Sunny Climes: An India Travel Blog

hampi photos

2008-07-19T14:56:00.001-07:00

I took a few photos in Hampi. More then a few in fact. I am not a very photo-prone person and I reserve vast amounts of rage for those people who insist on taking photos of every single thing they see in a foreign country, down to cockroaches and latrines. I especially hate people who like taking photos of me first thing in the morning with no makeup and a hangover. You know who you are.

As a result of this prejudice, my photography skills are 1. underdeveloped and 2. underutilized. However, Hampi is such a magnificent, exotic spectacle that even I used my camera on something other then food. So here you go.

The Indiana Jonesesque Virupaksha Temple sits in the middle of Hampi Village, the rather basic settlement which hosts many dirty hippies and tourists. The town is built around and right up to the monuments, adding a rather vibrant and deeply unsanitary living element to the ruins. This is not history closed off and sanitized for your protection: people still live here and do their thing. The tower itself is part of a Hindu temple that is still very much in use and occupied by a vicious tribe of mugger monkeys: I saw a guy have his puja basket (Hindu offerings) unceremoniously jacked by a particularly brave specimen.

The stroll to Hampi's Royal Center is a quick walk from town, and leads past lots of interesting scenery. I have no idea what this is but I like how it's standing rather singularly on a patch of slick rock.

This interesting temple is almost the first thing you see as you wander out of town. It was completely empty the day I came (everyone was off celebrating Holi by throwing paint at each other) and I got to poke around in peace.

Here's another shot. I like how the platform supports look so delicate compared to the large structure balanced on top of them. The quality of rock-carving on display in Hampi is astonishing: Viyangar's artisans work deserves to be better known.

As you walk into the temple, you're greeted with this view. That could be Shiva on the stupa-like thing in the middle but I am not up on my Hindusim. Hint: there are many many gods and you will never, ever understand anything about them. Start with Ganesh.

This delicate yellow tree grows beside the trail into the Sacred Center. It was really an achingly beautiful scene: I wish my photo did it justice. These yellow trees are all over Hampi and shiver in a very poetic way whenever the wind picks up, blowing tiny cream-colored petals every which way. I am pleased to know that they exist.

This is a small bath. I do not really know what it was used for or what it looked like, but I entertain fantasies of the central island being a pleasant, flower covered refreshment spot, possibly serving mixed drinks Viyangar style. I anticipate an early swim-up bar. As is, it's fun to hop down the oversized stairs and clatter around in this now sadly empty swimming pool.

These rows of columns stand beside one of Hampi's many fabulously geometric tanks.I believe they were used to support a wooden or cloth structure around the perimeter that is now long gone.

I like the artful carvings on these pillars, which used to hold up the supports for various shops and food stalls in the old Hampi bazaar. These reminded me rather pleasantly of Pompeii.

Some more left over structures on the stoll over to the Sacred Center. One of the wonderful things about Hampi is how open it is. Beautiful, historic buildings like these would be regulated, closeted off, and overrun with tourists in many other places, but Hampi's relative isolation has presented this fate. Of course, it would probably be better if access to the ruins were more controlled, as insurance against vandalism or destruction But it sure is amazing to be able to poke around these amazing buildings with complete freedom and solitude.

Another not-so well preserved structure on the way to the Sacred Center. Big plump lizards, hawks, and electric green birds live in the nooks and crannies of Hampi's boulders, adding wildlife sightings to the area's appeal. On the walk up to this temple, I had the unsettling experience of nearly treading on a cobra: I heard a pissed off hiss and saw a big black (and distinctly hooded) snake slither out from under my feet. Yikes.

This is a view of Hampi's Sacred Center, a short walk from the main town in Hampi (you do not need to cross the river.) As evidenced by this photo, Hampi's landscape is a fascinating juxtaposition of imposing granite boulders and lush tropical vegetation: it is unlike anything I have seen before. The ruins span an immense amount of land and appear everywhere, tucked into rock nooks, crumbling quietly away in untouched spaces and corners. This is a lovely area and I spent a lot of time here, enjoying watching pumped up Holi revelers mill around. I climbed to the very top of a big boulder with a nice commanding view (where these photos were taken) and fell asleep in the extremely pleasant shade - a nice change from the already nasty morning heat.

Another shot from atop my boulder. To the left, beyond the palm tree stand, is the trail back to town. The extremely famous Vittala Temple (which I didn't photograph whoops) is to the far left as you follow the path. A drunk guy was lazing in the shade of the temple-like building in the right corner all day long, which was pretty amusing.

Here's another nice shot of the river. It's an absolutely classic Southern Asian scene once you get closer to the water: water buffalos working rice paddies, swaying palms, vibrant tropical birds and flowers.

A huge number of little buildings like this one are wedged into the rocky banks of the river. The river is still much in use by Hampi natives, who make their way across the strong currents using coracles, a kind of perfectly round wicker boat. In the morning, just about everyone hangs out at the river, doing laundry, swimming (while avoiding the Deadly Whirlpools the signs warn about) and generally shooting the shit. It's a lovely and eternal scene.

One more shot from the top of my trusty boulder. You're looking at the Vittala Temple from above: it's encompassed by walls and thus you can't see all that much of it from outside. (You have to pay a whopping 200 rupees to get in: about 5 bucks give or take. Scandalous. And more worth it then almost anywhere else I've been, with the possible exception of the Forbidden City.)

As I am blissfully clueless about Viyangar architecture, I have no clue what this is. As the morning wore on, vacationing families in gorgeous clothing filtered in from all over for Holi celebrations, parking their Land Rovers and motorbikes near the river and having alcohol-soaked barbecues while blasting Shah Rukh Khan's latest. It was very fun to watch: just India's version of the classic American Fourth of July celebration. I can't imagine that kind of thing happening in the remains of Rome's forum (and maybe it shouldn't), but it does add a lot of life to what could be a sad and lonely mausoleum. (If you read about Hampi's fall and the total destruction the population suffered at the hands of Deccan forces, you'll understand the melancholy that hangs about the area.)

This is the King's Balance, which was honest-to-God used to weigh Viyangar kings against gold and other valuables on holidays. The equivalent weight was then distributed to the populace, meaning the average citizen had a vested interest in keeping the ruler in junk food. I thought this sounded rather suspect, but then I found out that even the Mughal rulers performed this kind of ceremony. History is weird.

(Personally, I think I'd find it rather humiliating to be weighed in public against gold and jewelry with everyone watching intently. I don't weigh very much: would I be publicly censored for not eating enough Cheetohs? I guess in Viyangar times it would be kulfi and lamb shanks...)

This is Anjaneya Hill, which stands on the other side of the Sacred Center. The hill is known as the birthplace of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey king, who is remembered by a fetching white stupa at the very top. A challenging and twisty path leads to the top, and I hope to climb it someday: I didn't get a chance to this visit.

A Sacred Center structure with some young stud types bikes parked out front. I like this photo: it highlights Hampi's distinctive "alive" status, which made it more compelling to me then many other ruins I've visited. They were getting tanked on the riverside with their families and having a wonderful time but I was still a little bit too skittish about India at the time to join them. Now I totally would have.

Water buffalo are everywhere in Hampi, used for plowing rice paddies and other farming-related tasks. When not on the job, they wander around by the river and graze. They are also subjected to photography by annoying tourists.

And some more water buffalo. I love how their horns point downwards and look kind of like ears.

Next post: pictures from Hampi's royal center and the Best Restaurant Ever.

Elephanta Island

2008-06-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

Elephanta Island is only accessible by ferry, which must be caught from the begger-and-vendor nightmare that swirls around the Gateway of India. I was determined to make the damn ferry that day - I had had two seperate boat vendors tell me that going in the morning was an awful idea while the other told me it would be terrible, terrible to go in the afternoon, so I decided to go when I damned well pleased.

I had an excellent lunch of bhel puri - puffed rice with lots of chutney and fried things and onions and deliciousness - and tandoori gobi (cauliflower) then walked industriouly over to the ferry area. I bought a 100 rupee ticket, elbowed my way to the front of the line, and found a chair that wasn't covered in gunk to enjoy the boat voyage to Elephanta.

I love boats: they comfort me and sustain me, remind of my early childhood spent motoring around on tarpon fishing expeditions in Florida's gulf. I can sit on a ferry and be transported instantly to a land of happy memories and relaxation: I am well known for falling asleep on aquatic transportation, lulled away by something or another. This time was no different: I nodded off almost immediately, ignoring the soda vendors.

I arrived at Elephants at a decent time. The boats dock at a big cement jetty that extends out rather far into the water: a small train is set up to accomodate the lazy or terminally ft who don't want to walk in the heat and brave the snack vendors. Curiously, Mumbai's miserable tropical ferment disappears on Elephanta: the island really IS a dry heat.

All the shops and restaurants are spread out on the side of the large stairway that leads to the top of the hill and the caves, all of which must be braved before reaching anything of historical interest. I bought a Diet Coke and was sipping it leisurely when a shop keeper waved me over: "Watch out for the monkeys - they'll steal your food." "Even the Diet Coke?" "They steal everything," he said with grim resolution. I took his word for it and chucked the Coke and began the climb up the hill. (The lazy and terminally fat can take palanquin chairs up to the top but as we all know this is for pussies.)

I made it to the top and the entry area for the caves, staffed by a bored looking park manager. A very large school group was there as well, composed of what appeared to be fifth graders. Their malicious teacher had equipped them with cute little autograph books and apparantly entreated them to get foreigner's signatures. The kids were friendly and cute and all but my hand got pretty tired after signing fifty-plus kids books (also no one ever had a pen which meant everyone got to fight over two or three available pens.) Because of course if one girl got a signature from the Glamorous Foreigner then damned well everyone ELSE needed one.

I managed to satisfy the fifth graders whims and entered the park, which was fairly empty - a few foreign tourists with cameras, courting couples, and families defending their picnics from the usual packs of stray dogs. An ambitious looking young guy offered to be my guide and looked crushed when I turned him down (he proceeded to follow me in a not very subtle way the rest of the day, doubtless hoping I'd have a historical question/ask him to inspect my underwear. Preferably the latter.)

This is the entryway to the primary temple structure, accompanied by a lovely tree.

I walked into the first cave, which is accessed through some impressive and not-very-Greek type columns (to hold everything together.)

The primary temple is very large and very impressive, full of images of Shiva, completed between 450 an 750 A.D. I am the last person you should ask about Hinduism (though admittedly many of my Indian friends find it pretty incomprehensible themselves), but I definitely was impressed. The huge temple complex is filled with monolithic and expertly carved images of Shiva, crowing doorways and erupting surprisingly out of rock walls, such as this one:

The archetypical serene images of Shiva were also present. Note the multiple arms.

This is a particularly intricate wall mounted statue display - it's astonishing how much detail has survived. I especially like the voluptuous woman to the right. Someone Who Actually Knows Shit About Hindu Art: is she the feminine incarnation of Shiva?

I was particularly struck by these guys guarding the doorways, who seem vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian sculpture, except they look a lot more blissed out. And less flat. (As you may be able to tell, I am a art history expert.)

This is a neat display of three aspects of Shiva - warlike, calm, and feminine as I recall, going left to right. They are really very large which is not obvious in the photo.

Unfortunately, some of the statue's faces were missing - I'm not entirely sure what the reason was, but I imagine it was one of those usual morality-enforcing ancient art defacement rampages people like to go on.

The main cave complex is rather large and takes a bit to walk through. Once you come out on the other end, you find yourself at the top of a hill with a rather lovely view of the harbor below you and the other islands associated with Mumbai, set in a dry scrub environment that is very strange to encounter after time on the tropical and sweaty mainland.

And again:

The trail leads you around to the other historical sites, which are not much to see after the main cave - a few columns and rather empty abandoned temples and a Shiva lingam or two, and all that jive. The walk itself was very pleasant, and I dragged myself to the very top of the island, which did indeed feature an even more commanding view (and also my stalker, who was really trying very hard to blend into the bushes. I thought it was funny.)

In any case, I wandered back down the hill, successfully avoided the monkeys, and caught the launch back, where I proceeded to fall back asleep again. The rest of the evening passed uneventfully - (maybe i should make up something about hooking up with a bollywood star here but it would be a lie. but more entertaining then reality.)

india traveler tips

2008-05-26T04:16:00.000-07:00

INDIA TRAVELERS TIPS

I am not an expert. I am not an officially mandated Lonely Planet vagabond, and I do not profess that this is actually good advice. This is, however, what worked for me.

1. Become very good at ignoring people.

India is full of people who want your money. This is natural and to be expected, but you should have a coping technique. Beggers and touts almost always leave me alone, and this is because I completely ignore them.n I look right through them and pretend they do not exist. They will usually follow me for a half hearted couple of steps, realize I am not going to react in any way shape or form, and then they leave and go for an easier mark. This makes my life as a traveler much, much easier.

Is this rude? I have given this advice to a few other friends, and they acknowledge that it works, but also note, "I just couldn't do it. I'd feel so rude." By normal standards, completely ignoring the existence of another human being is rude. However, I find that touts and beggers are being rude by following me, getting up in my face, and aggressively attempting to sell me crap I don't need - and I might as well reciprocate.

Unfortunately, polite refusals do not work. Polite refusals simply indicate to the tout or begger that you 1. speak English and 2. are probably a soft touch, which means they will step up their entreaties even more. If you engage in conversation, you will probably have found yourself an unwanted new friend for the next thirty minutes, attempting to sell you a drum or a taxi ride or an elephant or a hooker (whatever.) Just know what you're in for if you wish to maintain politeness.

Note for women: Ignoring amorous men also works very well. It is especially important never to engage in conversation with men who are hitting on you or attempting to solicit you - this will encourage them and you will probably pick up some very unwelcome and rude followers.

2. Don't give to beggers.

Beggers are a tremendous presence in India. They are everywhere, they are persistent, and they are incredibly desperate looking. Westerners often give to them, and furthermore, they give a lot - and its hard not to. However, you shouldn't give your money to beggars. According to all the Indians I've spoken to, beggers in most areas are organized, which means the rupees you give to the starving mother and cherubic child may not actually benefit them in any way. (Furthermore, the beggers often are not in as dire straits as they may initailly appear.)

If you want to help the poor in India - and who doesn't? - find a big and legitimate charitable organization in the area you are in and make a hefty donation. This will find its way to the right people and projects and do a lot more good then random dollops of money given to random people.

3. Bargain for everything, but not TOO much.

“I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved.”

- Robert Byron

This is sort of complex. In many places, especially tourist areas, rickshaw drivers, shop-keepers and random Purveyors of FIne Crap will overcharge you immensely with a big smile on their face, under the presumption you are incredibly stupid. Do not fall for this. Bargain, do not accept the first price, and do not be cowed or fooled by claims that you are looking at an incredibly nice antique or that you will be taken on the best rickshaw ride of your goddamn life to date. Halve the price and keep moving down from there. Walking away and saying you'll think about is usually an excellent tactic.

In regards to transportation: ask around and figure out what baseline prices for rickshaws and taxis are BEFORE you take one. You will never, ever get local price, but you can at least shoot for decent Stupid Foreigner price. I had a guy at the Delhi airport attempt to charge me 2000 rupees for the 10 minute ride between the domestic and international terminals. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both burst into raucous laughter because he was full of shit and he knew it.. Do not pay these prices.

HOWEVER. The bargaining thing can be taken entirely too far. The poor woman selling handicrafts in the small village is not trying to screw you and could probably use the money a hell of a lot more then you. Many sellers in Colaba might appear skeezy, but I genuinely felt bad when I read an article in the newspaper where the salesmen lamented foreigners who bargained them down to prices that didn't even cover their expenses - they're trying to make a living like anyone else. If there's a sign on the wall saying BARGAINING NOT ALLOWED, then be a nice polite human being and heed it. You may not want to admit it, but you are indeed a Wealthy and Decadent Westerner and can probably afford to pay a smidgen over the local price. Take a look at the average local salary and perhaps you will appreciate the logic of this.

4. Dress nicely, you damn hippie.

Indians place a big premium on dressing nicely and looking put together. For some reason, many Western tourists decide to completely ignore this, going everywhere in ratty body-odor smelling clothes, while flashing hairy unshorn armpits (women) and bristly five o' clock shadows. (men.) This is not the way to win friends and influence people in India. Many Indians I've spoken with have demonstrated extreme disdain for the omnipresent dirty hippie found wandering in most tourist areas. They also wonder why people who can afford a not-inexpensive plane ticket to a place like India are somehow unable to afford showers.

You are not making a polite gesture of solidarity to the common man by dressing like you are poor yourself - the common man, odds are good, just thinks you are a utter fool for refusing to use your decadent Western wealth on a t-shirt that doesn't have holes in it. People will be polite to you, help you out, and treat you with respect if you show them the respect of looking nice, smelling good, and being put together.

5. Tip, but not too much.

Leave restaurant tips. This is a good thing and makes everyone happy, especially if the food was good, the service was polite, and you enjoyed your meal. I leave big tips at my usual restaurants and the staff are always happy to see me - which makes enjoying dinner a lot more fun. And yet again, you can afford it, you damn Westerner.

HOWEVER, do not tip too much. This can be a problem with rickshaw drivers (who demand tips at times for, uh, existing). It's also common at airports, where porters will do everything in their power to snatch your bag from you then demand money. Just refuse to give them anything if they attempt to charge you 100 rupees for touching your bag for 1 millisecond.

Good rule of thumb: if they ASK for a tip, they probably don't deserve one.

6. Shut up and stop worrying so much about the food .

Yes, India is not exactly known for its hygiene. Yes, odds are good you will get sick while you are in India - intestine-cramping crying for your mommy kill me now sick. HOWEVER, this happens less then you might think. Don't let the potential risk stop you: I may have an unusually steel-plated system but I've eaten just about everything here and have only been ill once. Use common sense - don't eat it if there's flies buzzing around it and no customers in sight - but a busy and fairly clean street stall full of happy customers will probably serve you fine. Try the chaat and the juice and have fun.

One thing that annoys both me and Indians is Westerners who will enter an expensive, classy restaurant and begin obsessing over the hygiene and the water and the forks and.... This is very offensive and you should really knock it off. A five star restaurant in India's major population centers is no more likely to give you food poisoning then a five star restaurant back home. Relax.

7. You will need balls of steel to cross the street.

Westerners are always jarred by the utter chaos that are Asian street crossings. We grow up accustomed to friendly crossing guards, blinking crossing lights, and drivers that stop when they are supposed to for the appointed amount of time. We are also accustomed to the notion of "pedestrian right of way."

None of this exists in India. Crossing the street means you are going to be playing a game of Frogger with your body and there are no extra lives. Watch traffic extremely carefully, be ready to run when there's anything approaching a break in activity, and take especial notice of rickshaws and motorbikes: they can be easy to miss.

Never, ever expect anyone to slow down or wait for you to cross: motorists assume they have the right of way and it is contingent upon you as the lowly pedestrian to get the hell out of the road if they are coming through.

Watch for groups of local people waiting to cross and cross when they do. Alternately, find the toughest looking old lady in the district waiting to cross, and cross with her. Old ladies have survived for a very long time under adverse conditions and generally have street smarts.

Westerners often like to remark in a patrician sort of way that, "You know, traffic looks dismal here, but it must be safe -I never see any accidents or fatalities!" This is a pleasant illusion. The accident and fatality rate is horrific. You just haven't been here very long.

8. You are probably safer here then back home.

For some reason, many people back home seem to believe you are propelling yourself into the jaws of Certain Death by making a visit to India. India has a popular perception of being some sort of squalid, terrifying shithole full of the screaming starving, emaciated villagers in dodhis fighting over a single scrap of cow patty, and vicious throat-slitting urban bandits and terrorists. This is totally untrue. India's recent economic leap forward has turned most of the country, especially the urban centers, into a highly civilized place indeed - and it is is deeply offensive to most Indians when travelers assume all of India is a poverty-ridden nightmare. Most Indians are rather proud of their countries progress and hopeful for the future: you could at least indulge them a bit and go along with it.

Poverty is of course still rife and obvious, especially when you get out of the posh areas and into the backcountry. These are problems that need to be corrected and must be corrected, and it is equally unwise to equate the Lacoste-wearing masses sipping Americanos at Cafe Coffee Day with all of India. Donate your money, your time, or your expertise, and maybe things will improve.

Use common sense: Delhi is indeed not a particularly safe place, but I would still wager you're better off there then in the nasty bits of most modern cities. Places like Bangalore and Mumbai have a well-deserved reputation for safety: travel intelligently, avoid seedy people, and you should be perfectly fine. I have found myself walking back home alone many times here in Bangalore and have felt perfectly at ease - and with good reason. I wouldn't take my chances doing such a thing back home.

9. Indian food is cheaper and tastes better. Eat it.

Many Westerners come to India and are immediately repulsed and disturbed by the food. This usually manifests itself into an almost-crazed reliance on KFC and McDonalds. Do not become one of these people. Indian food is delicious, varied, and inexpensive. (It is rarely healthy and do not let anyone convince you a korma swimming with ghee and butter and cashew is. But good.)

Western food might be available, but it is generally either fast food chain junk or extremely badly interpreted at the lower end of the price range. Of course, this is not true in the major population centers: there are absolutely amazing Western restaurants in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai which are definitely worth a visit for the nostalgic, though you will pay for the privilege.

