shot Oct 28, 2004, 1:56 mins
Shot from the open door of the train, somewhere between Roorkee and Haridwar (I think), en route from Delhi to Dehra Dun.
Woodstock 150th & Class of ’81 Reunion
in memoriam, Diana Biswas – photo by Fiona
photo from Sharon Seto
Attendance and where we arrived from:
- Durjoy – Minneapolis
- Deepak – Mumbai
- Fiona – Mississauga (near Toronto)
- Lauri – NYC
- Sanjay – Mumbai
- Anne – Afghanistan, by way of Mumbai, she’s now home in Scotland
- Margaret – St. Paul
- Deirdré – Lecco, Italy
- Chris – Hyderabad
- Denise – Louisville, KY
- Sara A. – Ahmedabad
- Jenny – Liberal, KS
- Teeran – Germantown, MD
- Marilyn W. – Forestville, CA
- Vinita – on her way to Bahrain
- Yuti – Mumbai and Mussoorie
- Rohit – Yorba Linda, CA
- Deepu – Mumbai
- Pinder – Naivasha, Kenya
Not pictured:
- Jeet – St. Bart’s
- Sunita – Columbus, OH
- Alan Howard – Woodstock staff
Near-misses:
- Rachana (above) was in Mussoorie the day before everyone arrived, but couldn’t stay.
- Bharaty was in Delhi, on a very brief visit to her parents, but couldn’t come up to Mussoorie, nor could we track her down in Delhi.
- Nitin couldn’t get away from his duties with the president of India. We hoped to see him for dinner in Delhi afterwards, but he had to go to Abu Dhabi for the funeral of the head of state there.
- Nina: Sanjay and I thought she was coming, but she never turned up. ???
With us in spirit:
- Susy S.C. sent a PowerPoint presentation with pictures and narration of her family – 10 kids! It was a fun way for her to share her life with her classmates; I look forward to receiving similar efforts from others whom we haven’t seen in person recently.
We had the second-largest class turnout for the Woodstock 150th celebrations; the winners, naturally enough, were the centennial class of ’54. But the class of ’81 had the best parties. <grin>
Home Ownership in Italy: Garbage and Sewage
Living in a villetta a schiera (townhouse or row house) is quite different from living in a condo apartment building. We learn something new every day.
Garbage is an endlessly complex question. We can put out the umido (wet waste) three times a week, but that can’t include garden trimmings. The comune will supply 150 biodegradable bags per year, free of charge, but we have to go to some particular office during a particular two-week span each year to pick ours up. We haven’t figured out yet whether they will also supply the sacchetti viola andtrasparenti (violet and transparent bags) that we need for recyclables and general waste – it would be nice, as these cost about 20 cents each (perhaps that includes tax?). General waste goes out twice a week, and the sacchetto viola (however many you have) only once. We’ve been giving the recycling guys plenty to do, but are now finally getting rid of the last of our moving boxes. By next week we’ll probably have our outside portico finally cleared – now that the weather’s too cold to use it.
We had to buy a new stove top and oven to fit into the spaces in the kitchen that had been built-in by the previous owners. We learned that gas ovens are going out of style in Italy; 99% of the built-in ovens available are electric. Which could get horribly expensive if you use the oven frequently, as electricity is costly here. For this reason, and because I prefer it for cooking, I insisted on gas. Our plumber, who is well-versed in the ever-changing laws regarding these things (as he must be, since he certifies his installations), learned that the law about gas appliances and air circulation does not even address built-in gas ovens, presumably because they have become so rare. So our set-up is probably legal in default of an actual law about it.
Our new home includes a bit of garden (a lot of it vertical, but that’s okay – we can plant those nice flowers you see growing out of walls all over Switzerland). The lawn has been neglected for years, and is lush with dandelions and some other kind of low-lying weed that chokes out the grass. If you’re keen on lawns, you might think there’s nothing worse than a lawn covered in weeds. Well, there’s one thing that’s infinitely worse: a lawn covered in weeds covered in sewage and toilet paper. Yes, we had a problem with the plumbing.
