Field trip to supermarket, Goethe Institut, power failure

We took the car and driver to another area of the city, which I don't quite know the name of but it's out on this long street called C.M.H. Road. The road goes past a "tank" or reservoir and then immediately skirts this low area where there's some serious third-world poverty. Gradually the land rises and as it does so, the affluence of the surroundings grows, until a couple of miles down the road we were once again in a middle-class area. The Goethe Institut was out there, and it had an exhibition by the people behind the Blank Noise Project.

Then we went to a supermarket across the way -- a very modern supermarket, it had every modern product and decor. I noticed some other western people there, so the neighborhood must be fairly cosmopolitan, what with the Goethe place and all.

On the way back a few drops of rain fell. I was very excited by this, because rain and floods figure large in my novel. Unfortunately (from my selfish perspective), the rain barely got the windshield wet.

When we got back to the apartment, the power was out. Debbie had told me it had gone out the day before, too, when I was out on Brigade Road eating pizza. (The power flickered at the pizza place, too, but came on in five seconds. I hadn't even been sure it was a power failure until I went out and saw that every single shop had a generator blasting away outside its door -- making the sidewalk even more hot and polluted than it was, something I wasn't sure was possible.) After the rain shower, it was actually a little cooler outside, so we opened the doors to the balcony and sat near them, reading. That was really pleasant.

In early evening I went out again to the little internet place to blog. After the fairly big breakfast and the fairly big lunch I had no desire to eat dinner so after blogging I just walked around some more, and then I finally realized I was really, really tired, so I went to bed about 8:00 pm. I knew this was, more or less, giving in to jet lag and would mean that I would wake up long before dawn. But I felt too sleepy, and after showering I fell right into bed and slept deeply.

I haven't said anything about the shower here. There's no automatic hot water; you have to turn on a little heater on the wall if you want some. But it's so hot outside and the bathroom itself is not air-conditioned, so I have just been showering with the "cold" water (which is cool but not that cold, definitely not as cold as the cold water in SF).