Try as many different cuisines as you can: Indian food features an incredible variety of specialties that range far beyond the standard Punjabi/Mughali food that seems to dominate most Indian menus outside of the country. Try spicy Andra food from Kerela - served on a banana leaf with lots of coconut leaf and rasam (spiced tamarind broth) - or perhaps some Kalkutta chaat - or maybe Hyderbadi biryani or....

10. Go out to clubs. This is a lot of fun and you will meet people.

Many people are suprised by the Indian club scene - in that there even IS one. I may be biased, but I have had a tremendous amount of fun at nighclubs in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi and you certainly will as well. Many tourists I've spoken to made the false assumption that there was no party scene in India and thus failed to pack their schmany clothes.....trust me ladies, bring along your glam stuff, you will certainly need it (and miss it if you don't.)

One more thing: Do not stand in the corner with your other Western buddies. Nightclubs and bars are excellent places to meet young and fun Indian people, who will probably be friendly, intelligent, and willing to hang out with you and have a good time. Meeting locals is half the fun of travel, and you are denying yourself an extremely good time if you stay in the company of your fellow Americans at all time - whether it be out of fear, politeness or (hate to say it) prejudice. Disconnect from your group, head up to the bar, and make some new friends: you may find yourself with invitations to parties or family events that will be infinitely more interesting then the average tourist experience. I have made many amazing Indian friends here who I hope to keep in contact with for a long time to come....it's a good idea.

11. You can always pee in luxury hotels.

One unfair but welcome perk of being a Westerner is that you are always able to pee in luxury hotels. This is an absolute godsend when you are walking through a sweltering Indian street with a full bladder and your other option is a cesspool watched over by a grinning overseer who is almost certain to peek at you. And charge you five rupees for the privilege.

Don't subject yourself to this. Walk into the nearest Taj or Oberoi, give a polite and confident nod to the attendant, and pee in air conditioned and marble-outfitted luxury - the attendant will hand you a jasmine scented towel and a breath mint on your way out. This only works if you are clean and dressed somewhat nicely. We discussed this.

More will come as I think of them. I guess.

mumbai mumbai

2008-05-26T03:27:00.000-07:00

Aneesa had some family matters to attend to, so I spent the day faffing around in Colaba. Colaba is one of those places that is rather pleasant to simply spend the day doing not much of anything in. There's always something to see: confused hippies, drunken Arabic louts, beautiful Bollywood types in skintight jeans, drunken louts of all shapes and sizes and colors. Also many, many ravens.

For some reason, the dining area at the Sea Palace insists on playing Bruce Springsteen singing about the SUMMER OF SIXTY-NIIINEEEE while I am trying to eat my cornflakes. This really is most offputting at times.

I have a curious Indian problem: I love bhindi masala. I really, really love it. For the unknowing, bhindi is ladyfinger or okra, that uniquely slimy vegetable loathed by most reasonable human groups other then: Indians, some African groups, and American Southerners. All groups have developed their own ways of preparing it so it becomes delicious and rich instead of slimy and wiry, but this is admittedly a delicate art that should not be trusted to *just* anyone. So I proceeded to spend my time in Mumbai trying bhindi masala pretty much anywhere that offered it. This was fun.

I decided to try a place that was encouragingly called The Food Inn on the main drag of Colaba for lunch. (Determining where I eat lunch takes up a majority of my leisure time on vacation. This pleases me.) I settled in and ordered the usual bhindi masala and a half tandoori chicken: I am always up for some meaty goodness.

The bhindi masala was only okay: they'd left the ladyfinger stalks whole which made them rather difficult to eat - no one ever, ever gives you a knife in an Indian restaurant. The chicken, however, was delicious - juicy and rich in the middle with a nice honey and masala infused exterior. Yum.

I ate that, wandered around a bit, bargained in a half-hearted way with the book stall guy over A Suitable Boy (high way robbery!) then decided to be a reasonable human being and sleep the rest of the day away. And so I did.

Aneesa and her sister were able to meet me briefly for dinner at a place called Rajdhani, which is sort of an upscale Rajhastani fast food joint. I love seeing the incarnations that fast food goes through in different places and cultures. The menu specializes in the kind of light and interesting vegetarian snacks that are rife in that bit of India: lots of curd, dry masalas, street foods and the like, along with plenty of mango specialities since the Alphonoso mangos are finally, finally in.

In any case, we ordered a thali, some puri chaat, and a pav bhaji. (While we waited, the music in the place for some reason turned to extremely creepy vampire horror show type stuff, which was a bit...offputting, epecially in a cheery and brightly lit orange colored sort of place.)

The thali was immense and delicious - I was thrilled with both the bhindi and the palak paneer, but there wasn't a loser on the plate. It even came with a tasty whipped mango dessert and a mini and adorable potato samosa. The pav bhaji was also nice: pav bhaji is a Mumbai speciality composed of buttery vegetable curry served with a rich dinner roll. You dip the roll in the curry and eat at will: hard to beat. The chaat was also nice, full of crisp fried wafers, small strings of potato-based sev and slightly sweet buffalo milk curd, tossed with spices and plenty of tomato and oion. Refreshing and the perfect thing on one of those very very humid Mumbai evenings.

That evening I decided to defy Saleem's solemn command to never ever ever go anywhere without a phalanx of angry looking male bodyguards, and adjourned to the ever-famous Leopold Cafe, usually home to a healthy number of frightened looking pink people eating crisps and drinking beer. I parked myself at a likely looking table, ordered a nice after-dinner fruit salad, and did a few drawings: my hobby of drawing comics has for some reason come back in full force since I've been in India.

They tolerated my occupancy of a single table for a while, but eventually tried to kick me out. I shrugged and decided to head on home and turn in, but as I was leaving, a guy came from downstairs to see me off: apparantly he'd been waiting to buy me a drink and was put out that I was leaving. I'm always open to a conversation when I'm on my lonensome in a foreign country (though I could feel Saleem's head exploding all the way across town in Bandra), so I joined him upstairs at the part of the bar that apparantly fancied itself hip because it was playing that Thumpy Techno Music. Also the interior was all brushed metal.

We chatted: turned out Rich was from Alabama, which meant we immediately got into a discussion about the various merits of barbeque sauces and barbeque preperations. One curious cultural reality about my people (Southerners) is that we will immediately upon meeting one another begin talking about how to cook a pig. There will usually be polite disagreement about correct pig cooking protocol and what should be served witht the pig and what sort of sauce the pig should be doused with: but the consensus is that there is pig and that smoked pig is delicious. It is always so comforting to know what to talk about.

Still, we did talk about more then just pig. I enjoyed hearing about Rich's many experiences in Japan: he did a foreign exchange when he was my age and fell in love, returning for the JET program and many times after for both work and pleasure. He was in fact about to lead a trip to Japan as an adjunct professor for Alabama State University (of snot nosed kids my age!), which sounds pretty cool to me. I warned him that people my age can be exceedingly obnoxious. He seemed unmoved. (But we so are.)

We also shared a nice bitch-fest about the hordes of unwashed hippies who moon around Colaba smoking weed and having dodgy encounters with various drug dealers and ladies of ill repute who hang out in Mumbai. Of course, it seems like everyone is gleefully of ill repute to some extent in Mumbai (which may be one of the things I like about it, though unfortunately I am not nearly as of ill repute as I'd like to be.)

We chatted in this fashion til' one AM, where we were unceremoniously kicked out per Indian regulations. (This translates into someone coming around and saying LEAVE NOW.) I certainly enjoyed meeting him and talking smack about the world around us....I love meeting Americans who travel and help in some small way to rectify the USA's current not-so-hot reputation in the world. And also prove that Southerners are NOT all unwashed banjo-playing hicks thank you very much. Only some of us.

Mumbai More

2008-05-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

Aneesa met up with me in the morning and we decided to see if we could make it out to Elephanta Island, an island off the coast of Mumbai proper which features lovely Buddhist caves. The heat was already beginning to rise most unpleasantly off the pavement, but we managed to make it over to the Gateway of India, which was swarming with various brightly dressed tourists and touts (who are convinced I need a giant balloon and aqua bead things and drums and flutes and GO AWAY.)

Unfortunately, it was by then too late to go to Elephanta, so we punted and decided to go for a little boat ride instead. This was very nice: I love boats. Perhaps it's due to y early childhood in Florida and my subsequent time in San Francisco, but a good boatride makes me happy: it offers a different perspective on a place, viewed from a good ways offshore. We paid a little bit extra and sat up top, and I enjoyed watching the mismatched Mumbai skyline drifting off and away, as we weaved between yachts and intimidating looking industrial cruisers.

Aneesa and I are very food oriented, so we imediately headed to find a place to eat. We settled on the Delhi Darbar, an apparantly famous joint in Colaba (it was certainly popular. And air conditioned.) We settled on an interesting looking spicy Parsi dish with mutton, vegetable kohlapuri, and the usual roti and etcetera. (For you must have roti. It is required.)

Parsi's are one of the more interesting ethnic groups to settle in the very diverse city that is Mumbai. Insofar as I am aware, they are Zorostrians of Persian descent, who came to the city a very long time indeed, establishing their own culture and traditions. Aneesa says they generally dress in Western clothes and speak with a certain kind of accent; Sheila simply considers them a hell of a lot of fun. They are renowned for their distinct cooking skill (and business acumen), but their numbers are dwindling rather quickly as one cannot exactly up and decide to become a Parsi. They are also known for their distinct matter of disposing of their dead: as Zoroastrians worship the elements (fire, water, et all), the only acceptable method of taking care of a body is to allow it to be eaten by vultures or decompose in the open air. Along these lines, the Parsi's have set up the Tower of Silence on Malabar Hill, which happens to be smack dab in the middle of a bunch of luxury housing complexes. Apparantly the two institutions seem to interact in relative peace, although there are stories of people stepping out for a bit of fresh air in the morning on their porch and finding a vulture-deposited toe. But they could just be stories.

In any case, Mumbai is experiencing an unfortunate vulture shortage, meaning the Parsi's are being forced to rely on chemical methods to dispose of bodies, since, well, things are just beginning to take a bit too long (and smell a bit.) I read in the paper that some Parsi's are beginning to make signifigant donations to vulture rescue and rehabilation facilities. This seems only prudent.

But enough about Towers of Silence.

The lunch was quite tasty: the spicy pieces of mutton were cooked in a red gravy to a melt-in-the-mouth consistency, although it was rather rich. The vegetables kolhapuri were fairly tasty but too greasy for my taste: unfortunately Indian restauranters sometimes presume that using enough ghee to kill a horse = good.

We headed out and shopped for a bit in Colaba, evading the usual touts and looking at purses and handbags and designer clothes and all the other misceallenous junk that one can obtain in that part of town. We finally got bored and decided to head out to Chowpatty Beach, the famous (or infamous) stretch of sand near Churchgate, where Aneesa's family stays.

We cabbed it out there, going past the rather adorably art-deco section that is Marine Drive (there's even a revolving restaurant!), tracing by the waterfront as the sun went down - which was by now hopping with people in all manner of ethnic attire. (There are many flavors of person in Mumbai.)

We got to the beach and wandered over to the water - swimming in it would probably be a horrendous idea but it certainly is nice to look at. Chowpatty is famed for its snack vendors, who operate their stalls in a sanctioned bit of sand set off a bit from the main drag. Aneesa told me that about ten years ago they were definitely Not Authorized and were forced to run away dragging their blenders and bhel-puri making apparatus behind them down the sand whenever the fuzz rolled up - an amusing mental image, but stationary bhel puri is probably (in the end) superior to the illicit variety.

Chowpatty Beach is suprisingly clean: what i'd read had given me the idea that it was some sort of nuclear waste ground, but it's actually rather clean and pleasant. An old begger woman had befriended and maintained a pack of friendly dogs, who chased each other and fell asleep under the shade of the big pots that local Hindu adherents performed puja in. Unfortunately your standard edition Creepy Indian Guy zeroed in on us, asking Aneesa many very personal questions and (oddly enough) caressing my foot. So we left.

We were going to meet Aneesa's cousins Saleem and (oh shit) at the very posh bar at the International Hotel. We went over there and ascended to the roof in a glittering and very white elevator. The bar was a work of art: a crystal white lounge with a killer view of Mumbai's glittering skyline. Prices were obscene, but that didn't faze the attractive and/or rich clientele, nibbling on tandoori-fusion bar snacks and watching the horizon. I was completely priced out and contented myself with some interesting masala flavored doritos, but Aneesa went so far as to order a Bacardi Breezer. We chatted for a bit util Saleem and appeared.

Saleem fancies himself a slick bastard in the standard Indian 19 year old boy way, down to the flashy cell phone and the half unbuttoned dress shirt. (Saleem, I love you and I kid.) He instantly proved to be a ton of fun, and we made plans to get out of Expensive Land and to somewhere more priced to small humble people like ourselves.

We decided to adjourn to Koyla, a shisha (hookah) bar and restaurant located conviently near the Sea Palace. The place is at the top of an incredibly sketchy apartment building that appears to be run by some sort of Saudi Syndicate: lots of evasive looking people mounting the stairs wearing sunglasses and carrying lumpy packages. (The place really was shut down by the cops for undisclosed reasons a while back but rebuilt: this kind of thing doesn't seem to faze Mumbaites all that much.) We took the creaky old fashioned elevator up to the top as Saleem steadfastly refused the indignity of walking.

It's a pretty swish place: lots of white sand and little benchy things, with another lovely view of the Mumbai skyline. Big elaborate shishas are constantly being carried out to hip groups of Mumbai beautiful people, who nibble on meaty tandoori delicacies and horse-laugh. (The only flaw is no liquor license, but I guess I wouldn't expect that.)

We had some meaty things and some sarson ka saag, which Saleem deemed repulsive (which meant I had to chase him with it.) We then shared a very nice mixed fruit shisha- something about smoking shisha is so deliciously cooling on those muggy kill-yourself tropical climate nights.

Still, Saleem is configured like me and he immediately deemed we needed a drink and we needed one now, and really, I am powerless to resist Old Monk. However, Aneesa and Saleemn's family are somewhat traditional and like to know where they are, and there were exams or something, which meant lots of feverish calls back and forth and Saleem scheming like a little weasel to figure out how he might be permitted to stay out. (I sat back and watched. One of the perks of being an American is permissive parenting once a certain age is attained. Well, least' in my case.)

Saleem hashed out some lie about staying over at a friend's house to watch educational documentaries, and we went over to Woodsides, a likely looking bar I'd spotted earlier. The place turned out to be lovely: woodpaneled, clean, full of interesting photographs, Led Zeppelin playing salubriously over the sound system. We ordered Old Monk all around the table: cheers. Saleem and his cousin were nearly ecstatic about the prospect of being able to get tanked.

We had a few, got pleasantly lit, then decided to head to the Sports Bar nearby. India was currently in the throes of the IPL or International Premier League, some sort of big cricket event that I can't be arsed to find out more about. In any case, that meant the bar was packed with screaming men (and some women) zeroed in like laser beams on the TV, where someone was pitching or bowling or whatever the fuck they do when they play cricket. Saleem and Aneesa got into pitched battle in the little basketball court by the side while they waited for the match to end, and i hung out for a bit and watched them sip beer. I managed to guilt Saleem into buying me an Old Monk one way or another, and sipped it demurely while making eyes at the craggy specimen chilling out over by the dart board. Mumbai is a nice place.

We were beginning to fade by this point, but due to the elaborate lie, Aneesa and her cousins couldn't go home. This meant they needed to find a hotel, which proved to be more difficult then anticipated as Aneesa didn't have her passport (you need your passport to check into most hotels here due to various government regulations.) This meant Saleem got into a protracted argument about something or another with the front desk guy until we managed to drag him away. (Funny.) I was exhausted and crashed in my room......thankfully they managed to find somewhere to stay.

2008-05-12T02:24:00.001-07:00

Aneesa came to collect me in the morning. We were going to meet her sisters from the UK at the Lakme Beauty Salon, fairly close to her grandparents place in Churchgate. I love the taxis in Mumbai: they're at least plentiful, fairly reliable, and don't involve vicious bargaining or the potential to fall out like those Bangalore rickshaws.

We found the place and ambled in: Aneesa was going to get a pedicure. Unfortunately they couldn't get me in on such short notice, which was probably a pity since my toe nails are beginning to take on a slightly horror show appearance. I was perfectly content to sit and read trashy magazines, watching Mumbaities have skin treatments.

I met Aneesa's sister, who was quite lovely: we discused India and various nerdy biological topics. She's just attained a PHD in biological science, and she specializes in human gum diseases, which I think is pretty cool. I asked her a few burning questions I've had for a long time about the difference in dirtiness between dog and human drool - apparantly dog drool does have less nasty stuff in it but still smells worse.

Aneesa's other sister emerged, who is ALSO a PHD (talented family, this) and specializes in communicative disease. I was impressed to find she used to work in Atlanta at the Disease Control Center, a fascinating receptacle of ebola and smallpox and polio and other nasty things. She said she "only" works with chickenpox, but I think chickenpox is much more relavant to our daily existence then Ebola anyway. I believe I came to admire her shamelessly when she told me about her visit to the Ebola Room at the headquarters. (They told her not to touch anything. She replies: "Why the hell would I WANT to?")

We were beginning to starve and Aneesa's pedicure was taking a bit, so she implored us to go on and get something and she'd catch up. Aneesa and I are both seafood addicts and we had been dying to try a place called Trishna, which is famous in Mumbai for seafood - especially crabs. Eating crab is one of the primary reasons I live upon this planet, so I was definitely game. I departed Aneesa with her sisters and we went over to the restaurant, which was down a rather slim alley in the Fort area. Still, we found it, and the bell-hop attired door guy ushered us in.

Trishna is a compact but reasonably classy place, full of wealthy looking people lunching on extremely messy seafood dishes on curiously white tableclothes. The service staff is a bit snooty but in the pleasant way that reminds you you are Getting What You Paid For. We settled on a chili garlic crab, squid masala, and some vegetables: bam, done.

Service is eerily fast, and the food lived up to all expectations. The chili garlic crab was sublime: it reminded me of my dad's near perfect rendition and definitely felt like home cooking. (Not as good as dad's though.) The chili sauce was perfectly spiced and had the right amount of kick, and we merrily chewed our way through the poor creature with brutal efficiency.

The squid masala was fine but I'm generally a bit underwhelmed by standard edition masala dishes: some sort of seafood in a coconut milk esque gravy. The vegetable jalfreizi was absolutely delicious and I devoured as much of it as I possibly could.

The bill wasn't cheap by India standards but still a total steal by US standards: 500 rupees or about 13 bucks for a big old crab. Would definitely run you more back home.

Aneesa unfortunately was unable to make it - apparantly her toes were taking quite a long time to dry out - so we met her at the hair saloon, where she and her sisters were having some sort of esoteric and eleaborate thing done to their roots. I accompanied them and sat for a while in the fading morning heat, watching the boats come out of Mumbai's remaining fishing colonies.

They decided to head on back to freshen up, but we determined we'd go out or something that night. Unfortunately, Indian families can get a little bit titchy about UnAttached Girls going out on their own in the evening, so I was on my own. This worked out fine: I found an Iranian restaurant that did chicken and edible hummus, then hung out at Cafe Leopold for a bit until I got sick of dreadlocked, ill looking Germans making eyes at me. Then I headed back to my hotel.

2008-05-12T02:19:00.001-07:00

Aneesa had family obligations and couldn't meet me this day, so I decided to perform my usual new city ritual: walk in a new direction until I can't walk anymore.

Tuesday was the hottest and stickiest day of the year so far in Mumbai, and I couldn't bear to think of eating actual food. I was thrilled to discover a gelato place right up the street from my hotel - done. I ate strawberry sorbet and raspberry yogurt gelato in blissful silence in the air conditioned confines of the shop - nothing tastes as good as really quality ice cream when the weather is seething with moisture and prickly heat, all around you. Now I was ready to walk.

I headed down the street into Colaba, one of the older districts of Mumbai, full of pictureqesly rotting English archiecture and aggressive touts. Colaba is known primarily for the Gateway to India (built to celebrate King Charles visiting Mumbai or some such colonial foolishness) and the Taj Mahal hotel, which regally faces it. The Gateway itself is certainly an impressive old granite heap, although it was being restored upon my visit - abroad is, after all, always under construction. What the tourist books and photographs don't tell you is that the Gateway is usually swarming with hyper energetic young touts attempting to sell you everything from jiggly gel beads to extremely large balloons to drums (and they chase you.) Brief cruises and ferries to Elephanta Island (of the Buddhist caves) also leave right in front of the Gateway, ensuring hordes of picnickers milling around and licking interestingly colored ice creams at pretty much all times. There are also incredible quantities of pigeons, which compete with the omnipresent and rather charming ravens for trash and touristic leavings.

The Taj is definitely impressive, all colonial splendor and glistening marble floors and Escada outlets and doormen in silly hats. I like it very much, especially because it is quite large and provides an air conditioned and peaceful corridor through which to get halfway through Colaba and to my hotel. It also has the added value of having impeccably clean bathrooms with a smiling attendant who will hand you a towel, a mint, and some moisturizer after you have availed yourself of the facilities. This is a lifesaver. I enjoyed walking through the place upwards of six times a day and looking wistfully at the oasis-like pool area. I tend to wear fairly nice clothes and the attendants seemed to believe I was staying there, which meant everyone opened doors for me and smiled real nice.

