Author: Nic Olson

holy crap.

India is reliably unreliable. you can always rely that you can’t rely on the unreliable. It has been raining for like three weeks straight, no lies. I enjoy it though. Who doesn’t like rain. Then when you go outside and walk around for 3 minutes, it counts as a shower. Can’t get much better than that.

I’m hitting up the cyber cafe again, and the keyboard is sticky.. But it has broadband, and let me tell you, it is amazing. If you live in Canada, and you complain about your internet connection, you might want to think about shutting up. Apparently India is going to be the second largest internet market in the next five years, and they barely have internet here.

I ate dog the other day. Pretty much like a dog stew. there was real meat, as well as intestines and liver. the liver wasn’t too hot, but the intestines were great. Kinda like a farmer sausage, but chewier. I have some hilarious pictures i’ll upload someday when India is working again. I think it was dalmatian.

Something like 17 days until I get home. That is crazy.

I learned some new words. The word ‘hotdamna’ (pronounced hot-dam-na) means salvation in the Peity language, and the word fuky (pronounced like someting you shouldn’t say in front of children) means praise in Mizo. When the guys told me these words, boy did i laugh. So, let us go FUKY because of our new HOTDAMNA. haha, ohhhh boy.

anyway, chances are, i wont write another one of these until i’m home or in Calcutta getting my face kicked in by some clever crooks or kungfu pandas. so, until then.

I like music. I don’t know about you, but I think music is pretty swell. The music here has been a little funny every now and then, a little deafening sometimes, slow as death othertimes, but usually it makes a smile reach my lips.

First, let’s talk about hymns. They love the song book here, and I do too. But the one thing that gets me, is their love of some songs. I thought that back in ‘99 I would be done with songs like ‘Step by Step’ and ‘As the Deer’ but those are huge hits here. Like those songs that never disappear from your nightmares, you know the ones. I don’t mind, it makes me look cool when I don’t have to rely on the song book, and can sing it by heart. No better way to impress girls, I’ll tell ya. Some of the other hymns they like, they seem to sing the song about 8 counts slower than it should be, and let’s be honest, hymns are long enough as they are.

Second, let us talk about popular music (but not popular with me). This is more of a bummer than anything, to be honest. For the first two months that I was here, they were been singing the same song very loudly. One of the guys loves the song ‘When September Ends’ by Green Day. I know, I had never heard of it either. They all sang it for two months straight, and let’s be honest here, Green Day hasn’t written a good song since they wrote the same song for every CD for the past 20 years. One guy even got the nickname of ‘When September Ends’ he sang it so much. Now that is a bad following, to be remembered for a Green Day song. You may as well just call me Good Riddance (Time of your life). That is pronounced ‘Good Riddance, bracket Time of your life bracket’ and then followed by a whiny ‘time grabs you by the hand, directs you where to goooo’. But they do like Guns ‘n’ Roses, so that is sweet. Knocking on Heaven’s door, baby.

Thirdly, I have found extra comfort in my iPod. I have always known it to be my best friend, as it serenades me to sleep, but lately, the sleep it gives me has been pretty beautiful. I have also been making some killer playlists. Back in Canada, I prided my self in my amazing MixDiscs that I could pop out, and the names for them were especially killer (Jazzy Hits that Soothe the Semi-Pop/Metal Heart 2). Since I don’t have discs to burn or a way to burn them here, I’ve been getting into the ‘On The Go Playlist’ featured on the iPod. Anyways, it is amazing, and these mixes would sell as an amazing compilation on the new Starbucks label. Yeah, the one that Paul McCartney signed onto. I’m selling out, so what? Paul’s doing it.

Here’s another one of those butt end blogs, filled with thoughts that just couldn’t cut it.

I woke up the other morning with a major rash. I’m talking full chest and arms, red and indented rash. Looked like spiders were eating me all night. Usually when you wake up with a rash, for one reason or another and however you got it, it is bad news. Turns out I was just laying on my crocheted blanket for a long time.

I’ve figured it all out. The people here are afraid of being nude. When the first missionaries came over, they must have taught them what shame was, and that they could never be naked again. If they aren’t naked in the shower, are they ever naked? Maybe they are naked doing something that would be weird to me being naked, like doing yoga, or working construction. They are all Never-nudes. Tobias would take comfort knowing that he was one of many.

There is an insect here that sounds like it is constantly logging on to dial-up internet. The exact same high pitch screechy sound, and it lasts for hours. It is like being back in 1997 again.

