yesterday i taught laila how to convert temperatures on the celsius and farenheit scale. she learnt quickly. wanted to learn it so that she will know fully well when her baby has a fever or when he is not in a risky range. like most other countries in the world, except the US, she learnt the celsius scale and it's a little bit crazy to memorize the scale. so there is a formula that we use. memorized it for gen. chem way back when and it's always managed to come in handy from time to time. well by the time my lesson was done, laila was a master at conversions. she's a smart person.
after she asked me why it is so bad when a person has a fever above 104 degrees farenheit. so i went into my explanation of protein chemistry and the active sites of enzymes, denaturing the enzymes and loss of conformation. in the end, she just said one word, "wow." i guess it was too much all at once but she understands quickly. she understood even better when i told her in terms of the hair straightening process. so yeah, the baby is better now. business was better yesterday too and i guess the boss was happy for that.
Thursday evening:::
Remember, nan was supposed to be having her party. we ended up only being the four of us in
attendance....me, nan, vin, and ami. ami wanted to drive to south beach so we decided that since there was no one else at our "party" and neither ami nor i had ever been to south beach, we got in the car and started calling friends for directions. seeing where the I-95 ended was actually something for us. Imagine, it is one continuous road that passes through the entire eastern shore of the United States! then all of a sudden, you see a sign that says "I-95 ends here."Okay, so there were so many people at South beach! all these kids on spring break....
no doubt, most of them were already drunk and there were a whole lot of bikers on the road. everywhere you looked, you saw them riding in envoys.....like a parade of bikes. all of the clubs were packed and there were lines to get in. we delighted in walking and looking at everything. my one drink i had was this really awesome cup of coffee that i bought when i got there....was tired but i wanted to be alert enough to take in all of the scenes.
the best thing was walking on the beach. it was deserted at midnight when we were walking on it, but one can only imagine what it would be like in the day. was amazing to see it. we took pictures too but there was no one to take them so they were all closeups.
while we were walking back, there was a fight...there were three kids walking on the beach and i guess they were drunk. two of them started off i guess joking and hitting each other and then it became a full blown fight. i saw some guys running over to where the fight was, thinking that they would part the fight, but these guys pulled out their video cameras and recorded the whole thing. finally the police came and parted the fight. thank goodness! things can get ugly really quickly there........
Friday, March 10th now....
well we got back from the beach at 2am and i had to work at 6am. really, by 2pm, i was fighting to keep my eyes open. ended up taking a shot of ginseng and it did the trick until i got home. then when i got home, we had to go to the mandir for a little event that they were doing that night. it will be phagwa soon. the indians call it holi but we've always called it phagwa. so we burnt a pyre of wood with a coconut in it to represent the burning of Holika.
the pyre took a long time to burn so we passed the time singing traditional folk songs about the festival. nan and i joined the group because they were short of a few singers. it's better when there are about 10 people. the drummer was awesome. there is a special style of drumming that was adapted in trinidad and guyana to fit these songs. haven't heard it in any other music from the world. but i know one thing though, the style of singing orignated in Uttarpradesh and the melodies are closely related to the folk songs from that region. we did a good job entertaining the crowd i guess. i love this festival. it is so amazing and colorful. even the songs are festive. it celebrates spring, birth, life and is so closely related to the life of Shri Krsna!
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