Hulli Cabs and Blake Shelton

First, let me explain what hulli means. It seems kind of rude if you translate it to English, and it's really hard to explain in English, but in Kannada (the native language) it's not a big deal at all. It pretty much means something along the lines of village idiot. It's used as an adjective though, like to describe people or things. So one of my friends ALWAYS says "You know her? That hulli?" She pretty much describes everyone as hulli. But you can also say stuff like, "That hotel is so hulli!" So yeah.

But anyways, for the past week we've been getting a ride to and from school from Amara's friend's mom who is a teacher at Indus. We get to school a little before the buses, so it works out well. Today though, it didn't quite work out that well. Amara's friend's mom, who I will refer to as V, has a really nice driver and car. This morning when we went to the building where V stays to go to school, we were informed that the car had a flat. The driver proceeded to try and fix the flat, but it ended up that there was some issue with that and he couldn't get the flat tire off the car to put on a new one. V then called up some cab companies (which didn't take long because it seemed she had them on speed dial), and after about 15 minutes of talking to different cab drivers, we got a cab to be there within another 10-ish minutes. This cab looked fine from the outside, but when the driver opened the back door of the cab, there were like several spider webs hanging off of the window and doors. Right away, I could tell that this cab was pretty freaking hulli. So we get in the cab (which smelled strongly of spicy Indian food and incense, ew) and drive away, brakes squeaking all the way to Indus. Later I found out that after we drove away, my mom saw one of the tail lights go out. All the more reason for this cab to be called hulli. About three whole seconds into the ride, the cab driver turns up some music in Hindi or Kannada or something, and it was SO LOUD! Of course my head was right next to the speaker too, so this squeaky Hindi music is blaring in my ears and it was actually kind of torturous. However, my sister and Blake Shelton came to the rescue. Thankfully, Amara had a headphone splitter, so not only could Amara and I listen, Amara's friend could listen too. As soon as she plugged in those headphones, I went to the country music playlist and started blasting me some Blake Shelton! YES. Then, I had another full hour in that hulli cab which was made bearable solely by my hero, Blake Shelton. :)

So not only did Blake Shelton save me from dying a sad miserable death in that hulli cab, I have introduced the wonders of his music to my fellow Indians here at Indus. Yes, that's right, I have hooked a small number of people on Blake Shelton's beautiful and amazing music (as well as other beautiful aspects of him). Below, I will post some links to a few of his songs, and let me just tell you that it was extremely difficult to limit myself to less than 50 songs to link to. I don't expect yall to watch all of them, but I would if I were you. If you like these, you'd probably like everything in his Red River Blue album, and everything else that he's ever written. :)

Hillbilly Bone by Blake Shelton (the first ever Blake Shelton song that I heard)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGoiiwxTWeE

Kiss My Country Ass by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJe754cLbok

She Wouldn't Be Gone by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki-n6DsDG40

Drink On It by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnuVedLV0yg

Good Ole Boys by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wUeegIam9I

Some Beach by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTT2LEyjdC4

Red River Blue by Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU--RQvpyA8

Thanks for reading and watching!:)

Disappearing drivers, middle-of-the-week holidays, and permanent housing!

This week, the school days were really screwed up. Our week was this: Monday and Tuesday, go to school as normal. Wednesday and Thursday, holidays for Eid al Fitr and Lord Ganesh's birthday. Friday and SATURDAY, go to school. Yeah, that's right. Grades 9 through 12 have a full school day on Saturday. Of course the “working Saturday”, as Indus International School calls it, had to be on the day that we finally get to move into our permanent housing. Yesterday, on Friday, Amara and I got back from school and immediately went to Commercial Street to buy bedspreads, sheets, pillows, and other things for our bedrooms at the new place. That being said, we didn’t get back to UB City until around 9:30 or a little later, and we still had to eat dinner. After eating dinner and finally getting to bed, it was well past midnight. Needless to say, we were all really tired, and then we remembered that I still had to go to school the next day—which meant being awake bright and early at 6am to catch the bus. We then decided, after much contemplation, that I wouldn’t go to school on Saturday because not only would I be running on 5 hours of sleep, I would be needed to help move into our new apartment.

