Our house - the grand tour

We have a place to live!! Unfortunately it’s not the 2 bedroom/2 bathroom, marbled floor apartment that I boasted about on facebook since apparently that area floods during the monsoon season. Of course Josiah was still keen for the place and tried to convince me of how super fun it would be to get a raft and go rowing from the living room to the local shops: "We could even hire a boat man sweetie, and it would be like we're in Venice!".

In the end, we decided for somewhere a little less exciting, and found a very reasonable, fully furnished 1 bedder in Bandra - the suburb with all the cool clubs and restaurants. 

Here's some pictures of our place. Please excuse the mess, our maid does a fantastic job cleaning and tidying the place up, but I do an even better job making it messy again!

Our living room (or the "Hall" as they call it here)

To hide the ugly construction work going on outside & to give me privacy from the inquisitive Indian workers, I bought some palm trees and rose plants for our balcony.Josiah's taken over the dining table as his office space. I usually stay in the bedroom with the aircon!

Kitchen

As you can see, nothing fancy, but I don't hang out in the kitchen much so it doesn't bother me.
Our landlord has been incredibly generous to us. When we moved in he asked if there was anything extra we wanted. The only things missing from this place was a washing machine, water sterilizer and a TV. Within a week, he'd bought all of these for us. Thank you Mr Pai!! 

Bedroom -

That's my side of the bedroom with my wardrobe and dressing space.
Josiah's wardrobe is on the left, out of the picture. 

There you go! From our house it’s only a 3 minute walk to a wholesale brownie store, a 1 minute walk to Josiah’s favourite restaurant the “Mini Punjab” (they know Josiah so well now that when he calls up for take out they say “Ah Joshiya, number 11? Ok sir, we bring. 15 minute sir”. They have free delivery and a 10% discount for ordering out so why not?!).

And the best bit - it's less than a 5 minute walk to the famous Linking Road street markets! I've already spent WAY too much money there! 

Leave the tampons at home!

I read that you couldn’t buy any kind of feminie hygiene products in India so before I left Brisbane I headed off to my local Woolworths and cleared the store of all the tampons and pads I could get my hands on. I bought so much that it filled an entire suitcase and I needed Josiah’s help to zip the bag closed (I did NOT want to run out!). When we flew through some bad turbulence, I kept imagining tampons exploding out of the overhead compartment like colourful confetti.

Anyway, I’d like to share a little secret – they actually DO have tampons and pads here! And because I knew you'd insist, I got photographic proof:

   

No wonder the Indians think foreigners are a strange lot – what kind of weirdo takes pictures of pads in a supermarket?

There were a group of young Indian girls watching me. When they realised what I was taking a picture of, they started laughing.  I finished my shopping and left, and they were STILL laughing at me.

So here is MY list of essentials to bring:

1. At least one bottle of sunscreen – the highest factor you can get. Not because they don’t sell them here, but because you’ll need it straight off the plane.
2. Lube – they do sell it here, but you won’t feel game to buy it when you have a whole neighbourhood of men staring at you hopefully.
3. Ear plugs – whether it’s to get some peace from the constant noise of the traffic at night, (or your husband's snoring), you’ll need to bring some with you because so far I haven’t seen any.
4. Joggers – the ones they have here look like a child designed them. In the dark. With crayons.
5. Good coffee – the stuff here is gross. The fact that Josiah keeps drinking it is a testament to his level of addition.
6. Proper bras/underpants - only men are allowed to work as store keepers here in India. I remember the first time I came, I felt very uncomfortable when a whole bunch of men tried to persuade me to look at their collection of bras and undies hanging up on display. Apart from that, you'll also probably have issues with the sizing. I'm a little tired of being looked over and hearing the words "We no have big size for you ma'am."  Ouch. 
7. Slanted tweezers. This is the single most important item that I wish I’d brought over with me. So far I’ve only been able to find flat ended tweezers, or ones with a slight slant. Not useful at all!

 Here’s what Josiah wanted to add:

1.  Ear plugs – for when you don’t want to listen to your wife moan about the tweezers
2. A big block of cheese (I second this one!!)

What you won't need to bring (even though other people say you do)

1. alcohol - it's actually pretty cheap here ($2-$3 for shots)
2. the aforementioned lady's products
3. sanity - its perfect normal to be off your rocker here. That's why we're having such a fabulous time!

What’s worse than snakes on a plane?

Unhappy kids on a plane

Especially since Samuel L. Jackson wasn't on board to rescue us all!

I should have expected it really since our whole day had been one fiasco after another. We arrived *slightly* late to the Gold Coast airport which meant a quick goodbye with our parents after checking in our luggage. On our way through we found out that the GST rebate was only available if you’d spent more than $300 in the one store within the last 30 days.
Unfortunately I thought it applied to all of my purchases, so I’d been on a giant shopping spree (assuming that everything had an additional 10% discount). 

The line for the rebate was huge (and our flight was on its final boarding call) but never one to waste an opportunity to get some cash back from the Australian Government, we decided to line up anyway. It was the right choice as we did end up making our flight after all. We were, however, seated on opposite sides of the plane :( 


Either AirAsia knows of our reputation for bickering over who gets the window seat, or its their way of 'encouraging' passengers to cough up more money to pre-select seats in future. As it turns out we weren’t the only couple split up. Josiah was sitting next to a woman whose husband was just 2 seats along from me. So we all played musical chairs and thwarted AirAsia’s naughty scheme! Ha ha!

Yes, I got the window seat

We had 2 flights that day - from GC to KL, then 3 hours later, from KL to Mumbai. A 3 hour gap is long enough in theory, but (of course) our plane was late departing. We tried not to stress about it too much. That is, until we saw the 2 hour long queue backing up from the immigration checkpoints to the tarmac! 

We were ushered into line, and left to crap our pants. 

The queue was barely moving (can you believe they still didn't open all the check points!) and time was ticking away. 

I decided we had two options:

1) We could politely ask to jump the queue (from the looks on everyone's face, this was not going to happen)

2) I could sweet-talk the security officer

Option 2 worked like a charm. What can I say?

As we were walked to the front of the line, I couldn't help but smile. There was one particular man who had been very aggressive towards Josiah for "pushing in" (it wasn't intentional on our part, and we very quickly moved out of his way). I wanted to give him a royal wave as we were ushered ahead, but Josiah said it would be childish and inappropriate. Whatever.

A little while later.... 
It was boarding time for our flight to Mumbai, and after buying our 4L of allowed alcohol (alcohol is VERY expensive in India, so we have to stock up!) I realised we didn't have one of our bags. I ran like a crazy person through the duty free shop, absolutely certain Josiah had gotten distracted by something glittery & had left the bag in there.

It wasn't there! I was absolutely hysterical. What had Josiah DONE?! All my makeup was in that bag!! In that moment, it was literally the end of the world.

Turns out I'd left it at the security check point. I was so embarrassed!

As predicted, our flight into Mumbai arrived early so our complimentary pick up was no where in sight. Thankfully he did finally turn up, but by then I was grumpy. And the hotel was disgusting.

I woke up in a good mood today though, and so far things are going great!!