nothing of consequence

I don't have much to say at the moment; I've been feeling a bit sluggish lately. We ended up not working Thursday or Friday (Thursday by design, Friday because IMED changes their schedule radically without telling us). I did literally nothing for most of the day yesterday; I guess I caught up on sleep and did half a crossword puzzle, but I didn't even get any reading done or anything. This was partly because we were out quite late on Thursday night. We went to Zara's to celebrate M's and P's birthdays, but they close at 11:30 (as pretty much all bars do), so we went to Pasha, the dance club, for about 30 minutes until they closed as well. We met this nice guy in his late thirties who works for Goldman Sachs and ended up going back to his hotel room about a five-minute walk away to drink beer, chat, and (in the case of myself, P, E, and M) soak up the luxury. It was like being in another world. There was a huge (and I do really mean HUGE) arrangement of star gazer lilies in the lobby, which made the whole lobby smell good. The room had AC and really comfortable furniture and a balcony and everything.

Here are two anecdotes about that night that I think say something about Indian culture: first, M and I were out on the balcony for a while. While we were out there, the front desk called the guy whose room it was (the Goldman Sachs guy) to tell him that there were two women on his balcony. Not to tell him to get us off the balcony, or that he's not supposed to have guests late at night (which he's not supposed to), just to tell him that we were there, as if he didn't know.

Second, and in a similar vein, we wanted more beer, so he called room service and ordered six beers and six glasses. So, clearly, there were six people in the room (for those of you keeping track, the sixth person was one of his coworkers). But the guy whose room it was wanted to make sure that the person that brought the beer to the door didn't see any of us (he didn't make us hide in the bathroom or anything, just stay out of the sightline of the door). Clearly he was breaking the rules by having people in his room late at night, but as long as you keep up some sort of pretense of following the rules, no matter how absurd, they don't seem to mind.

I'm really going to miss this place. We leave so soon (a week and a half, I think). In fact, unfortunately, E may be leaving in a matter of days, because his grandfather has taken quite ill and may not live much longer, so E wants to go see him as soon as possible. It's looking like we may have nearly a week more of work to do, since IMED is working on finding some dropped-out borrowers for us to survey (I'll explain later why this is important). So we might have to finish up the last bit of work without E, but of course that's just fine. He did get here and start doing work a week before we did. And of course family is much more important than any of this research silliness.

Well, we're off for E's last trip to Mamalapuram.