But it’s never that easy with Indus. This morning (Saturday), my mom burst into my room where I was still sleeping at around 8:20am. She told me that she received an email at 9:30pm Friday night saying that if I didn’t go to school today, I would be suspended for a week. Keep in mind that there was no way we could have planned for this, since the email was sent so late last night my mom hadn’t seen it until this morning at which time it was too late to get me to school on time. In a few moments of sheer panic, we called the vice principal of Indus and told him what was going on. My dad explained to him that we were moving into our new apartment, our driver had disappeared and we didn’t have a new one (I’ll explain that later), and we had already missed the buses. To top it all off, the coordinator of the high school division of the school had said earlier in the month that if we didn’t take a bus and were late to school because of our own transportation, we wouldn’t be allowed to enter the school. The vice principal, after hearing the reasons why my excuse to miss school was legit and why I shouldn’t be suspended due to the school’s stupid rules, said he would “consider our request.” Indus is all about how they will not sacrifice academic rigour ever at all no matter what…but if I miss one day of school (for a real reason), they’re gonna force me to miss a week of school? Does that make sense to anyone?

Okay anyways, now that I’m done ranting, I’ll tell you a little bit about what happened for the two holidays that were earlier this week. For Ganesh's birthday, there were a lot of new stands and venders popping up selling statues and sculptures of Lord Ganesh in various sizes. When I asked one of my friends how she celebrates the day, she said they celebrate by eating a lot. Sounds like an alright holiday to me! There was also a ton of extremely loud music being played out of random speakers on the sides of roads, which I didn't really understand. For Eid, there were lights everywhere and tons of people out and about in their hijabs and topis. On Tuesday, quite a few stores were closed due to Eid al Fitr (the Eid celebrating the end of the 28 day fast for Muslims known as Ramadan), but then on Wednesday, the stores that were closed opened up again and the stores that were open on Tuesday were closed for Ganesh's birthday. Luckily though, we had both days off! 

Earlier this week, we had quite a disaster with our driver Kalandar. He drove us to the bus stop on Monday morning as normal, but then, when he was supposed to be at Google to pick up my mom, he wasn't there. Like, literally, he was nowhere to be found. So some guy comes up to my mom and basically tells her, "No Kalandar. New driver. Get in car." Needless to say, my mom freaked out and called my dad. Long story short, she ended up getting in the car with this new driver, whose name is Babu, and getting dropped off here at UB City. However, there were several issues with mister sir Babu. To start, he doesn't speak English or Hindi, so we were kind of stuck on how to communicate with him. Also, he doesn't know where anything is, so we had to ask random people on the street how to get places every five minutes. Andddd, another thing is that he has like one of those bush cars, you know? The kind that you'd expect to see following a herd of elephants on an African safari, with a machete hanging out of the driver side window. You know the kind...the two seats in the back were even sideways! It was really weird. So, we had no choice but to try to work with Babu for a couple days while a permanent driver was being worked out. After struggling through that until this morning, we were given another temporary driver until tomorrow or the next day. The temporary driver was really nice and had good Hindi and English, so it's kind of sad that we don't get to have him be our permanent driver. Our new permanent driver is alright; he doesn’t know where as many things are as compared to Kalandar and the temporary driver, but I think it’ll work out okay. This driver fiasco happened at a really bad time though, because now we're moving into our permanent apartment for the year and it'll be weird to go through that with a brand new driver. This brings me to the next thing mentioned in the title...

We finally get to move into our permanent apartment!!! We found out at the beginning of this week that we would be moving in this weekend, so we went shopping on the two holidays to get dishes and groceries and get an idea of what we wanted for our bedspreads and pillows. It was kind of insane how expensive the stuff is here…it was just as expensive if not more so than in the states! It’s also super difficult to find sets of dishes…they’re usually sold as single plates and single bowls and single cups, so we were really happy when we finally found a place that sold dish sets. I decided on a set that I liked, and when I say that I was the one who decided, that’s no lie, my mom forced ME to pick out the dishes because the dishes we use here are going to be my college set. Yesterday, we went to a store on Commercial Street like I said earlier to get bed covers and sheets and all that good stuff. That ended up being really expensive too, but that’s probably because we bought 3 bed covers, 8 pillows and like 10 sets of sheets. We were there for a good couple hours and finally left with five or six bags of stuff.

I’m writing this from our temporary apartment—I’m just sitting on the couch listening to the chaos around me as my parents try to get things signed and cleaned and the many other things that are apparently associated with moving into a new apartment. But my mom just started playing Angry Birds, and you know that big white bird that (I’ll be frank) poops out an egg when you tap it? She says that bird is sad and lonely because its face gets all twisted up when its egg goes away. So now she doesn’t tap the bird to make the egg come out, she just leaves the egg in the bird so its face never gets twisted up. I just thought I would tell you guys that. Thanks for reading!:)