At exactly 2am last night the ancient industrial air conditioning unit that’s about 12 inches from where I sleep started spewing smoke and flames. I mean, it has been running on high non-stop since February, so I guess I shouldn’t have been suprised by this violent uprising. But I bolted awake to see what looked…
Husband threw himself in front of a car today. We were crossing a street with heavy pedestrian traffic. A street with an actual crosswalk protected by several speed bumps. A street with wide lanes and an unobstructed view. In other words, a street where you should feel reasonably confident that a car headed in your…
Let’s talk about the air. In most places there’s not much to say: you breathe in, you breathe out, end of story. But here in Delhi, the air is a common topic of conversation. Mostly because it makes its presence known much more overtly here than anywhere I’ve ever lived. You can smell it seeping into…
I drove today. Drove myself and two toddlers through the streets of Delhi, AND NO ONE DIED. No one got close to dying or even remotely close to getting into a fender bender! This, my friends, is truly a small miracle. I should note here that I am a good driver on my own turf.…
Say you live in Delhi and you need a tailor to sew together the blouse that goes under your new sari. So you call up the guy that a friend recommends, the one that serves all the expats and comes directly to your house. He arrives, takes a few measurements, makes an extra hard sell for…
There’s a nifty graph that gets passed around whenever we move to a new place that shows the stages of adjustment. There’s a honeymoon stage, where everything seems new! and exciting! and did you see that?! Amazing! This quickly fades into hostility, as you start to realize that the locals may be friendly, but buying…
Please for the love of god, stop making me bag my own groceries. I’m already stressed out by the language barrier, and worried that I forgot to weigh my produce, and feeling sheepish about my conspicuously large, undoubtably American-size haul of goods. Oh, and I’m probably not feeling too good about the toddler screaming in…
One of the little-known benefits of living abroad is that you are relatively cut off from American pop culture. It leaves more space in your brain, space you can hopefully designate for foreign language skills. Unfortunately this also means that our current American cultural context is pretty much limited to a dusty mental time capsule…
Unlikely Diplomat 