As I wrote earlier, we’re now enrolled in the IDC starting in a couple of days. The IDC aims to the PADI Instructor Examination (IE), for which there are som prerequisites. First of all, you have to complete the IDC, have been a certified diver for at least six months and have 100 logged dives.

The original plan for us was to do our IDC in April, which would have given us more than enough time to do the required hundred. We both had some 30+ when we arrived and we’re somewhere around 80 right now. Given that the IDC starts in two days and I’m still overexhausted from last week, I’m going to have a hard time reaching the three-figure mark before IE.

Luckily, BSB is a 5-star Career Development Centre, which allows its instructor candidates to fulfill the requirements out of order. This means I can take the IE with only 60 dives, sail through it and do the remaining dives afterwards.

What a relief. Now all I have to do is stop telling myself that I should somehow match the performance levels of my beloved wife. I guess it’s an equality and pride thing for me to bring in as much competence as she does. Yes, yes, I know it’s stupid, but still something I need to work on.

In other news, we finally have to change our bike. The current one seems to have a bad alternator and a bit of cold start trouble, giving me leg cramps from all the kick starts. Let’s hope we get a better one as a replacement.

Tags: Blue Season Bali, diving, instructor internship, motorbikes, PADI IDC, PADI IE, stress, transportation

I’ve finally started to feel more at home here, everything is not so bloody strange anymore. Possibly the only thing that comes to mind is that the roads are fringed everywhere with high walls, and nobody knows what’s on the other side. In many places there is also a stencilled sentence on the wall in question: “Do not urine here.” I will post an Engrish picture of it one day.

But I promised to try and catch the big bird of prey on camera, and today I did:

The palm tree is obviously a big one, as the bird is about the size of a big cat.

I also managed to catch a frame of a local policeman on his on-duty bike:

Check out that funky paint job on the bike! And yes, they all ride similar ones. Too bad about the electric lines in the picture though.

I now have my working desk which is big enough to accommodate both the laptop and my sewing machine at the same time. It’s now only a matter of time that I have new clothes!

Tags: birdy, motorbikes, people in india

Things happen too fast for me to comment on here. I’m being bombarded with various sensory stimuli all the time, and something has to be forgotten in order for new ones to be inserted. Here goes, then.

The air smells a bit acrid in the city, since there are so many engines running at all times. The noise is overwhelming, there is absolutely never a time that would be silent. If the horns of the cars, rickshaws and bikes are not hooting, the squirrels or birds are making some din.

Riding on the back of a motorbike in the traffic can be fearsome. Please keep all limbs close to the torso at all times. Beware of bumps and potholes in the road. Even if the traffic is supposed to be on the left, it’s not always so. Be prepared that you will be stared (what, two white people on an Enfield??) and made faces at. I was very happy to have a helmet with a reflecting visor today – I was alternately making faces and smiling to the flabbergasted people.

On Nandi Hills I was having a bit of vertigo. It’s not that high up, but the walls are steep in places. It was also beautiful, and in parts it seemed to be stolen from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. Gum trees, ancient gnarly trees and acacias everywhere. Again we were a part of the sights to be seen for the locals – enough to have our pictures taken from buses and cars going past.

The transit back from the hills to the city is a big one for the senses. In the countryside the air is clean, there are orchards and vineyards in between villages which are less than well-kept or well-organised. Cows and water buffaloes are plentiful, hen and roosters in all colours imaginable and stray dogs, packs of them. Kilometre by kilometre the neon lights and billboards start to appear more and more, and less of the orchard/vineyard/field plots until none are there. One does feel more free on the countryside, that is very much true. Not so many staring faces, no more walls around the roads, and no kingfishers sitting on electric wires.

And yet again we were back home. It is really starting to feel like home, more and more. There is still the syndrome of putting stuff down and forgetting which floor I put the said object down on, but I’m getting better on the efficiency side.

The nights are warm and my love is here with me. I have a home away from home.

Tags: food, happiness, motorbikes, natural beauty, road trip, traffic

So, we landed last night and now we’re back here, married and celebrated and everything. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is the stuff now for some 7 odd months.

The transit went as flights generally do, nothing special. We got scanned for fever at the airport, the people are nuts about the swine flu and trying to stop it. Apparently, it’s not just another influenza here. Otherwise everything was smooth, we got our luggage and Mr. S was there to pick us up as agreed.

Today it was all about shopping for the necessaries (a helmet for me for motorcycling and heaps of food) and having  a terrific lunch at Shiro (sushi buffet, all you can eat, delivered to the table fresh, yummmy!), otherwise just trying to unwind.

It’s surprisingly cool now, the air is very humid and full of noises. The local squirrels hooted me awake a couple of times last night. I’m guessing that when I get used to them, I’ll need a seriously bad-noised alarm clock. I’m constantly reminded of Darwin in Australia, the humidity and the warmth are like nothing else I’ve experienced. It’ll take me a while to acclimatise, but I’ll get there eventually.

Just a word from Heikki, the glasses he last got from the optician didn’t have the correct lense in the right frame, so he hasn’t been able to write for a while. What’s more, we’ve been running around organising stuff back in Finland and offline anyway for a few weeks, so that’s another good reason for not to post more. But that’s about to change, the glasses problem has yet again been faced and now that I’m here, I might actually have something to say about expatting too.

Tomorrow’s agenda has a meeting with the corporate liaison who will organise paperwork and stuff for me, but we’ll take it from there and see what happens. Will keep this blog posted though.

