Our nest

The first week I spent in Nasik back in February 2006 was a quiet week, during which I could make myself comfortable in our house, far too big for the 2 of us but so nice! For the moment we live outside of the so-called “Bosch colony”, where all expatriates have in theory the possibility to live, if a house (they say bungalow) is available. We wanted first to stay outside of the colony, to experience real Indian neighborhood, people… The house planned for us is anyway not ready yet. It is still being built for the moment. So we live in “Anandwalli”, an area of Nasik, near the MICO-Bosch plant. We drive 5 minutes to work. Anandwalli is a nice area with a few houses like ours, but also smaller and much smaller houses and a few low buildings with appartments. There are rich and poor people. The area is quite open, meaning not crowded with buildings. We have a beautiful view on the small mountains surrounding Nasik…

There are fields around the houses and gardens. Some cows (but this is obvious here) and dogs (very loud at night). Most of the people here don’t speak English, so we try and use the basis of Hindi we have learnt. There is a small shop to buy last minute things like eggs, millk, bread, etc… A guy near the house has a very small hut in which he can iron your shirts and bed sheets if you want to “delegate” this task to him. Of course he gets paid for that, 2 Rs per shirt, which is around 0,04 € (…).

To close the house chapter for the moment, we will move to the colony when our house there is finished, not before end of May, most probably mid June it was first planned for end of March, but never mind). We’ll see. One of the main reasons why we will move is that Anandwalli is an industrial area, in which there is no electricity on Saturdays, which is our sole fully free day over the week. The reason for that is that power has to be shared in Nasik, as there is not enough for all. Power cuts are very common over here. So some areas do have power on certain days of the week, and no power on certain other days. This means no fridge, no music, no TV, no AC, no nothing electrical. Ok, we could get adapted to that, but this is not really convenient. On top of that, we have had already quite a few problems with the house, the water pump was down for 2 days, with the 5 of us in the house (Greg’s family was there at that time), and if I agree that electricity is not a must, no water can turn to a catastrophe. I had never realized how important water is in your everyday life! It is the kind of things you have to experience to understand them. Now the pump is repaired, but it happens to do crazy things again and again… So anyway, we will move to the colony. The house being built at the moment looks great. We are preparing the furniture (“home made”) as it will be empty and we didn’t bring any furniture with us. Over there you have the benefit of the security, there’s a pool, a tennis court. So I don’t want to complain, because I know that we will live over there in far much better conditions than 95% of the population, but the context will be for sure very different even though more than ok.