When you walk out of my hotel and to the left, you find yourself going up a delightfully sketchy street that seems to be owned primarily by Gulf expats - the street is lined with Islamic kebab parlors, money changers, and many, many hookah/shisha outlets. One of the stores featured a hookah that had little mechanical fish swimming in the base, which I lusted after but didn't want to pay the shipping fee on. In any case, it's a useful street, although I was forced to walk a daily gauntlet of grinning sales-guys asking me in concerned voices, "Are you okay, ma'am? Are you okay....pashmina shawl...taxi.....cocaine...what you want?" Once you nod and side-step those guys and avoid the cows generally tied out at the corner, you walk down the street into Colaba proper.

The street is lined with crap emporiums, cheap and tasty restaurants, guys selling god knows what out of various stalls and carts and holes in the wall, and bars. I especially enjoyed Woodsides, which is a fairly classy place featuring cheap Old Monk and classic rock and extreme cleanliness. There are of course other, sketchier options. There are also many, many Western hippies in various states of disarray and drug-addlement. Paul Theroux wrote in the Great Railway Bazaar about the curious tribes of Western hippies that seem to roam India in their own, constant, exotic fantasy, and he is entirely correct. I'm not sure what they're looking for - spiritual enlightenment, connection with a mysterious and byootiful culture, excellent drugs - but I seem to sense they're generally disappointed at not finding it. The hippies tend to have this image of India as some sort of backwards land full of sadhus and holy men dispensing the secrets of the universe from the back of a holy cow (far as I can tell) and they are generally horrified to discover that India is not particularly interested in staying that way - like it was ever that way in the first place.

I believe the hippies dress so badly and maintain themselves so badly in some sort of effort to be "like" the locals. I imagine they are surprised to discover your typical Indian dresses as nicely as they can possibly afford and certainly takes showers. And shaves. And brushes their teeth. They can take their false image of some sort of mystic, non-existent India, stagnant in time, but I like modern India just fine, dance clubs and fancy restaurants and all. India does not need to cater to the narcissistic needs of Westerners out to Find Themselves and I am glad it is not particularly interested in doing so.

Colaba seems to attract both the wealthiest Westerners - who tend to huddle in safety inside the majesty and AC of the Taj - and the gungiest, who tend to stay at the cheap guesthouses (like the lovely Sea Shore) and wander around in a constant cheap ganga-and-cocaine induced haze. They also like to hang out at the Leopold Cafe - a famous joint where a writer apparantly used to write once - and talk about their various and exciting international drug experiences. This can be interesting to overhear, though I kept on expecting the FBI to bust in and lock everyone up, including me. (They could probably find some dirt if they really wanted to.)

You walk to the end of the street and once you hit the big white dome of the William and Mary museum, you're pretty much at the end of the tourist district of Colaba. Once you cross the extremely dangerous roadway - this requires skill and bravery - you're pretty much out of dreadlocks and sunburns land and back into the realm of the natives. You also will hit the very large naval base, which encompasses most of the spur of reclaimed land seen to the left of the Taj hotel. So there's my (or your) orientation.

I spent the day wandering up the street and orienting myself. My shoes as previously mentioned had died a horrible death in the fort in Old Delhi, so priority number one was finding a nice pair of Practical (blech) Shoes. Thankfully, I found a shoe vendor and managed to get a rather lovely and comfortable pair of silver walking shoes. So thank goodness for that.

I walked and walked and walked, cutting through the miserable mid-day heat and humidity (but with my usual dogged, perverse need to orient myself.) I found myself skirting the edge of the fort and decided to just keep on walking until I came to, well, the end of it.

This proved to be a bad idea as the fort is very very large. Still, I plugged away and finally found the end, only to discover that instead of a salubrious beach or park I could lounge in, there was just an angry looking man with a machine gun. So I headed back the other way, beneath a luscious stand of banyan trees (with various construction workers lounging beneath them and hurling affable slurs at me in Hindi.) I also found a perfectly severed and peaceful looking pigeon head on the pavement. I don't think I want to know.

By now I was a walking ball of sweat and human misery, and was thrilled to find a garden near the rather majestic Mumbai Library. Unfortunately, everyone else in Mumbai had the exact same idea on this hottest day of the year, which meant everyone in the area was vying viciously for a tiny patch of green space. I managed to nudge some people and found myself a spot on a bench, where I drew for a while and listened to my Ipod, some young day laborers staring at me in drop-jawed astonishment. (Trust me, my fellow palefaces: when you come to India, you will grow accustomed to this. Either that or you will go insane. It's sort of your call.)

I befriended a cat who was hunkered down in the bushes (he was smarter then us.) A curious note on stray animals in India: Bangalore is full of packs of mildly disquieting dogs and cows, Delhi has lots and lots of ravens and hawks, but Mumbai belongs to cats. Yes, there are dogs, but cats are everywhere, shimmying up trees and weaving under your feet and appearing in dark allies - usually affable laid back creatures. Sometimes they travel in families, and it's rather pleasant to be sitting on a Mumbai porch as the sun goes down to see a family of squabbling cats and kittens emerge in single file from a rhodendron bush and slip away again. But I digress.

I managed to stumble back to the Sea Palace and decided to get a snack. I was thrilled to find a place offering my beloved tandoori gobi, so I ordered that and hung out in the air conditioned comfort of the restaurant for a bit. A few young guys at the table by my side took photos of me sneakily (or so they thought) with their cell phone, but I ignored them until one of them slipped into the booth next to me. I said EXCUSE ME and he ran off with his tail between his legs. It was very satisfying.

Then I went back to the Sea Palace and slept. In these kinds of hot and humid climates, all sane and clever animals and humans spend the miserable piss-stain hours of the day indoors, preferably inert and underneath a fan. So I crashed til' the sun came down.

I wandered out for a small dinner of kebab and what not at one of the various Islamic restaurants on the strip, then had some not-half-bad red wine at Cafe Mondegar, one of the tourist infested Colaba bars. Then I slept.

2008-05-12T02:18:00.001-07:00

Woke up and intended to visit Lodhi Gardens, but unfortunately was still fending off the effects of tummy lurgy. So I mostly hung out and availed myself of the centre's free wireless internet. India unfortunately does not quite comprehend the whole free wifi-thing yet, and most locations attempt to charge you ridiculous prices for something that most red blooded Americans regard as something that SHOULD be free. So, free, free is good.

I packed up my ever-persistent Load Of Crap and checked out of the hotel, then met Sheila for lunch at the club's curiously cheap and delicious restaurant. We had a bit of whiskey and Diet Coke at the nice and empty bar, then adjourned to the actual dining room - mixed vegetable curry, roti, chicken reshmi kebab, and an interesting sort of tandoori veg item made out of corn and methi (fenugreek.) I managed to eat a decent amount, but had to leave in a bit of a hurry since I was rushing to make my flight.

Curiously, although my timing was tight on the flight due to lunch, I actually was not flipping out, whereas a few months ago back at Simon's Rock, I would probably have been working myself into some sort of almighty freakout over the mere possibility of not having adequate time to make my flight. Has India mellowed me? (Hopefully...that's partially why I came here after all, to escape the academic Crazy...)

Sheila's driver dropped me off in good time at the domestic terminal after a little defensive driving, and I grabbed my stuff and assumed the linebacker position to avoid the various touts who seemed to think I needed a taxi RIGHT NOW. I was now really pressed for time, and I sprinted inside the airport, after flashing my boarding pass and trying not to look like a criminal to the inevitable mustachioed security guard. Check-in proved fraught with danger when I realized I had to get my bags scanned and tagged first BEFORE they'd throw them in the hold. I navigated around a variety of speed bumps (old men staring off into space, horny young guys, et all), got the bags in, then ran to security.

Unfortunately IndiGo had neglected to stamp my bag tag for my backpack, which meant I got up to the gate and was informed I needed a stamp. I sprinted back to the security clearance area and begged for a stamp - the woman manning the post apparantly took this to mean I wanted my Swiss Army knife back, and I COULD NOT HAVE IT NO WAY. Since I do not own a Swiss Army Knife and in fact just wanted a damn stamp, this involved a bunch of shouting across security guard posts until someone finally figured it out.

I got my stamp.

I hopped onto the bus that took us to the plane and got on - horror - middle seat! I was however exhausted and still a little sick, so I managed to get some sleep anyway, contorting myself into various unnatural positions. I have an excellent ability for a traveler: the ability to sleep anywhere at any time. I have fallen asleep on parking islands, in trees, in car trunks and on a couch in the Louvre. Perhaps someday I will fall asleep on top of an Indian bus and complete the circuit.

I arrived at the Mumbai airport - glistening and disarmingly new - and collected my bags. Time for the usual running the gauntlet any arrival in India entails. I found a taxi driver who agreed to use the meter and headed downtown to Colaba.

Unfortunately the hotel I wanted to stay at was booked up, so running through my options, I decided to try the Sea Breeze Hotel which Lonely Planet said only had occasional bouts of bedbugs. This was up about 12 flights of narrow, twisty stairs, and as everyone knows Elevators Are A Luxury Item. I looked up them and tried to figure out how to get my two large bags up them at the same time. Thankfully a nice gentleman off the street offered to help me. We made it up to the desk, huffing and puffing, and I was shown a small cubicle of a room. It did however have a fan. I looked over the guestbook and the clientele was entirely composed of Irish hippies with a couple of Swedes thrown in for good measure. Do Europeans have a perverse affection for staying in crap accommodations in the name of economy?

I decided to call Aneesa and figure out where she was. This involved trying everyone's cell phone in the hotel (the number doesn't like to work), but I finally got through. She and her cousin were at the other place that was full, so they decided to meet me there.

I hung out on the veranda and tried not to be disturbed by the various men in increasingly exotic modes of dress (and increasing levels of sketchiness) who thumped by me on their way to god knows what.

Aneesa's cousin showed up and I initally ignored him, since, to be honest, ignoring strange men is generally good news. He finally said my name and I abashedly figured it out. "You've got to stay somewhere else!" he said - "They had a prostitution scare here a few years ago...stay with us...somewhere..anywhere else!" Obviously I wasn't going to protest, so we got in the cab and decided to have dinner and figure out if I could stay anywhere that didn't indirectly involve prostitution. This is a good accomodation goal.

We went to a lovely streetside kebab place and enjoyed mutton boti - a kind of melt in your mouth mutton kebab marinated in spices - and various varieties of grilled chicken, along with some mutton seekh kebab (ground meat) and endless chapatis. Aneesa made some calls and we figured out the Sea Palace hotel - a much more salubrious place right around the corner from the Sea Breeze - had vacancies. Done. I rang them up and booked it.

We went back to the Sea Breeze, extracted my bags from the confused looking desk-guy, and popped around the corner to the Sea Palace. They showed me a nice clean double, and I moved in. The Sea Palace features a nice leafy veranada and bar, so we adjourned there for some Old Monk (to calm my nerves) and a chat. Aneesa's grandparents are rather traditional and expected her home by 11:30 or such (for fear of murder kidnapping abduction), so I headed up for a deeply appreciated sleep.

2008-05-12T02:17:00.002-07:00

I woke up fairly late, still besought with tummy lurgy but pretty much alive. I managed to get down some tea and spent the rest of the morning messing around on the internet and enjoying the profound luxury of free wifi. Adam was going to meet me around noonish to get lunch and engage in some mandatory sightseeing, so I walked out to the Centre's lovely reflecting pool and drew for a bit before he showed up, flicking flies away from my face under the shade of the banyan tree.

(An older woman in a saree was doing six-foot long laps tirelessly and with grim determination on her face around the cement walkway the entire time, which I found kind of amusing.)

Adam called and told me that he was at the gate of the International Centre annex. I lit out industriously to meet him and discovered there are many different gates of the Centre Annex, many of which open up into the Islamic Centre and the French Centre and the ButtFuckistan Cultural Awareness Centre for all I know. We played a bit of phone tag and finally met up with each other, though I did manage to sneak up on him since he wasn't expecting me from the direction I arrived. I am tremendously unsubtle and am always very happy when I manage to sneak up on someone. We both were starving, so we decided to head for Khan Market, the Nicest Retail Space in Delhi, to get something to eat and then re-evaluate our strategem as it were.

We took an incredibly short rickshaw ride (but hey, it was hot outside) and wandered around looking for somewhere to eat. We finally found a fairly expensive Western place, but it was hot and we were hungry and we decided to go for it - and anyway, it was an interesting cultural vortex to suddenly step inside the air conditioned and atmospheric environs of a Western place, where no one gives you finger bowls or seeds or yells your order across the restaurant. Also no Hindi music playing. Just Total Eclipse of The Heart, which is about twelve times worse.

We were both thrilled to discover hummus on the menu and were forced to order it - it was delicious and even came with pita bread and these nice little crackery things. After two months of Indian food, it was a pleasure to be able to order vegetable fajitas with honest to god guacamole to go with. Even a very very small portion. I am probably going to spend a solid day upon my return making endless batches of guacamole.

We decided to visit the Lodhi Gardens, which are conveniently located next to the International Centre, extremely pleasant, and don't charge admission. It was wonderful to walk in the nice cool green of the gardens after the brutal heat of the Delhi afternoon, and I showed Adam around the tombs, which were almost deserted in the four o' clock lull.

There's one tomb I love in particular because it is so unexpected. You come to it after crossing a dingy little foot bridge - it looks like a rather simple falling apart stone wall - but you mount a flight of stairs and go through a small portal and you're in a lovely little courtyard, a path leading up to the dome and the simple stone cenotaph within it. The actual body in these Mughal tombs is apparantly buried about 10 feet below the marker, and an incense burner is usually positioned above it, hanging from the ceiling - although the burner has long gone from this one. I noted upon this visit that some of the original paintings on the dome are still preserved, rotting away but hanging on with faded brilliance throughout the years. I enjoy seeing paintings of that nature that have not been revised and revamped and reworked into oblivion but retain their originality - true, they should properly be preserved for latter generations, but it's pleasant to think some sort of essence of the artist itself lives on on the walls, not some modern-day restorer taking educated, educated guesses. But that's just me.

Adam enlisted the security guard to give us a brief run-down on the history of the tombs, and I half-listened and half watched the motions of the brilliant green parakeets, occupying the trees that grew in shabby profusion around the red brick courtyard walls. It was that nice part of the day where the light makes everything golden and attractive, and it was easy enough to imagine some sort of Mughal potentate making the rounds of the gardens round bout' evening -except there would be more roaming blackbuck and less joggers. It's really one of the most wonderful parks I've ever had the pleasure of walking in, full of carefully maintained plants and acres of pastel green grass, with lots of historical nooks and crannies to walk in and contemplate. I envy Sheila for living close enough to walk in it every evening - to be able to walk in such a place on a regular basis is good for the human spirit. It certainly is an improvement on doing afternoon laps at the Y.

We wandered over to the other tomb, which contained an adoining mosque. Apparently Muslim groups keep up the place to the immaculate standard it exists in; the government only does so much. The mosque certainly was lovely, elaborate red-marble work on display over the doorways and entrances. Little blue turquoise tiles still ran over the walls and the sides of the domed structure. Just as I love original paintings, I love detecting leftover bits of color and detail from a building's original heyday. They feel left over or forgotten somehow, like time and modernization have given them a brief reprieve, and it makes it so much easier to imagine what things might have been like.

I was feeling not so hot again and sat down for a while to watch the birds swoop by and the other park-goers breeze by (women especially in little bursts of color). A guy who'd been wandering in the park came over to talk to us about the working world in Delhi, which happened to be quite nice for him, and gave us a bit more background into the history of what, exactly, we were looking at. He apparantly was a big internet afficinado, so we gave him our contact information. He was also kind enough to get us an impressively cheap 60 rupee fare to the Red Fort - being native counts for entirely too much when it comes to getting rates that aren't highway robbery.

I was incredibly dehydrated due to being sick and actually got to the point where I couldn't talk because all moisture had apparantly been sucked out of my body. This was kind of amusing from a clinical stance. I do feel a new solidarity with those Foreign Legion types commonly portayed in cartoons, crawling in the Sahara desert, desperate for water. India even has plenty of vultures!

The Red Fort is indeed immense - the red sandstone walls and ramparts seem to go on forever, an imposing testament to just how powerful the Moghuls were during their hey-day. It's definitely more impressive in the late afternoon, as the sun gives the red stone a certain emotive warmth. We disembarked and I immediately ran over to a beverage stand and purchased a Sprite and an x-large economy bottle of water, which I downed in quick succession. (I think Adam was impressed. Or grossed out.)

We were walking along the walls of the Fort, attempting to find a way into the grounds, when my goddamn shoe broke. Now, that particular pair of shoes had proved fairly dependable: I had bargained hard for them in a Beijing department store, and they saw me through a drippy summer spent tromping through Tiananmen' square upwards of four times a day. Perhaps they wanted to choose a similarliy exotic place to give up the ghost. Unfortunately, a New Delhi bazaar street is one of the absolute worst places in the world to be running around barefoot, which was, at this point, my choice.

One good thing about Indian bazaar streets is that pretty much anything you want is obtainable for VERY GOOD price (ranging from live chickens to false moustaches to hash), and I predicted that we would find a shoe stall shortly. I was correct: a shoe seller appeared seemingly on cue. Admittedly, it was a men's shoe stall, but I was desperate and had no desire to contract Hepatitis C, so I began going through the gentleman's stocks. I have extremely small feet and I attempted to convey this notion to the seller, who kept on coming up with shoes that would have suited Bigfoot and no one else. By then we had attracted a crowd of nearby and idle men, sipping chai in the lingering evening heat and watching with rapt attention as I attempted to find a pair of shoes that would sort of, kind of fit.

I finally managed to find a pair of sneakers that didn't swallow up my feet and began negotiations. He wanted 350, I'd pay 200 - the inevitable bargaining dance in India. As is always present in these bargaining affairs, a Helpful Old Man stepped in and helped me get the price down to 230, which was acceptable for me. (I really really didn't want to factor communicative disease into my vacation plans. Also I saw no discount Jimmy Choo outlets within spitting distance of Old Delhi, which was really a shame.) So I laced up my very large sneakers which did not really go at all with the dress I was wearing and tromped on down the street.

Adam made witty commentary about how it was a miracle to finally see me in flats. I would definitely have hit him if I wasn't ill.

We finally found an open gate into the Red Fort grounds and walked in for a bit but were immediately shooed out by a rather aggressive guard. We finally found the other-other entrance and hung out and looked at the remains of the old fort's moat, which is now grown over with lush looking green grass. I maintain everything would be even more awesome if they filled it up with water again, though I guess there is a water shortage going on.

We both concluded we were exhausted and decided to go back - I had just about passed out on the railings over the moat, my eyes glazing over as I watched those ephemeral green parakeets hop into nooks in the walls. I hate that residual weakness that hangs over from sickness, when you just lose the will to live with depressing regularity.

We bargained for passage with one rickshaw and proceeded for a couple of blocks, until Adam figured out that they were calling him a stupid motherfucker in Hindi. He got angry and insisted we get out - "You're not going to cheat me AND insult me!" Thankfully we managed to find another with slightly less of a criminal aspect.

We passed by the original Moti Mahal restaurant on the way back to the International Centre, which apparantly is the actual origin point of butter chicken. Next time I'm in Delhi. Next time.

We managed to direct the driver to the Centre. Adam says that next time I come to Delhi I should stay somewhere easier to find. I'm thinking the actual top of the Qutub Minaret. Or I suppose I could take up residence in Humayun's tomb. Maybe I could stamp tickets.

I loathe saying goodbye to people and generally prefer to avoid doing it if at all possible. However people find this strange and they are probably correct. In any case, I gave Adam two slightly-rib crushing hugs and told him (with complete honesty) that I would miss the hell out of him. Then I walked away and didn't look back because you have to do these things this way.

I hate missing people.

I didn't miss anyone for long, however, as I was so exhausted that I fell asleep and didn't wake up again until 2 am - I even missed dinner, which is a real testament to how tired I was. (i do not miss meals for anything even nuclear attack.)

2008-05-12T02:17:00.001-07:00

I stuck to my promise and slept quite late, managing to awaken, shower, and choke down a bit of cereal around 10 in the morning. Sheila was determined to keep me from doing much of anything that day (and she was busy beside), so I bummed around and read until lunch time.

I had a nice light lunch at the country club - a half tandoori chicken with a nice, delicate ginger flavor and some nice Chinese stir-fried vegetables, along with a bit of roti - then decided to steel myself for a little stroll to Khan Market, the Very Luxurious retail space a bit down from the International Centre.

To my suprise, I was mostly able to walk without doubling over with intestinal death throes, so I made it down to the market (while dodging the usual homocidal taxi drivers) to have a look around. I pawed through book stores and was happy to encounter a nice looking gelato place for future reference. Otherwise, my presence there really had no purpose, so I found a nice place to sit beside a dozing and intermingled pack of rickshaw drivers and dogs, sipping a Coke and watching the world go by. I enjoyed watching a group of new Western inductees to India deliberating over rickshaws, confusion and irritation written all over their faces. That was me once, that was not me anymore. Perhaps they too would learn a couple of creative Hindi swear words and rude gestures to use on rickshaw drivers. It is only a natural progression.