The previous owner conveniently forgot to mention that anything was wrong, but we learned all about it when, by sheer coincidence, we ended up calling the same sewage guys who had already been here twice in six months. So they suspected that the problem is not ours alone – it’s the main pipe for the whole complex (four families), which has bent, probably due to earth slippage. Since our connection to this pipe is the lowest of the four, we’re the first to suffer when it blocks – I had noticed a foul-smelling burble of liquid coming up through a hole in the concrete manhole cover in our yard. This manhole turned out to cover a drainage reservoir, about half a cubic meter, from which stuff is supposed to drain immediately into the sewage pipe. When we opened it, it turned out to be completely full. (No, I didn’t take video of that.)
Unblocking the mess required inserting a hose as far as possible and squirting in water under high pressure. On the first couple of attempts, from our manhole, this merely caused a backup and overflow, proving the sewage guys’ thesis that the problem was further down. I wish it had not taken spreading disgusting stuff all over our yard for them to determine this.
They then dragged their hoses down to the neighbor’s yard where our collective pipe connects to the city line, and proved, as suspected, that the block was there. Fortunately, they did not spew sewage all over the neighbors’ carefully-manicured lawn, which would have been far more tragic than what they did to my weed collection.
Eventually the line was cleared, and they washed as much of the yuck as they could back down the hole, using the high-pressure hose. But my weeds were furred with toilet paper and the general smell was not pleasant – I’m glad this didn’t happen in summer!
So I spent a couple of hours digging up weeds (something I needed to do anyway), which also removed a lot of the toilet paper (I wore gloves). I hadn’t realized gardening was such backbreaking work – my right arm was so painful from unaccustomed exercise that I couldn’t sleep that night.
Customer Service in Italy (Again)
We’ve been customers of Ikea for over 15 years – sometimes satisfied, sometimes not. I suppose that eventually we will replace most of our cheapish Ikea furniture with stuff that Rossella won’t be embarrassed to inherit, but for the time being, given budget constraints, we still buy Ikea. The Ivar unfinished pine modular shelving has mostly migrated out to the garage (after I spent hours this summer cleaning, sanding, and staining shelves coated in a decade’s worth of Milanese grime – I thought we were going to use them in the house!). The Billy bookcases are still in use, though by now they’re so old that Ikea doesn’t even make them in this color (pine) anymore. At least all this old stuff is no longer in the fancier public spaces in the house; my office and the taverna(basement den) have become the repositories of our less-presentable furniture.
Anyway, my point set out to be about customer service at Ikea. Which has markedly improved. A few years ago we got very angry about some customer service failing, I forget now what it was. As we stood arguing at the counter, a non-Italian Ikea manager observed, and came over to set things right, going the extra mile to make us happy, and showing the staff that this was the correct approach. I supposed that Ikea HQ had detected customer unhappiness in Italy, or this particular store, and sent someone from Sweden to make improvements.
During our latest visit, we saw that they’d taken great strides in staff attitudes. All the floor staff were knowledgeable and enthusiastic, in spite of being swamped with customers. It appears that Ikea have finally found the secret to training Italians to provide good service; this is knowledge they could sell, if they chose.
They could start with Telecom Italia, who continue to lose marks on both competence and politeness…
Meeting Cat Stevens
Everyone’s had their brush with fame, or at least with famous people. My personal biggest to date occurred in Bangladesh in 1976 or ’77, when Cat Stevens came to give a lot of money to UNICEF, and to visit some of the projects he was funding in various parts of Bangladesh. (I guess this was just before he officially converted to Islam.)
There wasn’t a lot going on in Dhaka in those days, and a famous person even landing in the country was huge news. It happened that a friend of the family, part of our usual weekend music group, was a huge Cat Stevens fan. He learned Stevens’ travel schedule, and showed up at the airport every time Stevens and his entourage of one (his lead guitarist) passed through. Eventually, our friend managed to invite them over for an evening.
The result was a private concert, for about 30 of us, at someone’s house in Dhaka. I was already familiar with many of the songs, and was surprised that the two of them alone sounded just like they did on the albums, without benefit of the rest of the band or any studio mixing. Cat Stevens also looked just like his album covers, with the long curly hair and beard. He did sing one song I hadn’t heard before,”My Lady d’Arbanville.”
I don’t know if anyone got any pictures with him, but I definitely didn’t, so all I have is the memory and the story to tell. And there you have it.
