Varanasi Ho!

Loading up and moving out

Early Tuesday morning, Allen and I packed up all our worldly possessions from Lucknow and took the 5+ hour drive out to Varanasi to begin his PhD fieldwork. We were totally floored by how much crap we had collected over the last year in Lucknow - though somehow it all seems so indispensable ("But I don't want to have to repurchase all the kitchen-wear or buy new buckets for hand washing clothes!") .... Seems like a moot complaint I guess coming from the US, but then we remembered that each extra item we might have to repurchase would require its own special outing ... and well .... we caved and tried to take as much as we could possibly cram into the car.

I gotta say, I think my dad would have been incredibly proud of Allen's packing job (and that's saying a lot). As it was, everyone at the institute (where we had stashed our stuff over the summer) and even the driver were amazed that we managed to get everything in.

So we made it safe and sound with our washing buckets in tow. Our new little flat is cheery and completely welcoming of all the crap we have to fill it.

Varanasi is in the throws of monsoon heat - with its contingent power-outages .... but also surprisingly water outages too! Our host have warned us that things will get much worse after the local elections (just trying to butter up the constituencies ahead of time).

Groan.

But I'll be in the mountains of Mussoorie soon enough - leaving poor Allen to fend for himself in the heat.