I wandered back to the International Centre and freshened up, as Sheila was picking me up soon to take me to her nephews wedding. I wanted to go, since I though I'd enjoy seeing a Hindu wedding (and the prospect of an open bar is always an attractive one.) I selected my nice black fifties-style dress, and managed to pull myself together so I only looked slightly deathly instead of mostly deathly. Sheila and Rajev picked me up, Sheila looking very dapper in a lovely cream colored sari (accented with vintage Moghul jewerly) and off we went.

The hotel was quite close - near the Qutub Minaret - and we got there quickly, sideskirting an incredibly elaborate Indian children's party happening at the other venue. (Indians apparantly have a thing for throwing ridiculously over the top 10th birthday parties, according tot he newspapers.)

The pool area looked beautiful, decked out with tiny flickering candles and orange and white marigolds, which hold some sort of symbolic purpose in Hinduism that I cannot determine. The wedding ceremony itself had just begun but was slated to go on for about forty minutes, so everyone seated themselves and gossiped and ate cocktail snacks, keeping one polite eye on the usual puja going-ons. Sheila's nephew is from Delhi, but the bride was from Assam - one of the Indian hill provinces - and thus the ceremony mixed traditions from both regions. (Not that I would have noticed.) She certainly looked gorgeous, outfitted in a shining jewel-red sari with tremendous quantities of gold jewerly, her girlfriends attired in shining black and silver and a lovely turqouoise blue. The groom wore a cream colored kurta and a deeply impressive headdress of flowers and jewels, and he looked both elated and profoundly embarassed, which I guess is how one should look at a wedding.

The ceremony itself involved a lot of reading in Sanskrit, a lot of dabbing of ghee on things and into things, a lit fire, throwing many unindentifiable things into said-fire, tying a knot, untying a knot, and some other stuff. Unfortunately even the Hindu's present I asked were not entirely certain what was going on...mostly they wanted a drink. I will probably have to do some research.

The ceremony did go on for quite some time and I was amused to hear Sheila and her friends and relations muttering darkly under their breath about how they desperately needed a drink. By the time the ceremony reached an end and everyone eagerly tossed marigolds at the newly united couple, Sheila led an exodus to the open bar. I was only too happy to follow. We grabbed our tumblers of Teachers and soda and adjourned to a nearby table, and I happily talked to Sheila's various relations while we waited for the buffet line to open. One of her other nephews is a California lawyer who owns a vineyard in the Santa Barbara foothills....I shall have to investigate. Another friend is a writer for a lifestyle magazine in Delhi, and we enjoyed talking about journalism and travel (I had by then moved to wine.)

Sheila and Rajev were getting a bit bored and the food took quite a long time to come out, so we determined we'd leave as soon as they fed us. The food itself was quite excellent - I remember some tasty salt and pepper fried bhindi, mutton rogan josh, curried eggplants, and made to order rotis, along with the usual panoply of Indian desserts. There was also some delicious and unexpected tiramisu.

I called up Adam to see what his plans were for the evening, and was suprised to find he was headed to a club near the Qutub Minaret as well. Obviously I wanted to join him, so I asked Sheila, who was rather doubtful of disposing me at a club under her watch. (Understandable.)

Indian notions of protecting single young women differ markedly from our own. Sheila didn't want me taking cabs on my own and especially not rickshaws, and she wasn't particularly thrilled about me going out in the first place....I was rather impressed she agreed to it.

She dropped me off at the International Centre and I hopped a cab to the club, which was a bit difficult to find. The taxi driver thankfully was one of those rare Indian public-transportation saints, and we put our heads together and found the place quickly enough - IndoChine, a sort of opium den themed place. As Adam was completely unable to hear a thing I was telling him on the cell phone (I'M HERE...WHAT...REPEAT THAT....WHAATTT...FUCKK), we sort of blundered into each at the entry-way then went in.

The place was packed and certainly impressive looking, with a sort of Chinese imperial palace theme - think low lighting, terra cotta warriors, and lots and lots of red. Delhi's contingent of Beautiful People had turned out to dance like dorks and drink overpriced liquor. The crowd didn't strike me as markedly different from the types I encountered in Bangalore, though women in Delhi do seem a little more comfortable with showing more flesh then in Bangalore.

Shawna had introduced Adam to a few of her friends, who I in turn introduced myself to. I am eternally hopeless with names, but they were pretty nice, especially the one from Singapore who made me a little animal from cigarette butts and toothpicks. I appreciate things like that.

I danced a bit but was still feeling the residual tummy lurgy - and anyway, this guy on the dance floor with a freakishly huge chest was violating my personal and set in stone No Touching rule. "Oh, you are looking very beautiful, let me put my arm around you!" "...No."

I know Adam was disappointed that I wasn't performing my usual party trick of cadging free drinks but I was just not on my A game that night. Scoring free drinks does require some modicum of effort. I ended up not ordering anything...I figured I'd drank plenty at the wedding. Adam, of course, had vodka and diet coke.

The others filtered out eventually, citing tiredness, but Adam and I were coming off a rather long stint in Bangalore and were tremendously impressed that it was past 11:30 and we were still out. We held out for a while as the place emptied out, trying to determine whether we were pathetic enough to share a drink (we were not.) Adam teased me mercilessly for my mangled American pronunciations, but then again, he was under the impression that there were 53 states, so I guess we're even.

They kicked us out at 2:00 AM, and we filtered outside in the usual late night attempt to find a rickshaw. This proved more difficult then usual, so we walked up the empty street for a bit, weaving about in the manner of ever so slightly lit people. Adam rattled off various US states and I provided brief succinct descriptions: "New Mexico....deserts and Santa Fe. Also enchiladas. Florida...palm trees. retirees on the brink of death, nice beaches....Minnesota...cold, miserable, eww."

And so forth. I think I should write a very very brief travel guide to the USA for foreigners. It would make everyone's travel decisions so much easier.

We finally found a rickshaw. Unfortunately, Delhi is very big and very spread out and rickshaw rides seem to take a million years, which is especially unpleasant when you are wearing a fairly light dress and it is cold. But I lived. ( I always live. I have concluded I have the constitution and personal tendencies of a cockroach: somewhat perverse and unpleasant, but curiously difficult to kill.)

I wandered back to the Centre (the guard was asleep this time like a reasonable person) and fell asleep.

2008-05-12T02:14:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately I woke up with grade A Tummy Lurgy. I know that the universe was preparing to loose it on me and I was not particulalry suprised, but I wasn't pleased either. This meant I spent, in essence, the entire afternoon before I had to leave lying in bed and trying not to die, which was about as riveting as you might imagine.

I finally managed to rouse myself at 2:30 for the cab driver, who looked at me curiously as I curled into a ball of pain by the window. Thankfully, I was so exhausted that I was not particularly affected by the switch-back laden trek down - I even fell asleep.

I stumbled out onto the Dehradun train platform and managed to figure out which platform I left from. Too exhausted to contend for platform space with the extremely settled looking businessman who had consigned it, I squatted on the cement like everyone else and stared off into space (while everyone else stared at me.)

The train arrived promptly and I seated myself in first class - Sheila had got me first class to avoid any chance of my contending with a Bad Element. The car itself was not markedly different from the second class one - other then featuring larger seats and an absence of dogs - but the service men were wearing funny hats which I suppose attracted a premium. First class also means lots and lots of food. We were plied with an introductory course of samosas, candy bars, chocolate mints, potato chips and god knows what else with a promise of a multi-course meal to come. I of course couldn't manage much more then a couple of toffees.

I was also amused to note that a sadhu-appearing gentleman with long unwashed hair and white pilgrims clothes was comfortably settling into a plush seat and checking messages on his expensive cellphone.

The sun was going down and we sped through the rhodendron jungles and past the ever-decreasing, shadowy spires of the Himalayan foothills (rising incongorously up from the orange and parched low-lands.) I slipped further and further away into a sort of waking dream as the train rattled on to a sacred Ganges river town, full of whitewashed temples and elaborate Hindu statues, lit pink and orange by the evening light. The Ganga itself seemed to be running dry, and children and bored looking men picked through the white washed stones and mounds of trash left in the river bed. We stopped at the station and I got a momentary glimpse of hordes of white-attired pilgrims packing up their stuff and preparing to go home after their mandated yearly (i think) wash. A pack of young boys dozed on top of an imposing stack of microwave ovens.

I then fell asleep.

I awoke after the tomato soup course had been served, much to my consternation - soup sounded pretty good. I did manage to choke down some tasty and partially frozen curd, a little bit of butter chicken, and a bit or two of too-greasy paratha. I was thrilled when they served us butterscotch ice cream for dessert. Somehow few things are more elementally comforting when you're sick then butterscotch ice cream.

We arrived around 11:30 at night and Sheila's friendly cook met me again. I was feeling slightly restored and managed to keep up as we weaved our way around jubilant hordes of late night travelers. Unfortunately the Delhi train station's staircase is extremely tight and we had to contend for space for almost 15 minutes, fighting for breathing space with plump grannies and muscular young men with equal vehemence. But we made it - and I fell into bed with every intention of staying there a good long time.

2008-05-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

Woke up early to look at the mist-shrouded peaks as Baldev advised me. This was beautiful and I enjoyed hearing the chattering of the langours and the morning birds around me as the sun came up - it promised to be a beautiful day. I took a rather jarring shower, then read a bit until Goodie arrived with the beautiful sight of a full tea service (complete with biscuits.) I sipped some nice Darjeeling tea, finished my book, then went out to join Baldev for a nice breakfast on the lawn.

I decided to spend the day walking. I am a dedicated walker and few things give me more pleasure in this life then pointing myself in an indeterminate direction and walking until I get tired. (This usually takes a bit.) So I found a likely looking path through the pine trees, the same one Vikram and I took the day before, and wandered down it.

It was not a particularly eventful walk, but one of the more beautiful and calm strolls I've taken, a total departure from the dusty, screeching sort of tumult that is low-lands India. When you're up in the hills at Landour, you are perched in a curious sort of cloud-level oasis from standard issue India, plunged into a relaxing small town sort of existence, where everyone knows who you are and who you are staying with, and possibly your purpose as well. Small towns are the same everywhere, after all - the occupants obsessed with each other and content enough not to bother with much of anything else. I was charmed to discover a book of Landour house-wife's recipes in Sheila's house, reminiscent of social cookbooks found anywhere in the world - except for the occasional bit of advice on how to boil water at 7000 feet or how to deal with the endless, maddening quantities of mutton a Landour cook is forced to contend with. (I think it'd take a bit for me to get sick of mutton, but I imagine it can be done.)

In any case, I found a good view and relaxed there for a bit, draping myself over a concrete railway and watching the world go by - old men on nattily decorated mules, porters smoking bhidis and toting microwave ovens on their backs, the chai-wallah tripping along with his cups and tea-warmer - and the occasional mischievous looking young couple speeding down to Mussorie-town proper on their motorbikes. (I do not know what kind of trouble you can get into in Mussorie, but I wish them the best of luck.)

I returned for another excellent lunch. Chicken curry with plenty of ginger and whole spices, yet more delicious bhindi, daal, and mutter gobi, along with the usual curd and chutney. I ate a huge amount and went out to sit on the porch and read for a bit, then perhaps take yet another welcome afternoon nap.

Baldev had arranged for me to meet Ruskin Bond, one of Mussorie's more famous figures - a travel writer and children's book author of considerable repute. (I had a book I wanted him to sign.) I'd read a couple of his books over the last few days and was very impressed with the wry, deeply human nature of his descriptions of rural India and the Himalayan countryside - and especially his love of walking for walkings sake, which is a notion I can get behind. So, Vikram and his sister Vineeta walked me down the hill to town, which was certainly steep as anything - my knees were begging for respite by the time we got to Ruskin's place, a pleasant falling-down sort of white bungalow at the ridge right above the bazaar.

We rang and Ruskin eventually answered the door, accompanied by the grinning children of what appeared to be his house-attendant. The three year old was engaged in a very serious discussion about god knows what on the phone, and we laughed about this for a bit. We exchanged pleasantries about Mussorie and he asked about Rajev, and then I got my book signed. I excused myself early - I really hate imposing on people - and decided to tool down to the bazaar.

I was very pleased with Ruskin's siudy. I believe I can determine whether someone is good or not very quickly by the state of their study. I have been in studies before that were like apocalypitc visions. once I wandered into an open house in my neighborhood out of pre-teen boredom. Wandering through the house, I found myself in what was apparently the appointed Book Room, which was full of books on basketball statistics, abdominal improvement exercises, and Tony Robbins 10 Minute Life-Long success seminars. There was also a puppet. I left very quickly. I have encountered many studies along these lines in my life and they infalllibly indicate a boring person.

Good studies, however, are like Ruskin's: cluttered, confusing, dusty and full of the various accumulations of a life well-lived. His study included an array of ancient and interesting travel books, a few trashy trade paperbacks, compilations of comic strips, photos of weird stuff, statues and figures accumulated from pretty much everywhere, and lots and lots of history books. In short it reminded me of my own study and the studies of everyone else I have known and loved, and it made me very happy. I support the cultivation of an interesting study.

I walked down to the bazaar for a bit and popped my head into the usual array of Kashmiri handicraft shops and tooth-ache inducing Indian sweetshops, although Mussorie does have an unusual quantity of used book stores. I discovered such titles on offer as Rafting Ohio's Rivers and Cultivating Your Italian Wine Collection, which I suppose might be relevant to someone somewhere in the area. Though I sort of doubt it.

We began the long climb up the hill, and I am very proud to report that I completely winded Vikram and Vineeta. Not that they aren't wonderful kids and good company, but I think I will be able to dine out on the story of winding a couple of kids from the Himalayas for a while now.

I hung out and wrote for a while then joined Baldev for a light dinner. We had a nice vegetable soup, and I had gobi mutter and saag - my favorites. We finished with some chapatis and a little bit of fruit, then watched the news for a bit. I was utterly exhausted, and after paging through the adorable Landour Cake Cookbook, excused myself for bed.

dellhi

2008-05-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

I awoke very early indeed and checked out of the International Center. I was off to spend three days in Mussorie, an old English hill station in the Himalayan foothills, near the town of Dehradun. This is about a five hour train ride from Delhi, so I needed to embark early. The bleary-eyed driver picked me up, along with Sheila's friendly young cook, and the cook helped me find my train car (this was harder then it seemed, and we spent a few early-morning minutes desperately trying to find my name on the little papers pasted on the train car walls.) I finally found my spot and immediately made my usual travelers nest - pashmina around the shoulders, laptop plugged into the handy outlet, backpack placed to create a strategic privacy-buffer zone - and I dropped off to sleep contendedly as the train chugged into action. I sleep very well on transportation.

I woke up slowly about an hour and a half into the ride - as usual I missed the drinks cart - and looked out the window. The scenery was rice paddies and yellow, waving fields, water buffalo shining with slick perspiration walking among the rushes. People in dodhis hunched over threshing grass, pausing to watch the train go by. I saw a woman in a brilliant red sari walking down a country trail as a storm rolled in, big grey clouds coming up from behind and billowing the cloth of her dress - and with that beautiful image in mind I dropped off again.

I woke up for the last time and we were almost there, the country growing more wild and rocky in my absence. Little shanties and vaguely Tibetan-looking houses lurked on top of rocky knolls, and the train rolled through thick rhodendran jungles (I even saw a couple of wild gaur or Indian cattle grazing in the clearings.) The day was a bit overcast and it lent a nice moody feel to the air outside - I could see the big dark outlines of the Himalayas off in the hazy distance, over the tops of the jungle vegetation. In one particularly dense looking bit of forest, I saw a lone, solitary rickshaw putting around a country road - they cannot be escaped.

(I have this running nightmare that there is a taxi or rickshaw parked in an alley somewhere in India, waiting for me, lurking in the shadows. It has my name written on it - I don't seem to see any driver - and it desires to crush me into nothingness, to turn me into yet another Indian traffic fatality. I have awoken in terror from such dreams on a few occasions and can only conclude that my destiny is written on the rusty bumper of an auto-rickshaw, my death dealt out by a slightly lit driver in a khaki suit toting a couple of plump and surprised aunties on a shopping tour. )

We finally arrived in Dehradun, and I disembarked from the train to find my taxi. (i find getting off trains so jarring - you have spent the past few hours in comfortable air conditioned doziness and suddenly you're up on your feet and elbowing touts and snarling at beggers and what the hell just happened.) I found him and hopped in the car, and we began winding our way through the traffic of Dehradun - a misty town totally unlike anything else I'd seen in India, full of wooden and mossy looking structures and hill people lugging huge loads on their backs. This was punctuated by expensive designer clothing emporiums and advertisements for air hostess training school.

It was election day and to the driver's consternation, we found ourselves behind a rowdy victory celebration, hordes of young men and women on motorbikes waving yellow flags and shouting and firing blanks into the air, gleefully shutting down traffic. The lady herself - the winner of the election - sped by in her yellow bedecked car, waving beatificially to her hordes of admirers. The driver muttered Hindi curses under his breath and attempted to navigate around them to make his way up the hill to Mussorie, but I rather enjoyed watching the whole thing go on.

The driver finally escaped the victory parade and we began winding our way up the most tortorous switchbacks I've ever seen in my life - after all, this is the Himalayas. We passed by rocky outcroppings and a colorful, gorgeous Buddhist school, making our way into the pine forest that Mussorie lies in- the car driving up ever more dizzying heights in a light and slightly disarming rain.

We finally reached Mussorie proper, a pleasant and slightly leaning old town perched on the very top of an incredibly steep hill. It's composed primarily of wood and is a curious combination of Himalayan hill archeitecutre and British design, a big old clock tower presiding over an antiquated bazaar full of smiling, healthy looking people shilling potato chips and used books to all comers. We weaved through the cobble-stoned street, dodging wizened looking porters and uniformed school children, to make our way to Landour - the little group of houses right up above Mussorie where Sheila and Baldev's place is located.

The car stopped and I noticed the house was actually situated down below the road, on a lovely ridge with a full view of the wild Himalayan peaks. You can't see Mussorie town from this side, just a bunch of tiny, tiny little white villages and the curiously graduated outlines of farming terraces.

I disembarked and went down to meet Baldev, Sheila's very sweet husband, who prefers to spend his time up here instead of in the boiling misery of Delhi's summers. We talked about my family and his with a bit of delving into Indian political affairs, and I was introduced to their house staff - Goody and I believe Manesh, though I am probably getting his name wrong - who were preparing lunch. We then sat down for a lovely lunch - bhindi masala (yum), curried lotus root, lamb curry, and some daal, along with those nice little wheat chapatis that puff out hot air when you pop them with a fork. This was served with home-made mint chutney - refreshing as a breath mint - and some tangy and rich curd, which is used as a condiment with pretty much anything. We finished with some fruit and a biscuit or two. India is turning me into a serious digestive biscuit aficionado. I imagine a visit to England itself would ruin me. (I would subsist primarily on McVitie's Chocolate Digestives and then turn into Jabba the Hutt.)

Anyway.

Goody's friendly 13 year old son, Vikram, was consigned to take me on a little tour of the hillside, and we set off despite a gentle (and in my opinion, most welcome) drizzle that set the rhodendron leaves quivering and settled a gentle, refreshing mist over the hillside. Himalayan rhodendrons bloom lovely red flowers that appear most suprisingly in the blanket of green that surrounds the rocky crags - singular and interesting. (I also enjoyed the tenacious little stands of yellow daisies that erupt in the spring time.) I half-heartedly chased a few little bronze skinks, the sort that always travel in pairs - but skinks are hard to catch and they probably form profound interpersonal bonds that I should not lay asunder.

Vikram and I tromped up to Prakash's tiny little curio shop and rummaged around a bit, looking at carefully preserved and oh so English pressed flower greeting cards and bronze statues of Buddhist icons intermingled with the omnipresent packs of biscuits. Adam had mentioned offside the day before that he had not actually bothered to acquire a towel for his service apartment and was using a sheet instead, and I decided as a sort of joke to buy him one from 7000 feet in a little Himalayan village. (I figure this would be a high altitude sort of towel.) I found a nice blue one and went up to pay, inadvertently offending the hell out of some high class type English people there as well, by asking if they were American. I am beginning to confuse the accents. (Nothing seems to piss off an English person more then being mistaken for an American, even if the mistake is entirely innocent.)

We set off down the mountain again, passing by the Kellog Language School (contained in a nice old granite church), coming to a wonderful viewpoint of Mussorie town proper and the Woodstock School below. I was alerted to the presence of the Woodstock school by the decidely unexpected sound of a highschool band playing American football fight songs and "Eye of the Tiger" below me - Woodstock is an American boarding school in a very, very strange location. It's got an incredibly good reputation and the location certainly can't be beat - Sheila went there himself - and I found myself wishing quietly that I'd just gone there instead of having to deal with the general misery of American high school. (But that's all water under the bridge!)

