The Healing Island?

So my newest guilt pleasure – though I don’t know if it necessarily makes me so guilty – is “Lost”. The series.

My husband kind of rolled his eyes when I told him last night that I wanted to watch it. He’s like, “Since when? You’re hooked on yet another show?” Yep. And this happens to be it.

Anyone happen to catch last night’s? I’m going to discuss it here, so if you haven’t seen it, you may want to skip this entry. Just a warning…
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I was terrified, to put it mildly, about the prospect of actually losing Charlie. I mean, I’d read somewhere that one of the producers warned us not to get too attached to the characters as not all of them would survive – but I love Charlie! I would’ve been so pissed if they had killed him off like that!!

But anyone else think it was weird that he actually came back to life? I mean, really – although I was rooting for him, when he started gasping and wheezing I went, “What the hell?” I mean, who knows how long he was hanging there before Kate and Jack managed to get him down? Then Jack was working on him for a good 5 – 7 minutes before he started to breathe. So that’s at least 10 minutes where he wasn’t breathing, at least 10 minutes of no oxygen to the brain, so wouldn’t that be at least 10 minutes where he was technically dead? I mean, I’m not sure how the whole process of hanging really works, but the way I understand it, there are a couple methods to this:

1) your neck snaps and you go instantly, or
2) you struggle and eventually strangle yourself to death.

Although the second one takes awhile, I’m inclined to believe that this is how Charlie (almost) went. Basically since if you break your neck, there really is no coming back… It’s almost like the island itself is a sort of netherworld – a place where your deepest wants/needs come to be. Someone’s a paraplegic, they want to be able to do anything, they suddenly can. Someone dies, but someone is desperately trying to revive them, they’re restored to life…almost like the island has healing powers…Or maybe I’m reading into this too much.
Then again, “Lost” is a weird show, and that’s what makes it so great.

I mean, the fact that Jack sees Ethan but Kate doesn’t, the fact that Walt keeps winning at Backgammon (although he said that even before the crash his father – not Michael – said he was “lucky”), the metal box buried in the middle of nowhere. It’s all very puzzling.
I think the next new episode is coming our way in January. Until then it’s reruns – which isn’t all bad – gives me a chance to catch up on what I missed!

Part 2 of ???

So where’d I leave off? Oh right…the Diwali celebrations.

After that, we spent a lot of time just going around to the different shops, buying a number of really pretty Indian dresses. We visited his sister, brother-in-law, and niece in Bangalore – did a great deal of shopping there, then drove about 3 hours (it should have been about a 5 hour drive but our driver was something of a maniac!) to visit my aunts and uncles in Neyveli. It was nice to see all of them again, and they were very excited to see us again as well.

We left India the night of November 15 – our flight was actually very early the morning of November 16th – and headed off for Taiwan. Let me tell you, it was SO nice to be home again. Like, back in Taiwan home. I forgot how laid-back everything there is. I feel bad because we didn’t take my husband out and about as much as we should have, but I think he still enjoyed it. We visited a couple Buddhist temples, and I showed him around the local street markets. It was really neat to look at everything through his eyes – he’d ask me questions about it that I hadn’t really thought of because I’d just taken it all for granted.

It’s amazing how much things have changed since I’ve been there, though. I think being away from it for two years kind of helped me notice that. Both in India as well as in Taiwan. Even despite all the traffic and pollution issues I described in my earlier entry, there’s been a lot of technological advances, lots of industrial areas with companies, business, etc. that have expanded in India, for instance. And lots of retail. People in India are willing to spend, more than ever now. Especially young people. We went to Spencer’s Plaza, a huge 3 section (they call them “phases”) shopping mall in Chennai. So many shops, and such a huge crowd there! The weather outside was crummy – rainy, soggy, all that – yet inside it was packed. Especially the food court. You could barely find a place to sit, there were even people standing up and eating their lunches – pizza, smoothies, pastries, all kinds of eateries. And down on the ground floor near FoodWorld, a sort of supermarket, there was a pizza stand – you could barely get to FoodWorld because the crowd at the pizza stand was so thick! But yeah – lots of development. And everyone has a cell phone. I mean, everyone. We were standing on the balcony of his house one afternoon and saw a guy delivering water on a bicycle rickshaw. He was clad in just a T-shirt and dhoti, no shoes, but his cell phone was tucked snugly between his ear and his shoulder and he was chatting away as he pedaled around the corner. It was almost surreal. What’s even more surreal is when you realize that despite all of these technological advances, you can still see the traditional way of life when you drive out of the main cities. There are still people that live in thatched roof huts, barefoot, bathing in whatever river is nearby, with little or no electricity, living the lives of simple workers – whether they be farmers or other laborers.

