Life away from work

After an insane 70+ hour work week (20 hours of which was put in on Friday alone), I finally got to move out of the hotel and into my new apartment!! That first balcony is mine, and that's our stray dog sitting out front. His name is Raja. I really like the neighborhood! It's super cute, and there are plenty of shops within walking distance. And the landlord (or maybe he's just some on-site super) filled my fridge up with a case of Kingfisher 40s on Saturday afternoon! My co-worker Ben lives two floors up, so he showed me around on Saturday during the day. Later on, in the evening, the landlord/super, Mamu (I have to get a picture of him for you, he is really interesting-looking because he is old and wears the thickest coke bottle glasses you have ever seen), took me out in a rickshaw to buy bedsheets. We went to this little hole-in-wall room full of fabric, and I picked out sheets, pillows, a beadpread, and pillow cases, all of which cost something ludicrous, like 5 dollars. And all of it looks straight out of the Anthropologie catalog. The fabrics here are absolutely amazing. I really need to learn how to sew! Ben had invited another guy we work with over in the evening, and I ended up going upstairs and hanging out for a while after my excursion. I have never needed to unwind so badly in my life, so needless to say, it was awesome to drink and hang out with new friends!

Speaking of new friends, Rahul came over this afternoon, and took Ben and I downtown. We went to Commercial Street and MG Road, which are very busy shopping areas. I didn't buy anything except for a new nose ring, which cost less than a dollar, but I got to finally see some of the city that I now call home. It was difficult to take a lot of pictures, because there are a million people everywhere, pushing up against you, and children trying to force you to buy flowers and crappy over-sized carnival-esque stuffed animals. But it was really fun, and I'm thinking about going back tomorrow by myself, since I have been given the day off, and I really need some Indian clothes to wear to work. I'll write more tomorrow, since it's really, really late (or really early, actually). But here are some pics of my apartment and some stuff I saw today - the view from my balcony, my bedroom (there are two, come visit!), one of my bathrooms (how jealous are you of my bidet-shower-head-sprayer?), some dude with a needle peirced through both of his cheeks who saw me take his picture and then followed us for a while, an advertisement for the movie Wolverine (all the American movie posters are drawings that I really need to figure out how to buy), a Hindu temple in the middle of a bunch of shops, a mosque in the middle of a bunch of shops, Rahul at India's version of Starbucks (apparently reruns of the TV show friends started a huge coffee-house trend here), and Rahul buying hot peanuts on the street.