I found a sling shot. Real high quality, homemade brand, but strong like a paintball gun.. After a good half hour of shooting things perfectly fine, with nearly perfect aim I might add, I saw a bird, picked up a rock and shot the rock quickly. The rock, however, didn’t go the way a rock should when you shoot a sling shot. The rock slang and shot me, hit me right above the zipper on my jeans, just inches from the worst day of my life. And if that happened, I likely would’ve fell, then rolled down a set of 80 rock stairs that I was standing at the top of.

I led songs at church one week. I didn’t really have a choice. I chose some classics. It was awful.

Scott and I taught the guys the wonderful game of dodgeball. It took a while for them to catch on, but once they did, it was pretty fun. I don’t think throwing a ball is a natural motion for many of them here, what with the two handed hoofers they layed out, but it was sweet.

I finished supper one night and needed to utilize the squatter. When I was finishing up, a wall lizard jumped off the wall onto my head, then into my water bucket. I closed the bathroom door and tried rushing it out the window, but the only place he wanted to go was my toilet, just recently de-freshened. He squirmed around for a while, I tried to flush him out, save his life, but it was too late. Needless to say, I laughed for quite sometime. LOL’ed, you could say. Apparently dead lizards float. As do other things.

I saw a lady put out a cigarette on her tongue. Straight outta the movies, man.

So, I tried it. The famous beetlenut. (Sorry Ray and Ellen, sorry Mom.) When in Rome. (Ron Burgundy anyone?) I know, you likely don’t know what the beetlenut is. I’ll explain it as best I can, but it is something very foreign to Canada. Kinda like chewing tobacco in Canada, but here everyone does it. Even cute girls. I bet babies do it in the womb. It is this little orange tiny coconut looking thing that they peel and eat the inside, which is a small nut. They break this nut into four pieces, and they start to chew on a chunk with a piece of some leaf, and some white stuff, lime I think, spread on it. It makes your spit all red and your teeth all red and gross. It creates so much red saliva that you have to spit it everywhere, and you see the red tinted spit marks all over town. Beetlejuice, I call it.. They also have to spread the lime on the leaf with their finger, and then their finger is coated with white that they wipe anywhere in town they want, poles, walls, anywhere. Like finger painting.

Scott and I decided for the full force of our trips, that we should give the stuff a try. We bought some at the Difference United concert we went to, for five rupees. We got some girl nearby to show us how to do it, so we did it properly, but it was still the grossest thing I’ve ever tasted. I started chewing and had to squat down because I was laughing so hard at the taste of the stuff. I spit/sprayed from laughing and got some beetlejuice on a girl’s leg. She wasn’t too pleased and we’ll just say that I didn’t get her number after the show. I’m sure the red juice was running down my face as I laughed/gagged. I couldn’t finish my helping, I had to spit it out. Not much makes me gag, but this did the trick. Its taste is something that cannot be explained, but I were to give it a shot, I’d say it would be something like cat testes dipped in whale vomit. Sorry about the description, but seriously, that is what it was like. We both got head rushes and laughed for a long time. But really, what is a gospel-rock-powerpop concert without some illicit substances?

I also tried the packaged version, the ones you can buy absolutely anywhere. It is like beetlenut mixed with sugar, or so I think, so it isn’t half as bad, which makes it into a fraction of awful that is still astounding. The taste is way too hard to explain, you’ll have to try it out to understand it, I’ll bring some home, you can try it out. It is like chewing on popcorn seeds that didn’t get popped in the microwave. Anyways, it is likely super addictive, and afterwards it gave me a headrush and I got a bit dizzy. You know it is good when it does that.

Don’t worry Mom, Ellen, I won’t ever do it again. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I prefer buffalo testes and dog vomit.

India has shutdown on me recently, and the internet has been out for nearly a week and the power has been less than reliable. So here I am at Dazzlechips Internet Café, with broadband. Yeah, its huge. I also had to wait an extra four days to learn that Montreal didn’t make the playoffs. Hugest bummer ever. But, on a good note, the Leafs did no better. That is a relief. Huge. Montreal couldn’t pull it off even with a hattrick by Ryder. Brutal…..ahhhhh. I also had a long Easter blog planned out, but I’ll take the marathon internet outage as a sign that it was not meant to be. Instead, a blog about a big white guy.

Every Canadian that comes and visits me in India gets a blog devoted to them. Good deal hey? Getting space on Balls of Rice ain’t easy. (ain’t is a word, ask Scott.) Will that convince you to come visit me?

It was a quick two weeks when Scott Landry was here, but it was action packed. We hit up a table tennis tournament, went to a tomb, went to a concert, climbed a few mountains, jumped off buildings (in a blog coming soon), tried the beetlenut (in a blog coming sooner) and sat in my room listening to Means, a lot. He pulled out lines to movies that I forgot existed, and I laughed for a total of 4 weeks in the 3 weeks he was here.

