wordfalls and scatters

First, the lessons:
* It is probably not a good idea to carry home a roti soaked in ghee and sugar in adequate packaging in your backpack. At least, not if you would not like to find a thousand ants in your backpack in coming days. If you enjoy a thousand ants, feel free to ignore this advice.

* I was pretty sick on Saturday night and Sunday during the day. I mostly spent the day sleeping, and drinking lots of water, and not doing anything absurd like trying to work or sit up. Then slept for 10 hours straight last night. I have still been a bit sick today, but well enough to do some work. Lessons learned: having a day off sometimes is probably a good idea! Also, coconut juice is good for rehydration (I knew this one already)! Also, one day is enough to rest, now back to work! (I think at least two of these lessons are good lessons.)

* I haven't been cooking while I'm here, because I have been daunted by the different kitchen setup and by cooking for people and fretting that I will get it All Wrong. But I couldn't eat much at all yesterday, and definitely not anything spicy, so I made myself a little mashed potato. And today my eating is still a little shaky, although I've been wanting to eat EVERYTHING, so I made some mashed potato-with-green-beans, and some tomatoes-with-onions, and noone said: 'peh! worst ever! stupid Australians!' I went to the supermarket to get ingredients instead of one of the little vegetable sellers (and I felt bad about it, but I wanted tofu - or 'soya paneer', as it was labelled). And it wasn't too scary, although one woman did just walk in front of me because I was queuing insufficiently aggressively. The guy behind me showed me how it was done by standing about five centimetres away from me the whole time I was Buying Things. Lessons learned: cooking is not too scary! I should do it, sometimes! Also, it's okay to not be good at queuing as long as I'm not in a rush.

In other news, I was taking an auto home from an interview a couple of days ago, and another auto pulled up next to us at the lights. And sitting in the auto was a goat. I looked at the goat, which was looking quite unconcerned, and had holes drilled into its horns that had little clusters of bells threaded through them. And the goat didn't look at me, because it had some serious staring off into space to do, but the guy sitting in the auto with it did. I think his curious looks at me were very similar to my curious looks at the goat. And then the lights changed and that was the end of it.

Well, in the latest in a series of Unfortunate Events, we missed our plane yesterday. Or rather, we arrived at the airport in good time, waited around for two and a half hours, went to security, and then realised that despite what our itinerary said, we had beenbooked to fly on the 22nd, not the 23rd.

All things considered, I think that everyone handled it pretty well.

So we will now - fingers crossed, prayers to any gods listening, and many double-and-triple-checks of all tickets and documents - be arriving in Perth today instead.




*sigh*