We finally found ourselves at Four Shops, a little clearing that is exactly what it sounds like: four little tea shops perched on the side of a cliff, where hillsmen and tourists park their mules and luxury jeeps side-by-side to drink chai and gossip about everyone else. We ran into Baldev and went to the Tip Top Tea Shop to order tea and read the newspaper. While there, Baldev hailed his friend Ganesh, who is apparently a photographer and writer of some note in the area, along with his charming wife and daughter. He was great fun to listen to, and I quietly attempted to figure out something, anything about Indian politics as they talked shop - the daughter is a news announcer with one of the major Indian networks, in the area to cover the elections. Victor Banarjee, one of India's more renowned actors, also blew through with his wife, although I didn't get to actually meet him: he was yelling at someone on the phone. (I understand. I often find myself needing to yell at people on the phone.)

The clouds began looking ominous again, so we walked back to the house, and I had a lovely nap in the ridiculously huge bed I'd been appointed in the outside cottage. I awoke just in time for dinner: tasty garlic spinach soup, chapati, cucumber and tomato salad with garlic, and some curried cabbage and peas. After supper, Baldev and I sipped whiskey meditatively and watched the BBC - the story of the Texas polygamy case had just broke. I found myself having to explain that this sort of polygamy business is not uncommon in the United States (with extreme embarrassment.)

I was tired and decided to retire early to my warm room - Goodie had lit the big wood burning stove in the corner. Still, coming up from the heat of Bangalore and Delhi, a little evening chill in the air and the refreshing, smoky snap of burning wood was pure luxury. I slept very well.

delhi day 2

2008-05-12T00:39:00.000-07:00

I woke up nice and late, and Sheila picked me up for coffee then a trip to Humayun's Tomb. Although foreigners are charged a rather extortionate 500 rupees (about 12 bucks) to the Indian 10, it was worth it: it's a very impressive structure, reminescent of (though preceding) the Taj Mahal. Built of red sandstone, it's absolutely huge, gigantic steps leading up to the inner sanctum within. Just like at the Taj, tiny and intricate little aqua-colored canals lead right up to the steps, and I loved watching leaves and other debris wind their way through the currents. Sheila says that they hold night concerts here of Indian classical music, which sound sublime - I'll definitely catch one next time I'm in Delhi.

Sheila had some work to attend to, so she told the driver to drop me off at her favorite seafood restaurant in the military district of Delhi. (I think.) The restaurant was a nicely appointed and fiercely air conditioned enclave among many other eating establishments: the menu focused on Mangalore style seafood, which is very famous within India. (Lots of places focusing on Mangalore food in Bangalore as well.) I was profoundly happy to see bhindi masala (okra cooked with tomatoes and spices) on the menu, so I ordered that and their special fish - prepared in tamarind paste and red chili.

As I was waiting for my food, a corpulent woman and her brother entered, and she immediately began ordering around the staff in the most amusing way possible - "The music is vile! Change it!" "No, we do not need RICE, how DARE YOU EVEN PROPOSE IT", "I find these onions too large!" et all. One thing I've noticed is that Indians are a lot less bashful about ordering around service staff then Americans are - I've often found myself blushing with embarrassment about how rude Indians seem to be to otherwise innocent 19 year old waiters making no money whatsoever. I suppose this why they call them cultural differences.

My cell phone actually got reception at the restaurant, so I got a hold of Adam and we made plans to find somewhere to get a stiff drink in Delhi. This is apparently more difficult then one might anticipate.

The driver took me next to Old Delhi - dropping me off at the mosque in front of the Red Fort. This was admittedly one of the more jarring experiences of my time in India, as I disembarked from a nice air conditioned Ford into total and complete chaos during the hottest part of the day - maimed child beggers trailing me up the steps of the mosque as grinning teenagers attempted to sell me such essential items as fake beards and water-proof watches. I took a polite look at the mosque and the fort - a good view from the top of the steps - and decided that descending into the warren-like bazaar that oozed all around me unaccompanied was probably not the best idea on the planet, delicious looking mutton-kebabs and pilaf on offer nonwithstanding. (Fruit salad vendors here always burn incense. What fruit salad and incense have to do with one another, I cannot tell you). I did, however, need an ATM and a Diet Coke, and with those noble ideals in mind, I went off down the street to my right.

This street was slightly less insane, although a few guys insisted on following me and asking in plainitive voices if I Needed Any Help. (no, no, I did not.) Also rickshaw drivers here like to solicit you by saying, "Hey, baabbyyyy, need a ride?" which makes me infinitely less likely to want to take their vehicle. I guess they do not know this.

Anyway. The street seemed to specialize primarily in microwave ovens - I know where to direct you if you are in dire need of a microwave oven whilst in New Delhi - and it was a long dry trek to a Diet Coke salesman. He turned out to be lovely, and called me "his daughter" while giving me a discounted price on my fake sugar infused refreshment. I stepped out of the shop and continued down the street, finding to my dismay that all the ATM's were on the *other* side of the street. Now, crossing the street in the USA or most other first world countries isn't really a huge deal - you find a crossing, you press the button, you wait. In places like India and China, however, there is no such thing as a crossing and really no such thing as pedestrian right of way: crossing the street means entering into an all too-real game of Frogger played with one's own body. However, I do have a strategy: find the toughest, nastiest looking dried up old lady waiting to cross and cross with her. Tough looking old ladies in these sort of countries generally have the good sense to make it through traffic unscathed. This is exactly what I did and no one managed to run me down. (Remember that.)

I found an ATM, collected my money in the 120 degree heat of the little money-collecting cubicle, and dipped into about five different book stores to make walking down the street a little more bearable. I came out again at the Red Fort and gawked at it for a while - it is absolutely immense and really does seem to go on forever. However, I didn't have the energy or the will to actually go inside the damn thing and pursue all billion rooms it is saId to contain, so I went back to find my driver. This took a bit, as finding anyone on the steps of the mosque requires will and fortitude (and the ability to ignore beggars asking for chapatis for their cancerous mother's brother.) I finally found him, and we walked seemingly a mile and a half back to the car, which was parked down a side street in the Wool District next to a goat. Parking well in India really should be considered an art in and of itself.

I returned to the International Center and flopped down in a state of profound exhaustion.

Sheila picked me up around six and took me to the Khan Market, which was right around the corner from the International Center and apparantly the nicest retail space in Delhi. I believe it: it was brimming with gleaming Escada outlets, populated by sunburned and desperate looking expats. The grocery stores carried every single kind of Western brand of potato chip and toothpaste imaginable, and I saw one American woman with a desperate look in her eye carrying a massive, brimming over armful of Salt and Vinegar Lays to the counter. (I was boring and just bought some attractively priced Indian cereal.) Sheila showed me some lovely but unfortunately expensive stuff at the Enokhi outlet, and I also found a very nice Kashmiri handicrafts store - Christmas ornaments of camels and man eating tigers anyone? (I really shoulda bought that.)

Sheila and I proceeded to the Golf Club to meet Rajev, who was having a swim at the rather salubrious pool (loomed over by a Mughal era tomb.) We alerted him to our presence then retreated to the lovely, wood paneled pub to have a tumbler of Teacher's whiskey and comport ourselves fully for dinner. The golf course itself was lovely on the warm evening, and I enjoyed watching a couple of stray dogs happily chase each other up and down the beautifully manicured greens. (you can never eliminate the dogs fully in India. they are omnipresent and eternal.)

Dinner was delicious, lemony tandoori pomfret, a vegetable tandoori platter with aloo tikka (roasted spiced potato), veg seekh kebab (minced mixed vegetables roasted), stuffed tandoori peppers, and baby corn, along with tandoori roti and the usual delicious daal makhani (black lentils with cream.) I was slightly but happily boozed, and Sheila and I had an enjoyably rowdy conversation about Men.

Sheila dropped me off at the International Center, and I figured I might as well just go to bed, since Adam seemed to be getting off work pretty late. To my suprise, he called around ten o' clock and asked me what I was doing - well, not much of anything. I proposed we go to Connaught Place and see if there was anything in a stiff drink there, and he agreed to meet me at the Center.

Adam showed up around 11 and I walked out to meet him...he was standing at the gate and looking confused. Unfortunately, the Center's gate was closed and I had no idea how to get around it. Which meant I had to jump over the India International Center's gate at 11 at night to the deeply disapproving stare of the night security guard.

We caught a taxi to Connaught Place for a not-too-bad 150 rupees and proceeded to look for somewhere, anywhere, that would give us a drink. Connaught Place is a very large circle full of expensive retail and banking offices, and we circulated the area a few times before running into a bar called Olive, which featured nice Detroit-esque surrroundings and very overpriced drinks. Still, we were desperate, and Adam bit the bullet and ordered a vodka, which meant that I of course had to order a cheap gin. I ordered it neat and the waiter gave Adam a look of worry and solidarity, which I found very amusing.

The bill was highway robbery but we paid it anyway.

We walked around a few more times, debated getting ice cream, decided against it as being almost too pathetic, and met a guy in a car with his friends who asked us, "Hey, where's Connaught Place?" Obviously this was just a pretext to talk to us, but we gestured about 2.5 feet away at that BIG ROUND HUGE THING.

I asked the mysterious guy in the car where a good bar was, and he shrugged and said, "Hey, jump in...we'll find something." As my mother always told me not to get into cars with strange men and this seemed like a textbook case, I walked away, though Adam industriously tried to grill him for a bit on something, anything in the area. No dice.

We finally found a flashy Chinese restaurant shutting down for the night populated by four or five lit Indian guys and some nervous looking servers. They begrudgingly served me a gin, though they would have vastly preferred it if I had had tequila shots, and Adam had his perennial vodka and diet Coke. I really, really want to be there the day he orders something else. Hopefully something completely unexpected like absinthe or a long island iced tea or a singapore sling or something-anything other then vodka and diet coke. Or maybe even one of those pink frothy things Chris is partial too. Though I can't really see that happening.

It was getting rather late and I had begun nodding off over the table and alternating words with other words, so we decided to head on home. Finding a taxi proved more difficult then expected but we finally managed one - Adam seems to like negotiating with taxi drivers as much as he likes negotiating with rickshaw drivers. I'm not half bad at arguing with the criminals but I derive little pleasure from it - it's kind of like squashing cockroaches - unpleasant but necessary. Adam on the other hand, far as I can tell, seems to derive real pleasure from telling taxi and rickshaw drivers that they are cheating awful criminal scum, who had better knock down the price quick or we are calling the authorities. (I have seen him use the whip out your camera to photograph their license trick on multiple occasions.) This is definitely a useful trait to have in a traveling companion. Sort of like consigning someone else to squash your cockroaches for you. (Or rickshaw drivers.)

I got home late - the security guard remained disapproving - and got a good three hours or so of sleep before I needed to awaken to catch the morning train to Mussorie.

(I'm going to look back and laugh at the inherent, youthful ridiculousness of the whole situation, laugh someday about how when I was 19 and stupid I was up way too late walking around Connaught Place in New Delhi (of all places!) over and over looking for a drink with a good friend, and how we couldn't find anything, but at least we were cussed enough to put in the effort to try, to circumnavigate the damn thing over and over in a desperate attempt to find a good time......I guess this is why I travel anyway, for these ridiculous memories)

agra

2008-04-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Woke up way too early to catch the car to the IITC Maurya hotel - where my tour was due to embark from. Sheila insisted on booking me the luxe tour, as she noted, (speaking softly and conspiratorily), "I could have saved you money on the cheaapp tour, but I believe there are often people on drugs on those types of things." I am unable to argue.

I disembarked at the IITC's opulent lobby, and settled myself on a super-plush armchair to await the car. The little brochure and the man upfront had led me to believe that tea was free from the lobby's restaurant, so I wandered in and ordered a cup (silly me.) I drank it quickly and was displeased to discover that a Maurya Hotel seal of approval cup of tea costs 280 rupees - I didn't even have that much cash in my wallet. With no other options, I whipped out my credit card.

At that moment, the large, sweating man who occupied (with entirety) the table next door boomed, "What, you pay for a cup of tea with a credit card?" I shrugged, embarrassed, and he made a chopping motion with his hand - "Psh! I will cover it for you! Sit down, sit down, I am Bollywood!" He was wearing a vest and nothing under it, since he claimed, "I sit here, drink tea and coffee all night, I get terribly hot...." - (I disbelieve he was only drinking tea.) He insisted I take down his contact info in my book, for "I am very big in Agra! They LOVE me in Agra." I shall have to google him later and find out if he is actually Bollywood or simply a drunk man with a considerable amount of money, but I did get a free cup of tea out of the situation and that is good enough for me. (I am beginning to think I should write a brief guide to scoring free drinks in foreign countries.)

In any case, the bus finally arrived and I managed to drag myself away from my benefactor (the waiter looking devastatingly embarassed the entire time), making it out to my seats. I began chatting with the two people in front of me, who turned out to be FedEx pilots on a brief swing through New Delhi: naturally they had to see the Taj. They had traveled just about everywhere due to the nature of their job, and I enjoyed listening to them talk casually about Morocco and Dubai and Italy, as I gave them a few tips on India. The scenery outside as we moved to Delhi gave me a curious sense of deja-vu: it reminded me of nothing more then the I-80 route from Sacramento San Francisco, the same kind of dry lands scrub and occasional oases - though of course I-80 features considerably less camels, elephants, and tonga horse carts. Moving vehicles, however, put me straight to sleep, and I dozed under my lovely new red and pink pashmina the entire rest of the way.

Our first stop was Akbar's brilliant red mausolem, which emerges in grand Mughal splendor from the flat and unprepossessing desert land that accompanies it. It was getting very hot by me and we disembarked, panting, from the bus, shouldering aside the hordes of eager bangle and figurine sellers who pounced upon us. We walked up the wide avenue to the mausolem, all set off in red and white tiles, passing through the gateway which was decorated in beautifully written passages from the Quaran. As you pass through the gateway, you have sudden and gorgeous exposure to the sight-lines the Mughal emperors must have had: the crisp green gardens spreading out from the water-canals that pointed right to the center of the tomb and the cenotaph within, herds of dainty antelope playing and fighting among the flowers and palm trees beside.

The mausoleum itself: almost heart breaking. I have always had a slightly embarassing and highly romantic ability to be moved by architecture: this was a stellar example of such. You walk through the richly decorate entry-way and pass through a dark tunnel into the inner sanctum, which is, surprisingly, almost totally undecorated but for a black cenotaph and an ornate and wired incense burner hanging directly above. Even the tourists go a bit quiet inside, although the acoustics are incredible, as a man who called out a bit of the Quaran showed us: sound bouncing off in melodic, dense waves from the geometrically outlined ceiling. Pigeons called to each other quietly from the rafters and tiny half-seen bats chased from end of the roof to the other - (you may never be completely alone in eternity, you will always have companions: tourists for Akbar by day, and bats and pigeons to see him through the night.) The tomb is supposed to be an elegy and not a poem (as the saying goes), and I think that is an apt description of it as there might possible be. You walk into it and feel sad and melancholy, but not over so - you are reminded, merely, of how terribly short things can be.

So back on the bus.

Next stop was the Agra Fort, where the poor Shah, builder of the Taj Mahal, was impriosoned by his unappreciative son to the end of his days. The scale, of course, is majestic, red sandstone walls bursting out of the plains and up and away, and it's a curious, tropical experience to walk through the ramp and up the red gates, entering an inner sanctum of green palm trees and sweating benches. But the red does not and cannot go on forever: when you enter the place of the Shah and his harem's imprisonment, everything turns into startling white marble, evocative of the Taj itself, worked over nicely with lapis-lazuli and wire and precious stones. You stand at the entrance to the complex and look over the gorgeous, geometric gardens of red and green that Babur himself was so partial too, looking right into the bedrooms and living chambers of the Shah and his women. (But he only had eyes for Mumtatz, which is what they say.)

The Taj can be viewed across the lazy blue river from the screens, can be viewed from between white columns and delicately carved white marble walls. (But just the back portion, which was in my opinion more then salubrious enough though viewed from distance.) Although you can not go onto it, you can see out onto the porch where the Shah himself died, eyes fixed on the Taj Mahal (I presume) until he finally took it upon himself to expire - this is another tragedy written in architecture, and it is as beautiful and lonesome as I had imagined.

We broke for lunch at the fanciest hotel in Agra, whose name unfortunately escapes me. It was refreshing enough: we disembarked and walked through a lovely garden delicately spritzed with a fountain, and I even saw a slinky brown mongoose disappearing into the geraniums. The lobby was all engraved white marble and pomp, of course reminescent of the Taj itself. Even the buffet lunch was excellent: I had some unusual and tasty jackfruit curry and the only reputable Chinese food (mushrooms in black bean sauce) I have encountered here in India, along with a tasty sort of preserved fruit thing serving as an Indian dessert. We hung out and chatted in the profoundly air conditioned air: next was the Taj.

You approach the Taj up a rather dusty and tourist infested path, then are dumped from your bus and made to board another one (as tourists cannot be expected to walk any distance over a quarter of a mile.) This takes you to the gates of the complex, where a grim faced security woman pats down sensitive parts of your body and ushers you inside. You walk down a long long red stone gallery until you reach a gateway: the Taj is before you.

It is a tragic cliche but the Taj truly is the most perfect piece of architecture the world has ever generated: it cuts through the sky in white marble perfection, juxtaposed prettily against the blue afternoon. It is entirely true that "no part of it displeases the eye" - you comtemplatively scan it hoping for some sort of human flaw, some discordant component, and find none. Tinkling, aqua-colored canals run from the gateway to the doorway of the Taj itself, tracing off in geometric water-ways all throughout the gardens - which are shot through with flowers and palms. (No gazelle here, sadly.)

It was of course deadly hot and we slipped on foot covers to walk out on the white porch to enter the sanctum within, laughing Indian tourists in brilliant red and orange sarees padding barefoot over the super-heated marble floors. The inner sanctum itself is another elegy: blinding light giving way to a subtle, halting darkness, a screen of beautifully wrought wire surrounding the cenotaphs of the Shah and Mumtaz. The screen around the tombs is decorated with rainbow colored images of flowers and vines, none exactly the same - the flower opens and closes and opens again in close sucession (life proceeding too in endless circles, Hindu or no Hindu, we will meet again someday.) The usual dark incense burner hangs here too in quiet outer space, accomapanied as usual by softly gurgling pigeons.

I walked out into the open air again and tracked the aqua-blue canals back down to the gateway, encountering a man who claimed to be the Taj's own gardener, and a blushing young Indian man with his English relations who wanted me to pose in a picture with him. (I always say yes. Why do I always say yes?) I made it back to the red stone gateway and watched the view for a happy 15 minutes or so, a big and jubilant Indian family squabbling good humoredly behind me. (This was their monument too, and anyway, their Hindi accented nattering gave the place a sort of life that might be denied it otherwise.) Then we got back on the bus.

So what did I think of the Taj? I am entirely happy I saw it and entirely happy I took it upon myself to awaken early and haul all the way to Agra: it is truly as perfect as I had dreamed of it being. It is of course slightly smaller then I had expected but I find that that only adds to its beauty: it is just overstated enough, its beauty functioning on the calm scale that most truly beautiful things manage. And yes, it is sad, terribly sad: a love poem erected by a man who was not particularly lucky, an elegy to a woman who died too young. (I hope I can find a man someday, who will build me such a thing when I pass, but I think I will be lucky with a correctly spelled tombstone and some fake geraniums.)

In any case, we got back on the bus and proceeded to the Official Tourist Shopping Centre, full of hideous and expensive knick-knacks (along with some pretty marble tables.) As I definitely do not have the financial wherewithal to purchase a single thing on offer in that shop, I decided to wander down the street and pick up a Diet Coke instead. I found myself being nervously followed by the overweight and sweating tour organizer, who yelled, "No, come back! You will get drink here!" I explained I had been in India about seven weeks already and was unlikely to be abducted in a sleepy street in Agra if it had not already happened, and this seemed to convince him to retreat to the air conditioned cool of the bus. I bargained the shop-keeper down to 30 rupees from 50 for a coke (highway robbery!) and sat around and watched the shop assistants attempt to sell people crap they didn't need. Then back on the bus to Delhi.

I slept almost the entire way, although we did stop at a nice bus stop for dinner. I convinced the two FedEx Pilots to order some dinner, and they were deeply impressed at how delicious and cheap a simple supper of veg curry and samosas can be at a good ol' Punjabi Dhaba. (Well, this one was nice. It even had lovely bathrooms. And a snake charmer.)

We got back to the Maurya around 10 at night. Some sort of super glitzy do was going on, and models and Bollywood stars cruised the lobby on their way out of the lovely golf themed bar. I found myself wishing for a shower and my evening gown so I could join the fun. The FedEx pilots kindly invited me to join them for a bottle of French red wine and I was sorely tempted, but my driver came for me and I went on back to bed.

2008-04-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

Got up ridiculously early as is my wont to hit the airport. (I adhere to my grandfather's Gotta Be Somewhere policy.) I said goodbye to Chris, who I really will miss immensely - the perfect human combination of English charm and wry, polite willingness to go anywhere and do anything. I was absolutely touched by his willingness to get up early to see me off, bleary eyes and all. Chris, if you're reading this, please please please stay in touch: you're absolutely one of the most charming humans I've ever met and I valued every minute of your company - your steadying influence on my admittedly rash and unthinking self was a godsend, and no one can make me laugh harder when it comes to making subtle, spot on comments on the nature of the universe. Whenever I find myself in England again, I will make a point of coming to bother you in your little English village (or generate doubtless unwelcome trouble within it.) Also, I'd love to try some of your family soap......(i will always value the lovely elephant from Goa: try not to crash the bitchin' rickshaw too early.)

