Getting set up

My towel had ants on it so I threw it in a bucket with some soap and left it overnight, and then rinsed it for about an hour but it was till soapy, so I let it try and it is now a cloth-rock. So I bought a new pink fluffy large fancy towel, which only cost me about $6.00.

We have two bathrooms in our flat. The water doesn’t work in one bathroom, the one that has the Indian style toilet and shower head and sink. We shower with a bucket which we take from the tap in the other bathroom or from the tap on the balcony (where we hang out laundry). We have no form of hot water besides boiling some on the stove and mixing it with water from the tap in a bucket. We have a tank that we need to turn on so it fills up, and turn off when it was full. When it is full, it overflows through a tube into a large bucket in the bathroom.

We do laundry in a bucket. Packaged Tide here has directions for doing bucket laundry.

We don’t have AC (nor do we need it right now since it is Monsoon season which equals extremely nice weather). We have two fans in the living room/dining room area, and a fan in each bedroom.

Sometimes the power goes out randomly (this happens at work, too). It usually comes on after about 20 minutes or so. Not always. We keep flashlights, candles and matches nearby so we are can continue cooking or eating when the power goes out. It sucks when the power goes out on a hot night (this happened in Delhi) just as you are trying to fall asleep, and you try and ignore the happy heat taking over as the fan slowly winds down and turns off.

No one seems to refrigerate anything here. When we were refrigerator shopping we couldn’t find any used ones, and all the new ones were really expensive. In this country, electronics can be a lot more expensive that the USA, as opposed to food and clothing and other things, which are a lot cheaper.

When we arrived in Hyderabad, someone from Lily's work collected us from Secunderabad train station. We took cabs through horrendous traffic and finally arrived in Tarnaka. We went to the wrong apartment building and terrified several tenants by knocking on their doors and asking if we were living there - turns out we were about a block and a half from our place. Below is several of us Southerners in the rain, wearing/carrying our luggage and looking annoyed as we searched for the correct apartment buildings. Also below is Lily, Shlayma and I after being caught in monsoon rains after grocery shopping:


Last weekend my roommates and I went to Osmania University and walked around. We found a nice building and a garden:


There is a park near my work. This is a photo of it; as seen in the picture, there is frequently garbage on fire in this park:


These are the signs outside my work. On the second sign, the characters below the English are Telugu:


Per request of my lovely uncle, I have added some photos on previous entries (such as the train journey) – see below.