The guys here loved to hear him preach, even though he thought they didn’t really understand what he was talking about. It was pretty encouraging for all of us lonely college boys to have a Canadian come over and hangout and show us that we haven’t been totally forgotten about. They also didn’t think there were people bigger and whiter than me, then Scott blew them away.

It was sweet to have him here, Yellowknife is lucky. He loved the Imodium, that is for sure. And be sure to ask him about the girls dancing beside him at the concert. He’d love to tell you about that.

Theme of his trip according to me:
‘Aspen. A place where the beer flows like wine, and beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano’ Gotta love Lloyd.

See you soon Scott.

It was a quick tournament for me. It lasted only one day. No consolation or anything, just lose and you are gone. I played one set up to nine games, and there is no need for me to tell you the score, just that I lost the match and I won one game, think about it. I could blame the loss on a number of things, including my shoes, my racquet, that I cut my Samson-like hair, the wind, the simple fact that I suck, my inconsistent serve, my lack of practice in the past five months, I forgot to cut my fingernails, this bracelet I’m wearing, the fact that it was sponsored by a tea company, Scott left that day so I cried for hours, but I’ll just go ahead and not blame it on anything, and say that it was for the good of mankind that I lost. Or something like that. We’ll just say, through the most appropriate phrase (or not so much) that I can come up with, that I crapped the bed.

I wasn’t really angry or anything, just a bit disappointed. One of the old men, probably the Mizo son of Bjorn Borg, told me that my strokes were very strong, but I he could tell I hadn’t practiced. That is a bit encouraging, that it isn’t that I just plain suck. At least I can say that I played in a tennis tournament in India. I’m practically on the ATP Tour, with that kind of coverage.

There was a chair umpire with a microphone who announced the scores. There were ball boys, and they just freshly repainted the surface for the tournament. High class $2 tournament. Jeremy, you should’ve come. You could’ve taken your second singles title in your world domination. And we easily could’ve taken our second doubles title together. The number one seed hit two handed on his backhand and forehand. Like Monica.

Oh well, I guess there is always the Yellowknife Open. Then Wimbledon.

We went to a concert. Yeah we did. Scott and I. Difference United. It was huge, to say the least. Make sure and check out their myspace page on the link above. They were some gospel rock powerpop group from Nashville, and they liked to rock…? Check out their site for sure. The dude with the long metal hair had to be from Megadeth, and he could rip it up like nothing else. He wrote the book on how to shred called God’s Guide to the Ultimate Praise and Worship Power Shred and Head Bang, and even brought out the whammy bar every now and then. The keyboardist, well, I dont know what to say about him really, he was kinda a tool. You could call him a pianist, I guess. The singer was the lady, Sarah. Scott thought that altogether they sounded like Christian Aqua (Barbie Girl) but I figured they were more of a mix between Metallica, No Doubt, The Gaither Group, United, Slipknot and Throwdown.

Check out the look on that dude’s face. He’s worried and sickened.

Workin’ on it.

Lloyd Christmas. All I need is the bowl.

The policeman approves.

Looks like a toupee.

Awesome!

Why can’t just everyone talk like a Canadian from Saskatchewan? That is the right way to talk.

One night at devo, one of the guys was talking about being the salt of the earth. He introduced his topic, and at the same time plucking at his shirt, like he was hot or nervous. Then, throughout the rest of his short message, I could have swore he was talking about being the Shirt of the earth, and without shirts nothing has flavour. I’ve heard of loud shirts, but not tasty ones.. (ohhh, that was bad). He couldn’t say salt, the way you’d think it should be said, but it came out like shirt. Put your tongue to the roof of your mouth, and say salt, it sounds like shirt. That musta been the problem.

Another time, one of the guys was started his devo topic, and I seemed that he was talking about the stability of shelves, shelf control, but it turned out he was talking about the last of the fruits of the spirit, self control. But man, do I ever look out for shelf control now. Powerful message, that one was.

This other girl, Thwethwe (pronounced Twee-twee. She has a shirt with a huge picture of Tweety bird on it. What are the chances? I tried explaining that the bird’s name is tweety, she just doesn’t get it.), I have been trying to teach my English. I have been working on getting her to say and respond to, “What’s up?” or “What up?” and eventually, the awesome short slang that emerged in early 2001, “Sup?”. She understands it, and now can respond with a sly, “Nothin’”. I have been working on a response to the question ‘How are things?’ with a response ‘Things are chill.’ But apparently chill is a difficult word to say, without adding a ‘er’ sound to the end. She tries to say it, and all I get is ‘Things are chiller”. New slang? Why not.

We’ve also been working on the word potato for quite a while now. It just isn’t happening.