… have been really good. Let’s see:
- I’m walking again. Yay!
- I went down into CP the other day to wander about. It was a half-day thing, but my first time actually going out alone in Delhi. Not harrowing in the slightest. Quite nice. Saw some interesting things and especially found a portable tambora I have my eye on.
- I toured Old Delhi with Ritu. We went to the spice bazaar, then stopped for lunch, visited a small Shiva shrine because an ancient Shiva temple nearby was closed, proceeded onto Jamma Masjid (spelling?)—which is the biggest mosque in India, with a big freakin’ tower that I (and, after a couple of reluctant tries, Ritu) climbed… with the result of a great deal of pain as the fruits of out labours—and then we went around Shah Jahn’s old stomping grounds at the Red Fort. The whole complex of monuments is something that seems less impressive to Ritu than to me, but perhaps that’s because she’s seen a lot bigger stuff. To me, all of that together comprised a hell of a lot of the oldest stuff I’ve stood among. It was an intense but good day.
- Today I was a little lazy, feeling the strain of that day in Old Delhi and so I woke a little later, and John and I ended up going in to Delhi to find music and DVD shops with decent prices. We failed to find a music shop that would allow listening before purchase, but we did go to a regular DVD shop of John’s and got me a schwack of DVDs with Bollywood movies on them. Most are 2 or 3 movie-DVDs, some with subtitles and some without. I am grinning and imagining our next movie night in Jeonju.
Ah, and before I forget, today’s funniest anecdote:
Today, Koko was saying she wanted to go upstairs with Uncle Gord and sing noraebang (Korean for karaoke) with her Daddy. So after (or was it before?) extorting a promise from her that she would sing the Korean song Bbo Bbo Bbo in addition to Doe a Deer and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, I was working on the computer. I guess I kept her waiting a few moments too long. So she said, “Uncle?”
“Yes, baby?” I said to her.
She turned to Ritu and said, in Hindi, something like, “Why is he calling me baby? Does this mean he’s become my real uncle now?”
We all had a good laugh and then she led me upstairs on the end of a fake ponytail, while I taught her how to say “be careful” in Korean (because I was worried about how she was walking up the steps).