I walked out of my section at work the other day, and ran into a couple of colleagues (a married couple) who were unfolding a child’s t-shirt.  I watched as she looked at it and started laughing and exclaiming, “I can’t believe you actually bought that!”  I asked to see what was so funny, and they turned it around to show me that it was a political t-shirt, supporting a certain individual who is currently running for the U.S. presidency.  I started laughing as well.  Not because the t-shirt is funny (actually not funny at all, just has a name and a likeness of the guy), but because this colleague had found an imaginative way around the restrictions on diplomats expressing political views.  He couldn’t wear the candidate’s t-shirt himself, and neither could his wife, but his 2-year-old certainly could!

This is a common frustration among those of us in the Foreign Service, but not one that is often readily admitted to.  The rules about government employees taking part in political life are very strict, and when you’re in the “fishbowl” scenario of a diplomat living abroad, the rules get even more restrictive.  We’re not allowed to have political discussions with random individuals in the countries we work in, for fear we might get quoted as officially supporting one guy or the other.  Some diplomats find themselves encouraging other expatriate friends to express the same views they have, so they can feel as though they’re taking part in the discussion (albeit vicariously).  Candidates talk about the image problems the country faces in the rest of the world - and who would know about this better than the men and women who are out there every day living in “the rest of the world,” trying their best to present what is good about America and constantly having to combat ingrained misconceptions?  But we’re encouraged not to indicate which candidate’s ideas we think are the best (though we do sometimes discuss it amongst ourselves).  And I promise, though we will tell you until we’re blue in the face that we don’t have a firm opinion, some of us feel very strongly about it.

So how do you get your point across?  Find a 2-year-old, and buy him a t-shirt.  Because he’s too young for rules.

Last weekend, my husband and I went on a walk. We took the train down to Churchgate Station, got off, and proceeded to wander about a few of the neighborhoods in South Mumbai (or, to those who don’t live up north near us, it’s considered to be Mumbai/Bombay proper). A few photos from our wanderings:

We’ll see where we end up exploring this weekend . . .

We went to a bar/lounge a while back that overlooks a pretty nice stretch of beach. We got there just as the sun was starting to go down. The sunset and the sky were so gorgeous, I couldn’t resist taking far too many photos. And I couldn’t resist sharing them here.

My husband says it feels odd to him to watch the sunset over the ocean - he feels like it should be the sunrise instead, since you’re sitting, looking out over a vast expanse of water. To me, it couldn’t feel more right.

I’m thinking it doesn’t quite count as being published. I mean, it’s not like I wrote something profound and ground-breaking, and some well-respected scholarly journal has included my creation in their next edition or anything. However, something I created is out there, and it was put out there by someone else and as part of a larger collection of things. So I guess we’ll call it being pseudo-published. Some photo scout (or whatever they call them) from a site I had never heard of before came across one of my photos on Flickr and wanted to use it as part of their travel and activities guide for the Pacific Northwest. They sent me an email asking permission and all that, and since I have no objection to being associated with a guide to Pacific Northwest attractions, I agreed. So, a little while later the whole world (or whoever knows about that site and is interested) can see a photo I took while wandering around Foster Island a while back. Want to see? Check out the finished product here.

Last night I went to see a musical. No, not a Bollywood film musical, a real, bona-fide musical. Live, on the stage, as a play. To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect. Apparently, India hasn’t ever had a tradition of stage musicals, the kinds of things Americans are accustomed to seeing on Broadway. I got to thinking about it and it struck me that they seem to have done things backwards: they launched into movies, and movie musicals, without ever having had a tradition of musical theater. It made me wonder whether local audiences would welcome the stage version of Bollywood, or whether they would see it as extraneous.

