A happy researcher indeed

Yes, I am a happy researcher! I am having a half-day of profound contentment and happiness, that I am exploiting to its maximum!! I don't know exactly why I feel so happy. I just feel calm and at peace in a way that is very strange for me. However, the sticky keys on this keyboard could just be the undoing of my calm ocean of contentment... Uh oh... I can feel the rage...

Nope, am still happy.

So, today we went to another site of tsunami-ness and it was really very lovely, much different to how I pictured it. It is a compact town, no stranger to tourists yet are not very many - not enough to make it a tourist oriented town which is good - it has bikes for rent, a couple of still working NGOs for the tsunami and a nice beach and good transport connections... so I think we shall be back at some point when am working down here. I can't base myself in the town - it is far far too tiny, though for a couple of months maybe it could be good? hmmm, will think. I don't know - but it was very pleasing to find anyway. We stopped at a lovely hotel for some lunch - and had some chicken in a red wine sauce?! I ordered it thinking hmmmm... but it really *was* chicken in a red wine sauce! It was delicous! and quite a surprise. It did open the hunger floodgates though - I have not stopped being hungry since I ate it. So much so that I made DB come for a snack with me post-recce. The snack was 'vada', a kind of deep fried lentil bread thing, in a small round shape. You get sambar with it (a lentil sauce) and some coconut chutney (not sweet though) and soak all your vada in it - it is yum. Today it was particularly yum though, really hot and fresh and I was most pleased. Not least becasue I am really getting into South Indian food now. I haven't had anything spicy for aaaages - which surprises me because I thought once we were out of cities and tourist areas the food would become really spicy and hard to eat, but actually it has been the reverse. I love it! I have had such good food these past few days. This little roadside place was lovely too, it was spanking clean and we went in and did the whole thing fluently, and no Engish was spoken! you would think such a thing woud have happened by now, but India is a strange land with strange customs that take a while to get right. For example, you always wash your hands before and after a meal, so you need to find the public wash basin - not the kitchen one, oh-no. Then you order your food in Tamil, while trying to stop the water-boy from filling up a glass of water for you with tap water (it is always free and provided everywhere which is great - but not for our tummies), but ordering bottled water instead. Then you eat with your hand, squashing up the rice and really getting right in there - very hard for a cutlery-oriented person to get into. For some reason I am precious about getting my palm and the last two fingers manky. Then you eat, spooning the food into your mouth with your third and fourth fingers. Then when your plate is taken you don't say thank you, you look at them and wobble your head. You don't ever say thank-you out loud - it is all in the wobble. Today the cleaning lady came to take my plate and I wobbled at her - and she wobbled back! It was an amazing moment of communication - not laest because women are so tacitern in India, I am convinced they all hate me. It is sooooo hard for a British (and American I am told) person not to vocalise 'thank-you' all the time, and here to start with I though people just seemed really off with each other and abrupt. But it is all in the wobble. Hurray that I have mastered it! (well, nearly.) And then we had coffee which is boiling hot and comes in a metal vessel which is inside another much broader and shallow flat-bottomed bowl - because you pour the coffee from the vessel into the bowl and back again - which cools it down. you do this without scalding your fingers (a skill I think I have mastered! Yaya!) and drink it... and then pay, tell the waiter he can keep the tip, wobble your head in gratitude and off you go!! Huzzahs! Small exchange but so satisfying!!

Am now permanently hungry. If I was at home I would order a massive 14" pizza, chips and some ice cream. I would. We are going out for dinner in half an hour - the new series of heroes 3 is starting on Indian tele and we wanna seeeee!

Worked on analysing my photies from the recce later this afternoon, it takes ages to do. And wrote up my journal. Am now going to research the two aid agencies I saw in town. And then eating (yay!) and home for tv then some more work laters on what to do in site1. Tomorrow we are heading up north - site1 is very far away on the bus so we are stopping off in Pondicherry on the way - I have a date with some baguette and chips on the beach, and a cup of 'secret tea'. (beer). I have been sober for 15 entire days! A miracle! Maybe that has something do to with my good mood?!!! I am not being a morose alcoholic...

I don't know why I am in such a happy mood. I am worried about going to site1 and wasting time, and have a lot of prep to do, so it isn't that work is necessarily going swimmingly.

Who knows! but long may it last (DB is in a foul mood btw - he thinks he may be stealing away the PMT I should be suffering, like girls who synchronise, because we are spending so much time together... I think he is just grumpy).

G' Bah!

x J