I went out to dinner with some of the guys here last night. We were here late to make sure that some bugs in the code got fixed before the next release to our customers. Actually, I was here late. The other guys normally work late and get in late. We went out to a place called The Coconut Grove, on Church Street near my hotel. Church Street comes off of Brigade Street, which is part of my route to Food World.
Rohith, Sethu, and Ram (pronounced Rom, and the "th"s are pronounced as a t followed by an h) were with me. They are all aware that I have an exceptionally low tolerance for spicy food. Rohith in particular sort of looks after me. He ordered some non spicy stew for me, though when it came and he tasted his, for he got the same thing, he said it was spicier than normal. The meal was worth describing, not that all I will describe was unusual here, but some of what is normal here is unusual in the U.S.
The first thing worth mentioning is that people do not typically wash their hands here before meals. As I may have mentioned before (I can't remember just what I've described to whom always), they wash their hands after meals. There is a lunch room at i2 where they have catered lunches for everyone every day. I eat there with the guys I work with. There are two basins with water faucets and paper towels. After eating, people go there to wash their hands before going back to work.
Indian meals are, to my experience, eaten with two utensils; a spoon and bread. The bread varies a good deal but it is often tortilla like, at least in shape. Sometimes it is like a tortilla in texture but other times it's more like a pancake, as was the bread when Rohith and I went to dinner last Sunday. Sometimes it's soft and stretchy, some times not. The stretchy bread is the hardest to eat because one tears off pieces and either soaks up sauces or folds it over and picks up pieces of food in it. The hard part is the tearing, because this is done with one hand. All eating is done with the right hand, the other hand being considered inappropriate to use with food. It has taken me a while to get to the point where I can tear the bread with one hand and reliably get any sort of a piece fit for eating with.
The meals last night were eaten from metal plates shaped like straight sided cake pans with short sides, but very nice ones. There was a large leaf that lined the bottom. This leaf had just been freshly washed as was evident from the water drops on it. The guys here know I'm afraid of the local water and one of them was suggesting that I dry it with a napkin just as I was thinking the same thing. The food, a stew, came in separate bowls and then the bread was delivered one piece at a time as we ate so it was as fresh as could be. It looked crispy on the bottom, maybe cooked a bit too much, and was white and somewhat bubbly on the top. It was all soft and tasted quite good, and it really hadn't been cooked too much, despite the looks. The odd part about this bread was that when I folded it over it stuck together, which made it a bit hard to use as a utensil. It was a bit like working with a large piece of scotch tape. However it tasted just great, and the whole meal was good, though at the upper limit of spiciness for me.
Here there are sweets, bread and rice, and everything else is spicy. I'm sure that's not true, but it seems so to me from my limited experience.
The Coconut Grove was definitely a fancy restaurant and the food was very good. Three of us even had some dessert. I had some ice cream, and since it is sweet it isn't spicy. The bill came to around Rs. 800, more than had been expected. We each put Rs. 200 in, about $4.00, and had it covered. Tips are not as common here as in the U.S. and much smaller when given.
We walked back to the hotel and the other guys got transportation home from there. It was a nice night, but I didn't get to bed till about 11:00. As a result I got in to work late this morning.
I've been thinking that there are a number of odd little things I see and don't understand here or at least want to mention in my emails. There must be half a dozen of them, but only two come to mind at the moment. One is the large plastic bucket and moderately large plastic cup with a handle that lets one hook it over the side of the bucket. There were to be found in the shower, under the faucet. Having only limited, almost no, experience with other cultures, I have been unable to figure out just what they are for. No doubt some of you will have the answer.
The other odd thing that I just noticed this morning was dirt that had been dumped at intervals along the median of Airport Rd., which is the large road that the i2 offices are on. The median in the road is two 9 inch, or so, cement walls with a foot of dirt in between and some small plants, many just managing to survive, planned at short intervals. Now the reasonable thing to think would be that they were going to put more dirt in the median, but the median is already full of dirt. There's no room for additional dirt, at least not in the quantities that have been dumped. The piles of new dirt have spilled out into the fast lane and many have been flattened at the edge by bus tires. The dirt was dumped last night so I guess in the next few days I'll see what becomes of it. [right: Diamond District office building and the Airport Rd. median before the dirt.]
Other oddities will have to wait for another email since I have emails to answer and should have already started work by now.
That's it for this Wednesday morning, 22/1/03 as they would write it here, the 23rd of January.
Garr