Greetings!

Welcome to Flora's occasional cooking blog.  Most of my journal is friends-only.  The public portion is mostly a way to share recipes (or cooking misadventures), along with "ooh, shiny, must share!" (mostly SCA) stuff. 

If you're looking for my India travels, see the public blog on DreamWidth at http://flora.dreamwidth.org .

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Cheers,
~Flora

The ancient Indus Valley "cradle of civilization" is today an island in a dry sea of salt. Hundreds of miles of salt flats stretch across to Pakistan. It's a barren wasteland that looks eerily similar to snow. We saw it, and tasted it too.

We left very late. Kutch is a five hour drive from our home in north Gujarat. We planned to leave at 8 in the morning. Our driver came by 9. However, his jeep was out of town; it didn't arrive until after 10:30. We ended up leaving at 11. We submitted a ShmooCon abstract to fill the time.

The Great Rann of Kuch looks exactly like a frozen Great Lake in the midwestern USA. But it's *salt*, not snow. This was a great, shallow sea as recently as the time of Alexander the Great. Even now, when it rains in monsoon season, the sea briefly returns and fills with shrimp. Flamingos flock here by the thousands for the shrimp feast, turning pink from the shells. But in the dry winter months, when we visited, the Great Rann is a silent, barren landscape of solid white. Neither plants nor animals nor people live there. We saw only a handful of vehicles - mostly construction equipment. And mostly heading the other way. There aren't any gas stations out there; people mostly use camels or the rare, precious tractor.

If you've ever walked on a snow-covered lake, you have an idea of what Kutch is like. When Lake Michigan freezes over, it's a vast expanse of flat, sparkling white stretching beyond the horizon. Not <i>completely</i> flat; the wind sculpts the snowdrifts into long, horizontal white dunes. With sun or freezing rain, the formations develop a hard, brittle crust that crunches underfoot. Walking on the crust makes footprint craters that break through to the soft snow below. Now imagine that same landscape, but with a 90-degree temperature and absolute still silence. Add a briny ocean smell, and substitute salt for snow. That's Kutch.

We stopped the car and walked on the salt plains. The surface cracked under our feet exactly like frozen snow. We broke off a little bit of the crust and tasted it; natural sea salt. I stayed near the relative stability of the road. But my husband blithely wandered over to a pretty, open pool of water, with Yellowstone-like colors from the minerals. The salt crust was thin at the water's edge, and Michael fell in!  He didn't go far, but he sank past his ankles in brine. When he extracted himself, his feet and sandals were completely covered in salt.

We needed the jeep. The sturdy, national highway ended 40 kilometers before Dholavira. The Indian Government was actively doing construction on the lengths on over the salt flats, with a strangely solid, single raised bed. On land, it was another story. We took two hours to travel the last 40 kilometers. After an hour of barely-road travel, our driver suddenly realized he'd passed the last gas station for 200 kilometers and we wouldn't have enough to get back. So he stopped at one of the villages and they poured a can of diesel fuel into the jeep. Whew!

We finally pulled into the Harrapan ruins at about 4:30, the only car in the parking lot. A handful of workers were still sifting through the archeological site with drum-shaped screens.  Other workers were coating the ancient bricks with a slurry of cow manure and mud.  There are huge, elaborate systems of reservoirs created to capture the monsoon rains for use in the dry seasons.  There's a tiny, year-old museum there too. The workers followed around us, switching on and off the displays of the millenia-old artifacts.  They have found many toys, including carved marble chessmen-like figures and toy carts; pottery; stone and shell beads; and beautifully detailed seals for stamping designs into wax. The seals included several intricate, recognizable designs startling in their lifelike quality. Several seals showed a multi-headed water buffalo--like a bovine Cerberus. Their mundane, single-headed buffalo are today outnumbered by camels and goats in this part of India. The climate changed, and the area became deserted.

(Cross-posted from my DreamWidth account, http://flora.dreamwidth.org )

We posted our India photographs.
http://blacks.smugmug.com/India

(Cross-posted from my DreamWidth account, http://flora.dreamwidth.org )

We spent the post-Diwali week in Udaipur, Rajasthan, known as the Lake City.  We stayed with Dr. Neelu Ghosh and her family.

Dr. Ghosh and her husband have two charming, intelligent teenage daughters - Ashmika, 17, and Abiditi, age 14.  Their English is impeccable; Michael and I had to adapt our language to not talk down to them.  They're easily the most fluent English-speakers we've met in months.  They're also fluent in Hindi and Bengali, and proficient in Gujarati and Sanskrit.  And they're creative. Their family's home is beautiful, decorated equally in carefully chosen decorations and their daughters' own impressive artworks. And the girls are as nice as they are smart. 

