My Family Moves to India

A lesson in cultural paradigms

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Insights from Mr. Fixit

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After catching up on rest, we've done plenty of pool time (the resort here has a FANTASTIC pool!), beach time (really not that interesting to me since sand is a daily part of my life - oh well), and elephant time.

Today the kids are out snorkeling with dad, g-pa, g-ma, and K and J. Preliminary reports state so far that the scenery is fantastic, but the kids are way too tired.

That would be because we saw FantaSEA yesterday, the Thai equivalent to Cirque de Soleil. Frankly, Cirque de Soleil has them beat to peices, but, on the other hand, the Thai show has elephants. 18 of them, to our count. Seeing those majestic beasts provoked the same reaction in both S and I: sadness that such obviously intelligent beasts are doing silly circus tricks. Wonder at their strength and their tiny but expressive eyes.

The show ran very late, which is why the kids are so tired.

I really enjoyed the Thai dancing though. It's so interesting to me that they can communicate so much with dance that concentrates on hand and foot movements. It's somewhat similiar to the traditional Indian dance that J was learning. I also enjoyed (not!) the part where J loudly announced to all around us that "This is not very interesting. Is this all?" Luckily the acrobats followed, and it became more energetic.

L was mightily impressed with the magic show and is convinced that they actually made the girl disappear.

And me? Well, I TOUCHED MY FIRST ELEPHANT yesterday. Whooohoo! It was only a baby, but it felt like very tough bristly leather. I have added "learn to train elephants" to my pipe dream list. You never know.

The rest of the day J and I spent shopping at a local indoor mall. I am consistently amazed and disheartened that every country besides India seems to have a wide variety of goods that we either need or desire. Mosquito repellant, for example. I have seen one brand in India, and that rarely. It is an Indian brand and therefore has no identified ingredients, which makes me leery of using it on my kids. (Or myself, for that matter.) I have seen Indians use some very dangerous substances on a daily basis.....at any rate, there I was in a Thai supermarket, buying all of their mosquito repellant. Ridiculous. I feel like some sort of freak bandit.....all the mosquito repellant in the store, laundry supplies, pasteurized whipping cream, iron care supplies, an ironing board cover....the bizarre list goes on and on. At least this time we weren't looking for a ham.....but I nearly cried when I saw they had US Butterball turkeys! It's frustrating to be in a supposedly "third world" country and find that they have so much more available than we do in Chennai. Or maybe Thailand has moved up on the list since I took high school geography and it's now "second world"?

After our girl's day out, we took a break and saw "Enchanted" at the local theater. It was a marvellous theater and an interesting twist on the old Disney princess tale. I have to admit that I thoroughly liked it....maybe it was just because I haven't watched a movie in a theater in over a year.....the nearest theater that I'd bother to go to in Chennai is over an hour away, and you have to make a separate trip to get tickets. Women don't usually go to movies alone, and they seldom show any English-speaking children's movies. Ah well. I hardly watched movies in a theater in the US. That made it a special thing to watch one here, especially since we splurged and bought the recliner seats.

We also showed our cultural respect and stood when they played the Thai national anthem along with a little video clip commemorating their king. (Jessa's comment: "Why are we doing this? We aren't from Thailand!") The Thai people really revere their king. I have to say that I read parts of his last speech on the plane, which consisted 100% of poking fun at what his prime minister was wearing and giving advice about the colors that his people should wear. Not wanting to offend anyone, I will not comment any more on that, except to say that pink is out and the yellow the women wear is apparently too bright.

Actually, you don't even need to read the speech to know what the king wants you to wear. There are all kinds of little stands selling polos in the color of the week.

Yes! I can't believe it either! I am about ready to go all superstitious and declare this house (it can't be me, I've successfully had felines before!) a death trap for cats!

In our latest kitten catastrophe, I was awakened at 5 a.m. one night by Stella screaming her head off. Rushing towards the sound of her agony, I found her at the bottom of the stairs, unable to walk properly. She had fallen off the stairs, same as one of our other kittens. A trip to the vet confirmed that she had broken her thigh bone, close to the hip socket.