I also saw off Kasey who, a humanitarian, gifted me his last pack of America fruit-flavored chewing gum. He may never fully comprehend how happy that made me.

The airport was quite close to good old Thippasandra, so the ride was quick: I ended up spending a few hours dozing off waiting to board my JetAir flight to Delhi. The airplane itself was surpisingly nice, nicer and newer then most US planes, with an individual inflight entertainment system and everything. (On Southwest you pay more money for stale peanuts and horrible attempts at inflight humor by the stewardesses, so no complaints here.)

I love watching the enviroment change as I descend into a new city: Delhi was profoundly different from congested Bangalore, all spread out with slightly scrubby terrain, red brick buildings giving way to palatial government palaces and humongous Mughal monuments. We mae a good landing, and I met my Auntie Sheilie at the airport.

Auntie Sheilie and her husband, Baldev, were best friends with my grandparents back in their Dow Chemical days. By way of explaination, my grandparents are to some margin the reason I am here in India and why I am so addicted to Asian travel: they gave the damn idea in the first place. I spent my early childhood at their big Florida house full of bewitching Chinese, Korean, and Indian artifacts: little metalwork fish and paintings of tigers and inlaid Kashmiri daggers: I would sit at their feet as we all ate dinner out of wooden bowls in their living room as they talked about India (and you could hear the nostalgic, profound affection there in their voices) - the train journeys and the sandal-wood scented boats in Kashmir, the game reserves and terrifying langur monkeys, bathing ghats and water buffalo: of course I had to go. It's a bloody cliche but I read Kim at their house about two years ago and determined that after I saw China, India would have to be next.

Now, Auntie Sheilie was everything I expected her to be: the Indian mirror image of my voraciously intellectual and eminently classy grandparents. We were immediately discusing authors and books of all stripes as soon as we met (she ushering me into her private car and contemplating me on my dress). It was like picking up a conversation with my grandmother, really, and it was a lovely thing indeed - she pointing out various neighborhoods and boroughs of Delhi as we proceeded to the India International Centre where she had booked me a room. My first impression of Delhi was, I'm afraid, the bourgeois side: Delhi looked to be all wide open avenues and leafy tree-lined streets, almost deserted compared to the omnipresent scrum that is Bangalore. There were rickshaws and cows and dogs here too, of course, but they all seemed curiously controlled - not mashing up against each other (delightfully I must say) as in Bangalore. I'm certain Delhi is certifiably bug-fuck insane in other neighborhoods, but the Golf LInks neighrobhood houses Delhi's upper crust: no one-eyed leprosy ridden snake charmers here, I am sorry, Salman Rushdie.....

We drove to the India Interational Center, which is apparantly a famous locale for Indian intellectuals - Shiela's daughter, Deepha, is a member. It's a deeply 60's mod sort of building and I loved it immediately, with wide open grounds full of green flitting parakeets and hawks, wealthy male and female businessmen conferring quietly on the grounds, sipping omnipresent tumblers of gin and tonic. Sheila treated me to lunch at the club, which was startlingly inexpensive and wonderful - tender, lemony fish tikka, delicious and earthy saag, dal makhani (yum) and tasty little rotis. I discovered to my immense pleasure that northern India serves my beloved, beloved peach chutney tableside with every meal. I am buying huge quantities and bullying it through customs.

(Sheila told me that my grandfather once, when asked to give his fathers name by the Indian authorities for some godforsaken reason on a customs issue, bristled and answered "Jesus Christ!" I do not disbelieve it.)

(That is the great pleasure of meeting people your family knew and loved from far away: you triangulate these people you have known and loved yourself for so long, interpret them through another viewpoint, see them through the vantage of someone else's time and experience. And they are not there to deny anything!)

I had a lovely nap and shower (good lord, but it is nice to use a shower and not have to worry about the water shorting out, to sleep and not have to worry about mosquitos and sudden drunken intrusions.....admittedly, I was the direct root of many Katary drunken-intrusions but still...)

We went out to a nice sanitized variant of the bazaars I knew and loved from Bangalore. Sheila had a trusted pashmina vendor and since I'd lost my beloved Chinese pashmina in Mysore, I needed a new one. (Sheila insisted losing something was good luck, but I still adored that thing, and it's the only souvenir I have from China since I never buy things....) In any case, I selected two lovely red ones - one expensive and one not so so - for myself. I then focused on the main attraction, which was finding lovely blue ones for my mom. I found her a vibrant turquoise variant and a lovely embroidered blue one that Sheila picked out herself - hopefully she'll love them. (You better!) (I know you're reading this!) (We looked for a water buffalo but couldn't find one.....would you settle for a Nandi....or a tiger Christmas ornament....?) We managed to get all four gorgeous pashminas for 5000 rupees, which, if you know Indian money, is one hell of a deal.

Pashminas, by the way, are some of the most wonderful and versastile clothing items know to man - and the fact that they are breathtakingly beautiful in most cases is just icing on the cake. A pashmina can add exotic appeal to an evening gown, jazz up a gungy jeans and t-shirts combo, cover embarassing curry stains, be used as a blanket, a towel, or (if feeling inventive) perhaps a noose or an escape rope. I wear my pashmina quite often back home in the USA and I suggest you do the same.

We passed by the gorgeous Lodhi Gardens to have a stroll and pick up Deepa. The gardens are breathtaking, slightly reminescent of the public gardens I recall from Rome: an arresting mixture of ancient architecutre and modern, perfectly manicured greenery. Joggers wove in and out of the night-lit Mughal tombs that lit up atmospherically as the sun went down. I popped my head in the black, curving entrance of one of the tombs, viewing the occupants black monolithic cenotaph slumbering quietly inside:

I wonder about how it is to spend eternity in a park like this - did they anticipate it would be a minor tourist attraction, that joggers would go by and couples make goo-goo eyes at each other on blankets on the grass outside, that there is no such thing as solitude in public places in the time after death? Or is that what they wanted - this sort of lively company during the day and in the quiet going-down hours, when living people are spooked by wandering around in ancient tombs - do they appreciate the downtime, the quiet?

But of course I do not believe in life after death.

We found the lovely Deepha (who is making a deeply impressive recovery from breast cancer while studying for exams), then went back to Golf Links for dinner. I also met Rajev, Sheila and Baldev's son, who has made an impressive recovery from a brain tumor in his younger days and is now a delight to be around - we happily discussed various Indian authors over dinner. (Both he and Sheila are trying to get me to read Ayn Rand. Watch out, mom. Watch out.)

Sheila and Baldev's white and lovely home was deja-vu for me: an Indian mirror image of my grandparents house, with reciprocal art objects and trinkets that they had exchanged with each other sitting on tables, pictures of my family and there's interspersed among them. (I loved seeing the little clackety metal fish that fascinated me so at three years old sitting on the table: I shall have to buy a couple.) Sheila loves Bob Dylan, so we put him on for a bit then switched to Indian flute music as we chatted. She poured me a generous tumbler of Teacher's which I accepted (like one wandering through the desert) - it was an absolute revelation after too many weeks of Old Monk.

We had a lovely dinner prepared by Sheila's kitchen staff - leg of mutton, organic beans raised at the family farm, kuchamber salad with a little bit of lemon, garlic, and olive oil, and my beloved gobi mutter, along with bewitching little wheat rotis that emitted puffs of steam when punctured. We finished off with incredibly good alphonso mango and papaya for dessert along with some little jewel like beads of pomegranate - sublime.

I was deposited at the International Centre by the chauffeur and had a most excellent sleep in my highly air conditioned room. Sometimes it is nice to return to the good life.

2008-04-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

We woke up fashionably late (noonish). It was one of those languid days where no one can summon up the energy to do anything. It was my last day in Bangalore and I knew I should do something about that, but I've always been curiously awful at goodbyes - and I shouldn't be, since I've made so many of them. My method of leaving a place, even one that's been good to me, is to slip away in the night and attempt to avoid confronting any unpleasant realities. I know it's awful, but it alleviates the pressure on me of having to cut anything off at the stump: I prefer not to think about it.

In any case, Chris, Arvin, Phil, Kasey and I finally summoned up the energy to go for one last nice lunch at the Oasis. I ordered tandoori crab and tandoori gobi: even better then last time. The crab comes in a generous portion and the meat is indescricably sweet and spicy with a nice, charred flavor - awesome. I thought the gobi was scrumptious, but Phil described it as "perfumey". Well, his loss. I also tried some tasty and sweet tandoori prawns, nice vinegary chicken Hyderabadi, and the omnipresent chili squid.

Chris needed to do some work, and I (exhausted) wanted to join him back at Katary. However, Arvin, Phil, and Kasey peer-pressured me into staying out with them, and we went on a long hot trek down M.G Road to find an art gallery that supposedly existed in Cubbon Park. (I was suspicious.) I had a good time talking to Phil about various aspects of the universe, as a guy trying really really hard to sell him a drum followed him down the avenue. (They always leave me alone. Do I look like the kind of woman who wouldn't need a drum or want one? Should I be offended?)

We did find the park, which I hadn't been to in forever and was a nice leafy sort of interlude from the rest of the city. We wandered through the small, somewhat tragic theme park and a lovely bamboo forest, that clattered and shivered in the afternoon breeze. The boy s had popsicles (What flavor is it? .....Orange?) and we gave up on the art gallery and spent some time trying to find some monkeys. Well, they wanted to see monkeys. My monkey policy is avoid at all costs but they don't share my opinions on the matter. Thankfully we didn't find any.

We broke down and decided to go back to the hookah bar on M.G, which was certainly nice and new and air conditioned, although the black-chalk walls are accumulating more and more Indian style slurs since the last time I visited. We smoked hookah and soked ever-downward in the entirely too squishy bean-bag chairs, watching as the (apparantlly all 12 year old) fellow patrons circulated around, staring at us as if we were aliens imported from Planet Zog or something. Kasey isn't used to it yet. Trust me, he will be. I do like hookah: it's a nice cool way to spend a hot afternoon, which I guess is what it was designed for. (Mind you, the overciviliized English call it shisha but...whatever.)

We managed to get a rickshaw back and I spent my last day on my beloved, squalid, cow-infested Thippasandra road doing nothing in particular: purchasing one last overpriced pineapple, one last viciously bargained for kilo of grapes, one last Diet Pepsi from the stony-faced Casio SuperBazaar guys. I hit the internet cafe and on the way down neatly broke the heel off my favorite pair of shoes. Balls. Bollocks.

We spent the rest of the evening talking and watching the usual awful movies. I couldn't fend off sleep any longer and crashed halfway through as Chris raptly watched Failure for Launch, though I managed to reawaken when the others got back from the Night Boozer. We hung out and drank (through yet another damn power outage) and I said my goodbyes and went to bed. I had to wake up early the next morning to make Delhi.

Goodbyes: I've been thinking about them a lot. It's the nature of this kind of trip, of the kind of existence I've led my entire life, really - a constant state of leaving and departing. I had a few theories on the matter, formented this summer in Beijing: I was standing under an umbrella in a humid rain with a Dutch aquaintance, sharing a joint: he turned to me and said, sadly, "You know, friendship is an illusion, a temporary thing: we keep o moving on."

I believed him, I'd been believig him for months and months. In the past week or so here in India, I'd come to the halting, unpleasant conclusion that people are to some extent interchangeable, that I would enjoy the company of different people just as much if the cards had been played differently (if you will) I was with one group of people at Katary for about seven weeks and they were good, good friends to me: but then the new group came in and I could see the potential for the same thing in them - this confuses me. Is anyone really special, or do we simply tolerate each other, grow to know each other, by circumstance?

This would be nice for me, for as I stated earlier, I am wont to simply melt away and pretend I wasn't there when I say goodbye: I hate to put a cap on things, I hate to acknowledge it. If everyone is essentially the same, if no one is truly special, if a good but always temporary friend can be found anywhere...

But saying goodbye to Chris and Adam and Aneesa, that did feel different, it really did. I remember I had a fairly rueful discussion with Adam (I was probably drunk) where I said something to the accord of, "Look, I love the company of you and all the people here, but won't it turn into another Facebook-driven sort of thing - exchanging "lol how r u's" over the internet and nothing more - isn't that how this always has to be? Does anyone really care about anyone else, here?"

Adam is a more decent and hopeful person then myself and he believes that sometimes people really do care, that chance traveling friendships can mean something, that perhaps we are not all interchangeable. I think I may be beginning to believe him. I have role models: my grandparents 40 year long friendship with Sheila and Baldev here in India, still going strong - perhaps we can make friends while traveling, keep in correspondence, remember each other fondly as something somewhat special rather then another face in the crowd - perhaps this is something I have to learn before I can be happy. I do worry if my life will continue as it has been: a succession of chance encounters - but if I can learn to let those make me as happy as the long term sort that stationary people have....(or get better at staying in touch?)

I'm rambling, I know, but these are the thoughts of an unsettled person, the thoughts of a young and unsettled person. Someday maybe I will resolve them. Watch this space.

2008-04-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

My last day at work. I said my goodbyes to everyone and got their contact info: if Food and Wine Mumbai has any openings, I know who to call. The lovely Lori and James accompanied me to Konark for one last lunch: gobi mutter, vegetable curry, fruit salad - the usual. I told Lori and James I'd do what I could to meet up with em' again before I left: they're good people all around.

My last night out in Bangalore: we went back to the magnificent Ice Bar at the Taj West End. (I'm getting used to posh. How will I ever survive back home, where a 19 year old in the presence of an alcoholic beverage is a Danger to Society?)

It was dead as hell when we arrived and I could tell Arvin and Phil were having desperate nightmares of being trapped in an enviroment full of stupendously wealthy buisinesspeople all night long. I decided to soldier on and started working the crowd (well, not exactly - *mingling?*) I located Bob again from the Fusion Bar sitting with his plump and sweet natured buddy and (knowing a good thing when I see it) introduced Alicia, my wonderful new friend from Queens in NYC. As we had both impressive coasts covered between us, we made a fairly unstoppable pair, and I tried to introduce her to the various after-party dispensers in India. (A good turn.) The two guys insisted on buying us whiskey, which I made sure to send over to the Katary Villa boys in my stead (I'm trying to hold off. No more Yellow Things.)

Kasey from Boston and I were accosted by a deliciously foul mouthed Indian guy from Pittsburgh, and to the general amusement of all parties, we exchanged increasingly vile Your Mom insults. (This apparantly was astonishing to the UK people: "Is this what passes for humor in your country?" "Good lord, but I am afraid, yes.") I prefer English humor as it actually contains something more then scatalogical humor and sexual inferences about your parents, but I am an American and I must know how to dish it out.

The rest of the evening passed fairly usuallly: Alicia and I made a good attempt at dancing, I got a few more few drinks from various appreciative businessmen, the new people had a great time dancing to OM SHANTHI OM and doing tequila shots: I felt like I was leaving them in good hands. Sniffle.

Alicia and I got invited to an afterparty, but I decided to be a hero and stay with the boys, who naturally had not got invited anywhere. I enjoyed the hell out of their company (Arvin, Phil, Kasey, Jimmy), and I figured I'd rather spend the evening getting sloshed on Old Monk on the roof rather then having to make small talk with unattractive but wealthy people at somone's bitchin' Bangalore mansion. (See, I got some semblance of self-control.)

I was hit on in the intierm by an amusing 5'2 Irish businessman, who took me aside and gave me a lengthy spiel on how I Needed A Man and (gesturing to my friends), these, these, were Merely Boys. (All delivered in a high squeaky Irish voice.) He grandly invited me to his apartment where he said I would be plied with a variety of expensive Irish whiskies, but I politely declined.

The boys and I had yet another profoundly uncomfortable rickshaw ride (you try wedging five strapping young guys and one shrimpy but game girl into one of those suckers)

We spent the evening doing exactly what we'd planned: drink Old Monk on the roof, talk about all sorts of interesting stuff, and watch bad movies on Star Network. Arvin, Phil, and Kasey were in theory slated to go to Mysore with the new girls earlly the next morning, but we all agreed there was no way that would happen and went to bed at three am.

The girls came by very early the next morning to attempt to collect Arvin and Phil, who were utterly dead to the world. I did get to say goodbye to them and exchange contact information: I am determined to see them again. Alicia is especially wonderful and I look forward to meeting up with her again somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard this summer. Maybe she can talk me into some good Caribbean clubs....

Thursday

2008-04-11T02:25:00.000-07:00

I woke up feeling curiously fine. I made myself breakfast and meditatively ate my cereal on the roof, watching the sun come up over the palm trees. (only a few more days!) I was going down the stairs when the Creeping Death hit me. Uh oh.

I have no idea whether it was food or alcohol (for god's sake, never, ever drink anything electric blue), but I spent the entire day straight-arming the death angel in my bed. It was just as unpleasant as you might imagine. I happened to have been surviving primarily on cereal for the past few days (dinner keeps on being egg curry and ew no), so I didn't have much to actually barf up, but the sheer evil feeling was more then enough.

I was vaguely aware at one point that Alicia and Flo came to get me for work, but unfortunately at that juncture I was actually too sick to drag myself out of bed and to the door so I could croak "PASSING OFF WORK ON ACCOUNT OF FATAL ILLNESS." So they had to wait around until they figured out I was not so much with the alive. Then I think they left for work.

I slipped in and out of black-death inspired conciousness for a few hours until 2:00 came around, when I made a mysterious but total recovery. I gingerly had yet more cereal for lunch (Kellogs is gonna make some serious rupees off me), then hobbled down to the internet cafe to make sure the world had gone on turning without me (it had.) I ran into Nimi and Carli and joined them at the Breeze....I watched them eat and sipped some Coke. I really had no desire to anger my system more then totally necessary .

The girls planned to visit the Fuga club that night but I decided it might be better to just go to the Night Boozer with Jimmy, Arvin and Phil instead. I had a light dinner of tandoori pomfret at the Breeze (unfortunately it was about a two bite fish so I was hungry after), then came back to collect the guys. Phil and I had a deep, profound conversation about stupid cartoons of our respective childhoods, then we all went down Thippasandra for our nightly commune with the Old Monk. (I held off. Pretty much.)

We returned with six beers for the new guy, who's called Casy and is from Boston. He went to boarding school in the Berkshires. We probably know the same people.

Wednesday

2008-04-10T05:01:00.000-07:00

Woke up tired and was embarassed to find Flo and Alicia sitting in the common room waiting for me to emerge into the light of morning. Which I did. We got a rickshaw on downtown - the long way thank you very much - and got into work, where I did yet more events.

I noted from an email that Sheila booked me in for Delhi until the 21st and not the 18th as I had believed, so I ran down to the IndiGo office to change my flight to Mumbai. Which was quite painless, although they couldn't accept my credit card over the phone due to rampant international credit card fraud in India. This meant I got to see the nice lady at the IndiGo office again (the one with family in Denver and New York City.) The change fee was about 20 bucks...no big deal.

Indians say "bucks" just like we do, although it is always jarring to hear someone casually say, "Oh yeah, that costs 1000 bucks" then realize they are discussing rupees and not cold hard American moolah.

We met Chris for lunch at Konark - delicious tandoori gobi (cauliflower) and babycorn. I don't know why tandoor ovens work such miracles on humble garden vegetables but there you go. We were also subjected to the always amusing roti up-sell, wherein if you fail to order a carb (and I, miss Voluntary Atkins Diet Woman, never do), the waiter will give you a look - a complex mixture of pity and disdain - and explain that this IS a gravy dish and you will NEVER be able to fully enjoy it without bread and good god almighty what is WRONG with you. It usually takes at least a few minutes to convince them the world will keep turning without roti, that the sun will come up again tomorrow.

I went back and had a nice nap, then we convened the troops for Bollywood Night at Hint, a swank nightclub in the Bangalore Central Mall.

We had our names on the list due to James knowing someone, and the door bitch ushered us in. The Door Bitch is the fashionably dressed woman (usually white or Asian here) who looks over possible entrants and judges them for suitability for the fabulousness of the club awaiting inside. I think I would make an excellent Door Bitch and I may investigate this possibility for future overseas careers. (The Door Bitch is also required to occasionally stand on a table and do Technicolor shots, but I believe I would be up to the challenge.)

The club was lovely, all dark and moody inside with an excellent 5th floor view of the Bangalore metro area. The walls outside were heated which I deeply enjoyed, and I Stressed Chris by leaning over the guardrails to enjoy the night air. (I deduced using complicated calculations that I could angle a large glob of spit to land right on the head of the loathsome rickshaw drivers hanging out below me, and that would definitely make my week. But I did not do it.)

More and more people filtered in and the music started - awesome dance-beat accented Bollywood music. There was a bit of highschool-ish apprehension as everyone waited for someone to be either drunk enough or uninhibited enough to start dancing, but eventually everyone got over themselves and the party was on. I of course jumped in with gusto despite my utter inability to dance, finding an attractive Indian guy to entertain me for the remainder of the evening.

