Merry Christmas from India

T'was the night before Christmas
When all through the house

Not a light bulb was shining
Not even a [computer] mouse

The appliances all sat
With their power not on
In hopes that GSO
Soon would be anon

The child was nestled
All safe on a chair
While shadows from flashlights
Danced here and there


Uuuuh, this is getting hard to maintain... so...


But I heard them [GSO] exclaim
As out of sight they were driving
Happy Christmas to all
And we'll be back in the morning


Ok that was pretty strained. It seemed easier in my head when I was driving home from work. Anyway, it's our first Christmas in the Foreign Service, and on paper it was pretty lousy. In reality, it was quite pleasant, TAKE THAT PAPER; you're always lying to us!


I should start from the beginning, and I'll recap at the end. So we have some family visiting and after 5 days of traveling (standby, and being bumped from flights several times), they arrived at our house at around 2:30 AM on Christmas Eve. I had an extra long day at work, but an hour or two before leaving I got a frantic call from our housekeeper saying that one of the AC units was smoking and she'd turned it off. Thinking she'd done well, but might have been overreacting a little, I planned to submit a request to GSO that it be repaired, and just not use it for few days. (One missing air conditioner is not really a big deal when you have 7 in the house, and we were coming up on several holiday days.) Shortly there after I got a call from my wife... Apparently the AC unit had caught fire and my housekeeper had turned off all the power to our entire house. This seemed a little more serious, so I called GSO to have them look into it immediately (yes... fires are always an emergency). When the maintenance guy got to the house, he attempted to turn the power back on. Approximately half of the house stayed dark, and the light bulbs from the other half started making popping sounds and turning off. (Hooray?) He quickly turned the power back off and had the landlord call an electrician. Long story (a little) short(er), the electrician left with one AC unit and most of our lights working. However, our refrigerator and microwave were not so lucky. We moved most of our chilled goods to the freezer (separate unit, still working) and the rest to our upstairs neighbor's refrigerator. The GSO guys came the next day (Christmas), conveniently arriving shortly after we finished opening presents to continue repairs.


To recap, my Christmas eve was a sleep deprived work day, with overtime, where my house caught on fire, our power was out for several hours, our refrigerator and microwave broke, and we had only one AC unit to cool the house, all while having guests from the States. Sounds pretty bad, right? Well... not so much.


The positive side. We had several people (even the CG) offer to let us stay at their house if needed. We had upstairs neighbors who could store our food and let us heat up meals. Christmas day we had (previously arranged) plans to be at a friends house. The GSO folks were fantastic: they came quickly, fixed as much as they could, and had no issues with coming again on the holiday day to continue working. Best of all? I don't have to pay for any of this. Having just gotten rid of my old house, I can truly appreciate how lucky I am to not have to replace every major appliance in my house... as well as paying electricians overtime (and/or holiday pay) to come fix the faulty wiring in my house.


We've been jokingly saying "Welcome to India" or "Welcome to the Foreign Service," but honestly we still had a great Christmas. We opened presents (most of which were shipped half way around the world by our family), we spent the day with friends, and had good food. We're quite lucky; many of the locals here would have never had any of these problems, since they live everyday without air conditioners, refrigeration, or even power.


Merry Christmas!

Our House

Welcome to a special "Foreign Service" edition of House Hunters International. In this episode, I was given one choice of places to live and after careful consideration, I picked it! On a more serious note, we filled out our housing survey a few months ago, a month ago received a text description of our house, but we were thrilled to finally see where we'd be spending the next two years. 

Our apartment is on the 2nd floor (that's the third floor for you folks back in the USA) and takes up the entire floor of the building. We're in a corner building on moderately busy streets. There is a decent amount of street noise (mostly polite honking, since people honk here instead of using blinkers... or brakes), but it is not very loud in the two bedrooms we're using. 

There are 4 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms, 1 eastern style bathroom, two living rooms, a dining room, kitchen, pantry, and 5 small balconies in our apartment. It (in theory) takes 7 air conditioners to cool the entire house, but we generally only use 2 or 3 at a time. We also have 3 dehumidifiers that are running constantly to minimize the insane amounts of humidity in the air (we're trying to avoid getting mold in our less frequently used rooms). Every room has marble or tile floors and extra high ceilings.

The GSO-provided furniture is fantastic, much nicer than our previous furniture. We were also provided with a welcome kit which provides us with everything we need until our effects arrive. 

Enough talk already, here are the pictures!

Kitchen

Main Living Room

Auxillary Living Room

Dining Room

Dining Room's Balcony

Front Door + Fancy Bug Zapper

Guest Bedroom

Guest Balcony

Guest Bathroom

My Son's Room

Master Bedroom

Insane Amount of Storage
(that top cabinet goes back like 2 meters)

Master Bath

Fourth Bedroom / Office / Trampoline Room?