Ashmika and Abiditi showed us around the sights in Udaipur.  We visited Lake Fateh Sagar, an artificial lake/reservoir in the shape of India.  We took a ferry boat out to the Nehru Gardens in the islands in the middle of the lake.  The ferry was packed with (Indian) tourists visiting for their Diwali vacations; it's normally not that crowded.We saw Udaipur's famous fountains. There's the Musical Fountain, an elaborate modern water fountain that plays traditional Rajasthani folk tunes to a sound and matching light show.  It was a little cheesy, but oh well.  The historic Saheliyon-ki-Bari (pictured above) made up for it.
(Cross-posted from my DreamWidth account, http://flora.dreamwidth.org )

The host institution is bending over backwards to accomodate us. Among their wishes is to provide food that we will enjoy eating. Professor Hiren, our key guide, has taken us for lunch and dinner to various restaurants to try to see what foods we like. Apparently, they will arrange for the local Visnagar restaurants to deliver food to campus for us. The local Gujarati cuisine is completely vegetarian (as are about ~80% of the local people). Fortunately we love cheese, and most of the vegetable dishes are served hot so we can eat them without fear of getting sick.

Chandrika, our faculty coordinator's wife, cooked us a standard Gujarati dinner when we visited them. We ate it in the traditional manner, with our right hands, as we were all seated on the floor.


We've also eaten a couple times at Shukan, the main hotel-restaurant in town. It serves Paneer (Indian cheese), in just about any way we could imagine. Much of it's Punjabi (North Indian), with cheese cooked in different spicy sauces. Michael especially likes the dry paneer tikka: a toothpick hors d'oeurve-style cheese chunk, dipped in Tandoori yogurt/spice sauce, and topped with a grilled pepper or onion or tomato slice.

I'm remembering much of my culinary Indian terms. Aloo (spelled Alu) or Batate for potato; Ananas is Pineapple. The Gujarati dal (lentil soup) is more watery here. The Lassi is normally a sweetened custard sundae. They serve "buttermilk" (chaas) which is more like the plain/salted yogurt Lassi drink I'm used to, but frothy.

Michael is living on chai coffee. That's made with hot steamed milk, sweetened, with cardamom and other spices. I still prefer tea, but the coffee is good. There's also a certain novelty in being able to push a buzzer and summon a new cup of coffee brought to you upon demand.

For drinking water, we've been able to drink bottled water (seals broken in front of us). I've also been drinking tea made from tap water after it has been boiled in the electric teakettle. The water from the sink is not safe to drink or use, due to the prevalent bacteria that cause diaharrea and worse. We brush our teeth using bottled or boiled water. It is also not safe to eat vegetables or fruits that have been washed in the tap water; we try to only eat hot food. It's that way throughout India. An article in last week's national newsmagazine was trumpeting a new project for safe drinking water in Harayana, a relatively small state near Delhi. So it can be done.

Sanitation and tradition also dictate that eating occurs with the right hand only. We've torn our <i>naan</i> and <i>roti</i> breads with our right-hand to scoop up mouthfuls of food. Forks are usually provided, though not always. Spoons are served with Lassi and desserts. Silverware is acceptable, but eating with fingers is strongly preferred.

(Cross-posted from my DreamWidth account, http://flora.dreamwidth.org )

We were literally welcomed with flowers.  Sankalchand Patel College of Engineering (SPCE) is very glad to have Michael here. Our first day was full of welcoming meeetings and greetings.

Thursday night, we flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad--the largest city in Gujarat.  Michael's faculty coordinator, Professor Hiran Patel, was waiting at the airport with a big sign with my husband's name.  He and the driver loaded our luggage into a large Chevy labeled Noonan Dental College (it shares the same campus as SPCE).  Professor Hiren Patel and the driver gave us each a decorated package of flowers as a welcome gift.  We had about a two-hour ride to the campus and Visnagar. Michael and Hiren and I chatted a bit (the driver didn't appear to speak English). I think Hiren was a little surprised that we had been to India before. However, we had been to the tourist sites. Now, we were going to rural Gujarat, where very few non-Indians go. It's almost all new to us.

Our faculty coordinator and personal host, Professor Hiren, is young, enthusiastic, bright, positive, and completely fluent in American English. He is very open and honest, as well as knowledgeable about his culture and ours. Hiren had personally initiated the process of applying to the Fulbright-Nehru scholar exchange program, and pursued it through the two-year application process.  He and the college have never had a visiting foreign scholar before, and they are anxious to make us feel welcome.  Hiren and his family spent a couple years living and working in Birmingham Alabama, so he has experience with the United States; his colleagues regard him as their resident expert on Americans and American culture. Now he teaches networks and security at SPCE; he is the head of the computer engineering and information technology departments as well as running the college's IT services. He is also finishing his PhD dissertation in network security (border gateway protocols). I don't know where he finds the time to help us so much, but we are immensely glad and grateful to have such a warm, tremendously helpful guide.

