Sweating. A lot.

After the initial high of "Holy Cow, I'm moving to India!" I've been thinking I should maybe learn something about Chennai (and stop saying things like Holy Cow). When I went to India in July 2000, I was in Mumbai (Bombay) and New Delhi in the northwest; Chennai is in the southeast.

From skimming the wikipedia entry, I can now recite with authority that Chennai...

• is one of India's "smaller" cities: a population of just 7 million residents
• is very, very hot: it's all-time low temperature is 60F/16C, and it rarely gets that low: look here for today's weather in Chennai.
• speaks (mostly) Tamil.

Random online postings seem exclusively to be written by people who are bitter that Chennai is not Florida, that it is a hot, humid teaming mass of humanity with no rhyme or reason and is perpetually on the brink of sinking into utter and complete chaos. Or they type things like: TSUNAMI. I'm still not placing my bets,--people who write like that just weren't prepared to live in India. But the prospect of living and working for 24 months under climate conditions that make the steamy Ozark jungles from my childhood summer vacations sound like a cold day, and I start getting a little nervous.

So, I've started soliciting first-hand accounts, not written on the Internet, which seems to bring out the most peeved answers from us all. I've also found the blogs of a number of foreign service officers, even one recently posted to Chennai! And they all make the place sound great: good food, great cultural experiences (temples, festivals, tours, vacations, beaches), hard work but with good colleagues, etc. As if I couldn't have predicted it, there are previous visitors to Chennai coming out of the woodwork--cousins, neighbors, co-workers, family friends. And they use words like "beautiful," "developed," "diverse," and "wonderful" to describe it. Whew.