A Return Home, And A Computer Rises From The Dead

Sometimes I can't figure India out. My laptop has been, as many of you know, busted for the past month. That's why I wasn't able to update anything. Any updates I had been writing were written after staying late at work, which is one of the least enjoyable/most creepy ways to spend a night here in India. After months of trying to get the laptop fixed, my problem is now all gone, all because I tried my damn best to prevent it from getting fixed. Let me explain.

When my laptop died, I tried all the usual fixes. Fiddling with the power button. Unplugging the battery and leaving it over night. Trying to shake it back to life. Making offerings to Lord Ganesha. And when all of that failed, I tried my last resort: my company's IT department. With great reluctance, I handed my laptop over to them. I sat with them as they retried the techniques I mentioned. Nothing seemed to work. With a heavy heart, they said I was out of luck, and that it was likely a motherboard issue. Well damn, right?

As I go to take the laptop back, trying hard to think of some other arcane ritual to perform to bring my laptop back from the dead, the head of the IT department gives me an offer. It's hard to ship things back to the States from India. It's damn hard. He offered to take care of it, and that he would ship my laptop back to Asus, even thought it was out of warranty, just to see what they said. Well great, right?

Fast forward two weeks. I'm back from Kerala. I ask if they've heard anything from Asus. Turns out, they didn't send it to Asus, exactly, but instead gave it to a friend of a guy in HR who has a soldering iron and a screw driver set. I panic. I'm furious. They're letting some half educated guy on the street rip open the guts of my sweet innocent laptop, poke around, put in whatever garbage knock off parts they can salvage, and call it fixed. No way, I tell them. Just give me back my laptop. There is no way I'm paying the fifty American that the guys wants. That's practically what my laptop is worth, anyway.

I tear in to the IT department for cheating me. I tear in to the guy in HR for not letting me know what was happening. I tear in to anyone who would listen to me. Unfortunately, this is, I guess, standard procedure for how stuff gets fixed in India. Go figure. Anyway, the next morning, I get the laptop back. I figure I'll just leave it in some corner and gather some dust. Maybe dust will fix it. Then the HR guy tells me it's all fixed.

What? The laptop I told him I didn't want fixed? Yup. Looks like I now have a working laptop. I feel half insulted and half like a jackass (because the guy did actually fix the laptop, after all). Oh well. This is India. Onward, with part two of my Kerala story.

So our next stop on our trip was Allepey. Allepey is the boat house capital of India. There are some four hundred rice barge captains willing to rent out their boats for a night to tourists who want to explore the backwaters of Kerala. When you get down to Allepey, everyone will seem to have a boat. Guys on the street, restaurant owners, and post card vendors all seem to have a cheap ride available. Unfortunately, yet again, we arrive too late to really do anything that day. We check into a hotel and accept the offer to take the owner's boat out the next day.

At the hotel, I talk to some guys from Holland who were also traveling Kerala, and some Brits who had studied textiles back home, and one of them had just finished up working in a textile factory in Delhi. I guess this is glamorous to some people. The guys from Holland wanted to know how the boat tour was. I said it was alright. That was when I was informed by the hotel owner about the boating accident. Yikes.

The rooms were fairly comfortable and had mosquito nets, thank god. The cockroaches weren't that large, but the ceiling did start spewing some weird dust down on me while I slept. Before I went to bed, I went to get some water with some of the other British girls. Bobby, half asleep, asked me what I got. I explained “I got some bottled water”.

What he heard: “I got some hot water”.

Lord knows how he didn't notice that the bottle wasn't by any means 'hot', and it was clearly marked as drinking water, and that the bottle was still sealed after I took my own shower, but I guess he decided this water was just my little gift to him. Bobby is now one of the few people I have ever met that has used bottled water to shower. That bastard still owes me one two liter bottle of water.

After breakfast, we got on to the house boat, and started the tour of the backwaters. It almost immediately started raining. Rain on a rice barge is fun for maybe the first ten minutes, top. Then the boat starts to floor. Then you're just stuck in your cabin until the rain stops.

It was still beautiful, even if we didn't get the sun that we hoped for. We hired a captain and a cook. The food that the cook made was delicious. We also had two stow away kittens who jumped on board when we stopped for lunch. I'm not sure what happened to them. Last I heard, they were hiding in the kitchen... Oh god.

After the house boat, it was time to head back to Kochi to catch a train the next morning. Our return to Kochi was fairly uneventful. We saw one of the few Jewish temples of India, and walked around the island that we stayed on.

The next morning, we caught the train at 8AM Saturday, and were supposed to get in at 4PM Sunday. 32 Hours. Long, but not bad. What we didn't know was that it was raining for three days straight in Maharashtra, and that the tracks were now flooded. We ended back to the apartment at 4AM Monday.

The only saving grace about the ride home was that we had far more enjoyable neighbors. I became the cool one. Bobby became the Angry one. Jan is still the German one.

When we finally reached Pune, I don't think I was ever more glad to be coasting through the streets in a rickshaw. I felt like I had finally reached home. I think I'm starting to really love this city.