I also accumulated another prospective Indian Sugar Daddy in a suit with one of those irritating speaker phone things blinking in a blue way in his ear throughout the evening - he'd follow me around the club like a puppy, and I experimented by dodging into alcoves a bit to see if he'd find me - he did. I did manage to extract a whiskey and red bull from him (an evil combination.)He gave me a long, poetic description of his red sports car and how he'd like to let me drive it, while I politely reminded him that that could turn into a potential insurance nightmare. (I have visions of a gory, tragic collision with a bullock cart.) He seemed curiously unmoved.

In any case, it was a fun evening, with the events coordinator shoving blue-colored Bacardi down everyone's throats while cajoling us to GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GET YOUR HANDS UP AND SING....OM SHANTHI OMMMM. (Love that song. Love it.) Apparantly Nimi got her pictures in the Mid-Day Bangalore paper...our drunken antics will now be preserved in the media annals of this beautiful garden city for all eternity. i don't know how to feel about that.

Alisa and I contemplated going to an after-party with aforementioned Hot Guys (or at least a greasy, excellent midnight dosa) but we erred on the side of caution and rickshawed home. Despite the copious amounts of Red Bull mixed with lord knows what, I slept like a rock.

monday

2008-04-09T02:09:00.001-07:00

t was the volunteers first day, and as I have (somewhat unwillingly) taken up the mantle of Grizzled Veteran Leader, I told them to show up at 9:30 so they could be inducted into the mysterious world of rickshaws. We tromped up and down Thippasandra for a bit but finally found one and made it to work in good time.

The two new girls settled in nicely to work, and I even got to delegate some tasks regarding the evil Downloads page to them. We went down to Juice Junction for lunch - Flo discovered that "veg" in Indian parlance always means "cheese" although it is entirely true that CHEESE IS NOT A VEGETABLE.

We finished up work at a decent hour, then I rickshawed on home. While walking down Thippasandra, I ran into Chris to my great joy, who has been away for two whole weeks turning into a Feni drinking hippie on the beach in Goa. Well, that's what he said anyway. We walked back and filled each other in on recent happenings - he got me a lovely elephant figurine from Goa while I presented him with a fairly bitching pull-back toy autorickshaw I bought on Thippasandra.

We managed to pull everyone together and left for the Tandoor restaurant around 8:00 - the posh and expensive (by Indian standards) Raj themed place near Brigade Road. The meal was again lovely. We had excellent, smoky tandoor lamb chops, tender and spicy chicken tikka, lightly fried shrimp skewers, and some piquant and interesting saag. (The aloo gobi was a bit greasy.) The ambience was lovely, all wood paneling and silver dining ware, and it was nice to linger for a bit and chat with the new people, who are all proving to be very cool.

The bill was about 5000, which made everyone's eyes pop (including my tightwad own), but then I did the calculations and realized I paid 12 bucks for a huge quantity of delicious, high quality food, wherein 12 bucks in many places in the USA will buy you a high-class sandwich and maybe a bag of chips. So I shut up and paid.

We went back to the Tavern at the Inn on Museum Street, which was unfortunately fairly empty. Still, we enjoyed knocking back Kingfisher and listening to The Who. (Well, I did anyway.) It got on past 11:30 and a security guard began nervously cruising the perimeter as the lights went low and the owners began to glare subtly at us over our drinks - we felt it might be best we depart before the cops came. (Bangalore shuts down at 11:30 sharp and woe befalls the pub that flouts the rules.) I managed to hail a rickshaw for the not half bad price of 120 rupees and we headed on home.

I finished Lonesome Dove. Beautiful, although the ending kind of makes me want to go over and slap Larry McMurtry for throwing me into an evening depression over a literary character which really is quite ridiculous. It's the only 1000 page book I've ever read I wished had a few hundred more pages tacked onto it.

Monday

2008-04-08T03:02:00.000-07:00

Day off work, which I certainly needed if I had any hope of catching up on my running, malignant sleep deficit. It was yet another curiously scheduled Indian holiday. I'm certainly not complaining.

I bummed around in the morning, wandering down Thippasandra to visit the Skanky Internet Cafe and get a bit of sun. I met up with Carli around noon and we proceeded to yet another orientation lunch with the new volunteers. (Apparently I wasn't supposed to attend because I've been here so long but 1. no one informed of this and 2. they fed me anyway, so I was not particularly put out.) Food was usual buffet stuff, although the hotel the lunch was held in was rather luxe.

The new volunteers were all quite nice, and I enjoyed talking to them about the various idiosyncrasies of surviving in India. We now have two Americans - one from Chicago and one from New York - and it is bizarre to hear an American accent again after consorting with exclusively British people for so long. I wonder if I will keep on saying biscuit, crisps and ALLO' WOT when I return home. Probably.

(Of course, I speak AMERICAN and they speak ENGLISH, since they must be superior. Or this is what they tell me.)

The volunteers got dropped off at FabIndia on Commercial Street, so Julie, Carli, Ella and I rickshawed over to meet them. I bought my dad some nice cotton shirts for nothing at FabIndia, then took the new volunteers over to the Natural Ice Cream shop for some delicious sugar-cane ginger ice cream. It was getting hot and I was dead on my feet, so we returned to the Katari Villa and I slept the afternoon away - I had promised to take the new people out that night so I had to sleep sometime.

We had dinner (egg curry will give me screaming nightmares), then proceeded to Styx, which is apparantly Bangalore's only heavy metal bar. It was dark and smoky and they sure as hell were playing metal, but the appeal of the place ended there for me - no one was there but a deeply lonely Frenchman who kept on looking at me with sad eyes and imploring me to speak slower. (Apparently he had been working in steel in a rural town in Southern India and was growing increasingly desperate for non Hindi-accented human interaction.)

We departed and went to that perennial favorite, the Guzzlers Inn, where we drank Kingfisher and listened to Jethro Tull - until the inevitable and always cruel 11:30 kickout time. Finding a rickshaw was mercifully painless, and we got back at a decent hour.

sunday

2008-04-08T02:45:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to visit Mysore for a while now. Located about three hours out of Bangalore on the freeway, Mysore was the seat of the Kingdom of Mysore ruled by the Wodeyar Dynasty, who were proponents of arts and culture and generally kept things civilized in Karnataka. It's retained a historical and regal ambience that's certanly missing from Bangalore, making it a popular and leafy day out for those sick of autorickshaw traffic and bad air in the capital.

Intro here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysore

Carli, Ella and I awoke early and trekked out to the bus station, taking a windy early morning rickshaw ride. We managed to find our bus after some negotiation and boarded. It was very modern and quite nice, although the standard-issue Bollywood movie blared in the background when all I really wanted to do was sleep. (The ear plugs helped a little, though the child sitting on the row across from me was convicted this was actually the Bus To Hell and screamed straight through the first hour.)

The route certainly was pretty, dipping through rice paddies and rows of waving, lovely palm trees. We'd pass by Punjabi Dhabas, the Indian version of the good ol' fashioned truck stop, full of people chowing down on dosas and endless cups of over-sugared chai. The country gets hilly and rocky outside of Bangalore, and the sheer granite cliffs were a lovely site to see.

We arrived in Mysore and contracted a rickshaw driver to take us around for the day. We immediately drove by the palace, an ornate, shining, prickly sort of building. It was noon and we stopped at a nice hotel for lunch, eating our usual tandoori gobi and roti in airconditioned comfort (although the waiter kept on trying to shut the curtains and plunge us into darkness.)

The driver took us over to the palace. At the entrance, we ran into a pack of Americans - medical students volunteering at a hospital in Bangalore for a bit of a break. They were quite nice - all New Yorkers adapting very well to the bartering culture of India - and we spoke with them for a while.

We eventually wandered in, paying the usual foreigner entry fee of 100 rupees (to the local 10.) The palace was certainly worth it - built in 1912 by an English architect, it was full of ornate metalwork and lovely peacock-adorned stained glass windows - with rows of giant meeting halls and recieving areas and galleries for nothing in particular. Apparently the Maharaja's descendent still lives here (the place is only open on Sunday's), and I imagine it would be very odd indeed to rattle about those marble halls all on your lonesome. (Imagine the long and chilly work to get your cereal in the morning, across mosaic marble floors and under ornate screens. You would feel fragile and terribly human and it would only be 7:30 in the morning, and who needs that?)

We began chatting with a group of Indian guys who were working in Bangalore like we were, although they hailed from all over the country - Jaipur, Delhi, Hyderabad. They worked with Americans and one of them was especially enamored with New Mexico - I certainly understand that. They pointed out various Indian goddesses to us (They all tend to run together), and invited us to join them for the day in their hired jeep. Jeep's certainly beat rickshaws when it comes to convenience, so we paid the rickshaw driver and went off with them.

We went to the Catholic church in the middle of town - not much to look at, beyond incredible and menacing hives of bees hanging off the eaves. We then proceeded to the Charimundi Hills, going up a considerable series of switchbacks to the top. The view was deeply impressive and I took some decent photos, fending off a tribal-attired local child trying to dive into my pictures for a small fee. There's an incredibly enormous racetrack below near the palace....I wonder what it was used for.

We next saw the temple at the top of the hill - reminded me of Hampi architecutre-wise. It was a bit of a tourist zoo with various Hindu adherents sipping coconut milk and patting the baby cows that wandered indiscriminately through the parking lot. We watched the sun go down a little then proceeded to the Nandi (or bull) statue a little below. This was lovely, with a terribly placid expression on its bovine face - nice to sit and contemplate among the greenery and the boulders. But we did have a schedule to stick to. After a brief stop at the inevitable Indian Crafts Emporium, we drove about 30 minutes out of town to a garden area.

We had a train slated for 8:30, but we were having such a pleasant time that we didn't want to rush back. (And miss dinner. The mere idea of missing dinner gives me cold shivers.) The Indian guys conferred with the driver, who agreed to take us all the way back to Bangalore for 1500 rupees - not bad at all. Load off our shoulders, we watched the impressive fountains at the park, Sunday revelers picnicking on the grass and eating bright-red chili fish from the reservoir. (We also posed with an 8 foot tall man standing in the center of the garden, grabbing people with immense hands for five rupee photo ops.)

Ella wanted to see the special Sunday night lighting of the Maharaja's palace, so we drove back quickly, dodging the usual tour buses and bullock carts. Carli managed to cajole the boys into singing Hindi songs - they weren't half bad.

The palace really was lovely lit up at night - every single tiny and intricate point and pillar on the facade decked out in white electric lights, setting up an impressive blaze in the center of town. Seemingly all of Mysore wandered in and out of the grounds, and a band that looked very tiny, sitting all alone in an alcove in the palace facade, played Hindi standards as people took the night air. We popped briefly into the HIndu temple nearby, a grass and incense scented refuge from the craziness outside - (how long did THAT last!)

We had dinner again at the hotel - vegetable jalfreizi, tasty mint flavored tandoori fish, daal makhani (indians inevitably must order it and feel empty without), and some spicy lamb hyderbad curry. And then we jumped in the jeep and drove home - which felt extra luxurious, with no need to jockey for position on the train or bus or avoid flagrant ass grabbery or anything. I slept for most of the three hour drive back, awakening briefly to have a warm and spicy cup of masala chai from a truckstop.

I stumbled back into the house to encounter the new volunteers on the roof - two dread-locked guys from England, listening to Jurassic 5 on the roof. They were drinking a large bottle of Jack and I joined them briefly (never been one to pass up free booze.) I offered them some Old Monk but they took one sip, realized it was in essence rum flavored rubbing alcohol and politely declined. Their loss!

saturday

2008-04-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be bad and start at Saturday here, since the last week was honestly pretty profoundly boring. The only interesting thing we did was visit the Fusion Lounge and watch drunken Thai college students shake their money makers to hip hop, which was admittedly kind of amusing, but only to a degree.

On Friday, we went back to the Oasis since Aneesa loves the place and I do too. Wherein we had delicious fish pollichathu (a whole pomfret fried in spicy sauce and grilled in a banana leaf....awesome Kerela speciality, that), Kerela fish curry, delicious butter and chili prawns, chili squid, some sort of awesome Afghan chicken dish and probably some other crack-like substances. Then we went to the English Pub (the Old Tavern?), which was full of Westerners and Indians slamming pints and listening to rock music. I liked that place very much.

So Saturday. I had decided to go to Mysore on Sunday since I've been looking forward to visiting for a long time. This did mean that it would be my last day with Aneesa and Adam until I....see them again in Mumbai and Delhi, so I guess it isn't that big a deal after all. They'll probably get sick of me and change their phone numbers anyway!

I jest.

I had been a bad seed and declined to go to work on Friday, primarily because I was running on a fairly vicious sleep deficit and was afraid I would pitch face-forward onto the keyboard and ruin some sort of computer apparatus. (It's all TERRIBLY EXPENSIVE AND MODERN HERE after all.)

So I decided to come into work on Saturday to finish off the Downloads page and do some events and then go to Konark for delicious, delicious vegetarian food. Which is exactly what I did. Work was deeply uneventful, although we did engage in some harmless joking around about throwing dysfunctional computers out of office windows and nailing people on the street below. I think that's illegal.

I went down to Konark and had an excellent lunch of mutter gobi ( a dry stir-fry like curry of cauliflower and peas....delicious) and fruit salad, then crossed the street to buy a Diet Pepsi and watch the world go by. It's nice to sit down and regard Indians instead of having them regard me, though this never lasts as long as I might like it to. That's why I love to spend so much time up on the roof of the Katary Villa. I can see the teenage boys down below who hang out by Coffee Day and confer evilly but they can't see me. I am rarely anonymous and it makes a nice change. (I never got the hang of blending into the background. Not that the attention is positive. Usually of the GOOD GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU flavor.)

I hung out a while longer then came on back home. Carli and Aneesa had decided to wear their saris out to the Ice Bar that night, so I watched them wrestle with them for a while. Draping saris is a complex procedure and I salute them for managing it. I think Indian clothes are incredibly beautiful but I've balked on purchasing a sari, mainly because I have issues getting into normal clothes with zippers and buttons, and I believe a sari would just break me.

In any case Carli and Aneesa looked gorgeous, and we all took many pictures. I could in no way compete but I did put on a neat black 50's style evening dress I ganked from my mom. (Thanks for your good fashion sense, mom! )

Unfortunately Adam and I had yet another convoluted rickshaw experience. The guy wasn't entirely sure where he was going then decided he needed gas although we were already late. So we got out and tried to walk, except it began to rain. Then a bunch of rickshaw drivers attempted to charge us 100 rupees for a five minute rickshaw ride. (I have been eagerly awaiting the day when Adam flips out and attacks one of those malignant assholes but unfortunately he is less violent then me.) (I just haven't done it because Indian jail scares me. A lot.)

But we finally got there. The Ice Bar was in the Taj Hotel and very glam indeed. They didn't want to let us in but we called in our favor with Bob (one of our Indian contacts) and got in. The place was absolutely packed, with an interesting mix of Westernized Indians, young ex-pat Europeans, and leering elderly businessmen of the Indian and English varieties. The bar area was fairly small but opened out on the pool, which was lit up attractively at night. There were also drinks and yakitori snacks being dispensed by the pool, but when I asked to see a menu, the bartender gave me a profoundly disgusted look and shooed me away, and I can take a hint. I hung out at the table for a while but decided to go dance (damn the torpedos).

The music wasn't half-bad, and I enjoyed dancing, although it was absolutely packed and I kept on getting maneuvered into the sweaty and thrilled chests of various tie-wearing businessmen. (This did translate into free drinks.)

One particularly smooth guy noted, "I feel like I'm in heaven here!" I asked why, and he said, "Ah, yes, when I see the blonde dancing here, I feel like I am in heaven!" Then he gave me his business card. I think that's almost as good as the "Are those space pants? Cause' your ass is outta this world" pickup line, though admittedly no one has ever used that one on me.

I wandered over and talked to Bob and his friend for a while, who also were kind enough to share their alcohol. We discussed the relative merits of various women and men around us (Classy, I know), then I went back to dance some more. The night was getting on and, not surprisingly, a few people managed to jump into the pool and flail around a bit. I was tempted but didn't want to ruin my dress, although I made a heroic effort at finding someone who would let ME shove them into the pool. (One guy had his entire group of friends begging me to throw him in, and I did manage to drag the sucker a few feet, but was in the end unsuccessful.)

We hung out in the overpriced coffee shop for a bit and watched drunk people filter out, which I've always found curiously amusing. Except most of them were getting into luxury cars and driving back in air conditioned splendor, whereas we were going to have to get yet another rickshaw (and the wind will blow into the cab, which is almost cold at night, and everything will be ruined.)

So we did. I said goodbye to Aneesa and Adam (who I will miss although SSH DON'T TELL THEM), then went to sleep. Which I would not get much of since I had to wake up at 5:00 to go to Mysore anyway.

Monday

2008-04-04T23:20:00.000-07:00

Almost totally non-descript. Sorry. I will try to involve myself in more wacky Thai drug lord related adventures in the near future, okay?

We went to work. I was still feeling mildly vicious about the whole UCSC thing and didn't eat much, though in my defense I did manage to get plenty of work done. I hope I have only been a mildly crap intern.

I walked down Brigade Road for a while out of a sense of nothing in particular. It's a nice enough walk, going past the creepy old opera house, fading into some nice green stands of trees. There's this covered area full of people tapping away at typewriters for some reason I am unable to discern. Seeing a typewriter in any format in 2008 is kind of fascinating.

Unfortunately I got one asswipe sort of rickshaw driver, who decided that instead of depositing me on, say, Thippasandra, he would drop my ass off at the airport instead. And attempt to charge me 100 rupees for the privilege. I peppered him with colorful obscenity, gave him 70 rupees, and decided to walk home. I had no idea where I was and with my happy dreams of an afternoon nap shattered, I walked back in a vicious state of mind. I wandered down quite a few dodgy looking alley-ways (children yelling at me the entire time), ambled like an idiot somewhere in the region of Thippasandra, and managed to convince a kindly old man on a bicycle to direct me somewhere in the region of home. I immediately went to sleep, determined to kill all rickshaw drivers someday, somehow.

I woke up eventually and walked down to the Breeze for a palak chicken (chicken in spinach sauce) and a chat with the others, who were eating a chicken dosa and doing nothing in particular.

Aneesa, Carli, and her brother wanted to see a three hour Bollywood epic but I politely declined, preferring to wait around and hope that someone would go to the Night Boozer and take me with them. Unfortunately this did not happen, which meant I spent the evening drinking putrid but potent Old Monk and watching bad TV. You win some, you lose some.

Sunday

2008-04-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

This was a very boring day and I am sorry you have to read this. But so it goes.

We decided to stay on Thippasandra, which meant I got to sleep in late. For me this means the decadent hour of 8:00 because, like my father, I do not actually need sleep like a normal, well adjusted human being. In any case.

I faffed around for a little bit then decided to walk down Thippasandra to buy a nutrient filled morning diet coke and watch the cattle carts rumble down the road. I also passed by the friendly neighborhood porn theater. This place looks eminently sketchy, a low slung puke brown sort of building, frequented by seedy looking guys at all hours. Posters with slatternly looking Western women adorn the place, which probably should have tipped me off as to why the wink wink nudge nudge behavior around that building was ESPECIALLY bad. I am amused to find that they offer a matinee porno showing. I wouldn't think that most people could summon up the will to really get into a dirty film at 11 in the morning but I suppose I should never underestimate humanity.

I was starving, and since Carli and Aneesa both had tummy lurgy, I popped into the Breeze for my usual delicious fish tikka. I waited for Carli and Aneesa to reappear but they didn't, so I decided to walk back home and go to bed.

I met up with the whole gang again at the Breeze just as it began to rain - those hard afternoon rains Bangalore seems to specialize in, that come and go with suprising speed. I decided this would be a good day to lie around and make serious inroads into Larry McMurty's fabulous Lonesome Dove, and damned if that isn't exactly what I did.

We had been sorta-commanded by Asha on behalf of I to I to go participate in a soccer game with the kid's YMCA team, which would apparantly be filmed for an Australian travel show. (I know, this is convuluted.)For some curious reason I agreed to this, although I am one of the least coordinated people on the planet and thus useful only as something to bounce the ball off of on a soccer field. But I was in one of my very occasional up for anything moods, so I threw on my gym shorts and my Practical Shoes (ewww!) and decided to go.

Despite the rain, Asha picked us all up in her jeep and off we went. The playing field was, I am not making this up, located in a cemetery, full of skinny and over-excited kids kicking around old soccer balls (which would occasionally lodge themselves behind gravestones and crypts, looking at us with hungry, competitive eyes. They were obviously gonna kick our asses.

We skirmished for a while and I played my version of soccer, which mostly means chasing the ball up and down the field and trying not to get hit in the face. The film crew then pulled up in a large professional van.

The film crew was comprised of a team of four Aussies: a jovial fat guy who kept on calling us "ladies", a tall blonde host called Jules (who the kids gleefully abbreviated to Mango Juice), and two camera men, one of whom kept on staring at me in a somewhat creepy way. (Dunno why. I was wearing practical shoes. No one likes practical shoes.)

