We tend to sleep past 8 am here, sometimes even past 9am, but I think it was the former that morning, and near 8 am we had breakfast [sliced apples, sliced plums, a soy milk shake, toast with peanutbutter and cherry preserves, and scrambled eggs]; Gita makes sure we get lots of antioxidants in our diet here. I swam 1500m in the pool, and by the time I finished D and Gita were ready to go. Gita had put on a smashing sari: white with a gold border and some scattered embroidered flowers in pale blue [I think; these might be visible in one or another picture with her in it]. I thought it looked quite formal; when she left on her off-day, Sunday, to go into Little India, she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. So we were splendidly escorted this day. Gita's lilting speech is a kind of music, maybe more so because I don't always catch the words or the syntax (though well enough for all practical purposes), and she laughs often and readily.
I don't recall a lot of details from our Wednesday excursion to Little India. D says it's because I stood around a lot reading Lord Jim, and it's true I did a fair amount of that while she was shopping for whatever. We caught the bus at the nearest stop on Mt Sinai Rd, and rode it down to the MRT, changed from the green to the purple line, and rode past Chinatown to Little India. When Sir Stamford Raffles first set up the place he partitioned it for Chinese, Indians, Malays, and English, but it all looks pretty mixed wherever we've fone. I understand [I think from Julian on Monday] that there's a quota system in the public housing here, such that all the different ethnic groups are represented in the housing blocks. One of my strongest impressions here is that we fair-skinned, fair- or varicolored-haired, pale-eyed northern hemispheric people are the strange ones on the planet, the ones who don't look quite like the rest of the human species, the darker-skinned, black0haired, dark-eyed people. It's a shift in perspective.
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