Sunday: Last night the bass was so loud from the hotel rooftop bar from 9pm until 1am that our room shook. We are 3 floors below the bar. All the calls to the front desk were met with much polite apology, but no resolution. Sounds like we missed a good party! We’re going to have to get a new room.
After such full days of home searching, school interviews, hospital tours, and drive-thrus of the various parts of the city it’s hard to have the energy to do anything at night. We have been collapsing on the bed, ordering room service, watching some Discovery channel and falling asleep-at least until the music upstairs starts. Today is our first day off so we are looking forward to some adventures, swimming in the pool and relaxing. We want to hit up a church, a bazaar and maybe a public park.
The cough and cold that I’ve had since the beginning of February is still with me. The coughing seems to be exacerbated by the dust in the air, and riding around in the car with my scarf covering my mouth and my big sunglasses keeping the sun away has become my new look. (Michael Jackson perfected it-I’m just borrowing it). Dan bought me some medicine at The Cash Pharmacy as well as some antibiotics. Antibiotics over the counter! (These are impossible to get back home even if you see a doctor!) It’s nothing like a pharmacy in the US, Dan says. He described it as a large hardware store with lots of drawers. You tell your symptoms to the pharmacist and he/she chooses the right meds for you. So I’m taking something for cough and cold twice a day-the ingredients of which sound interesting and difficult to pronounce.
Time to drink my room service coffee and plan the day!
Brooklyn Mama in India 
Hi Sharon, It is so gratifying getting reacquainted with you and Dan through these posts (which, I admit, I just raced through reading in one sitting). Congratulations on your pending and exciting move to India! What’s up with all the Xanax, though?
Even though you have many life experiences, know that the curious, extremely verbal 9th grader whom I got to know still shines through. I greatly appreciated then, and still do today, your wit and sense of humor around life’s ironies.
My three girls are thriving, too. Anna, who is 15 and a 9th grader, is a sweet, quiet and studious person — a recipe for a wild college girl, I know. Eliza, 13, is already a college girl in her head — hyper-social, an atheist (I think), and wears her emotions on her sleeve (You’d especially like her.). Sarah is 10 — carefree and full of laughs — by far the most well-adjusted person in the family.
I just finished reading ‘Siddhartha,’ a novel about an Indian man’s growth to understanding his life, when I happened upon your blog this morning. Serendipity, indeed. I hope your trip is productive, if only to relieve some of the inevitable anxiety that goes along with such an adventure. Keep writing.
My best to you, Dan, and the kids. Bon, bon voyage.
Mark
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Hi there, So great to hear from you! Thanks for reading! Your kids sound amazing. You make having 3 (well, 2.5) teens seem manageable—that’s my biggest fear: that their adolescence will be payback for my youthful endeavors.
I think I read Siddhartha in an Eastern Religion class at VA Tech, but I will have to revisit it.
How are you? Are you still teaching?
The baby is telling me she needs some love now in a not so subtle manner.
Take care!
Sharon
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Yup. Still teaching. I’ve been at Longmeadow High School since we relocated to Massachusetts — 16 years ago! This year I have 9th graders and 12th graders, so quite the difference in every way. So far, we’ve been lucky with the girls. They have been healthy, both physically and emotionally, over the years. The birth order dynamic is tough to crack, in that Eliza (our middle daughter) is always feeling deprived, even though we bend over backwards to be attentive to her. If anything, Anna is so quiet that we sort of forget about her for stretches, and Sarah is the last person to get much attention because she has two older siblings. It’s a juggling act.
They all attend a Chinese immersion charter school (like a Virginia magnet school — so it’s public). Pretty cool, but unclear if any of them will go on to use it. They all started in either kindergarten or first grade, so to some degree they are fluent as readers, speakers, and writers. For some reason, they don’t talk in Mandarin to one another in front of us, which would be the greatest secret language ever.
[in Mandarin]
ANNA: Eliza, where did you hide the vodka?
ELIZA: Next to the bag of pot.
[in English]
DAD: Oh, isn’t it great that they know a second language!
So, no drama yet. But I ain’t no fool. It’s probably right around the corner. Haven’t kept up on the blog, but I presume that you found housing in India? What’s Dan do that opened up this opportunity? Are you going to work? Stay home with the girls? Nervous? And excited?
When you have a minute, write back.
Always my best,
Mark
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