Its been more than a year and time flew. I miss Bay Area, KVites, and all the fun activites we did together. Its been a topsy turvy journey for us from packing to unpacking. Some pros and cons from our experience.
1. Kids loooooooove it here. They enjoy their time with grand parents and extended family.
2. Every time to think of living in India we think of the awesome cooks, maids, drivers being nice. Its no more true. Out of three tai 2 already left and I have 2 new ones. Help in Bay Area is way better than here. Tai’s here do less work and want more money. For lifting their hand to do any new work they charge extra. You need to be lucky to get a good tai and who will stick along.
3. We have been lucky to get all our facilities like wifi, water filter, bank accounts etc set up very smoothly. People came to home to get information and we were set.
4. Hiten started to drive in the first week we came. Driving a stick shift car was tough for me so we got an automatic car and it’s a savior in the India traffic.
5. Something I don’t like in India- Infrastructure for kids….no good museums, library or age appropriate theme parks. Local parks in Pune are decent.
6. The weekends in Pune were tough nothing much to do for 1 year and 3 yr old except for parks. Also making new friends was tough, Most weekends we were in Bombay (40 weekends out of 52).
7. It takes about a year to settle in a new place, to make new friends so, the first 6 months are hard; I started liking Pune after Dec 2014. But God had other plans for us and we moved to Bombay in March 2015.
Now that we are in Bombay it will be a different experience and will share it soon.
Until then cya….
Nicely written Ami. We are missing Pune/Mumbai too. There are some things which are unique to India. 🙂
Congratulations on completing one year. Loved reading, please continue writing.. And 40 weekends in Mumbai, no wonder you decided to go to Mumbai :-).
The 12 weekends we were in Pune we have guests coming from Bombay for at least 6 weekends….:) So we were barely by ourselves; we got to know Pune better in March when we made a checklist to see and do things in Pune before we leave. Still need to eat the famous Ice Cream and few more things…..will do it eventually.
Its always nice to hear about experiences at our homeland…….it shows how things have changed but we have freezed in time and thus the gap between our reality and expectations……