Watching the Olympics in bed has made me feel lazy. So, upon returning from Charminar earlier today, I decided to go to the gym. Moments after I entered, they switched the music from Hindi to Top 40. Good news is I was able to finally run a 5-minute mile, from mile two to three on the treadmill (the treadmills here use English units, to my surprise), with Rihanna singing me along. I haven’t tried this in a while, so it was nice to know it’s still possible. Watch out Usain Bolt!

I tried to see all of the famous sites of Hyderabad this weekend. On Saturday, I went to the seven Qutb Shahi Tombs and Golkunda Fort. My first stop was the tombs. From what I understand, they are tombs for seven Qutb kings, who ruled the area about 500 years ago. Someone also told me the fifth king is the one who built Charminar, which is where I went the next day. Anyway, the tombs are now mostly falling apart, but they are still pretty impressive. While I was walking around the seven tombs, I could see a big fort up on a hill about a kilometer away (functioning on the metric system these days), so that’s where I decided to go next.

The neatest thing about the Golkunda fort is the acoustics — you can clap at a spot near the entrance gate and hear it at the very top of the citadel, and the other way around works too. This would seem to be handy to help ward off invaders, but apparently not handy enough; emperor Aurangzeb conquested the fort in 1687.

Climbing the 380 steps to the top of the fort (and back down) sure worked up my appetite. Hyderabad is famous for its biryani, so I decided to go get some at a place near the fort. Most people eat it with their fingers, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Here’s a picture of a spoonful of my chicken biryani:

On Sunday, I visited Charminar. Here’s how it looks from below:

I really like the combination of square and curvilinear forms in the structure, but the best part about it is they let you climb up to the top. Upon hearing this, I went straight to buy my ticket:

There are really narrow, spiraling staircases in two of the towers. When you get to the top, you have a really great view of the streets below. It’s pretty scary because there are no railings, but luckily nobody pushed me.

I posted a lot of pictures here already, and I plan to keep updating that album during my trip. I must say that India is beating my expectations so far. Keep the Palak Paneer coming.

They are good. My memory, however, is not. Anyone have a good technique for remembering names? I already have pictures of everyone with his/her name posted on my cube wall, and even though I don’t like it so much when people repeat your name when you meet them, I tried that too. These tactics don’t seem to be working for me. I called one guy by another’s name today. Upon realizing this a couple minutes later (he didn’t correct me!), I emailed to assure him it would not happen again. When he came past my cube to say goodnight, I called him yet another person’s name. I’m horrible.

I just made it to Hyderabad. Here’s a picture of where I am right now:

It has been raining constantly here for the past day or two, so a lot of the streets are flooded and our internet is down. (Thanks to WLAN for letting me steal their signal!)

I’ll try to post all of the exciting news here. Also, thanks to everyone for all of the tweets.

Today, my passport with visa was shipped back to me from the Indian Consulate in San Francisco. (Interestingly, FedEx shipped it from San Francisco to Memphis, Tennessee(!), and then back to Cupertino.) Tomorrow, I have the first of two doctors’ appointments to get me all vaccinated up. I’m already starting to miss Henri.

First video with my new camera:

From Camping

The adventure has already been heavily blogged about, so there’s not much more to write. Even though we might never again want to do something similar, I think we are all happy we went this time, while some might not yet admit it. The pictures are amazing (see: Koklynn’s, Michael’s, and mine) and I’m sure we’ll all have lasting memories from the trip, even of parts that we weren’t able to photograph.

Much thanks to Reid for organizing everything, including arranging a night’s stay at his overwhelmingly friendly relatives’ house. Also, thank you to Koklynn and Michael for putting up with my current Japanese music phase. Sorry to Charlene for losing your SIGG cap to the river. Finally, thank you to Jenny’s shoe for putting my Leatherman Skeletool™ CX to good use.

I spent most of the day yesterday trying to make the perfect potsticker. I researched filling recipes in the morning and ended up making my own recipe by combining three of my favorites that I found online. Then, I went to Ranch 99 and got all of my ingredients before coming home and spending a few hours making the filling and wrapping 124 potstickers and 25 wontons. Here’s my recipe for the perfect potsticker(s):

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 pounds ground pork
• 3/4 of a pound peeled shrimp
• 1/2 head Napa cabbage
• 1 bunch of green onions
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 3 tablespoons (black) vinegar
• 2 teaspoons sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon chili oil
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• cayenne pepper to taste (a few shakes)
• 4 packs of potsticker wrappers
• waxed paper (comes in handy for non-stick freezing)

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Wash, dry and cut the cabbage and onions.
2. Peel and chop the garlic and ginger.
3. Chop the shrimp into smaller pieces.
4. Mix together pork, shrimp, cabbage, onions, garlic, and ginger.
5. Add soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, vinegar, salt, and cayenne pepper.
6. Mix again.
7. Fill wrappers with filling. (They stick better if you moisten the edges with water before pressing them together, and try not to put more than 1.5 teaspoons or so of filling in each.)
8. Quickly freeze for 30 minutes in a single layer on waxed paper before allowing potstickers to touch.
9. Store in airtight container in freezer.

COOKING:

1. Heat cooking oil (I used Canola) in a pan at medium-high heat.
2. Put single layer of frozen potstickers into pan.
3. Cook for a few minutes, stirring often, until bottoms begin to brown.
4. Add water (thin layer), reduce heat to medium.
5. Steam for 10 minutes (since we want to cook the meat) with lid, opened very slightly. Stir occasionally. Add water as necessary — if it evaporates before the 10 minutes are up.
6. Cook uncovered 2-3 minutes for crispy bottoms.
7. Serve with your favorite dipping sauce.

If you’re interested, here are the pictures.

Yesterday, Henri fell over on a bush while peeing on it. It was really cute because he tried to pretend like he didn’t fall, but I saw him.

He didn’t fall today, but it was still cute.

Notes: This starts the Henri category of my weblog. Thanks to Mike for telling me about Gimp, which is what created those fancy rounded corners.

Coming up with a first post is always difficult, so I thought I’d build off of Michael’s recent compliment and just write about something I use that I think other people might like: Quicksilver! (found here)

I don’t use Quicksilver for much, but it still makes my life more fun. A couple of the things I do use it for:

• Open up programs really quickly: I have Command-Space set as my keys to activate Quicksilver. After that, you can just type in the first couple letters of the Application you want to use, and it will find it. Hitting Enter should open it. Best of all, Quicksilver will learn based on your use history and if it’s not quickly finding what you want, you can always choose what you want it to find for specific searches and set these pretty easily. Oh, and you can do more than just open Applications this way — you can set them to do specific actions (there are 22 things you can do with Firefox, for instance), though quickly opening things is usually good enough for me.
• iTunes(!): It works seamlessly with iTunes. There’s a plug-in that will let you set triggers to open and do other useful things. Since Quicksilver is always running in the background, you don’t need to have iTunes selected to start your music or switch songs. For me, Shift-↑opens up iTunes and starts playing the first track, then Shift-→ skips songs, and so on. You can set these to whatever you like. There are plug-ins for other applications too, like Firefox, which will let you open your bookmarks in the same way you’d open applications.

Ok, go download it now. It might take some time to figure out how you’ll use it, but once you have your routine sorted out, I think you’ll love it.

Note: If you don’t have a Mac, you’ll have to go here first.