# (4) 21 Feb 2007, 02:16PM: Day Of Activities:
Yesterday I took the day off from work to help Leonard get his Indian visa at the Indian consulate. (Later this year he's coming with me to see my parents in India, just before our short vacation in London.) I didn't expect the whole day would be as nice as it was.
If you get to the New York City consulate of India by 8:30 or so, then you don't have to wait too long after the office starts working (by 9:15) to actually get to a service window. They let us into the heated waiting room about 20 minutes early, which I appreciated. (Snow from about ten days ago is still on the ground here.) Leonard's application said he was a writer, and this got his otherwise bog-standard case escalated to "Talk to Mr. Such-and-so on the upper level" status. Aside from that, everything was in order and tediously uneventful.
In between dropping off his application and picking it up at noon, we walked around a bit and ate an unremarkable brunch. Tip: Central Park's zoo doesn't charge you until after you've seen the seals through the iron fence. Also: Lexington in midtown has lots of little interesting shops, where Madison has extremely designed rich-people stores.
We passed two of the nine Oren's Daily Roast locations. Oren's takes in used books to supply schools and libraries in Ethiopia, a coffee exporter.
After we picked up his visa (which takes up a FULL HONKIN' PAGE in his passport, with stamps and glittery stripes and who knows what all), we visited the Make (Meaning) shop and painted a few coasters. Neither of us wanted to do representational art, so they're all abstract: dots, stripes, that sort of thing. Maybe we'll get pictures of them up after we pick them up next week (the store fires them in the shop kiln). Huzzah, they'll be microwave- and dishwasher-safe!
Then, another nonmemorable meal, and homewards, where we watched "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)". Leonard's old CollabNet colleagues hosted it, telling stories about ways they kept the Subversion community out of trouble. Recommended.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.