Tuesday, June 29, 2010

This and that

Above: the only picture I took today...just a random cool-lookin house near the Corner House ice cream shoppe on 12 and Main, where our team treated ourselves after a long, toilsome day...

Today was our first day of splitting up into our roles (jobs, technically!) and starting to work on our project simulation task. We started off the morning with a lot of brainstorming and productive conversation, but I felt like the deeper we delved into the task at hand, the more anxious and less productive we became as a team. There were just so many unknowns and we only had a handful of tools at our disposal to make sense of a huge project. It was definitely a frustrating day and for the first time, I find myself dreading going back to our conference room a bit...

On a completely different note, I have been trying out all combinations of sleep-retaining tactics. Any Arrested Development fans out there who remember the prison scene with Kitty and Gob should know what I'm talking about ("Glasses on! Hair down! Oh god...lights off!"). Last night I tried fan on, eyemask on. Went to bed at 1, woke up at 6. The previous night, AC on, eyemask off. 6 hours of shut-eye. Tonight, I'm going to try fan on, earplugs in. I'm usually kind of nervous about sleeping with earplugs for fear of missing my alarm but it's honestly been so long since I've actually woken to my alarm that I stopped caring.

Another thing here kind of sucks right now: laundry. I spent pretty much half of Sunday morning grappling with our apartment's washing machine. Every time I pressed down on a button, it would crack under my fingertip and sometimes the pieces would just fall into a hole. It. Was. Awful. I managed to get it done eventually after making many a call and soliciting the help of my gracious roommmate, but it was such an ordeal that I am considering forking over the 35 rupees/garment to have everything done by maid service next time...

 Above: My Sunday morning
At one point, I managed to stain one of my favorite white shirts somehow with weird red splotches. I was pretty upset, but then I ran downstairs to the little market in our basement and bought some bleach and was able to remove it. A small victory, huzzah!

I also took an inventory of the clothes I brought, and this is what it came out to:


The good news is, this is conducive to avoiding laundry by shopping a lot...

Another silly: while in Mysore, after touring the epic awesome-encrusted palace, my friend Sam and I both needed to go to the bathroom, so we left the perimeter of the park and paid three rupees each to use the "nice" bathroom. Afterward, we wandered around the chaotic market square, where vendors packed all sorts of elaborate bobbles and gizmos and diamond sparkle beauteous sandals into their stalls and yelled at us to buy their goods ("please, master!"). I stopped once and only once to look at a chess set, but it wasn't really anything special so I told the vendor it wasn't what I was looking for and walked away. About ten minutes later, we left the square and headed to the parking lot, when we heard someone yelling behind us...I turned around and saw chess guy running after us, waving a couple of travel chess sets in his hands and shouting at us to buy them.

"Please! Excuse me! Just look! 300 rupees!"
"No thanks." (We keep walking)
"Please! It is good for travel! Just for people like you miss, travelers!"
"No." (Still walking. By this time I am ignoring him completely, and Sam is politely declining as the man nudges him with the chess set)

This continued for a few minutes until he stopped following us and just yelled at us from afar ("200 rupees!") until we couldn't hear him any longer :/ I think I felt equally amused, harassed, and well, kind of bad for the guy. Can't say he didn't try.

And, just to bring some closure to this completely non-sequitur post, here's some footage taken on our party bus. I filmed the rickshaw ride we went on today but am way too lazy to deal with YouTube's antics right now, perhaps that will be a task for tomorrow.



Most random post ever, but I don't mind, I don't mind.

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