Tags: accommodation, luxuries, motorbikes, practical stuff

Yes, I’m still alive. Just.

I haven’t been updating the blog because my right eye decided that it wants to look to the right rather than straight ahead. If I try to focus my sight too close, the muscles around the eyeball have to stretch more to the left, which in turn causes a headache of gargantuan proportions in less than fifteen minutes. It takes around a week for the glasses to be ready, so right now I’m using an eye patch to check my mailbox and read what I have to, but mostly I’ve been spending time doing everything else. Especially today’s bike ride in the countryside was refreshing and got my mind away from mundane worries.

Unfortunately it seems that the problems don’t stop there.

I wrote earlier about air pollution in the city, but lately it’s been worse than that. I woke up today (but not for the first time) tired, coughing and out of breath, just to see all the symptoms go away when I got out of the house to the fresh countryside air. After coming back it didn’t take long before the whole thing started again, only to cease once more when I left out for dinner. I’m beginning to suspect that this house is infected by mould, especially since the cupboards below the stairs smell like a century-old earth cellar.

Oh bloody hell, what next?

Tags: accommodation, motorbikes, oh bugger, work

Only two more days to go in Oulu before the previsit, thank heavens. During past two years I already got used to having my bike out before end of March, but right now it’s snowing out there. Some five centimeters has already come down during the night, and right now the air is full of flakes roughly the size of a cow. Bloody bloomin bollocks.

I blame global warming.

Tags: motorbikes, weather, why I wanted a change

The previsit is now confirmed and I have the tickets in my pocket. My contact person in Bangalore is hunting houses according to my requirements (4+ bedrooms, fully furnished, peaceful location) and we’ll get to choose from a number of alternatives when we’re there. There will also be some cultural training during the visit, butI doubt if it has much to offer me after my last visit. What I’m expecting the most is information on driver’s licenses and bikes in India, but we’ll see what they have to offer.

It’s a pity that Bullet Classic is not available in India.

Tags: accommodation, culture, motorbikes, previsit, travel

Sometimes it is beneficial to stand out of the crowd. I was walking towards the office in the morning when a seemingly random Bajaj Avenger pulled to the side of the road. I didn’t recognize the driver, but it was enough to see the neck strap of the Corporation over his shirt to understand what was going on. No doubt he recognized me (I wonder how?) and offered a ride to the office, which I gladly accepted. I was already prepared to take a rikshaw, but this helpful dude saved me the trouble. Thanks again, even though I don’t remember your name

I found out yesterday that January 14th is a public holiday in India, so all of a sudden I have only two early mornings left in Bangalore. Time flies at unbelievable pace when you’re far away from home.

Just a quick side note: the Finnish police has done one of its biggest mistakes yet by collecting a secret list of child porn sites. Apart from completely useless filtering system for implementing the list, its content has been proved to include a lot of legal sites.

And now the list has been published in Wikileaks, helping people find stuff that the police wants banned. Great work, guys!

Tags: colleagues from India, internet censorship, motorbikes, time, traffic, transportation, why I wanted a change, work

I have now been in Goa for a little more than 24 hours, and already I find myself in the middle of a lot of things. I didn’t get a Bullet this time, but instead I have a lightweight and agile 150-cc Bajaj Pulsar for moving around. A bike is definitely the best choice of transportation here, so if you have the least bit of courage and preferably a license for MB, I suggest you go for it. The traffic isn’t even remotely as bad as in Bangalore, so you should be doing fine.

The open water diver course started today with a bunch of theory lessons followed by a good hour and a half in the pool for practical training. The theoretical part was easy for me, as usual, but surprisingly the practice went brilliantly as well. According to the instructor, I am “a natural” with SCUBA skills. No wonder it felt so easy! I had some concerns about breathing underwater without a mask, but I cleared even that without extra effort. All well for now, more diving practice tomorrow!

Goa seems like a nice place, but there are a couple of catches: first of all, you should have a friend or two with you. Second, be prepared to see a lot of western tourists, and even more locals who want every penny the tourists (yourself included) have. Go see an elephant in the side of the road and the people next to it will surely figure out a way to charge you some money for just looking at it. Walk a hundred meters and you will see half a dozen of taxi drivers offering a ride. These people live out of us.

I’m not saying that Goa is a bad place, [insert entity] forbid! It can be the ultimate mix of relaxing on the beach, having a good time with your loved ones and experiencing something new like SCUBA diving. My views are obscured by the fact that I am here alone, which in turn makes chilling out in the beach rather unattractive. That leaves me with only the third aspect, which I’m going to concentrate on as much as possible. The rest of the time I will be roaming around the area on a bike, eating in different places and consuming alcoholic drinks in various environments.

Speaking of alcoholic drinks, I am currently sipping my test portion of McDowell’s Single Malt, the only non-blended Indian whisky I could get my hands on. I was looking for a bottle of Amrut, but half a dozen liquor shops later gave up and bought a 50-rupee (80 cents orso), less-than-a-centiliter bottle of McDowell’s to see if it’s any good. After half a glass I am pleasantly surprised to say that this stuff is no bad at all: yes, I’ve had better, but I’ve definitely had worse also. Put a reasonable price tag on it in Finland and I’ll be definitely adding this to my home bar.

Tags: diving, drink, holiday, motorbikes, people in india, practical stuff, tourism, transportation, travel