On Friday morning, the college held a small welcoming reception for Michael. We had coffee and cookies with the college's president. There was a faculty gathering Friday morning, where each of the college's department heads stood and introduced themselves.  They presented us with two more packages of flowers each. I was invited to all of these too, though I mainly sat to the side. The faculty are mainly young men in their mid-30s. The department heads included even the dental and MBA graduate schools. The president and principal are traditional, older men and wear white kurtas and lungis like Gandhi wore. The younger faculty members dress in modern polo or button-down shirts and trousers.

Michael's office is several large desks in one end of their totally modern conference room. They set up a desktop computer for him there too.  Michael's favorite feature is a coffee button, where he can press a buzzer and someone will arrive with fresh Indian chai coffee (made with thickened milk and cardamom/spices). They invited me to telework from there too; I will see how it goes with internet in our apartment.

The campus is stunningly beautiful, with tropical flowers and palm plants everywhere. (I promise to post pictures soon.) We're still in monsoon season, so it's very hot and humid. We have air-conditioned living quarters; more about that later.

(Cross-posted from my DreamWidth account, http://flora.dreamwidth.org )

Another post, continuing my notes from last week's Fulbright Orientation. These are mainly for my reference.
( To expect for South and Central Asia )

One in a series of Fulbright Orientation notes. Not all these are public yet. It's mainly for my reference when we're in India.

These are my notes from this morning's talk. I'm making this entry public since others might be interested. I will try to hide this behind a cut, but it's cross-posting from DreamWidth so I apologize to LJ friends if the cut doesn't work.

My notes from 26 June 2009 Fulbright Orientation speaker on Safety and Security - Michael O'Neill, former director of safety for Peace Corps, now at Save the Children.

( Read more... )
Lots of interesting, practical advice for those going abroad.

The Fulbright orientation has been the past few days in downtown DC. I went with my husband to several sessions before and after work. We've learned about all kinds of stuff - staying safe abroad, medical concerns, what to pack, what to expect, security, and how to dress and act to avoid looking like targets. There are hundreds of people at this training; people are going to south/central Asia, Middle east, and Africa. The vast majority of people there are students, very recent college graduates or PhD students, mostly in the social sciences. There are also quite a few medical and public health people. Of the 140 people going to India, only about 40 are scholars like my husband; and most of those are researchers.

The session panelists, Fulbright alumni, say it will be a life-changing experience. The people we will meet will show amazing hospitality and we'll gain a deep appreciation of their culture. And all the panelists have been saying nothing will go like we plan; there will be problems - mostly small - and we just have to deal with them and accept it. The reliability and follow-through you expect from American daily life and business, is just not there. It will be replaced by an emphasis on personal relationships, relaxing, and coping with discomfort.

We've run into one problem already - we know we're going, but not exactly *when*. My husband is applying for an entry visa, to allow him to teach. India normally requires research scholars to wait 4 weeks before entering country, holding their passports, to be sure researchers' plans have time to go through the approval process. Michael will be a lecturer, just teaching, so he theoretically shouldn't have that problem. The visa office has told him so. The host university has told him so. Everyone in any official capacity has told him it's fine. But. As of yesterday, the Indian official in charge of the Fulbright program over there is convinced that Michael must have a 4-week waiting period. I met the official yesterday, and he seems like a reasonable guy, but he's absolutely sticking on this 4-week waiting period. So it could be August 1, September 1, or anytime later.

The very good news is that my job looks like it will work out. Did I mention I love my company? No details are settled yet, but it looks like I will be able to keep working and contributing, telecommuting. I'm taking the first week or so as vacation anyway, to give a few days to settle in and get the Internet and electricity hooked up. We'll see.

Email systems don't handle non-ASCII characters well.  Even web-based XML parsers have problems with > greater-than and < less-than signs.

Today's sophisticated email programs often function as word processors. They can automatically change straight "double quotes" into different beginning/ending double quotes; Microsoft Word is notorious for this. Word also non-helpfully transforms 1/2 and 1/4 (one-half and one-fourth) to single characters. This is a big problem in trading recipes over email.

Many non-serif fonts still don't display l (lower-case letter L) and 1 (number one) and I (upper-case letter i) in a format easily distinguishable to a human eye .

This problem is not necessarily new.  For instance, Washington DC doesn't have a J street because, in the early maps for the city plan, the letters I and J looked nearly identical and the founders thought it would be confusing for people. (source: a National Parks expert on the DC city layout, at a talk I attended last year.)

The SCA College of Heralds have worked out a standard for writing foreign and special characters in email that accommodates names for a lot of Roman-based alphabetic characters.  It's worth looking at for anyone who needs to share non-standard character information.

Anyone have other references they have found helpful?