That's Interesting..

For your reading pleasure, we thought we'd put together a collection of interesting tidbits that we've found here, starting with the air quality.

I tried to find some data from WHO studies to quantify how bad the air pollution is here, but everything I found actually looked too bad to be believable (as in, close to 1000x the accepted level of suspended particulate matter as recommended by the WHO). So we'll just leave it at this: anything you leave outside will have a visible layer of fine, black soot over it within a couple of hours, and we live 4 stories up!

No buildings are built from wood. They're all concrete support members with brick walls. When they're done, they mortar over the brick and paint it. All floors, ceilings, and support members are reinforced concrete, and it's all (except for the BIG commercial buildings) done by hand, with basic hand tools. Also note in the picture on the left the hand-tied wood scaffold that they use.




Next on the list, our dining table.

All along, we've thought that our dining table was veneered plywood with some tacky designs on it, topped with epoxy to seal everything in place. Not so! After trying to move it the other day to let the kids ride their bikes around the apartment (yeah, you heard me right), we realized that it was about 200lbs too heavy to be plywood. Looking under it we discovered that it's a solid sheet of marble with fake-wood contact paper glued to the top and covered with epoxy.

It's illegal to artificially ripen fruit here. There was even a big raid a few weeks ago where they confiscated a warehouse full of fruit that had been artificially ripened.

The media isn't squeamish about showing graphic violence and gore. The paper routinely has pictures of bodies at crime scenes, and just today, video and pictures of the dead LTTE Chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, were all over the newspapers and TV. What you won't find on TV is any type of sexual content, including kissing. It's interesting how sharp a contrast that is to the American media.

Moustaches are considered quite sexy. We read a recent poll in the "variety" section of the newspaper that had readers answering that they much preferred moustaches on their leading men than six-pack abs.

I was told by co-workers that hair loss in men is a pretty big deal here. If you lose your hair before you have your marriage is arranged, you better have a lot of money to make up for it.

In India, you give others gifts on your birthday.

..and that's it for now, but there's so much more.