem like much, but this is a big deal for me. Mike's been on several work trips since we arrived last November, but Muffin and I have been in H'bad nonstop since Day One. Summer is almost over so we're running out of time to take a summer vacation. And for some reason it just seems physically and mentally difficult to book a trip within India, so I'm proud of my accomplishment.

We are going to a somewhat remote area that doesn't have online booking for hotels and has very little online information about hotels there in general. Every site that popped up had the exact same wording copy/pasted. Some sites call the region by its colonial name and some call it by its Indian name and it took me about a week to sort that out and realize everything I was looking at actually was in the same place. I contacted some travel agents for help and they all directed me to the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (APTDC). Their website offers friendly online booking for hotels, but really what you do is fill out a form, then exchange many emails back and forth, then end up going into town to visit the office in person before you get some specific questions answered. They wanted to sell me a standard package tour, but in all my Google searches I'd actually been able to narrow down the names of some hotels and activities we wanted.

Visiting the office in person was kind of a drag and took longer than expected, but ended up getting me what I wanted. The woman I'd been emailing with was there and she helped me quite a bit. It was easier for me to watch her sit on the phone with the different hotels, relay the room options to me, and let me make the decisions rather than me call the different hotels and have language barrier issues and/or email back and forth with her several times. She could also advise which activities we wanted to do were close to which hotels, helping me put together an itinerary that involves as little time in the car as possible. And she booked the car for us, along with the hotels.

(Yes, more than one hotel. Unfortunately the jungle camp I really wanted only had a cabin available for one night; my new APTDC helper-friend negotiated the same price, though, for a luxury suite at a hotel for the remaining nights. We'll see how "luxury" it really is, but we're not too picky. After one night in the jungle camp with Muffin, maybe we'll be ready to have an additional star or two added to our accommodations.)

We've done a lot of traveling with Muffin, but it was all for ending up here in H'bad. This will be our first vacation with her. She adds another level of complication to the trip. I have no idea how to pack for her. Lots of diapers I guess. And socks, since it will be quite a bit cooler there than it is here. She's never worn shoes and I can't find any in this city that fit her, so hopefully thick socks will be warm enough.

In about two weeks, we'll be headed for the hills.

This Week

This week I also posted at Coffee Mommy.

She's Like the Wind

Sophie and the Wind a video by girl_in_bleue on Flickr.

A Mike and Muffin Project

Wearing Shorts

I've decided to ignore the social convention of covering my legs, at least while I'm running during the summer. It's not a religious thing here, aside from a few Muslim women who wear burqas. It's just a very conservative society and women should be covered from their shoulders to their knees -- or preferably ankles -- unless they want to be victims of staring or harassment by men.

Let me be clear, I feel perfectly safe. I would not be wearing shorts if I thought they put me in any danger whatsoever.

Here's the thing, though. People stare at me anyway. Men and women. Children laugh. I'm a hilarious freakshow. I'm white. I'm a woman (who's often not escorted by a man). I'm often running or walking for pleasure rather than transportation. And I often have a funny little baby with me, too. I've accepted the fact that I stand out. If I'm going to be stared at for all of these reasons anyway, I may as well be comfortable in shorts rather than leggings.

First I started wearing shorts around our yard, outside. I figured that if the neighbors were offended, well, they didn't have to look over the wall and watch me. Then one morning, bleary-eyed from my 5:15 alarm (I have to be on the road by 6:00 during this hot weather), I automatically reached for shorts, just like the old days, instead of leggings. I was already out the door by the time I realized my faux pas and I decided to go with it. That early in the morning there are few people on the road and they were already staring at me regularly. The shorts didn't seem to attract any additional attention.

I'm generally not one to have the attitude that being an American gives me the right to disrespect local customs because they're inconvenient to the lifestyle I'm used to. But it's true that Western women can get away with being less conservative, maybe because of the "we're being stared at anyway" phenomena. What really cemented my decision to continue wearing shorts though was seeing a young Indian woman out for a walk one morning, wearing the same color shorts and t-shirt as I was. If she has the confidence to do it, I should too. (And it's already in the 80s at six in the morning. My legs were burning up, being swathed in spandex.)

Adventures in Veggie Shopping

Much like going to the farmers' market in San Francisco or Dupont Circle to check out the fresh produce before heading out to the grocery store, here I have to go to a fruit stand and a vegetable stand to find the best produce before I take my chances on the grocery store produce aisle.

Finding the best "Western" produce is a competitive sport. I only just discovered the secret of the produce stand a few weeks ago. I usually send my driver out for groceries or make one stop at the grocery store and settle for what's there. But now that it's a little easier to shop with Muffin in tow, I love our weekly trek to Star Fruit and Tarkari Vegetables. The veggie ladies give Muffin carrots to play with. Star Fruit is a tiny, jam-packed shop and Muffin pokes and grabs at any fruit or customers within range. (And because people love babies so much here, they don't mind a little grabbing hand from the whitest baby they've ever seen.)

The best thing about Tarkari -- they almost always have green leaf lettuce. At most stores you can only get iceberg lettuce, which I detest. But Tarkari has green leaf lettuce and -- get this -- with a little washing it's perfectly safe to eat! We can have salad again! The first day I discovered the lettuce, there was an Australian woman in the shop who told me to take what I wanted because she was going to buy all of it. Competitive lettuce shopping indeed. When I found fresh basil after weeks of not seeing it, I was the one who bought the whole stock (and then I had my housekeeper make about a gallon of pesto). And I'm sorry other expats, but I also cleaned out the thyme and rosemary at qmart a couple weeks ago.

The prices at the grocery store aren't prohibitive for most expats, like they might be for local shoppers. It's certainly more convenient for one-stop shopping. But what I like about the smaller stands is that the fruits and veggies are local. They are fresh. They are ripe. They may have traveled from another state in India, but few things came on a plane from another country.

You do need to wash everything, but that's one of the benefits of having a housekeeper. She washes and cuts everything up, which makes it much more likely that we'll actually eat all the fruits and vegetables that I buy.

Muffin's been enjoying the local watermelon lately.

Cross-posted at What I Eat.