It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

27 Apr 2013

Last week I gave you a tour of our house in New Delhi. Like concentric circles from a pebble hitting a still pond, today I move out to our neighborhood. I actually debated trying to do something on the greater Delhi area first, just to give you context. Our neighborhood is so quiet and peaceful (even with a train track less than a quarter mile away) compared to most of Delhi, I would somehow like to help you appreciate that difference. I can’t quite figure out how to do that with words and a few pictures, so I guess you will have to visit and see for yourself.

Anyway to our neighborhood: we live in an area, a colony o

r nagar as they say here, named Friends Colony West. This is not to be confused with Friends Colony (no East that I’ve been able to find) or New Friends Colony. It is a fairly well established neighborhood. There are many large, beautiful homes. Most of them, like ours, actually house more than one family. Actually, in our case, we are the outliers. The second and third floor flats are occupied respectively by a brother and sister. The owner is a man about my age who now lives out of the city on a farm. Whether it is an actual working farm or a large home in the country is not clear from the ancient record. I have picked up the fact many families with means have more rural homes, estates really, that they call farms.

Anyway, I am going to take you for a virtual walk around our neighborhood. Last week I showed you the front of our flat. This is the whole building from the street.

You will notice there it is gated, every home or complex in our neighborhood has a separate gate with a guard that keeps watch on things and opens and closes the gate as needed. Here is one of our guards and the driver for our neighbor the brother. He really has nothing to do with us but I wasn’t sure how to ask him to step out of the picture. My Hindi is really bad at this point.

So, moving out to the street, this is what you see if you look right from our house…

and this is what you see if you look left.

Directly in front of our house is a little fenced and gated park. There are these parks in the median of each of the roads in our neighborhood. This is ours here:

In London, and I am sure other cities but I always associate them with London row houses, there are what are called key parks. They are locked parks for the use of the people who live in that immediate vicinity. These neighborhood parks are like that, except there are no gates with keys. Rather, one enters the part through a mini-maze like this.

I guess you can say these are a-mazing parks rather than key parks. Sorry. Living in India has not fixed my warped sense of humor or love of puns. I can’t wait until I can make puns in Hindi!

Well. Moving on. We live as you may have been able to tell from the pictures above on a dead end street. If you walk towards the open end of the street, you enter into what is really the central road in our neighborhood. This is what you see when you look right…

and this is what you seen when you look left.

Here is a shot of the a-mazing park in the median of this central road. You will note that it is lusher than our little park.

That may be because it is cared for so well. This sign is posted on the fence to the park (in only one place that I could see; I’m not sure exactly how effective that would be for a park that runs probably a half mile in length). I am sure, however that the prohibition on card playing has helped keep the park so green.

Walking further on I snapped these pictures of flowering trees. The first looks like a bougainvillea but I am not sure it is.

The orange in the second picture does not do the vibrancy of the original justice. It was practically flaming in real life.

At the end of the a-mazing park is this little playground. Those of you with smaller children (yes, I am looking at you Beverlins, Browns, and Cliffords; Maude too, although she is hardly small anymore) will be glad to know there is a place close by for your kids to burn off a little energy.

Bill Griffiths these two pictures are for you, though any other bird lover is also invited to look. This one has to be a cousin of a crow. Their calls sound like the cawing of a crow to my untrained ear.

This one is quiet and seems pretty non-descript. Except when they fly you can see they have beautiful white patches under their wings.

I didn’t see on this walk the smallish birds with the florescent green heads and stout beaks. I would like to know what they are. Likewise, I would love to know what the bird looks like that sounds like a howler monkey and wakes me every morning. If I find THAT bird, the outcome may not be pretty! I might be deported for bird-icide!

Well that’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed the walk around our neighborhood. If you have things you would like me to write about, I am open to suggestions.

Namaste.

Our house is a very, very very fine house....

In today's post I wanted to show you our house. We live, or will live in Rae's case at House No 7-A/2, Ground Floor, Friends Colony West, New Delhi 110065 India. That's if you want to visit. If you want to mail us something, you need to precede all of that with C/O Mr. Naraj Nayan Shrivastva. The post office doesn't know or recognize our name only that of the owner. So, if something is mailed to us without his name, it gets returned. We could go register with the post office directly and then the C/O would not be needed but I am not sure we will get much physical mail anyway, so I thought we should stay on the down low, as the kids say.

So our house is really quite lovely and spacious for Indian standards. It is definitely not an average or typical home. Then again, our house in West Linn is not average or typical for the US either, so there you go. This is the front of our house, or rather what you see once you enter the gate. On another post I will show pictures from our neighborhood, including our street and what our house looks like from the street. I have to save some excitement to keep you reading!





The door on the right leads to a common hallway we share with the folks above. I often just enter through the patio doors so I only have to open one door.










Here is a more complete view of the garden you see on the left edge of the above picture. It is small but picturesque. It makes a very nice view from our living room and buffer to the street.

Speaking of living rooms, here is ours. You enter from the patio doors you've seen before or from a doorway, in which I am standing to shoot this picture, which leads to the dinning room and the entry off the common area mentioned above. Note the stone floors. This is very common in India even in more moderately priced homes and in commercial areas. Our campus, for instance, has stone floors throughout, except in classrooms and the library, which have carpeting to minimize noise.









As I said, you pass from the living room into the dinning room, which is here.

In this picture I would like to point out the ceiling fans and the wall mounted room air conditioner. Delhi gets about as hot as Phoenix but central air is essentially unheard of, at least for residences. We are blessed to have high ceilings and fans and AC in every room. Even our kitchen has AC which is very rare. Usually only cooks are in the kitchen so they don't think there needs to be cool air. Actually, the bathrooms also don't have AC, now that I think of it, but they do have both exhaust and ceiling fans.

