India was always on my list of dream places to visit, along with Australia, Ireland, Italy, much of the Caribbean, and pretty much all of Canada. I have been slowly ticking those places off of my list, but still had a ways to go when we decided to move to India for a year. It became pretty obvious shortly after we started telling people about the move that we were not the only people with a keen interest in India. With that in mind, we planned for guests in choosing our house, and tried to make it clear that we want visitors. So, wanna come to India?

Bangalore, the city that we live in, was just named to the Lonely Planet’s list of top ten cities to visit in 2012. It’s number three in fact! I am not sure that can vouch for all of the selling points that are listed in the description in the article, but hopefully I will have by the time that you get here! From what we have seen so far, it is a pretty neat and diverse place to visit, and well situated for visiting other parts of India and Asia. The food is SO GOOD too.

Here are a few tips for those of you who are planning a trip.

• Let us know when you are thinking of coming. we do have some visits lines up, and want to make sure that we have enough beds! In case of a conflict, we will pick favourites!

• You need a visa to come to India, and it is best if you apply for this sooner rather than later. Information can be found here, but you should note that to apply you have to give them your passport for up to 15 business days, and that your passport needs to be valid for at lats six months. Don’t plan on travel outside of Canada for a couple of weeks around application time. Tourist visas are valid for six months from date of issue.

• You will want to talk to your doctor or a travel doctor (I can recommend one!) about the shots that you need to come visit. What you need to take will be dependant on where you want to go while here. It is very unlikely that you will need to get the number of needles that we got, but you also won’t be protected from rabies for life! If you are timid about needles (ahem Chris), these meds can be taken orally, you just need to start the ball rolling sooner. I am not a doctor, so talk to yours.

• The weather here is perfect, don’t believe what any of the weather sites say. Bangalore is hot, but not as stinking hot as other regions in India, and not really humid when compared to Ottawa. You do need to bring pants (house rule), they just don’t need to be of the long variety.

• The travel here is not super fun. The flights are long, any way you look at it, so be sure that you bring whatever you need to be entertained. We will make arrangements to have you picked up from the airport, as it’s just the easiest way. Don’t worry about getting adjusted to the +10:30 time difference, we have two small alarm clocks that will get you on schedule pretty quickly!

• Bring rupees with you. They are the only currency that is used, and getting them while you are here can be tricky, as not all bank machines accept Canadian bank cards, even though they claim they will. I recommend going through your bank, rather than a currency exchange shop like the one I went to in Ottawa. We were robbed on the exchange, and I had left it too late to go to my bank. Credit cards are accepted, but you will still want some cash.

• If your mobile is unlocked, we should have a sim that you can use. If not, don’t plan on using yours, will be very expensive!

I should be up front and let you know that there is a “fee” for the use of our guest room. Wine. It’s hard to get good and reasonably priced wine here, and I know that each adult is allowed to bring two litres of wine in to the country. If you come via Frankfurt, you can even buy bottles at the duty-free in the airport, so you don’t have to worry about checking the bottles! Please also feel free to ask is what we are craving or needing!! There are a number of things that I just can’t get here easily, like many safe treats for Woo, Starbucks iced coffee, or a good plastic spatula. Just don’t ask Willy, he’ll be expecting steak!

So. Who is in?

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Some of the simplest tasks have become infinitely more complicated here. Tasks grocery shopping, which has been a time suck and a source of frustration for me. I LOVE to grocery shop, with and without the lils. At home, it became our saturday morning escape. We would pack up and head to Loblaws early, and willy would sleep in. It was a mostly fun time for the three of us, where the lils were helpers and observers and generally got along. If there were times when it was not, a solo trip to the store always restored the balance. I loved to wander though and look at all the shiny, fresh new produce and products, getting lost in my alone time for an hour. I have not found this bliss here.

Most of my shopping excursions have resulted in me coming home tired, cranky and somewhat empty handed. Often with two small people who were equally tired and cranky. There have been many a trip too. I feel like I have to run out every day to with a list a mile long. Many of the stores are small and very cramped. None of them have carts that can seat two children, which leads to fights, and one child sitting in the basket part of the cart either breaking the eggs or squishing the bread. They are often built on at least two stories and lacking in elevators that work. Lugging one or two small children up and down stairs with a basket full of groceries is never fun.

