Trial and Error.

It is easy to forget about the belly button. Today I cleaned out my belly button, which I had evidently forgotten to do since my arrival in Chennai. Let’s just say I’ll be doing that much more frequently. Gross. I asked my housemate (or flatmate, as he is called in the local British-borrowed slang) if he had a particularly dirty belly button, and he informed me that stomach hair keeps most of that crap out. Live and learn. Or live, learn, and covet belly hair.

Monday was for failing. But failing can be funny, even enjoyable, when your entire framework is destabilized and you’re adjusting to living in the moment. After an incredibly hot afternoon spent hosting an art workshop at a local school, I returned home determined to make my 6:30pm martial arts class. Ari was coming along for the first time, and we left the house around 6:05pm. Right now we only have one bike (mine), as Ari’s cycle is in shambles and Nina has decided she’s not quite ready for hers yet. So the plan tonight was for us to ride to the class (about 15 minutes away) like the locals: one of us would steer and sit on the seat while the other straddled the back rack. It didn’t take us long to realize that I was horrible at balancing two people on a bike. Ari also felt a bit like I was literally his servant carting him around, so we switched and I straddled the rack. Imagine slowly branding your ass with a rusty composite metal…

Let me just say right now that riding a bike in India can be unnerving. Straddling the metal bike rack, wincing over the slightest bump, and having no control over where you are going…this, this is terrifying! We rode on for quite some time, and then decided to take a short cut that we had seen the rickshaw driver take earlier in the day. And then we got lost. This is the second (!) time I’ve been lost on the way to martial arts, and this time we never made it to the class. We did manage to make it to the post office to mail our days-old letters; however, we were told that unless we wanted speedy post (more than $10US to mail a letter), we had to come back between 9am and 5pm. Strike Two. The final failure was when, as we were walking home because our asses would no longer let us ride pseudo-tandem, we stopped at the new dance studio that opened up just down the road. Their sign announces in pink and black lettering that they offer line dancing, rock and roll, hip hop, jazz, waltz, cha cha, jive, salsa and marangue. But as I was told this evening, you have to start with line dancing and work your way to salsa. The owner told me that if I started classes with him, he’s have me confidently dancing in all sorts of social situations. Evidently he’s unaware of his competition, my much cheaper means of letting loose on the dance floor: gin.

Time to sign off. We’ve made pasta sauce and linguini. Very exciting.

Photo: Cows outside the Tara Office. Here cows are put out to pasture as well; the difference is, the pasture is a neighborhood in a city of 8 million people.