AAAGH. I feel like I'm investing tons of mental and emotional energy into pets only to watch them suffer. *bang head on wall*

The only treatment available for this type of injury is to keep her in a cage, relatively immobilized (not climbing or jumping). She's too little for surgical pins and the break is too high up to put a cast on it. As long as the break heals, her prognosis is good, although she may always have a slight limp.

So my entire day yesterday was taken up getting her to the vet, getting her diagnosed, and then searching at Spencer's for a crate. I considered just having the local cane furniture maker make one, but I knew that would take a day or two (or 7), and you can't disinfect cane. With all the problems we've had with feline distemper, I wanted something metal that I could disinfect with bleach. So it was off to KennelMart at the labyrinth mall known as Spencer's.

By the time I was finished it was time to pick up the kids from school, and I had a pounding sinus headache. I got home, got Stella settled (who, poor thing, had spent the day in the car recovering from the anesthesia needed to immobilize her for an X-ray), and collapsed on the couch in a near-coma. It was definitely a Domino's night.

Thank goodness for Arul, who stayed in the car with Stella to ensure that she was safe while she came out of sedation, then trotted upstairs not once, but twice, to carry the crate and some other packages to the car for me. Thank Heavens for my friend Nirupa, who steered me to a good vet who actually had an X-ray machine on site. And thanks to affordable health care in India for pets as well as humans, the entire trip to the vet only cost about $10 US. Whew.

The imported steel crate, now, that was another story. It cost as much as I would have paid in the US. $$$

In answer to the inevitable comment "I thought cats never fell", well, apparently we're wrong. (I thought this too.) The vet said that kittens often fall, but they are saved by the fact that they turn right-side-up in midair, thus landing on their feet, which act as shock absorbers and distribute their weight evenly. Unfortunately if their fall is short, they don't have time to turn, and they often break their pelvis, hips, or hind legs. Which is exactly what Stella must have done. The other kitten I know for a fact fell from the third floor and was fine - at the time of the fall, anyway.

Funny India note:

As a white woman here (a "Madam" - they seem not to understand the negative connotation of this term in American English), I am never allowed to carry my own packages. My purse is all they will let me carry without an argument. I have gotten used to this, and gotten around it by grabbing and running, but yesterday the crate really was too big for me to handle alone. The funny part was that the shopwoman who carried it was about 3'6" tall and weighed at least half (OK maybe even a THIRD)of what I weigh, soaking wet. She was so cute, and so funny ("I inside going now Madam", easily crawling inside the crate to dust it out There was room in there for her to turn around, too!), and I was so tired, that I didn't even argue that I should carry the crate. I just let her haul it out to the elevator and called Arul (she wouldn't leave until I did!) Service in India.....

Thursday was J's 8th birthday, so Saturday we had a party for her. As she and S have birthdays only a day apart, we held the celebrations together. This year, there was no argument about having Barbie on or in the cake, as there has been in the past. (One year Barbie had to ride a motorcycle to satisfy both of them. ) We seem to be over the Barbie cake fetish, on J's part anyway.

Despite my annual stress-out festival the day before the parties, this year's gala went well. We kept it relatively simple. Here in Chennai the current trend amongst expatriates is to hire a party coordinator, and then have custom-printed balloons, catered food, a magician, face painter, mehendi (temporary henna tattoos, usually on the hands) painter, and a bouncy castle. Although it's quite cheap, being in charge of all that hoopla kinda freaked me out. Besides, we live so far out I could anticipate many difficulties (and extra expense) getting people out here. So we elected to do the traditional Mitchell party: pinata, cake, and then games - in this case, swimming. (Using my assets, here.)

I did cave on the number of invited guests though. In the past we've always limited it to 8, the logic being that that's how many invitations are usually in a packet. (ha ha. You gotta love being a mom sometimes. ) The real reason is that 8 is usually all I feel up to handling. But, J's teacher gave her some pressure about inviting the entire class, and in such a multicultural group, I didn't want anyone to feel left out. (Because naturally, J had invited mostly native English speakers.) So we did invite everyone. We also invited a couple of friends from church, so it wound up being about 20 kids all told.

For his party, S wanted to have the young single adults out to play basketball, pool, and ping pong, so the two of them (J and S) worked out a schedule where the two groups would be here at the same time but not have overlapping activities. That's the beauty of this large house - it's so designed for parties that you can actually have two at the same time. Amazing. It also helps to have two maids do all the cooking and cleanup.

