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A Quick Note From Kolkata (Calcutta)

I had a really good blog all set to go about our 3 days in Kolkata. But that will have to wait until later, as the hard drive on my NEW Toshiba laptop has decided to call it quits. That darn thing is only 7 months old!! A similar problem happened to my Sony and I blamed Sony for the problem. Maybe it's time to start blaming the hard drive manufacturer.

Add to that the fact that I can't seem to shake this ridiculous cold, and that now Tadashi is beginning to come down with a cold as well; you can imagine that we're not in the best of spirits right now. But we've been catching up on our HBO and Star Movies.


Luckily, Tadashi and I picked up a small Acer Aspire laptop at Costco right before we left. Between booking tickets and hotels, processing photos, and writing both blogs and a book, there's high demand for the one usual laptop, so we figure that having a second one certainly wouldn't hurt. It's heavy for its size and doesn't have a DVD drive, but for $350 the price was certainly right. You can imagine that now we are REALLY glad that we decided to get the 2nd one.

Sadly, both our new blogs, along with the photo processing software, are on the main computer -- that is, the dead computer. So there will be no photos for a while. But, we are in India, and as you know, this is tech call center central. So of all places to have computer problems, this is a pretty good one.

After three days in Kolkata, I'm ready to move on. And with our hotel, having to stay two extra days for the repair shop to open makes it more expensive than we planned for. So we've decided to fly to Bangalore and have the computer fixed there.

We chose Bangalore for a few reasons. First, since it's the "silicon valley" of India, we're hoping that the computer will get fixed faster. And, Bangalore puts us close to Kerala, which is next on our itinerary. So if we have to wait 1-2 weeks (hopefully not!), we figure that we'll go to Kerala while they fix my laptop. And, we get some sun and beach to help cure these colds (something's gotta get rid of these things). Of course, we'll still have blog updates, but there won't be any photos until my laptop is fixed.

On the up side: we have a working title for our book!! Are you ready? Remember, it's just a working title, but we both really like it:

No Lunch, No Money, No Rice: The Challenges of Education in Asia

The first part is a quote from one of our Black H'mong friends from Sapa, Vietnam; she was explaining to us why she was never able to go to school.

Comments

  1. Katrina and Tadashi - let us know if we can do anything from "stateside" to help get your photo system up and running again. Ouch. Mark is thrilled you are heading towards Kerala! Like the book title. Get well. Lots of love, Dawn & Mark

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