tiredness and the world cup

We're still in Mamalapuram. We were supposed to go back to Chennai today, but decided to stay one more day because we love it here. I think we'll be spending lots of weekends here. Our favorite restaurant is called "Le Yogi" and it's advertised as serving "franco-indian" food. Basically it's Indian food plus crepes. The service is ridiculously slow (it's just one cook and one waiter), but the atmosphere is wonderful (you take off your shoes, and most of the tables are low so you sit on cushions on the ground; there are paper lanterns and usually a nice cool breeze). I've been having the egg and cheese crepe for breakfast, and alternating between prawn noodles, prawn rice (both of which are technically Chinese), and prawn curry for lunch and dinner. I do love my prawns.

So far, I've had mercifully few encounters with large insects. In fact, I was starting to fantasize that all the cockroaches in India were small. Then yesterday E mentioned that there was a huge cockroach in his bathroom, which of course freaked me out. So when M and I got back to the guest house I checked our bathroom, and lo and behold, a 2-inch-long cockroach (with creepy inch-long antennae) was crouched on the sink next to M's toiletry case. I called M in for backup and we managed to kill it, with minimal girlish shrieking, using my Lonely Planet India guide.

I mentioned in my last post that we've been watching World Cup matches. I have, as I'm sure most of you know, no interest whatsoever in football*, but M and E both do, so I've been watching with them, and I'm starting to get into it. The US got positively trounced by the Czech Republic last night, which was sad, but just a little while ago Korea beat Togo, which I am celebrating on behalf of my dear Korean friend H. The restaurant at our guest house finally got their TV working, so tonight we're watching just a few yards from our rooms rather than on the beach at Bob Marley. India is only about 4 hours later than Germany, so we can watch the matches live at a reasonable hour.

So things are great, except for the fact that I'm exhausted all the time. I think it's a combination of jet lag, the heat, the sunburn I managed to get, and the fact that so far we've mostly just been hanging out (today I actually went over a little bit of the data that Opportunity International gave us, but we haven't written our survey yet). I've been going to bed anywhere between 8:30 and midnight, and usually waking up really early, like 4 or 5. I lie in bed for a few hours, then I fall back asleep from around 7 to 9 (or in today's case, 11:30). Around 5 p.m., I become profoundly sleepy and usually take a nap of some sort. Right now it's 9:15 and I'm hoping I can stay awake long enough to watch the France-Switzerland game, which starts in about 5 minutes.

I have pictures to post, but I keep forgetting to bring my camera cable down to the internet cafe with me.

*football = soccer, for all you yankees