Items aren’t often organized in what I see as a logical fashion, and often aren’t grouped with similar items. It is not uncommon to find cereal tucked away in all four corners of a store, because that is where it fits. Eggs are not with the dairy, they are just where ever the pallet was placed that day. The inventory moves from location to location, day to day, so I wander around aimlessly trying to figure out if I was dreaming when I saw that item on a previous visit. Asking staff is hit and miss too. This is not because they don’t understand English, it is because the products often have a different name here. Flour is atta, okra is lady fingers, spinach is palak… They are also sized differently, often in smaller sizes, which led to underbuying of the staples I did find.

Then I found online grocery ordering and delivery. Thing were looking up. I spent the better part of an afternoon searching one outlet’s website, using every way I could think of to describe products. This store, that I had been shopping in, carried a number of the items that I was looking for, I just didn’t know how and where to find them. So I placed and order and hoped for the best. It arrived within hours of my hitting submit, but sadly contained only half of the items that I wanted. I tried a couple of days later, and the new order was much slower to arrive, and again missing many things. I surmised that they didn’t know where to look either, and went back to the drawing board.

The online shopping experience wasn’t a total loss. It taught me that I needed to broaden my thinking on what things might be called, and to look a little harder when I am in the stores. Each subsequent visit has been a little more successful, has led to a few more items scratched off the lists. We now have a maid who will watch the lils when she is here, which lets me do a solo trip and concentrate on the shopping alone.

Today I feel that I conquered grocery shopping. I went to one store and got ninety percent of the item on my list, remembering things like extra loaves of bread and cartons of milk. For the few items that I missed, I was able to either substitute, or know where to buy them and am saving that shopping for a promised solo trip with Woo on Saturday. The best part? It had been a week since I had last grocery shopped, save for one quick trip to pick up two items I didn’t know our cook needed. Success. Next up, finding and conquering all the markets!

Now if only I could open a bank account and transfer money into it.

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When we were looking to move here, one of the choices that we had to make was whether our house here would be furnished or not. We had pretty much made up our minds on furnished before we even came to look at houses, as we did not want to ship the contents of our house here for just one year. I can’t imagine the work that would take, the wait for shipping, and the potential customs headaches. No thanks.

We wavered a bit when we learned exactly what a fully furnished rental home included in Bangalore. It would appear that the minimum that needs to be provided is your appliances and curtain rods. This does not match my definition of fully furnished in any way. I wouldn’t expect the nicest of furnishings, but I expect something. We were lucky in the end, and found a place that had the basics: beds and a table to eat on, as well as some accent pieces and patio furniture. We decided that we were willing to live in a sparsely furnished house, and only but what we really needed.

I knew that we were pretty much setting up a house from scratch, and tried to plan accordingly. I made lists of all of the things that I thought we needed and either through stuff in the suitcase, packed for the shipment, or planned on buying here. I forgot some things and didn’t plan for others, but all in all I was pretty pleased with myself. Then we arrived, and I started noting some things that I likely should have put in the suitcase. Things that I have years supply of in the shipment that is not yet here. Like a bottle of contact lens solution that actually had liquid in it, at least one of my cookbooks for when I am stumped for dinner because I can’t find things in the various grocery stores, more than one ziploc bag, so I don’t have to keep reusing bread bags and other sacs that just aren’t up to the task, all of the sunscreen (it’s surprisingly hard to find here), and the toys. Why did we not include any actual toys in the stuff that we carried with us?! Plenty of markers and books, but no toys. I finally broke down and bought a couple, much to the lils delight.

Even with these little glitches, I still felt pretty good. Then we got an email that let us know that our shipment had left North America later than we thought it should would have. This meant that it definitely wasn’t going to arrive before Willy’s birthday, and his gifts were in it. we knew there was only a remote chance, but it still disappointed me to have nothing but homemade cards for him. Then came a second email, letting us know that we weren’t going to get our shipment on this past Friday, as they had failed to account for Diwali when scheduling our delivery. Diwali is a pretty big deal around here, and they forgot about it. This pushed our delivery to next Wednesday (and we all assume that they are taking the state holiday on Tuesday into account). Wednesday is two days after Hallowe’en. The lils costumes are in the shipment.

We broke it to them at dinner tonight, when they were talking about how we were going to celebrate Hallowe’en in a place that doesn’t really celebrate Hallowe’en. Woo was crushed and upset, which upset Goose. He couldn’t figure out how this happened. I know it isn’t a big deal, and we can do other costumes, but these are the ones they LOVE, that they play with all the time at home. We talked them through it, and made plans for a little trick-or-treating when the stuff does get here, and they were OK with it. I still feel that I should have known better.

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