Pachdin

We had an abnormally productive day yesterday. Granted, we did sleep in until about 9:30am, but in the space of about six hours, we managed to do the following:

• Cook pancakes for breakfast, accompanied by stewed apple and sultanas;
• Go down to the post office and pay for our CTP green slip;
• Hightail it to the Parramatta RTA office and lodge all our paperwork to renew our car registration so that we don’t have to do it the day we return to Sydney (we got there about twenty minutes before the office closed, and were the last customers to be seen at the counter. The CSO who looked after us initiated our transaction by scribbling ‘No voice’ on a piece of paper and holding it in front of us. She later explained, in husky tones, that a debilitating sneeze earlier in the day had rendered her vocal chords useless; we were assured that she would regain her voice after spending some time in the fresh air);
• Head over to Parramatta Westfields to check out the sales and get some last-minute items for the trip (we also managed to close one of my old bank accounts, buy some blank CDs for our trip photos, get most of the things we need for the trip, and Lorien scored a $20 MP3 player from HMV);
• Prepare and photocopy the church newsletter, as well as witness the whiz-bang new automatic screen and projector setup which appears to have been installed this week.

Still to do: wrap up as much work as possible in the next four days; choose a book to read on the plane (I am technically reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth during contact visits at work, but I idly selected Philip Yancey’s Disappointed with God from our shelves last night and I’m thinking that might be a good one); polish off my chapel talk and sketch out my testimony; confirm our extra luggage allowance; pack!

I can feel my Bangla is getting better. Words and phrases now make a bit more sense, and I can start predicting how I might ask certain questions or make statements about myself or other things. The word order is what I struggle most with – my observation is that very basic sentences tend to follow a subject-object-verb construction, but this is obviously not the case for every single sentence ever. Sometimes, it is better to mimic the (more familiar) English equivalent – for example, ‘What a beautiful bird’ would be rendered ‘ki shundor pakhi’ (what beautiful bird). I think I will probably still be parroting my phrasebooks and my well-worn Teach Yourself Bengali, but perhaps that’s OK.

Today’s Bangla phrase: apnake onek kosto dilam (I’ve caused you a lot of trouble)

I am filled with anticipation for the subcontinent again.