The story centers around a girl named Adaa, who moves from the “small” town of Lucknow (this small town has well over 2 million people), to the big city of Mumbai, hoping to make it big in Bollywood.  She runs into all the stereotypical Hollywood/Bollywood types - the struggling actress who’s played bit parts in films for 20 years and never got her big break, the sleazy producer with the “casting couch” interview, the high-flying movie stars, etc.  Periodically, the action on the stage stops and a screen comes down for videos of some of Bollywood’s biggest stars talking about whichever aspect of the Bollywood business has just been portrayed.  It’s a love story and a story about friendship, in addition to being fundamentally a story about Bollywood itself.

So what did I think? It was fun. It was entertaining. I was disappointed that the songs were not sung live (many of them were original songs for this production, but everything was prerecorded in a studio), but the dialogue was live. There were a few bumbles, some kinks that need to be worked out, but it’s only natural since last night was the first staging before an audience. Speaking of the audience, there were apparently quite a few Bollywood notables in the crowd, but I’m not yet familiar enough with that scene to be able to recognize who’s famous and who’s not. At any rate, my own verdict: it’s quite an experience, and I’m glad I went.

Tonight, we went out after work with a couple of colleagues from the consulate. We started the night at a social club just one or two doors down from work, where I took a photo that proves that yes, the monsoon weather has arrived:

We ended the night at a lounge in the bottom of one of the hotels along Marine Drive, probably Mumbai’s most famous street. My husband tells me it’s referred to as “the queen’s necklace.” It’s pretty:

I got a phone call today from one of the other employees at work - specifically, from the guy who’s in charge of tracking shipments and making sure that people get their things when they come to or leave a post.  It went a little something like this:

He: Hello, I wanted to tell you something.
Me: Okay, what’s up?
He: I have news.
Me: Okay…
He: Don’t worry, it’s not bad news.
Me: Oh, good.
He: It’s good news.
Me: Great!
He: Can I tell you the good news?
Me: Of course!
He: Are you ready to hear it?
Me: Yes!
He: It’s about your air freight shipment.
Me: Okay…
He: It’s arrived.
Me: Great! So, what do I need to do?
He: We can deliver it to your house.
Me: Good!
He: We can deliver it tomorrow.
Me: Tomorrow? That’s great!
He: Can you be at the apartment tomorrow?
Me: I’ll have to clear it with my managers, but I think so - at least one of us should be able to.
He: We’ll come at 9 o’clock.

The moral of the story?  My stuff is coming.  Well, part of it, anyway.  He called me again a scant few seconds after we’d hung up to tell me that, so as not to be unfair, they’ll deliver my husband’s air freight together with mine.  So: our stuff is coming.  Well, part of it, anyway.

I also learned today that we are allowed to paint the walls in our apartment, which should be extra-fun because it’s got some architectural features like recessed parts of walls and ceilings and such, so we’ve got multiple surfaces to work with.  Any suggestions on colors?  A friend of mine in another country has used purple to great effect, which is tempting (seriously, when else are you going to paint a wall purple except in a tropical country?) but her apartment is brighter and more modern, so I’m not sure…  Got ideas?  Share them!

At the end of Day 2 in Mumbai, my first impressions are, in no particular order:

