Happy Friday, etc.

I am sooo happy it is Friday. It has been one of those really long weeks, but I'm heading to Jaipur tomorrow for some fun sightseeing. Hooray! I have no clue what is in Jaipur, but everyone seems to want to go there so it is time for me to find out what the fuss is all about.
Anyway, here is today's random cultural differences deep thought...
Through a series of circumstances that I would rather not get into, one of my responsibilities in the office now includes keeping track of our groups' payments and reminding the sales staff to get payments in on time. I don’t like doing it and have tried about 20 different ways to get out of it but alas, no luck. Anyway, one of the main reasons I don’t like dealing with it is because it has been really really tough to get people to pay on time. I commented to someone that I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge talking about money all the time...they had no clue who I was talking about.
I don’t think of myself as a super literary person (although I did once famously think that a dog named Marley was named after Marley from A Christmas Carol rather than Bob Marley so maybe it is just A Christmas Carol thing with me) but it is odd to live in a culture where I pretty much cannot make any literary references. Like, when the lights kept going out at night in the summer I kind of felt like a character from a Jane Austen novel walking around with my candles; again, no clue.
Pop culture is also very different. Only a few American TV shows are shown here, and they are shown a year late, and almost no Indians watch them; and only the BIG movies are released here. Sports stars; forget about it. It is all Bollywood and Cricket stars here (aside: I’m getting to know some of the biggest Bollywood stars from all the commercials they do, there are 2 actors and 1 actress that seem to be in every other commercial).
Anyway. This doesn’t have much to do with anything, it is just one of those things that you don’t think about when moving somewhere so different. You think about the big things that will be different, but not the little things.