Phenominal Cosmic Powers...

itty bitty living space (Aladdin). I was expecting the wall outlets to be different here. It's one of those things that is kind of a travel cliche, the inability to use the outlets. What I wasn't expecting was the different voltage. I thought that we could just use wall adapters and all of our electrical things would work. Silly me. It turns out that in the US, the power that comes out of the wall is 120 V while here in India it's 240 V. That was how I fried our baby monitor. At least I assume it's fried. It stopped working and I haven't tried it since. I'm not throwing it away just in case. They do have voltage adapters but they don't have the third prong and they can still overheat so you can only use them for a little bit before you have to turn it off and let it cool down. We decided that we didn't really need it that badly. Fortunately some of our electrical stuff can handle the higher voltage. The laptop and camera batter charger for example. Apparently there is a point to all the technical jargon on the back of the adapters.

One set of switches in the living room. They go to (from left to right); unknown, the light just above it (on), the fan on this side of the room (off) and the outlet (on). The dial controls how fast the fan goes. The box that hangs down has something to do with the phone and internet. I don't really get it and just try not to knock anything off or out or apart.

Another thing that took me by surprise was the sheer number of switches on the wall. EVERYTHING has a switch. Each individual light, each ceiling fan (of which there are many) and even each outlet. It can be tricky figuring out which switch goes to what because they aren't necessarily in the most logical places, when you flip an outlet switch nothing happens and some of our lights don't have bulbs in them so there is no response there either. I'm starting to get an idea of which switches go to what but Jason still has a hard time. Also, I have a hard time telling when a switch is on and when it is off. For some reason it's counter-intuitive to me

This is the other set of switches in the living room. Notice how the height seems reasonable next to the table but imagine if the table wasn't there, as is the case by the front doo. Then it wouldn't make much sense.

To add to the weirdness, the switches are less than half-way up the wall. It kind of makes sense when there is a table or a couch next to it but not so much when it's just floating in the middle of the room.

You would think that with all of these switches, there would be lots of outlets too. Alas, this is not the case. There are a couple but before we got our power cord/spike protector (apparently here they are more than just surges), we had to have things strung across the room. Now they can all be lumped together in a tangle of wires just like they should be.