Taiwan, I already knew what to expect. Technology there has always been rather advanced, cell phones were popular even when I left. What amazed me was the traffic and the roads and the buildings. So many shops came and went in my absence. The Industrial Park across from the complex where my house is has been (or is pretty close to being) completed. It’s huge, too! They’ve widened the road in front of our complex, and put a divider and extra traffic lights here and there. Roads all around seem to have improved greatly. Smoother (for the most part). Traffic is still dense in some areas, but since it’s a small island, it’s to be expected. But there was one overpass in particular that had sat untouched for at least 4 years. They’ve FINALLY completed it. My parents said it had just been tangled up in government red tape with no one really wanting to deal with it until recently. So that’s nice that that was finally taken care of. The night markets were as I remember – the sights, smells, sounds, unique offerings. It was really neat.

So that was about it for our trip. This is a long entry (sorry for yakking your ear off). But hey, at least I’m keeping up the writing, right?

Til next time, kiddies!

I’m baaaack!

Guess who’s back -

Back again!

Yes, kiddies, ‘tis I. Back from my lovely, LOVELY vacation. I did pretty well with my “at-least-one-entry-a-week” while I was gone. I think I only managed to skip one week. Otherwise, there was even a week or two in there were I got in three or four entries a week! Aren’t you proud??

So…let’s see what I can tell you about my vacation. Overall, it went really well. There were, of course, little bumps along the way. Although, if you ask my husband, he’ll say that every step of the way while we were traveling, something or another went wrong through our trip. At least on the flight portions. First, while we were going to Chennai, our JFK – Hong Kong flight got delayed so missed our Hong Kong – Singapore connection. They ended up putting us on a Singapore Airlines flight to Chennai via Singapore. Then when we left Chennai for Taiwan, they wouldn’t check our bags all the way to Kaohsiung, so we went through immigration in Taipei, got our bags, then went to the transfer desk where they said we never should have come through immigration. So we had to go back, have them take care of our bags, then go to Kaohsiung and go through immigration again. Then coming back from Taiwan to JFK, our Hong Kong – JFK flight was delayed by about two hours. Little things, and minor inconveniences, when you look at it in the big picture, but it really all worked out in the end.

The trip itself was wonderful. We went to India first for two weeks. Landed on the night of November 1. We were quite exhausted, but it was wonderful to see his family again. They fed us well, as usual. His mom is a great cook, and always insists that we eat well – breakfast included. My husband’s not used to eating breakfast in the first place, but she made him eat! (So of course, we’ve both put on weight!) India’s really changed a lot though. There’s so much more traffic – but that’s modern traffic, and in addition to your usual auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, animals, bicycles, motorcycles, etc. The streets are unbelieveably crowded. Pollution is terrible. Not just the exhaust fumes, but noise as well – horns are always blaring. A couple really brief observations:

1) People never use their turning signals. Rarely when they’re actually turning, and never when they’re passing. To pass, you use your horn. You honk, scoot over, peal forward, and zip back into place in front of the car you were trying to pass.

2) Stop lights while obeyed, offer a means for drivers to cheat. What I mean is, there’s a counter next to the light that tells you essentially how many seconds remain before it will change. So when there’s five seconds left to a red light, everyone has already started going, anyway. Kind of amusing, really (unless you’re a pedestrian in the middle of crossing the street at the time!)

3) There’s no such thing as a “motorcycle lane”. They weave in and out of cars. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’ll go. If there’s a way that they can get past you to get where they’re going faster, they’ll take it.

4) Tied with #3, there’s no such thing as a safe following distance. The lanes are narrower, and half the time drivers straddle them anyway, and they follow very closely behind cars. You frequently brake – it’s very similar to driving in NYC. Stop and go a lot of the time.
We were there for Deepavali, the Indian festival of lights. It was my first Deepavali in India, so definitely a different experience. I’ve never heard so many firecrackers in my life, even during Chinese New Year in Taiwan! And they were SO loud!! There was one called The Red Fort that’s basically a long strip of firecrackers – about 1000 of them all in a row – and you light them and they just start popping – you have to be careful, because they’ll go all over the place! My husband lit one and wasn’t paying attention – we were all wearing the new clothes that we’d bought for the special day and my husband ran back after lighting the crackers, turned around to watch, then realized one of the crackers had flown by and burnt a hole in the brand new shirt he was wearing. Luckily he wasn’t hurt or anything. But people were setting off “crackers” (as they called them) day in and day out. It started at around 11 or 12 the night before, continued on almost non-stop until 10 or 11 the next night. And they had these ones called Atom Bombs – which I hated – that lived up to their name. They literally sounded like Atom Bombs were going off right beside you. I wrote in my journal that it sounded like there was a war going off around me – literally every 15 seconds there were explosions all over the place. I lit a few – just the pretty ones – at night. I stayed away from the loud ones. Fun to watch, but hard on the ears…

Part 2 of ?? to follow….I think that’s enough for one entry.