We’ve made it to Pune!
The flight didn’t set any high bars for comfort or food – in fact the tastiest item served on both Virgin Atlantic flights was called GU.
It was a prepackaged chocolate/banana pudding thing, the only edible object on the tray. In general, Lufthansa should rejoice. Amenities were so poor on Virgin that the German carrier has been promoted out of my basement ranking for long haul fights.
But you aren’t reading this for airplane food rants. Not only are we here, but after two days of aggressive power napping interspersed with cleaning and unpacking, we’ve managed to achieve relative sentience and order. Proof of the unpacking:
Proof of relative sentience and a virtual apartment tour, not necessarily in that order. First, the kitchen, with the soon to be infamous Pigeon Porch at the right.
The living room, with legacy non-working TV left by the landlord:
A couple of offspring-infested bedrooms:
Younger daughter is already entertaining herself with the paint set she brought with her.
Elder daughter, doing what comes naturally. Note my knitting and stitching stash bin in the foreground, and yet another landlord abandoned dead TV in the background. Our bedroom is the same, a bed, a wardrobe wall that includes both hanging space and shelves behind wood and mirrored doors, and a king size bed. No student desk in ours, though.
The Resident Male needs to do a lot of work after hours, synching up with colleagues on US time, so we’ve turned the fourth bedroom into an office:
The office is off the entry vestibule, on the far side of the living room, so he can do phone meetings without disturbing the rest of us. I’ll spare you the pix of the dining room, in which I sit and type this; maid’s room, turned laundry room, with its curiously mobile washing machine and drying racks; and of all of the bathrooms. Every bedroom comes equipped with its own, with a separate one off the laundry room.
And finally – the view off the balconies:
There’s no road behind the building – just a strip of shrubby ground between us and the Indian Army’s athletic training facility. Most mornings there are groups of cadets out there doing dawn calisthenics. On a couple of mornings they’ve had loudspeaker music accompaniment. Other mornings a full military marching band has rehearsed, complete with bagpipes. I haven’t seen them yet, although we can definitely hear them. I suspect they are training on the field on the other side of the grandstand.
So there you have our post-settlement tour. We’re here, finally (mostly) adjusted to local time, feeling out local resources and schedules, and starting to branch out on adventures. More on those to come!
String-Or-Nothing 
Good luck with your Indian adventures. Your rooms seem to be quite sizeable so you can march along to the band if the spirit moves you. 🙂
Thanks! The rooms are quite large for an apartment. All the more so because furniture is minimal. The expanse of white stone flooring makes them feel quite airy and cool. Marching however might awaken the neighbors. 🙂
The kitchen, at least, looks large, gleaming and modern. Who is going to be cleaning that wardrobe of bathrooms? Does the flat comes with a cleaning service? My apartment in Cambridge, MA came with a Pigeon Porch right off the kitchen. The only solution was something called Glue Foot–a sticky goo. I even let one of my cats out, briefly, one day. It came back with just the tail feathers of a pigeon. It seemed to work as a deterrent for a short time, anyway. What are you going to do for TVs, buy at lest one new cheap one? (I do all my knitting in front of our TV)
–Kathryn
It looks like I’m the designated caretaker, although I’m sure the rest of the family will pitch in. The apartment is large, but it’s smaller than our house in MA, and we managed laundry, cleaning and upkeep without help there, including the garden and snow shoveling. No garden or snow here!
We’ve found a mostly effective pigeon management gizmo which we brought with us – an inexpensive motion activated ultrasound projector. It’s a box, about the size of half a loaf of bread. When a pigeon alights, it blasts it with noise in a frequency people can’t hear, but they find highly annoying (no word on whether it bothers dogs or cats though). Works well, although an occasional deaf bird still lands.
On TVs, we brought one. Not a problem. We even have cable. There are several English channels on which we can watch reruns and recents, plus some movies. Plus lots of non-English programming which between trying to puzzle out the language after our quick Hindi immersion classes, and inventing new narrative to accompany the on-screen images, can be quite entertaining.