work and play

Well, we've been living a bit of the high life since we got back to Chennai on Thursday. On Thursday night we went to sort of an American-style pub called the Bike and Barrel. By India standards it was pretty obscenely expensive--I paid Rs. 800 (about $17.70) for three glasses of wine (a pinot noir made in India--not too bad), dinner (pasta with chicken and shrimp--yum!), my share of an appetizer (something called "potato nachos" which tasted like tater tots with cheese and peppers on them), taxes, and tip. And I suppose I was also paying for the privilege of sitting in air conditioning for three hours and watching the England-Trinidad and Tobago football match (England won by scoring 2 goals in the last seven minutes of the game--very exciting). The only annoying part was that the music was quite loud, but they did play an entertaining selection of random, often cheesy, often old American hits. The highlights:

• You're the Inspiration by Chicago
• Dancing Queen by Abba
• Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean
• Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees
• Faith by George Michael
• Maneater by Hall & Oates
• All I Want to Do is Make Love to You by some annoying chick (note to B: I nearly died when this song came on)

As if that wasn't luxury enough, on Friday night we went to an even swankier place. First, let me rewind a few days back to Mamalapuram and give you an update on M's love life. There were these three French hippies staying at our guest house, and M kept exchanging looks with the really cute one. Eventually she met and started hanging out with them, and a little romance blossomed between "Romeo" and her. As luck would have it, they were planning to head to Chennai about the same time we were, and also planning to stay at Broadlands Lodge, which is where we're staying too.

So they arrived Friday night, and we decided to go to Zara's, which is a hip tapas place. I found it rather entertaining. First of all, they have a dress code which forbids men from wearing sandals. Since that's all the Frenchies (as we affectionately call them) brought to India with them (and reasonably so, I feel), the restaurant actually gave them shoes to wear while they were there. The servers were very attentive, and I almost peed my pants when M got out a cigarette and a server rushed over and lit it for her. And they had cocktails! With ice! After drinking a lot of lukewarm Kingfisher (a local beer--their slogan is "The King of Good Times"), my mojito and my whiskey sours were wonderful. A little too wonderful, in fact, because I had a few too many. This was coupled with the fact that I hadn't eaten since breakfast and all I had for dinner was 3 shrimp, a piece of "bruchetta" (actually spaghetti sauce on bread, but it was still good), and a piece of fried paneer (Paneer is a soft Indian cheese, a little bit like cottage cheese but it has smaller curds and tastes much better. The fried paneer was sort of like the Indian version of fried mozerella sticks, and it was YUM). So I was pretty wasted last night, and I'm pretty hung over today. And we spent a ton of money. I think it came out to an equivalent of around $35 a person.

So, no more splurging for Jenn. At least not for a little while. In the meantime, we managed to get some work done finally. On Friday we went to the Opportunity International (OI) main office to meet some people and get some more information on how things work. The main person we're working with is a cool guy named BJ (that's not actually his name, but in keeping with my "privacy" policy, I'm just using two of the letters from his name). He just finished an MBA in economic development, one of the requirements of which was field experience, which he got by working for OI in India on a contract basis. After he was done with his MBA program he decided to extend his contract with OI, so he's been here since last September and plans to be here until this coming September. He's 26, and his parents are both from India, but he was born and raised in the US. He's really nice and really helpful (in fact, E and I are in his air conditioned apartment right now, using his wireless internet connection on our laptops).

Anyway, going to the OI office was great. We looked through some borrower application forms to get a sense of what the women do (all the borrowers are female) and what sort of information OI collects about them. After reading a couple books and more than a dozen journal articles on microfinance, as well as studying it in class, to actually see the pictures of the borrowers (there's a picture on their application) and see the information about them was really exciting. I felt like I was looking at pictures of rock stars or something.

Today E and I went to a coffee shop (more AC! yay!) and started rewriting our survey (Romeo is leaving Chennai tomorrow, so we told M she should spend the day with him instead of working). We made pretty good progress, and are going to try to finish it tomorrow.

I will be posting some pictures in just a few minutes...