My apartment and the office

I realize that's it's ironic for me to be writing about my new home when I'm not even there, but we have a few hours of down time in Hyderabad (and free internet at the guest house where we're staying!), so I wanted to tell you a little more about my living and working conditions.

The Flat
In India (as in much of Europe, I think), apartments are called "flats." I am sharing a flat with two Indian guys named Huberth and Shyam - both are believers, but only Huberth works at EMI (Shyam is a friend of his from church). They are both great guys and have been extremely hospitable to me since the day I arrived. They both like to cook, but Huberth is from the north-east of India (descended from a head-hunting tribe, actually!) and Shyam is from southern India, so they have different opinions about what constitutes good cooking. It's fun to hear them jokingly criticize each other's cooking techniques ("Well, maybe in the NORTH that's considered good cooking, but if you really want to know how to do it properly..." haha). :)

Here Huberth is cooking up a feast for all the interns who visited our flat one evening.

The compact kitchen is missing some of the modern appliances that I take for granted in the US (notably: oven, microwave, and dishwasher), but that doesn't stop these guys from making DELICIOUS dinners every night. There are also a few additions that I haven't seen in America - a small water heater up on the wall (a geyser, pronounced "geezer"; not shown in this picture), a propane-fueled stove that sits on the marble countertop, and (most surprising to me) a reverse-osmosis water purifier to filter the tap water (the blue tank on the left)! Talk about clean drinking water...

Shyam commented that the kitchen was "very dirty!" when I took this picture, so please imagine that the dishes drying beside the sink are all put away neatly in the cabinets, and everything else is neat and orderly. :) That's how it usually is.

Following the trend with the rest of the apartment, my bedroom is also compact, although it has ample closet space. My bed, desk, and nightstand take up about half of the floor space, while the rest of the floor space is open (nice for doing push-ups if I want to). There is also a powerful adjustable-speed ceiling fan to keep me cool at night (and to keep any mosquitos at bay).

I bought the green travel sheet in the US - it's impregnated with permethrin (an insect repellant) to frustrate any mosquitos that find their way into my room. :) So far it seems to be working!

I have more closet space than I know what to do with! (Most of my clothes are packed in my backpack in this picture, but even unpacked, I had plenty of space.)

My bathroom has some idiosyncrasies (e.g., the light switch is located in the hallway, there's no hot water, and you operate the toilet by pressing a button on top instead of pushing a lever), but it does everything it needs to, and I'm happy with it. Perhaps my favorite part is the fact that the toilet is solid pink, haha. :) The bathroom doubles as the washroom on laundry days, because I have to hand-wash all my clothes in a big bucket, and the fastest spigot in the house is located in my bathroom. To do laundry, I sit on the toilet (with the seat down, of course), set the laundry bucket in front of me, and scrub my heart out (usually while listening to a Tim Keller sermon on my laptop). So far I've only had to do laundry twice.

It's hard to see, but there is a 1-inch drop in the marble flooring that separates the shower from the rest of the bathroom.

Finally, the flat has a living room and a small outside balcony that overlooks our entry gate. We (roommates) normally eat dinner together and then hang out in the living room watching TV, browsing the internet, having conversations, and/or reading books. Past conversation topics have included cooking techniques in India, opinions on churches in Delhi, current topics in the news, the role of women in the family & the church, and how to keep rodents out of the apartment (haha; they're not a huge issue, just an occasional visit. I killed a small mouse using my Nalgene bottle the other day).

Shyam has been doing various home-improvement projects lately, hence the random items laying around. It's normally neater than this. That dark door is our main entry door, and the bright glass sliding door leads to our porch/balcony. The small thing in the bottom right corner is our refrigerator.

Standing on our porch looking left...

...looking straight forward (there's a small park across the street where neighborhood kids like to play cricket)...

...and looking to the right. (This is the way I walk to work each morning.)

A view of our apartment from across the street. Admittedly it's not the best picture I've ever taken (I was in a hurry when I took it), but you get a general idea. The lower balcony is ours, and the other 2 balconies belong to other flats.

The office
Our office is situated in the basement of an apartment building across town. It's neat: the girl interns live upstairs in one of the apartments, so they only have to walk downstairs (and through a few doors: to maintain "boundaries" ;) ) each morning to come down to work. I'll readily admit that the girls' flat is a bit nicer than the guys' flat (but ours is more "authentic"!!). :)

The girls in front of their flat. I shamelessly stole this picture from Alyssa's Facebook album, but I don't feel so bad because I'm pretty sure I took the picture in the first place. :) (From left to right: Meredith, Christine, Alyssa)

Turn left and you'll go to the girls' flat. Turn right and you'll go down to the office. :) The motorcycle ("bike") belongs to an upstairs neighbor.

The office has an open feeling - there are a few partitions dividing up the space, but it's not a cubicle jungle by any means. Normally there are people sitting at almost every desk, and you can easily lean over and ask them a question, but this is project trip season, so some of the staff was out of the office (and I was taking this picture the morning before we left for our project trip, when people were out running last-minute errands), so the picture below just shows the desks. The main entryway staircase comes into the office just to the right of this picture.

My desk is the one with the light on.

A picture taken from my desk looking the other way. This is where Dannah and Ryan (two of the married EMI staff members) normally sit, with Matthew and Ivy (another married couple) sitting across from them. Ivy just gave birth to their first son Sean a few months ago (hence the green mosquito netting tent for changing diapers), so she's been taking a break from architecture lately and spending time at home taking care of Sean.

We have a printer/plotter area (on the left) and a "conference room" (on the right). Every morning we meet as a staff to do morning devotionals in the conference room.

There are a few other nooks and crannies that I didn't show here (namely the bathroom, kitchenette, and a few other desks), but this provides the general gist of things. The people in the office are great! There are three married couples, two single guys, and then us interns (plus Christine who is technically a long-term volunteer but went through orientation with us, so she feels like a part of the intern family). It's a neat mix of architects and engineers (each with his/her own personality), plus a graphic designer and computer network administrator thrown in for good measure. I've really enjoyed getting to know them, and I'm looking forward to working together on projects this semester. Hopefully in future posts you can get a better idea of what each of them is like. :)