Earthquakes and Milkshakes
Some elements of the following story are true....
Picture this.
A calm and breezy morning in the sleepy mountain town of Simla (shim-lah). The fir trees filter the golden light through the window looking over my personal view of a forested valley 3000 ft below and 5 miles in all directions. The southern Himalayan hills a the steep sort, the kind that necessitate very windy James Bond/Indiana Jones style roads. The streets sit on top of each other with 60 ft of brick holding one above the other and preventing the mountainside from simply collapsing down on itself. The whole community of a million or so healthy folks is built on narrow man made plateaus that requires a heck of a lot of stairs, guard rails and lanes, most of which are absent. The grade of the hill is between 30 and 50 degrees most places, the trees are very tall but the effect is lost when you spend as much time beside the tops of trees below you as you do near the trucks others. The buildings are well made but not so that you'd notice, a whole lot of mortar and rebar sticks out of everything and many houses are built on stilts.
These were my surroundings some two days ago when much to my chagrin I was awakened from a very appreciated morning off by of all things in a heaven and earth, a 7.something earthquake. Never mind that I was really enjoying my dream about learning how to ride a motorbike, or that my room was a 60 ft cantilevered afterthought recently tacked on to the house in which i was staying and hanging over the ridge to a sliding drop of 3000 ft or so, or that the house was itself right on the edge of a tier that was made as a walking path and had naught but two wooden stilts resting on soft earth at a steep grade to push it back towards the ground, I just did not want to get up this particular morning and tried my utmost to ignore any shred of common sense that would suggest getting to the cliff side of the house as fast as possible. In the end nothing near us fell over, save Felix the midget butler my cup of cold coffee which I had failed to drink an hour earlier.
It felt like a 5 to me not a 7 and Simla seemed in tact as I progressed through the next two days, but as i have learned probably days later than most folks back in the west, the quake did some serious damage in India and the neighboring "stans".
In Other News.
We were attacked and held captive by renegade Himalayan school children on the decent into Chandigarh and I was forced to dispense large quantities of candies and "sodie-pops" to secure our eventual freedom. As part of the negotiations I had to agree to shoot video of the kids and show it to them and when they were displeased with the colour quality and lack of HD 16-9 format viewfinder we were forced to draw straws to decide which of our lives would be forfeit to a life of slavery in their sandbox. I would be lying If I said I was not relieved when they picked Ensign Ramirez our token security officer. I received one of his teeth in the mail yesterday with a poorly scrawled Hindi message in yellow crayon. The yellow crayon was hard to decipher at first, and the Hindi still is. I trust international help will be dispatched soon.
Chris
PS
We lost another intern to the countries staggering devotion to ungrounded wiring, my attempts to cover our editing equipment in electrical tape have proved fruitless. Vinnie the nose is still stuttering and his fingers have turned black under the nails, I only hope he improves before we go to Delhi, because if he cant feed himself while were gone I'll have to sell him to the rickshaw union to keep him alive. And finding him after the fact will be difficult and expensive.
Picture this.
A calm and breezy morning in the sleepy mountain town of Simla (shim-lah). The fir trees filter the golden light through the window looking over my personal view of a forested valley 3000 ft below and 5 miles in all directions. The southern Himalayan hills a the steep sort, the kind that necessitate very windy James Bond/Indiana Jones style roads. The streets sit on top of each other with 60 ft of brick holding one above the other and preventing the mountainside from simply collapsing down on itself. The whole community of a million or so healthy folks is built on narrow man made plateaus that requires a heck of a lot of stairs, guard rails and lanes, most of which are absent. The grade of the hill is between 30 and 50 degrees most places, the trees are very tall but the effect is lost when you spend as much time beside the tops of trees below you as you do near the trucks others. The buildings are well made but not so that you'd notice, a whole lot of mortar and rebar sticks out of everything and many houses are built on stilts.
These were my surroundings some two days ago when much to my chagrin I was awakened from a very appreciated morning off by of all things in a heaven and earth, a 7.something earthquake. Never mind that I was really enjoying my dream about learning how to ride a motorbike, or that my room was a 60 ft cantilevered afterthought recently tacked on to the house in which i was staying and hanging over the ridge to a sliding drop of 3000 ft or so, or that the house was itself right on the edge of a tier that was made as a walking path and had naught but two wooden stilts resting on soft earth at a steep grade to push it back towards the ground, I just did not want to get up this particular morning and tried my utmost to ignore any shred of common sense that would suggest getting to the cliff side of the house as fast as possible. In the end nothing near us fell over, save Felix the midget butler my cup of cold coffee which I had failed to drink an hour earlier.
It felt like a 5 to me not a 7 and Simla seemed in tact as I progressed through the next two days, but as i have learned probably days later than most folks back in the west, the quake did some serious damage in India and the neighboring "stans".
In Other News.
We were attacked and held captive by renegade Himalayan school children on the decent into Chandigarh and I was forced to dispense large quantities of candies and "sodie-pops" to secure our eventual freedom. As part of the negotiations I had to agree to shoot video of the kids and show it to them and when they were displeased with the colour quality and lack of HD 16-9 format viewfinder we were forced to draw straws to decide which of our lives would be forfeit to a life of slavery in their sandbox. I would be lying If I said I was not relieved when they picked Ensign Ramirez our token security officer. I received one of his teeth in the mail yesterday with a poorly scrawled Hindi message in yellow crayon. The yellow crayon was hard to decipher at first, and the Hindi still is. I trust international help will be dispatched soon.
Chris
PS
We lost another intern to the countries staggering devotion to ungrounded wiring, my attempts to cover our editing equipment in electrical tape have proved fruitless. Vinnie the nose is still stuttering and his fingers have turned black under the nails, I only hope he improves before we go to Delhi, because if he cant feed himself while were gone I'll have to sell him to the rickshaw union to keep him alive. And finding him after the fact will be difficult and expensive.
posted by Chris and Nilu at 8:12 AM
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