Fourth Bedroom's Balcony

Pantry, Giant Extra Freezer, Laundry

Eastern Bathroom

The Arrival

Post two of our traveling to India, not to be confused with the movie from the ‘90s involving aliens and global warming.

We were met at the baggage claim by someone from the GSO, after using the Diplomatic Visas and Airline Crew line in immigration. I guess we kind of stood out as the only people to have two cats… I have to say, I've never been met at an airport by anyone other than family, but in this case it was a huuuuuge relief. It pretty much marked the end of our stress, since we knew everything would be taken care of from then on. It ended up being even better than we expected, because we slowly realized (once all bags on our carousel had been taken), that the bag containing my son’s car seat hadn't made it.

I've had misplaced bags before in the US. I can’t stress enough how different a process putting in our claim was. In the US, my general experience had been that waiting in line was the ‘hard part.’ The line wasn't that big at MAA, but the process after that was an adventure. We spoke to 2 people at the Airport Assistance counter and filled out some paperwork. Then we were walked over to the immigration folks where we spoke to 3 more people, some more than once, and with slight changes and additions to the paperwork. Finally we headed back to the airport assistance counter where we spoke to another person, before finally settling things. Somehow, during this process we also ‘went through customs’ even though my wife and son were hanging out with all the bags near the carousel. The plus side was, all we had to do was walk out after that. No one in India (to my knowledge) asked about the cats, but my guide left me for a few minutes to talk to people, so it’s possible he just greased those wheels without me knowing.

Once outside the airport we met my social sponsor, hopped in a motor pool van, and headed into town. Originally we thought we’d be in temporary housing for a brief period, but the renovations on our housing had been completed, so we were actually headed ‘home.’ I really surprised our sponsor by recognizing a restaurant that I’d seen was very close to our apartment when checking the area out on the internet. I don’t think he was expecting me to say, “Oh, we must be nearly there” when heading to a place I’d never been!

At this point it was past 3am, but we couldn't contain our excitement and we immediately started checking out our ‘new digs.’ My son quickly noticed that we’d been loaned a box of toys and immediately got down to business pushing his ‘car’ all around. This place is way nicer than our old house was, but I’ll go into details in another post. I will say, it’s readily apparent that we’re not in the US. Ignoring any differences in architecture, electric plugs, or whatever… Chennai just smells different. Not bad, but there’s a noticeably different smell in the air. Also, the random sounds of the local animals and frequent quick bursts of car horn create an unfamiliar cacophony.

PS: We’re in INDIA!

Our Housing Assignment is in!

It's official, we've been assigned a place to live in Chennai! Huzzah! It came with good and bad news. The good news is we're centrally located; have more bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage than we've ever had before; and our apartment is currently being renovated! The bad news is, it won't be finished until a few weeks after we arrive... oh yeah, and even more egregious... there are currently no pictures. I guess we'll live, but it is always cool to scope out a place before you arrive! Anyway, after a bit of confusion (eventually cleared up by the General Services Office (GSO) employee that sent us the assignment), we were able to find the place on Google maps and voyeur it up (from a pretty low resolution) using Satellite view and "explore the area." There are a handful of restaurants and whatnot within easy walking distance (our first priority on the housing survey), so I was able to check out some of the local eateries (with websites). We were never really nervous about our housing, but it's nice to check that pre-departure box. Also, I am very excited to be 10-15 minutes from work, especially after the past few months of mind-shattering commuting.

I guess on a similar note, we have also scheduled the pack-out from our house. The government provides me with 10 days in a hotel prior to departure, and our pack-out actually falls on the first day of that time. That works out nicely, since it will allow us to pack up everything without having to worry about where we'll sleep. Now if we can just get everything organized for when the packers arrive...

Disclaimer: The picture is not an accurate portrayal of our future abode...

Brand New Car... to me.

My new car. (I think.)

I bought a car! It's in India! I've never seen it... and before this week, I'd never even heard of the model, but whatever, don't rain on my parade. The information put out by the CLO and post literature in Chennai seem to consistently indicate two things:
1) Cars are essential in Chennai.
2) Buying a car takes several months.
The suggested solution to this is to start the buying process before arriving. The CLO published a mini classifieds for departing officers looking to sell their cars. I saw a good deal on a 2008 Hyundai Getz, so I made an offer! From here, we both sign some paperwork and the General Services Officer (GSO) at post will file the sale paperwork with the Indian government. They start it now, because it takes several months for the title change to be processed, so (in theory) we'll be able to exchange the money and car some time in July!

Next up, finding a driver. The previous owner of the car had a driver (which she hired on from the owner before her). It seems likely we will do the same, but we'll have plenty of time to work that out when we can actually meet him. I've never had a chauffeur before... It seems like it could be awkward, but with low wages and awful traffic, hiring a driver seems to be the prevailing practice for Foreign Service Officers (FSO) in Chennai... when in Rome!