Sights and Moments - July 2

---Today Stéphane bought some birdies for the office's badminton racquets. Thus commenced an office badminton party. Well, almost the whole office. Agila as always stayed focused on her work. Raja wasn't in the mood for sweating. But, Stéphane, Tamil, Ezhumalai, Nandhini, and I all came out and played. Man, exercise felt so good. Playing made me so happy, though this was actually my first time playing the sport, so it took me a bit to get used to the racquet (I'm used to racquetball racquets).

Ha, watching everyone get so excited for a turn was most amusing and heartwarming. Tamil would say, "Okay, whoever loses this set is out and then it's someone else's turn."

He would lose. And then he'd say, "Okay, NOW whoever loses is out." He'd lose again. The same with Ezhumalai (the "zh" is a mixture of a "r" and "l" sound...kind of.*)

After the initial excitement, everyone went back to work. Stéphane and I stayed and played for a while. I bragged to him about my array of extended family members who have played sports professionally or nationally, and he told me all the weird sports classes he had to take in high school. And to celebrate my fourth or fifth week of eating only rice and Indian food, I think we'll go to town and have Pizza Hutt tomorrow. I'm not for being those tourists who go to a different country only to eat McDonalds or KFC, but I think Pizza Hutt** is fine after a month of Indian meals.


---Since Perumal and Lalida are in Europe for a few weeks, his mother Lakshmi is taking care of me. I absolutely adore her, but I can't tell her because she does not know a lick of English, and I only know like six words in Tamil. After dinner I always try to sit and watch Tamil soap operas with her, as I did tonight. But it is so hard. When one does not know the language, these soap operas are just watching people move their mouths, and look at each other.§ I suffer through the soap operas because I know she gets lonely and wants some company. It's the only thing I can think of doing to serve her and to show appreciation for all she does. I don't think I've racked my brain so hard and in such limited success to think of ways to serve someone. She doesn't let me clean dishes, or put out laundry, or event serve myself food.


* I try not to use English letters to pronounce Tamil words, because then it's not really speaking Tamil but just a mixture of English letters. But, options are limited when typing).

** Ann, remember the "Wash Hut" in Provo?! "Oh I'm just goin' to da wa-ash hu-ut")

§ It's a worse version of Twilight, in which half the movie was the camera circling the two lovebirds staring at each other.