All the Best: Rain in Chennai, Horror in Mumbai, and I'm old.

The past week has been a surreal experience living in Chennai. Although the monsoon season is over for most of India, southern India (e.g. Chennai) gets hit by the "returning monsoon" or essentially the rain storms as they make their way out to the Bay of Bengal. At least that's how it's been explained. This past Mon-Fri has been the heaviest rainfall in Chennai since I've arrived and much of the city is still under quite a bit of water...the photo above of my friend shows one of the worst hit parts of the city. The thing is, people here don't even dare call this "flooding"...it's just "water logging." I'm pretty sure "flooding" by Indian standards involves the displacement of a population.

My co-workers and I were advised to work from home the latter half of the week given the dangerous travel conditions around the city. So when the horrible terrorist attacks began in Mumbai on the evening of Wednesday Nov 26th, I was struggling to remember who from our office might be in Mumbai, since I hadn't seen anyone earlier that day. Thankfully there were only a few folks I knew who were there and no one I know of was directly harmed. That being said, the attack was disturbing for many obvious reasons and the fact that it was so widespread throughout busiest parts of the city, lasted for so many days, and partially targeted at US/British/Israeli citizens does make me a little less excited for my next trip to Mumbai. We haven't had a normal day at the office since the attacks started so it's been an extra bizarre feeling being fairly homebound by the rain and out of normal contact with people here.

By Saturday most of the rain had slowed, so a few friends were kind enough to join me in celebrating my 26th birthday over some Italian food, Chennai-style.

Photos of the wet city, a belated Thanksgiving dinner, and other recent travels/events can be seen in various new Web-albums here. I've also added the rest of the pictures from Rachel's visit (one video below is from Shimla - a beautiful town in the foothills of the Himalayas, full of aggressive monkeys).

Monkeys in Shimla ("Look at the baby!...They're going to remember us.")