• Sidewalks. These are not necessarily meant for walking - sometimes they are for sleeping, sometimes for selling, sometimes for parking, sometimes they’re the local stray dog hangout, sometimes they’re for holding construction materials, sometimes they’re simply in such poor repair that they’re in desperate need of some construction materials of their own.  Every now and then the sidewalk will disappear into either a worn-down section of dirt or, worse, a gaping hole where there was once a grate covering an entrance to the sewer systems.
• Smells.  The city smells dusty, and perhaps a little chemically.  It smells like flowers when standing under certain trees in the midday sun.  It smells like noxious exhaust from all of the rickshaws and buses when in close proximity to any of the busier streets.  It smells like mold and mildew.  It smells like garbage burning, or like food cooking (both, by the way, common uses for sidewalks - see above).
• Shops.  We have been searching (unsuccessfully) for a real supermarket-type shop.  Perhaps they’re just not in our neighborhood.  What is in our neighborhood, though, is everything from super-upscale designer boutiques to grotty little one-man shops selling only one thing, and everything in between.  And what really gets me is that these are not in separate areas - one might stumble upon a boutique no “normal” person can afford to shop at in the middle of 3 blocks of nothing but dusty little demi-storefronts catering to those with very little to spend, with the proprietor (or his/her 10-yr-old son) squatting outside on the sidewalk munching on something.  I saw our neighborhood described as the “Beverly Hills of Mumbai” somewhere before I came, but the comparison doesn’t quite hold unless Beverly Hills recently incorporated significant chunks of South Central L.A. (perhaps without the guns, but I’m not entirely sure) - it makes for a heady, somewhat overwhelming mix of sights, sounds and experiences.
• Food.  The Indian version of Chinese food isn’t bad, though it’s frustrating to have only the names of the dishes on the menu with no description to provide a clue as to what you might get if you ordered it.  They seem to love gelato around here, though I have not tried it yet to see if it approximates the Italian version at all.  One can easily live a vegetarian lifestyle here and not want for a variety of flavors, textures, and styles of preparation.  And yes it’s true - generally no pork or beef (though we did find a teensy “western-style” deli today that has ham on offer, tucked between vendors selling wilted vegetables and shops with dusty notebooks and bars of soap).
• Drivers.  These are what make walking dangerous.  Honking the horn seems to be a national pastime.  It is even common to see trucks with “Horn OK Please” painted on the back.  As in Korea, there seems to be an unspoken rule that one must constantly endeavor to rush forward and pass the people in front of you.  However, whereas in Korea pretty much everyone is driving a standard-size car or SUV, here they have added agility (and therefore added unpredictability) due to the prevalence of smaller vehicles like 3-wheeled rickshaws, motorcycles, even occasionally horses or push-carts.  Traffic lights and laws are not always obeyed, and pedestrians certainly do not have the right of way.
• Weather.  It’s hot.  Very hot.  And very, very humid.  It’s sticky outside, and the air feels thick to breathe.  After a few hours of wandering around, you become sticky yourself.  I think I am developing a new appreciation for that line from the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird: “Ladies . . . were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum powder.”

More later - but that’s my 2 days’ worth for the moment.

I’m still in DC.  Yes, I should be in Mumbai (or somewhere between here and there) by now, but I’m still in DC. 

Why, you ask?  Because of bureaucracy, of course.  As my husband has recently noted, our visas to go work in India were held up for an unexpectedly long period in some kind of opaque bureaucratic process in New Delhi.

Some of my former visa applicants would be gleefully talking about poetic justice if they knew - schadenfreude at its best.  I can’t tell you the number of times I had to say, “we need to do some further processing before we can issue your visa,” knowing full well that this could mean major delays in visa issuance.  Yes, in a bizarre twist on the “trick the trickster” theme, a pair of visa bureaucrats’ plans have been thwarted by bureaucratic visa processes.

But there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.  After several weeks of no real news, we were informed today that our visas would be issued, and that we should have them in hand by the end of the week.  So next week, it’s destination India (insh’allah).  Better dig through the bags for some lightweight clothing!

Today I was sitting in class, listening to someone talking about something related to preventing fraud and malfeasance in a consular section, and all of a sudden there was a rumble, then a brief vibration, then nothing.  Nobody moved, and the speaker didn’t even miss a beat in his speech.  I’m sitting there, wondering at my knee-jerk urge to crawl under a desk, thinking to myself, “Hm - that sounded and felt an awful lot like a small earthquake.  But that couldn’t be, because I’m in DC, and there are no earthquakes over here.  Impossible.  Must’ve been construction.”  And I left it at that.  Nobody in class mentioned anything at all when the break came, or when we left for the day.  So imagine my surprise when I come home to find that, indeed, the impossible did actually happen.  Huh - whaddaya know?