Here is our kitchen, again notice the stone floors and counter tops. What you can't really see is how archaic, by our standards the oven is. It has two compartments, an 8 x16 upper and a 16 x 16 lower oven. There is a four burner stove top with a drop down griddle on top of that. We are lucky to have an oven, actually, of any size. They are not that common here. Nearly all cooking is done stove top.

You might notice four faucets one hot and one cold for each sink. The RO unit for potable water is just out of site on the right of the sink.


The next two pictures are of transitional space between the common area and the bedrooms. The first is a glass enclosed alcove directly opposite the kitchen. I took this picture from the kitchen doorway. I think, with the natural light, this would be a good place for Rae's art studio, although it is pretty central to the whole house. She will probably think it is too cluttered and probably too small for her art studio.

This second transitional picture is taken from the doorway of the dinning room. The kitchen is to the immediate right, just after you step through the doorway. What you are seeing is stairs (duh!) and a landing between the bedrooms. As I said, the kitchen is to your right and the alcove above is to your left as you pass through the doorway. The only think I am not showing you here, because I couldn't get a good picture of it, is a half bath that is opposite the alcove and between these stairs and the kitchen. No pictures, so you will just have to take my word that it is fabulous!

Now we come to the bedrooms. One thing that surprised us is that even in more down market homes, each bedroom typically has it own bathroom. No closet space to speak of, but its own bathroom. The first two pictures are of the master bedroom and bath, to the right of the stairs in the picture above. The next two are of the second bedroom and bath.

This leads us finally to the surprise we have discovered. Rae saw the house twice and I saw it once before we settled on it. Neither of us spent much time there and we were both pretty jet lagged. We knew there was a lower level we had access to which consisted of a main room (with a storage closet and desk area that are not visible...

and an exercise room.

What neither of us realized is that this entire space was for our exclusive use. We both remembered there were stairs off of the large common room (by the mops in the picture above). Turns out, not so much. This entire area is ours too. Now I have no excuse not to exercise and Rae might find this space more fitting for her art studio. There is not a much natural light, unfortunately. Otherwise this space might be ideal. By the way, those are not TVs in the exercise room, those are windows. I don't want you to think it is too upscale.

Well, there you have it. This is our home for the next three years. As you can see, we have plenty of room for company so start making your plans now to come visit. Heck when we lived in West Texas, we even got friends and family to visit there. Getting people to come to India should be a piece of cake!

Namaste!

And so it begins

I am sitting in the British Airways lounge waiting my flight to Heathrow and then on to Delhi. It has been an emotional day to say the least. In reality, the tears really started to flow on Sunday afternoon. I have found myself wondering over the past 48 hours, "how many tears can be shed before the body gives up and says, 'That's it. I don't have anymore to give'".

Before I get too far into this post, I need to give some background on how we got here and what we'll be doing.

A year ago, in the late winter/early spring of 2012, I was actively working to create possible joint venture activities and partnerships between Charter College and various Indian universities. The process that had begun with great enthusiasm and promise got mired in politics, bad timing, and conflicting agendas. In July, those projects and my role with Charter College were ended. It was a difficult time; as I said there had been great hope and anticipation for our joint venture relationships. I had invested a lot of myself emotionally and intellectually in making them happen. Now there was nothing.

Well nothing is not quite right. A seed had been planted and a potential had been opened through preparation. 

The seed: in one of the last conversations Mike Dawson and I had at the end of a month-long business development trips to India, Mike asked if Rae and I would be willing to move to India for a while to get the projects off the ground. This raised an idea in my mind I had never considered. Despite over a dozen trips to India, and a general interest in the idea of living and working for some time outside the United States, Rae and I had never even discussed the possibility of living there. When I got home, I mentioned Mike's comment to her and the seed was planted.

Preparation leads to opportunity: in trying to make our joint venture activities successful. I developed a certain degree of expertise in existing efforts between US and Indian institutions. I had tried for months to leverage that knowledge into a success. Despite best efforts, by mid-summer of 2012 Charter decided they were not going to pursue activities in India. With that decision I was left without a job. I followed a dual path of looking for interesting, challenging work that would build on my skills and experience and trying to leverage my contacts in India to create an opportunity with another US college or university. In December my good friend Larry Capps told me about an opportunity with Stratford University in Virginia.

I knew Stratford from my research about the efforts of US colleges and universities in India. In fact, they were the model I used to explain to the Charter Leadership what I thought we could do in India. It turns out, they decided that despite all of their efforts, there needed to be someone on site who knew how to grow and run a US campus. My initial contact through the recruiter was answered in about a minute, which led to a series of interviews with both internal and external recruiters. Ultimately I met with most of the leadership of Stratford and the CEO of the Indian joint venture partner MAII. These interviews took place in January. In February Rae and I visited India for me to meet with the folks here and for Rae to determine if she thought she could live here. By mid-March we had received a written offer and negotiated a mutually agreeable contract. Now here we are. I am sitting in our flat in New Delhi and Rae is half-way around the world in West Linn, Oregon.

My leaving was very hard on everyone. This move has not started without strong spiritual confirmation that this is what we should be doing. There has been fasting, prayers, and blessings received. Rae and I both believe this is what we are supposed to be doing. Still, when it came to actually saying goodbye, there many tears shed. We love our family, our friends, and our life in Oregon. Separating from all of that is very difficult. We hope that through this blog we can help make those relationships even stronger. Perhaps we will make India so appealing a portion of those who have said they will come visit us, will actually do so!

Namaste.