weekend roundup

Here's my beautiful girl, looking as cute as can be in her coveralls and long-sleeved shirt. It's hit Delhi-wintertime with temperatures dropping down to 10' celsius and even a little lower at night. It's still 25ish during the day, so basically as I've always said, winter here is essentially the same as summer in Calgary. In other words, lovely!

We had a great weekend - it kind of went from very busy to extraordinarily lazy between Friday and Sunday. On Friday, I worked all day of course, and then stayed at school because my drama classes were doing a show that evening. I had told the kids they were welcome to relax in my room from 5 to 6, so we ended up playing cards, eating popcorn, and listening to their ipods attached to my really fantastic speakers before the show. The show itself went really nicely - since it was a semi-curricular thing we didn't really advertise but we did invite the parents of all the kids and we had quite a healthy and enthusiastic audience, which was great for the kids. The show itself was called "Making the Familiar Strange" and was all student-written. I went off on a tanget with them on tech-related ideas, so the outline of the show went like so:

- video intro that I drew still-by-still and then photographed and turned into video and then overlaid with wonky versions of a kids saying "making the familiar strange";
- a kid-created video about how weird moose are;
- very random scenes / skits about the existence of aliens, the invention of the fork by a caveman, a magical unibrow, and then one about a kid whose parents' brains were stolen by aliens and flushed down the toilet and then she had to go and rescue the brains and she was mostly successful but in the end wound up with her Mom's brain in her Mom's head but Snoop Dogg's brain in her Dad's head;
- interspersed with the skits were these super short dance sequences that the kids choreographed to music written by the gr 6 music class;
- then, they did this lip-sync adaptation of a really popular commercial on TV here (you can youtube search for 'docomo train ad')
- and finally we finished off with the lights going totally off and the kids lip synching and dancing to music that was on the sound system, but they were lit only with the light of the itouches that they held in front of their faces. Sounds weird, looked COOL!

So: pretty familiar and pretty strange and lots of fun.

On Saturday we had a very relaxed morning and then went out for lunch at Sundar Nagar where we stuffed ourselves with vada, dosa, golegappa, and puri with spicy sweet chickpeas. We wandered around the curio shops in the market there for awhile, but Seung Yi was in a very saucy mood so that didn't last long. We headed home, tossed her into bed for a nap, and then Iaimon and Laree came over to babysit so Mum and I could go out. John took us out to the mall at Saket where we spent a couple of hours leisurely drinking tea and shopping. I bought a great gift for Jake and Mum picked up some mugs from Good Earth (home of all things spectacularly pretty - where we also ogled the most adorable little um, what do you call those things where ladies do their makeup? Vanities? Anyways, it was one made just in Seung Yi size - so cute!), and also a gorgeous soft and cozy black wool jacket.

Laden with bags, we called for John and had him drive us out to the place we were meeting my colleagues for dinner. It was quite the adventure. I had read about the restaurant a number of times and it sounded very nice - it's in a spot called "The Garden of the Five Senses" and I'd gotten the impression it was sort of a park-ish area with upscale restaurants. It turned out it sort of was like that, but to get there you had to drive through about 3 kilometres of dusty, creepy, uninhabited construction areas. So every so often we'd see a sign saying "Garden of the Five Senses ->" and all around the sign would just be rubble and dust and dirt and maybe a guy lying around all wrapped up against the cold. We finally went down the right alleyway, and got to the correct spot, a beautifully arranged restaurant called Magique, but it was all super surreal.

The restaurant looked great but was pretty awful aside from the pleasant company. It took ages for the waiter to take drink orders, and when he did he had a completely blank look on his face, like no smile, no nothing. We ordered a bottle of wine. Ten minutes later, he came back, and said they didn't have that bottle available. We tried again. Same thing, only it took longer. Instead of recommending one they did have, he just kept looking at us utterly blankly. It was weird. And meanwhile, there are, like, 10 other staff just standing around. I finally called one of them over to take our food order, which also took forever. They didn't even have any bread or snacks on the table - nothing. Finally, the wine and the food came, and lo and behold they didn't bring the main course Mum and I were going to share. So, we each had like 2 little skewers of meat, and some crappy cold calamari with tamari on top (yech), and some very oily corn patties. Really, I just don't think that "fusion" food works for the most part. I'd really rather just go to a place that does one thing properly. Like good portuguese-style grilled chicken and fish. Or pho. Or dosa. But there is no reason to try to be the place that will serve all three of those dishes. Totally unnecessary.

Still, a good time (if not a good meal) was had by all, and we were in high spirits upon departure, so we headed out dancing to an American-style bar with a few friends. It was all good fun until this morning when I woke up and couldn't lift my head. Wasn't the alcohol - at the bar they had played all kinds of rock and roll and I had stupidly head-banged all night. And now I am paying the price - it's 9:25 pm and I still can't shift my neck properly. Note to self: NO HEAD BANGING!

[Delhi-22-November-2009]