Party People

(5 Jul) As the only representatives from the US at Staff College, Jeff and I felt it was only appropriate to host the first big party of the year for the 4th of July. Unfortunately, the 4th was on a Friday and was obviously not a holiday on the Indian calendar. What to do? Well, it turns out that Canada Day was on the 1st of July, also a school day, so our Canadian friend Steve couldn't celebrate properly either. It only made sense to us that 1st of July + 4th of July = Big Canada Day/Independence Day blowout on the 5th of July. We held the party at Jeff's house and invited all of the foreign officers and some select Indian officers since we didn't think we could host the entire college of 450 officers in the house. Despite our selective invites, we still topped out at about 150 attendees and created havoc throughout Gorkha Hill the entire evening...

Group Photos

Canada and US flag cakes...

Jeff, Alex and Tim...fireworks safety demo

With Rohit, Abhi, and Tushar (all from India)

Me and Chris (Singapore)

Me with Jazna (Chile) and Hilde (UK by way of Germany)

Me and Prashant (India)

Me, Dave and Vanessa (Australia)

Me and Celestine (Nigeria)

Alex (UK), Jose (Chile), Amit (India) and I watch over the grill

A Walk in the Woods

One of things that the Nilgiris have plenty of is beautiful terrain for hiking. In the little bit of time I've been here, I've managed to get in just a bit of hiking in the local area, and there's never any lack of scenery.

View of Gorkha Hill from a neighboring hilltop.

Local village scenes

Dense woods

First hike of the season sponsored by the Staff College: Alex (UK), me,

Chris and Gregory (Singapore), and Ali (Oman)

View of the Staff College

Roadside shrine with requisite free-range cow

Hillside views and tea plantations
...post-hike beers, of course.
And no hike would be complete without a monkey sighting...

Ooty-liscious

Just to the north of Coonoor is India's "most famous hill station", Ooty. The official name for Ooty is Udhagamandalam. Like most Indian towns it seems, Ooty also has a British name that is no longer official but everyone still uses. For Ooty, that name is Ootacamund. Ooty it is.

Ooty is on a windy road further up into the Nilgiri Hills. The trip only takes about 45 minutes, assuming no mudslides or stubborn livestock on the road. Like anything in India, it's still a bit of an adventure as your driver navigates the many obstacles of Indian driving while maintaining an adequate safety buffer of sixteen inches from the edge of the road and a 400 foot roll to your excruciating death at the bottom of the hillside.

Ooty used to be a swanky British hill resort. While the setting is still beautiful, the city itself has grown into a fairly typical bustling Indian urban area. Despite that, Ooty is a nice break from the Wellington area and has a few additional shops and restaurants not available further down in the Hills.

Jeff, Jazna and Jose from Chile, me, and Alex from the UK at the Ooty Botanical Gardens

Fine Dining

(1 Jun) Another adjustment for me here in India is having a full-time cook working for me. Mary is a very conscientious worker, but this is the first time she's cooked for a Westerner, so there's been a bit of a learning curve for her. I try to have her mix in both Indian and American dishes so that I don't get bored of the same meals over and over. Unfortunately if I'm not specific in what I want, she sometimes has to guess at what suits an American palate. Case in point; one day my stomach was feeling a bit under the weather--actually, this pretty much describes your entire first three weeks in India. Anyway, when Mary asked what I wanted for dinner, I told her to just make a grilled cheese sandwich and some soup. Basic comfort foods, or so I thought. Having never been instructed as to what exactly a grilled cheese sandwich is, Mary decided to improvise. My expectation--bread...cheese...bread...grilled. Her execution--bread...cheese...tomatos...cucumbers...carrots...french fries (?)...and the coup de grace, peanut butter (?!). Needless to say, my American food orders have since become much more specific. Bon Appetit.

Home on the Strange

(20 May) After the arduous trek from Delhi to Wellington, I awoke on a Monday morning to explore my new surroundings in the daylight. I quickly met my new neighbors, the many macaque monkeys that roam the hills of Wellington. These monkeys were the inspiration for this blog and the pictures above and around the blog are of the monkeys which I see daily.

My new home is a three-bedroom house on the ground floor of a six-house apartment block. Being on the ground floor, I have the luxury of both a front and back yard, which are looked after by my faithful driver/gardener Pinto. He does a decent job for his lack of formal horticultural training, though sometimes his choices are a little puzzling. One day I came home to find that not only had he put a fresh coat of white paint on the front fence and bricks in the garden, he'd also thrown a coat on the bottom half of my tree. This is apparently a very British thing to do, and he seemed quite confused that I might not want a half-white tree...

Anyway, the house sits among many other student houses on Gorkha Hill, which is part of Wellington Cantonment. Wellington is nominally a military-only area, though there appear to be no actual fences and the wildlife and locals come and go as they please. Further down the hill is the village of Coonoor. Coonoor seems to be a typical Indian village with a bustling downtown market area and highly suspect sanitation standards.

All of this is set into the beautiful Nilgiri Hills of southern India in the state of Tamil Nadu. After the wretched heat of Delhi, I felt lucky to be spending my year in the cool climate and relative serenity of the Nilgiris. Welcome home.