ever since my parents left, i’ve had a steady stream of visitors helping to keep this rambling three bedroom place from feeling lonely. first elle came back from thailand for five days and brought with her a whole suitcase of thai food. she came in at around 1am and i was too out of it to eat then, but as soon as practice was over the next morning i raced home to eat longan, mangosteen, papaya salad, sticky rice and all sorts of other stuff she brought in her suitcase.

p’bpu came this past weekend to stay for a week. the weather has been really since so she and i have been doing lots of walking, some eating indian food and of course plenty of cooking thai food. i’m not sure why i didn’t start cooking sooner, i guess i just have gotten out of the habit of cooking after living in bangkok for so long but i’m reminded how much i like it. plus with all this free time on my hands, i really don’t have much excuse to keep complaining about being bored with indian food.

ohh, bpu had this rather scary thing to say about her trip in from bangalore.

soon after the cab picked me up in bangalore, it stopped. we barely got out of the city when traffic on both sides of the road stopped. the driver didn’t speak much english and was really only able to say “accident”. people started to follow the cars, just standing and staring, but nobody was able to tell me what was going on. eventually the taxi i was in, managed to cut through traffic, close enough to become the second car in line from where traffic stopped. i think getting so close was even worse than being far back, if only we had been a little earlier we could of avoided the whole mess. being so close also let me see the reason traffic was stopped, people had brought stones, trees and ropes to the road blocking any form of traffic in either direction. the whole thing was really scary, made even more so by the people who joined the road block my lying across the stones and trees.

after half and hour, the police finally showed up and made everyone drag the trees and rocks off the road, finally we were able to go. through the whole mess, i kept thinking of news reports from afghanistan and how the taliban use things like this to block the road before attacking.