Ice and Spice...

...is gone.

This will only affect some of you. But I feel like a little piece of me just died.

On my way to meet with my NGO contact, I walked through my old neighborhood at Lake Market to get to the metro station. It was such a strange feeling as I walked down Rashbehari Avenue and began to recognize things. I walked by the house where we lived, and could see our old classroom through the open window on the ground floor, and no one was inside. I don't know what I was expecting. All of these memories came flooding back of everything that happened in that house, and the relationships that I had there... and then this overwhelming sense of loss of all of these things that were so important to me coupled with a sense of stupidity for having gone there alone. Hopefully I'll be able to go visit in a less creepy(?) capacity in the future, but my relationship with that house is a bit complicated. Ah well.

Enough of my feelingy-feelings. My meeting went well, and it is very likely I'll take off to the Sundarbans on Thursday or Friday to start my fieldwork. The secretary was very friendly... between his English and my Bengali we don't have the greatest communicative relationship, but we got on fine. He was bemusedly concerned with my lack of a husband, saying it was "very dangerous," and then very elaborately set up a joke where the punchline was that he hopes I have come to India to find "a suitable boy," which is also the title of a ridiculously long novel by Vikram Seth. I can only hope that we will talk extensively about my love life in the future!

And because it always cheers me up without fail, I leave you with this.