I think I may be a tea thief. Today, as I was leaving work, the man who brings tea to everyone at various points during the day stopped me and seemed to be asking for something, but I didn't understand. Hamid, my driver, talked to him and the man left. When I asked Hamid what he had wanted, he said that he wanted money for the tea I've been ordering. For some reason, since the guy has not requested money from me since I've been in the office, I figured the tea was an office-subsidized phenomenon (like soda is in Chicago.) But alas, it is not, and I'm not sure if I have a weeklong-plus backlog of tea money that I owe him, or if my coworkers have noticed that I don't get the system and have been paying for me (a source of this suspicion is that they sometimes won't accept my fair share of lunch that we order in, which is silly to me since I can expense it.) So tomorrow I'll have to ask and find out. I feel really bad, though -- I don't want to be the jerk who won't pay for her 3 cups of tea a day.
This kind of misunderstanding makes me wonder whether I'm just totally clueless and being rude all the time, and it makes me crave my home context where I don't have to question how I am expected to respond, and social life makes a little more sense. Fortunately for me, I have been surrounded by English speakers for most of my stay here, so they've made life easier for me. I asked Hamid today how many languages he speaks, and the number is 5: Urdu is his mother tongue, and he also speaks English, Hindi, Marathi, and Arabic. And he's a driver, not a professional interpreter or some such glamorously multi-lingual worker. Unbelievable.
For those who are interested, I read up on Urdu on Wikipedia as well. Very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu
For those who refuse to click the link, Urdu is notably the official language of Pakistan, and "it developed under Persian and to a lesser degree Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526-1858 AD) in South Asia." It is apparently somewhat similar to Hindi, so Hindi and Urdu speakers can understand each other fairly well. I ride by a huge, beautiful mosque each day on the way to and from work, and attached to it is an Urdu school. I need to try harder to get the picture of this place, which has been eluding me behind traffic and blurred windows.
On a totally different topic, I keep forgetting to mention another funny thing that I have seen repeatedly during my commute. It's possibly the worst name I've ever seen for a restaurant: Aaswad. That's just unfortunate. And hilarious.
To end, I will leave you with a video I took of crossing a busy street, Linking Road, yesterday. It doesn't capture some of the vehicles that were inching up behind us (although you can hear them honking), but it helps illustrate the frogger scenario that Mark has described:
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