Letting Go

This is truely going to be an exercise in letting go-- particularly of all of those little things I am wont to keep, just in case. I spent almost the whole weekend throwing things away, getting them out for Freecycle, or organizing them so they can be stored. I know I am a packrat, but I amaze even myself how much stuff I can keep. I think about 1/3 is stuff that just didn't get put away or thrown away (like receipts from the hardware store) because I was either lazy at the time, or got interrupted on my way to putting things away. Now I get to purge, and purge, and purge.
Trying to figure out what is worth paying to store, and what small amount of things I want to take along is really hard. We get 5 cubic meters for shipping. If I consider that we need to take some essential cooking items so we can eat the first few days before we actually do some shopping and get our kitchen set up, also we want to bring some things which will make our home feel familiar and "ours" it doesn't leave much room for personal items. Of course we could ship more, and pay for it ourselves, but we don't want to end up with too much stuff there. All the housing I saw had less storage space than we have here at home. So, having a lot of extra stuff around won't be easy.
I have about a month more of time to get the packing and sorting done, I still have one week of travel before the end of the year. I'm starting to feel stressed and like the house is full of boxes. Cindy tried to sell off many of the homeschooling textbooks and resources this weekend, not many people came. We'll try again one more time, but int the mean time, there are 10 boxes of books sitting on the living room floor. Not the most "cozy". I hope the chaos reduces fairly quickly. I know I have a lot of work to do in the garage. I spent 1 day on it this weekend, and got a lot of junk taken care of, now I need to organize all the tools to keep/ sell/ loan out/ take... I suppose a hammer and screw driver might be useful, but none of the power tools will work... At least that decision is made. Ok, enough of that, back to sorting...

Home again

Well, I made it back home. Now I'm just suffering from that old nemesis of travelers: Jetlag. I managed to stay awake till about 8pm and slept all the way till 3:45am. Fortunately I was able to relieve my bladder, and get back to sleep till 8, so maybe, just maybe it'll go ok this time...

Weather here at home seems dreary and makes it hard to get moving this morning. But the jungle I call a back yard seems to be taking over and I really need to do something about it. Funnily enough the grapes I had cut for the family before I left, but forgot to bring in from the back yard, turned to raisins while I was gone; now I need to rescue them before they start to mildew and rot in from the rain. Also I have way too many ripe apples on my tree, I guess I'll have to make apple sauce, or eat a lot of pie over the next few weeks before we head off into the wild blue yonder. So much to do and so little time left-- better go find my cup of real decaf, something I had trouble finding abroad, and get started with the chores.

Rain Rain Go away

I've been in Finland all week, mostly just working. Long days. Hardly any light, and really no sunshine to speak of. When I arrived Sunday, it had obviously recently snowed, but that melted quickly. I guess Monday was ok weather wise. I slept in pretty late as I had arrived at 2am. It was a decent day and the walk to the train, and from the train to the office was brisk but refreshing. By evening it was drizzling and dark. It gets dark around 4pm now, and is still dark at 8 am. Tue&Wed were long days at the office punctuated by occasional taxi rides in the rain from one building to another.
On Thursday we went offsite to Majvik. It is a few kilometers from Espoo, and a rather nice place. Christian and I got there early, so I went for a walk while it was still dark/dusky. It was raining lightly, but not enough to bother with.
There were some wonderful trees, berries and birds, but the light wasn't really cooperative for good photography with my point&shoot.
Thursday evening we did some stretching exercises and learned some good techniques for a quick exercise routine even when travling. I will need to try them out over time to see if they really help out. I think they will. Then we went on to the obligatory (but highly enjoyable) sauna. None of us were really up for a swim in the lake, so we just enjoyed the sauna, and a beer in between times. I always enjoy the sauna, because it is relaxing and cleansing, and I sleep well afterwards. Friday was a pretty productive day, but the weather was really rotten on the way back to the city. Now I am sitting here, getting ready to come home and really ready to be back home after 2 weeks. I'll post more about the trip, especially the China part later after I am back home.

Singapore Sling

You've heard of the drink the Singapore Sling-- well by the end of the day I felt like I'd had one too many of them, even though all I had was juice and Tea, oh yeah and one coffee with breakfast. I plead lack of sleep, only 4 hours on the plane. But it was a wonderful day touring the city. I was fortunate enough to have a co-worker who really insisted on taking me around Singapore. She picked me up at the airport at 6:45am on a sunday, wow-that's dedication. We went for a nice outdoor breakfast at the Botanical gardens.
After a leisurely breakfast of Eggs, Sausage, and toast (yes I was hungry, I didn't have dinner the night before), we went to see the Orchid garden. It was huge, with orchids from all over the world. By now it must have been about 9:30 am and it was already getting hot. It was very nice to go into the "cool house" where they had mist and air conditioning for the orchids from cooler regions of the planet.

