More lessons learned

as an add on to my last post

8) I am nothing without a man. Or so they keep telling me. Everything you do here requires females to give their husband's or father's name. Some of you may remember that I had a match of wits with a policemen who pulled me over a few years ago for NOT running a red light on my scooter. He asked "husband's name?", I said "none", he asked "father's name", "none", "husband's name"... you get the picture. 15 minutes later he finally asked my name and I considered this an overwhelming success.

Here though I wasn't sure I'd get away with saying "n/a". All these official documents ( tax forms, lease, residency card, etc) require the name of the man responsible for you. I finally gave in and decided to make one up - I used my grandfather's name. I thought I was just making my life easier to get cable TV but now I see that all my documents have "Mr. Robert O. Hess" written on them. I may have won the battle with the officer but clearly they've won the war.

In other news - bird flu is here. All the papers can write about (seriously like 40 out of 45 pages yesterday) is the flu and how bad it is for business and that you can't get butter chicken at any area restaurants. I couldn't find an article that told me how to avoid it though. Although the did say TamiFlu doesn't work, and since butchers use the same knives and cutting boards for mutton, that's not okay either. Now, from previous experience I know about safety measures to avoid bird flu but that's not very useful.

Let's see how good my hindi/tibetan is to explain all this to my cook!