J asked for a heart-shaped pinata and Mexican food (her favorite - kinda funny to have a Mexican themed-party in India when we're not even Mexican). As I mentioned before, the pinata was mostly done by our head guard, Rajamanakkam. I finished painting it and added the candy (bought in France at the wonderful hypermarket ) this morning. For the food, I dug out one of our precious Taco Bell enchildada-in-a-box kits and just gave each child a tiny portion - I knew that most of them would not like the Mexican spices. I told them that they had to eat one bite but not finish it. One of S's guests (an American) finished all the rest.

The cakes were a part of my stress-out day. With so many people invited, I figured we needed about 3 cakes. At the last minute I decided to buy two of them , so that meant that they had to be ordered and then picked up today. Thankfully one of the young singles volunteered to do that, so that load was off my mind. The third I made myself, partly because I love the birthday boy and girl, and partly because I don't love Indian-made cakes. They're the same as American store-bought cakes - all looks and no taste. Only they are also greasy. Gross.

So, with two perfectly decorated store-bought cakes and one imperfectly-decorated homemade cake, we had enough. We had some of the store-bought ones left over, so I guess others share my theory about the cake here.

The pinata was the most fun - I sure wish I had charged the camcorder - the kids are old enough now that they can really whack it. In the end, it was almost broken open and S just ripped it the rest of the way because it was fruitless trying to keep the children far enough back so they didn't get their heads in the way of the bat. In fact, one Korean boy did accidentally hit a British boy's head, thinking that it was the pinata (remember, they were blindfolded). I have to admit that it sounded exactly like the pinata when it was hit. Thankfully, we used kid's bats (plastic) and the boy that got hit, W, is absolutely the perfect Brit - phlegmatic and stoic to the core. He didn't even blink.

(I love W. Last year as I sat at school, day after day, hour after hour, with the Queen of Hysteria (J), I would watch W calmly trot off to class and think "It can't be as bad as J thinks it is. Look at W!" W is just always calm and polite. He is the quintessential English gentleman. Where do you get kids like that??? It must be genetic.)

In keeping with Indian tradition, J didn't open her presents during the party. They feel that is rude. I'm OK with it because J agreed to ask for clothing for the orphanage kids instead of toys, so there wouldn't be much fun opening white shirt after white shirt anyway. Besides, with the pool calling, no one really wanted to stick around inside after the cake.

With so many nationalities represented, it was interesting watching the different parenting styles. The Indian parents mostly sent their kids with nannies and drivers, or they stayed themselves. They seem a bit leery of dirt and swimming, and insist on their kids taking complete showers and drying their hair after swimming. (Not a bad idea given the various parasites indigent to India.) The one nanny didn't even know her kid's name - we had quite a bit of confusion until we sorted that out (she was a new hire). But aside from that, they let the kids roam and play, without interfering. Most of the Indian parents applaud L for his "spirit" and are always counseling me not to "crush" it. Like that would be possible, ha ha.

The Korean parents definitely resemble the "helicopter parents" that you read about in the American media. They are constantly hovering and immediately intervene if anything goes amiss. They are never more than an arm's length away, and none of their kids were swimming.

The American parents were the drop-and-run type. Most of them know us pretty well, so that's what we expected. One of the American kids (older) played some kind of bucket game in the pool - he taught the younger kids how to go underwater with their heads in a bucket of trapped air. I was glad that I had two guards watching the pool....

And W, our Brit kid, his driver just dropped him off and picked him up. I think I've talked to his father once, briefly. He was definitely the most polite, the most self-assured, and one of the more independent types.

Anyway, when most of the younger guests had gone, we rounded out the day by going to the beach. The weather is absolutely perfect right now - about 80 F with a nice breeze. Despite our cleaning it up for FHE a couple of days ago, the beach was littered again - Cyclone Sidhr pushed a lot of waves and trash onto it. Ah well. Better trash and strong waves than a direct hit.

It seemed as if everyone enjoyed themselves - even S said it was a nice birthday. Look for pictures on Flickr.com soon. On to pizza and a movie with the singles.....it's my time to relax.