After touring the gardens, we went up the 'mountain' and saw the view of the city from there. They also have a statue of one of the icons of Singapore-- the merlion. It is a beast that was seen on the beach which looked like a lion, but was assumed to have come from the sea, like a mermaid. Therfore a merlion. Singapore is a real contrast to Bangalore, China and Taiwan. The streets are pristine, everyone speaks English as their first language, then most likely chinese or one of the other south east asian languages from the countries near by. The traffic is very orderly. And it seems that here in this small Island State, people of many races and religions get along very peacefully. In China town , there is a real sense of the old Singapore, but very well kept up. Buildings are old, but painted regularly and maintained otherwise. In front of all of the buildings there are extended shops onto the street. And I could feel the air-conditioning by walking close enough.
Then I came around the corner and all of a sudden I felt like I was in India again. There was a temple with a ceremony in progress. Traffic was briefly stopped while they came out into the street, turned around and went inside again. No honking of horns, or upset faces. In the market area, there was a definite sense of commercialism and some touristy items, but no-one accosted me to buy anything, it was very nice. They seem to be very into Christmas, according to my co-worker, and had decorations up already. I didn't get a shot of the christmas trees on the patio up on top of the mountain, but I did get one of the snowflakes hanging in the trees downtown.

After that we went for a nice lunch of Dim Sum and other Chinese dishes. The table was literally covered to overflowing with food and I felt stuffed by the time lunch was over. I was taken back to the airport where I basically had just enough time to document our meeting (it was a business stop), and then I was too tired to do any reading or writing, so I just zoned out and watched cricket on the TV till it was time to board the plane. I arrived in Shanghai at about 10:30pm and since we were just a bit late, there were several other plane loads of people going through immigration. About an hour later I managed to get through, find my luggage and driver and off to Hangzhou by car. I fell asleep in the car, luckily, as I arrived at the hotel at about 1:30 am and had to be up by 6 for another meeting. More about China later.

I have a lot of catching up to do. Here it is more than a week later and I haven't even had a chance to finish describing the trip to Bangalore. I really wanted to finish it while things were fresh in my mind, but China has blocked Blogspot and I couldn't do an update. So I'll just have to do some late posting.

Saturday was our one last day of sightseeing in and around the city. We started out by going to Lal Bagh. We had hoped to see some monkeys there as we had heard that they are all over the city, but the best place to see them is in this park. We got the car around 10 in the morning and went directly there. First thing we see is that there is some sort of stage being built for a festival or presentation. Turns out there was some dance festival planned in a short time. I couldn't get exactly when from the driver, his English wasn't too good.

We walked in a ways and I spotted some groups of men who looked like they were preparing for dancing or something like that. There was a variety of music coming from several directions. Then suddenly one of them starts drumming and the noise level goes way up. It was awesome how the drumming reverberated through the park. Then several more started up practicing and the noise was something ferocious. It was fun watching them practice the drumming and the dancing.
We must have stayed and watched the drumming and dancing for 15 mins or longer.

I could have stayed for hours, if it hadn't been our last day and we wanted to see some other things too.

We wandered on. On the way into the Japanese garden we were approached by this lovely young girl who first went to Anna and said "hello auntie", then she shook Cindy's hand and mine and asked if she could have her picture taken with us. She was utterly charming. You can see her picture on Cindy's blog.
After seeing the Japanese Garden, we went on and saw Snow White and her 7 Dwarves.
Kind of a crazy site in the middle of a nice park in Bangalore. Apparently this is a fairly famous location, never heard of it myself before. We went on and saw more of the park, including many sleeping stray dogs, several kinds of birds, as well as a variety of flowers and trees. See my Flickr site for all of the photos. Just for comparison though, we saw a small Tank (lake) which was partially covered by water lillies.


After seeing the park, we went to Commercial street. I didn't take any pictures there, but it is a veritable visual, as well as auditory, cacophony. Signs for and stores with just about anything you could want or need. We did a bit of browsing for clothing with Anna who was very concerned about what she might find to wear in India. I got very tired of standing around clothing stores. We did buy a couple more scarves and nicnacks for gifts. Then we got tired and returned to the hotel to pack up.

Somewhere during the day, Cindy had heard from Sensei Ganesh and we went to see a class. It was very interesting, I would guess about 30 students, and they practiced outside in the courtyard of a school. He wasn't there at the start, he has several classes throughout the city, and is involved in the India Karate Do federation. He met with us, and then had Anna show him her moves. He seemed to feel she could do well and suggested a private lesson.

Then it was off to the hotel to collect our bags and head for the airport. I had to leave at about 11:15, and Cindy and Anna had a 1:50 flight. They came with me. We arrived there very quickly (last time it took me about 20 mins to get into the parking lot, but this time we just drove right in). I could check in and run my bags through the scanner, but they could not. So we waited about an hour. They put their bags through the scanner and went to stand in the Checkin line while I went upstairs to go through immigration and customs and Security. They managed to get through it all before I had to leave on the plane, but I did get to say goodbye there in the waiting room. Then I got on my flight--destined for Singapore at 6:20am. Yes I got about 4 hours sleep. More on that in my next post.