the expat life
i've settled into quite a nice litte routine here in mumbai, doing no more than an hour's productive activity a day. the monsoon has hit pretty hard, so too much exertion is particularly fraught with hazard. rich's stuff was due to arrive on wednesday morning but turned up 12 hours early, which meant that he had the following morning off, and his stereo had just arrived. a few kingfishers and an entire bottle of old monk later we were air guitaring around his living room to a guns n roses medley and generally not covering ourselves with glory.the next morning was not rosy. rich finally stumbled to work at about midday, looking very sorry for himself. i had big plans to go and achieve things like buying train tickets: i barely made it back into the living room where i draped myself over the sofa all day as rita, rich's maid, looked on disapprovingly.
in the evening i got an idea of the life that young professional expats like darbs lead. everyone is in certain core groups from one of the major centres, usually hong kong. when you get farmed out you regularly have friends of friends, complete strangers, who'll ring you up and pop over when they happen to be in the same country. yesterday's candidate was a girl called fi who works for one of the big banks. she was perfectly lovely, but it really made me realise what rich was talking about when he said that everything had become too transient. we all got on very well but the odds are that fi and rich will probably never speak again, unless they bump into each other in hong kong. that's how this life goes, you meet a myriad of people, all doing fairly interesting things, but it almost always has to be a vast collation of acquaintances you gain, rather than real new friends. strange, especially for someone as affable as rich: it's going to be good to have him back amongst us next year.
no plans for the next few days, other than trying to return to civilized behaviour before me sis arrives: scary times!
posted by bicrom @ 9:10 am
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