They interviewed me, Aneesa, Lorraine, and Carli about our exciting adventures in volunteering, with more emphasis on Lorraine and Carli since they were working with adorable disadvantaged children and we were totally not. I can't say how I performed in my first adventure in broadcast journalism: I think I confused them by giving a long convuluted answer to the "so why are ya here" question, that involved among other things Bangalore's economic situation in relation to Hong Kong and cultural immersion. There were probably too many big words. (Dupuy Family Motto: Never use a small word where a big one will do.)

I'm just glad I remembered to put on lipstick.

We hung around a while later, kicking around the ball, then were returned to the villa.

I decided to head out for dinner and went down to The Clay Pot once again with Julie and Ella. We had tasty coconut milk infused fish molie, vegetable curry, chicken vindaloo, and various appams (spongy rice cake sort of things Kerelans flip for.) And we adjourned once again to the Night Boozer. I hope to hell they make t-shirts because I really want one. It was Lorraine's last night so we saw her off with some cheap booze and extremely bad card playing, which is really emblamatic of what we're all about if you think about it. Seems like she got outta Bangalore safely and in good time, which is really all one can ask.

Saturday

2008-04-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

We actually had something resembling a coherent plan for this day: a run by the City Market then a visit to Lalbagh Botanical Gardens.

Carli, her brother, Aneesa and Adam originally planned to visit a (in my opinion suspicious) water park that day, but Aneesa woke up with Nuclear Stomach and had to decline. So the others decided to meet up with us later. I was happy to hear this because in my opinion water parks and amusement parks in genera are more like elaborate, perverse forms of torture then actual fun. I do not why people are willing to pay exorbiant prices to be thrown in the air, terrified, soaked, and spun around until they barf but I am not falling for the trick. Well, I do like the California State Fair. But that's only because it has the World's Biggest Horse. And humongous turkey legs that can be used as weapons.

Where was I?

I had a sudden attack of deathly hunger and ran down to get lunch at the Breeze restaurant. To my suprise, their fish tikka (spiced grilled fish chunks) was incredibly delicious, and just about a perfect healthy meal when taken with a green salad. Indian green salads are composed of cucumber, tomato, and sliced carrot, and thus unlikely to make you ill, although of course you should never order one except in impeccably clean restaurants. (You may be suprised to find there are many impeccably clean restaurants in India, especially in Bangalore.)

I met up with the others and we rickshawed over to the City Market, which I had attempted to visit before on multiple occasions but had never actually been able to find. I wish I'd come sooner - it's the perfect Indian market, full of people and color and excitement. The people at the market were genuinely glad to see and curious about our home countries, and I loved having quick conversations with all manner of people passing through - mentioning I was from California to drooly young men always elicited a very positive response. Quite a few protective older folks made sure we weren't lost and guided us to where we needed to go as well - when lost in India, just find the nearest old person and look pathetic.

In any case, we walked by endless rows of vegetable sellers dealing lurid purple eggplants and giant, nobby daikon radishes - which gave way to eager fruit sellers, attempting to sell me pomegranates (yum), grapes (double yum) and durian (kill me now.) I did buy a 10 rupee pomegranate from a rather fetching fruit salesboy, who cheerily sliced it up for me and stuck it in a cleverly designed newspaper bag.

I munched on this as we walked up to the main market complex, a decripet four story open-air building full of people peddling most things you could posibly need - ranging from industrial strength metal cookery ware to banana leaves for southern-style dining events to lots and lots of bangles. There was a sort of gap between the outside market and the inside market into which the food sellers threw their excess product, and we were treated to the entertaining sight of a healthy herd of cows chewing on trashed watermelons in the half-darkness below us.

By far the highlight was the flower market, full of hordes of sellers pedalling gorgeous intricately woven flower garlands and bouquets, coiled up on each other like snakes on the cluttered salesroom floor - an arresting sight when viewed from one floor up. The salesmen had an utterly charming habit of giving me flowers as I passed by, and I amassed a collection of lovely roses and geraniums as I wandered through, which I put in my hair with enthusiam but little grace. (They kept on falling out.)

The others had begun to starve for lunch, so we took a rickshaw over to the botanical gardens. I decided to stay at the garden's enterance and recieve the others who were coming to meet us since I had already eaten. Unfortunately, this meant I signed up to be in the photos of quite a few Indian tourists - but what the hell, it doesn't hurt me any.

Adam came to find me and I hung out with the others for a bit as they ate big fluffy dosas and pakoras in the somewhat gungy vegetarian restaurant they'd selected. After the usual tortorous process of paying the bill, we went into the garden.

Lalbagh is a lovely oasis from the beeping horn and homocidal rickshaw infested expanse of greater Bangalore, and I enjoyed it very much. The others parked themselves on a nice stretch of grass to chat, but I wandered off to find a tree to (illegally) climb. I clambered around for a bit on a particularly impressive banyan, chasing the geckos that lurked in the roots and trying to ignore yet another gathering, mostly male fan club. (I did pose for a photo with a lovely girl in a brilliant blue sari.)

I climbed another tree but the friendly chaat salesman parked outside waved me down before the fuzz got me. I guess being tossed in Indian prison for tree climbing might be embarassing. I wandered through a few lovely bamboo groves, avoided some terrifying monkeys, and to my suprise found the lake reputed to be in the center of the garden that I had somehow managed to miss on previous visits. This was lovely and I decided to go back and get the others.

Upon meeting the others I found myself the new best buddy of yet another stray dog, who came over and curled up coquettishly in my arms after I scratched her behind the ears. She refused to leave and I was quite comfortable with the situation myself (she seemed to have only a few fleas), so I hung out with the dog for a bit, watching the purple sky go down, realizing that it's difficult to have hard feelings about the universe when a stray dog likes you and the weather is good. Angst can be difficult to maintain.

We walked all the way around the lake as the sun went down, then headed back to Thippasandra. We had yet another tasty meal at the Clay Pot - prawn curry, aloo gobi, butter chicken, vegetable curries - then headed back to the house.

The others decided to visit the Night Boozer, a deeply sketchy looking bar located on our street. I was incredulous but decided to go along anyway. It ended up being a hoot: a dark, smoky sort of place filled with Indian men slamming Kingfisher and whiskey and paying us palefaces little mind. I tried and mostly failed to learn to play Blackjack and drank my usual cheapo whiskey. A satisfying night all around.

friday

2008-04-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

Woke up in a decent mood (wore that neat camo and lace dress I like, which I had been balking on because India and white clothing do not always play nice together.) Went off to work. Discovered upon checking my email that I did not get into UC Santa Cruz. Uh oh.

This sunk me into a very exciting sort of depression for the rest of the day, mainly because I am so not looking forward to making calls and writing my plea-bargain letter all the hell the way from India. But it must be done. I did go for a head clearing sort of work, which can be a dangerous affair here in India, since walking indeterminately generally means dodging rickshaws, motorbikes, school children and bullock carts. I did however manage to survive.

In other news...okay, not much happened this day. We went to a nice new coffee place near work, which oddly enough played American pop music. (It's bizarre but curiously comforting to hear pop tunes from home - I recall in Beijing the cab drivers would always nod at me and flip the station to the American pop channel, which I rather enjoyed....)I toyed with a nice iced coffee while the others had sandwiches. I have this fun habit of forgetting to eat when I'm worried about something. I suppose it's a good thing for staying slim instead of being one of those people who prefer to bury themselves in fifty pints of Ben and Jerry's when things go to shit (but I just get hungry later.) It's certainly odd for someone who loves food like I do. Maybe I love food so much that I can't appreciate it unless I'm in a reasonably good mood?

I could be overthinking this.

In any case, I managed to pull my head out of my ass enough to get on home, where I had the usual not so satisfying Katary Villa dinner then waited for the others to convene so we could go to Mocha.

Mocha is the Indian interpretation of a coffee/desserts place. I have no sweet tooth whatsoever due to being messed up in the head, though the place is pretty nice: spread out with lots of cushions and chairs to sit on, although the music choice can be maddeningly awful. (Godammit, I'm in India, Bryan Adams followed by Michael Jackson is not my idea of fun.) Still, they also do shisha (or hookah, or whatever), which is fun and makes you giggly, although admittedly it is not so much fun for one's lungs. For some reason we always get green apple flavor. The cappucino and champagne flavors terrify me slightly.

The others ordered a variety of obscene looking desserts, such as a tremendous slab of dark and white chocolate cake, some sort of oozy brownie thing served in a giant coffee cup and tremendous, thick milkshakes. I sat there wishing they had some sort of dessert that featured key lime pie. Unfortunately no such luck.

In any case, we hung out and talked until the usual 11:30 kick out time. Lorraine, Claire, Pipa and Jimmy invited me out to a "local" bar they'd found on Church street rumored to stay open til' the magically late hour of 1 in the morning, but I declined: the rain was beginning to come down and the idea of standing outside a locked bar in the rain was too depressing to contemplate. (Turned out they really were open that late. Damn!)

thursday

2008-03-31T02:52:00.000-07:00

The weather is getting hotter. Bangaloreites swear up and down that the monsoon shouldn't be here yet, but it sure as heck has been raining a lot. (One has to remember to bring an umbrella, which has never been a talent of mine.) We managed to avoid getting rained on on the way to work.

It was Kishor's birthday and along those lines, he decided he was gonna take us out for lunch to the Hyderabadi Biryani place. Biryani is a delicious sort of rice casserole dish for those unaware, and apparently the biryani that comes from Hyderabad is especially delicious. We proceeded to order mutton and chicken biryani, chili chicken, butter chicken and lots of rotis. Then we stuffed ourselves silly. Meat gets downright delicious when cooked biryani style - tender and juicy as anything. Drool.

I needed to get back fast since I had to do an interview. (Ooh, I feel all professional!) Went back on the back of Madan's bike since that would be faster. I have to say, I know they're incredibly deadly, but I love riding around on the back of a motorbike here in India. Instead of getting jostled around (and cheated) in a rickshaw or waiting two million years in traffic in a car, you can just....go. Wherever the hell you want. Whenever.

I was, surprisingly, permitted to do an interview with someone Actually Famous: Renee, an up and coming Hindi pop star, and David Anthony, her USA producer who has handled such luminaries as, uh, Janet Jackson and the Backstreet Boys. I have never conducted a real official interview before, which meant I had to quickly figure out how to use the dang recording device quickly. However, I think it went okay: I took the precaution of drawing up my questions beforehand. Renee was authentically intelligent and charming, and it was actually a pleasure to discuss her interest in fusion Hindi music. Her music is quite good - I listened to it on her Myspace page - and their mission is to introduce Hindi music to dance clubs in the USA and the UK. I wish them luck. Few things are more fun to dance to then really good silly Hindi music.

I finished up the interview, then headed on home to take a sorely needed nap. Naps unfortunately are hard to get in India, mainly because the time around 4:00 is the time the neighbors decide to watch Bollywood movies at earsplitting volumes. While their dog barks. Thank God for ear plugs.

We managed to rally the troops at a somewhat decent hour (never easy to do), then headed off for Tandoor, a nice place on MG. Road. The restaurant had a pleasant Raj-Era ambience, with overdressed waiters and the inevitable open tandoori kitchen, featuring young guys in white chef's outfits skewering delicious, delicious meat onto big metal skewers. (This is fun to watch.)

The others ordered some terrifying cocktails, which I abstained from. I do not like my liquor adulterated with fruit juice and food coloring. Aneesa and I conspired as usual on the food, choosing stuffed tandoori peppers and an interesting sounding kebab composed of ground lamb wrapped around chicken. The stuffed peppers were delicious, with a paneer, mixed nut, pomegranate seed and onion filling and given a nice hit in the oven. The meat was delicious and rich as well, although I do find the notion of combining two different animals into one dish to be a big....wrong somehow. Maybe I should get over it.

I also tried some delicious chicken tikka (just chunks of tandoori chicken) and some awesome tandoor gobi (cauliflower.) For some reason, cauliflower given the tandoori treatment and marinated in a bit of yogurt transforms a usually unassuming and pale vegetable into something akin to crack. Magic.

I was kind of a tool and tried to rush the bill because I wanted to go to a club and it was already past 10:00 - and as you may recall, everything closes in Bangalore at 11:30 or the morality police get kerflumpt. Unfortunately, the (rather pricy, but in my opinion worth it) bill took its time arriving. We made a general decision not to bother spending 20 extremely rushed minutes in the club, and decided to purchase some booze-likker from the sketchy bar on Thippasandra. Which we did. I curiously lost the urge to drink and rounded out the evening sitting on the roof listening to music, which is always nice.

wednesday

2008-03-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

I have been too good lately maybe. (How can I help that?)

Went to work per usual. More writing. I decided to take a stroll down to Konark, a new vegetarian restaurant up the road. It was very nice and contemporary inside, and the menu was extensive, featuring just about every vegetable themed Indian dish known to man (And a few Chinese and Western ones to really round things out.) The place was full of business men chatting over lunch, tucking into epic portions of naan and spicy curries, gesturing at each other over glasses of tea.

I went with a tasty dish of palak mutter (spinach with peas) and a green salad. The waiter was absolutely aghast when I ordered no naan or roti - I am beginning to believe Indian waiters receive some sort of naan commission. Either that or Indians simply have a deep emotional need to get people to eat their complex carbohydrates.

I headed back around four, but the rain began coming down again, ruining my brilliant plan to go for a nice invigorating walk around the block. I sat around and was pissed off at the universe in general in protest. Food was concerning Indian-Chinese food. Indians and Americans are really quite equally good at messing up Chinese food.

I wanted to GO OUT DAMMIT and managed to recruit Aneesa, Carly and Adam to carry out my evil plans. However, Lorraine got us all trying to figure out how to make balloon animals (she's doing an event for the children at the school she volunteers at), and by the time we determined we were never, ever going to be able to survive as balloon animal makers, it was ten. Bangalore's biggest flaw is that everything absolutely poselutely must be closed at 11:30, so we jetted over to Zero G in a rickshaw (of course we couldn't find it initally.)

The door man let us girls in free, but charged Adam 500 cover charge. This could be used for drinks, but considering we had about an hour and a half to use it all, this meant hitting the likker pretty ardently and passionately.

I loved the place, however. Zero G is on the top of a large office building, and the dance floor and bar are open air, featuring lots of chrome accents and sparkly lights. It was Bollywood night and the music was fantastic, and I threw myself onto the dance floor, immediately getting some sympathetic Indian guys to teach me some Hindi dance moves. (I love jumping into the air and chanting OM SHANTHI OM when that song comes on. People who have done any clubbing in India know exactly what I mean.)

The others weren't up for dancing, so in disgust, I worked up the nerve to talk to an attractive guy I noticed lounging in the corner and looking bored. To my suprise, he was willing enough to talk to me - apparently he had to act nice because he was here with all the Big Important Guys from his IT company - and we chatted for a while. He was even kind enough to buy me some whiskey that wasn't swill, which was a nice change from the 35 rupee Old Monk I usually content myself with.

Unfortunately, the rain began pissing down - no other word for it - and the rickshaw back was almost unpardonably damp. We were pleasantly suprised at the aquatic abilities of your garden variety rickshaw though - the driver cut it through the foot and a half deep water with skill and talent. So we didn't fall in a pothole and drown after all.

tuesday

2008-03-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

Woke up to what looked to be a sunny day. (Relief!)

We decided to visit the South Indian canteen down the street for lunch, a scrum of business-shirt attitred men yelling out orders for dosas and thalis and chaat at rock bottom prices. There's no seating of course, and everyone stands around munching and arguing, downing endless fruit juices. Aneesa and I shared a masala dosa, a kind of spicy rice flour pancake filled with tumeric-flavored mashed potato and onion. I also got to try some of the thali, which for a mere 20 rupees provided tons of food, including a delicious okra curry, spicy papadums, sambar, pickles, and some tart yogurt. Excellent.

It was fun to watch the guys in the kitchen throw together food, feverishly turning out dosas from a hot grill, spooning out curries and sambar, yelling at each other but one way or another getting it all together. It's admirable.

Adam began to succumb to one of those unfortunate Indian digestive episodes, so I accompanied him back on the rickshaw. I can only imagine that riding in a rickshaw when you really want to barf is not among life's best experiences. (it was also thinking about raining, which indicates that the universe was not feeling so friendly at that juncture.)

It was raining, no one else was around, and Adam of necessity needed to go lie down in the dark and try not to die, so I spent the evening watching TV and drawing weird cartoons.

This went on until Aneesa returned. We went to the Breeze for dinner - an over buttery vegetable curry and a nice spicy lamb curry dish - and talked. She's going to Mumbai in a week and I'm having such a good time that I want to stay on. I may change my flights and go down to Mumbai instead of returning home. I've always dreamed of seeing Mumbai - land of Bollywood and endless, blissful phel puri vendors by the ocean - and this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. (I also remember how Salman Rushdie portrayed Bombay in Midnight's Children - a decadent, bizarre metropolis with weirdness apparently coming out of the dysfunctional sewer system itself - and I want to see if it lives up to even a portion of that.) We shall see.

Claire, Pipa, Lorraine and Jimmy reappeared after Aneesa went to bed bearing beer from the profoundly skanky Night Boozer bar down Thippasandra road, and we stayed up for a while, drinking crap whiskey and laughing about things, listening to the rain come on down.

monday

2008-03-28T03:19:00.000-07:00

Monday was not as good as Sunday, but I do not know how one could really begin to equal that, so I am not so disappointed. We went off to work per usual. We were all utterly exhausted from the not-so-restful bus journey and nodded off peacefully in the rickshaw- difficult to do considering that rickshaw journeys are rarely peaceful and therapeutic experiences.

The weather was looking ominous - I hate and despise the monsoon. I finished up the world music page. I will someday attend the Rain-forest World Music festival.

I rather desperately wanted to catch up on my sleep, so I left work fairly early and went home to crash. Dinner was rather dismal, but I was too exhausted to really care. The thunderstorm broke, viciously, and I sat around alone for a while at the Villa, hoping the power wouldn't go out.

Adam and Jimmy both got back late on account of horrible flooding rain, and I accompanied them to the Breeze restaurant to get a late dinner. It was a nice enough place but very brightly lit, and we could tell the server was not particularly thrilled to see us. Jimmy's strawberry milkshake was a slightly pornographic pink. We bought some adult beverages at the market down the street and retreated to the villa to watch bad movies - Dean Kootnz's "Phantoms" is a profoundly bad movie, a modern bad movie classic - and then we went to bed. All I could manage really.

sunday

2008-03-28T03:15:00.000-07:00

Easter.

My Easters have been strange and disjointed for years on end, always spent in transit. This one was no different.

We woke up to another day of driving, miserable rain, thwacking against the loose screen door that held out the moldy air. We tromped miserably up the uncovered stairs to the rooftop restaurant - breakfasted on fruit salad and pancakes that were really crepes, sipping hot tea and watching the rain beat down on the soaring temple outside. (how much rain had fallen there over the years, how much more could it take ...? more then us?)

However, the others were determined to see it all - why the hell else linger through a long train journey on sticky blue mats anyway - and the oppurtunistic rickshaw driver permanantly employed by Vicky's offered us a full-day rickshaw tour at a very reasonable price. We accepted - why the hell not - and piled squishily into the rickshaws, jetting out across the muddy ground to the temple complexes.

We went many places that day, but one that sticks out was the Underwater Temple, lurking in a marshy bit of ground, recently excavated or something. Standing water has permeated it, sloshing around the abandoned pillars and languid Shiva sculptures, and tourists shed their socks and sandals and wade on in, laughter reverberating through the corridors. I had met a sweet brown and white dog earlier at the rocks and she had followed us in the rickshaw, loping grimily behind our vehicle. We rejoined each other in the temple. I was in one of those states I get into sometime where I am punchdrunk on existence mostly, and I chased the dog round and round the temple, splashing through water-lily and clover. The dog and I watched the fish nip at the other tourists heels as they peered into the inner sanctum, peered at some unexpected crabs, ducked from the (non-vampiric) bats that inhabited the walls and corridors.

We ran into a pack of grinning Indian boys who took to me immediately. They were all wearing cowboy hats for some irrational reason - they were on vacation from Hyderabad - and they plopped a hat on my head and posed for pictures, my arm around the damp dog, smiling like an idiot for once for photos because I was so curiously happy.

(Aneesa has one of those - I hate photos of myself but I will take that one at least, keep it in my drawers, look at it again someday and hope the dog has lived a long and happy life, hope the cowboy hat boys did well in their glorious banking careers, hope that the fish have persisted against the dual threats of tourism and over-feeding - hope against hope, I guess. Maybe I will frame it. My hair was not however brushed.)

In any case, we piled back into the rickshaws and drove to the Lotus Temple and Elephant Stables, sitting on a ridge up against the hill. The Lotus Temple was a graceful pink pavilion, decked out like an elaborate doiley, and one could easily imagine beautiful women lounging upon it and eating fruit -

I was not particularly beautiful but I lounged there too, watching a group of women in brilliant saris pluck the grounds and tease each other. The umbrella I borrowed was dysfunctional and I fiddled with it futiley until one of the local workmen ambled over with his own umbrella, smiling ear to ear. "Mine doesn't work," I offered, abashed, and he took it from me and repaired it. "Can we trade?," I asked, and he laughed in my face. He knew a bad deal when I saw it, me and my forlorn umbrella. The dog and I and the umbrella looked out to the elephant stables - big as you might expect them to be - and watched green parakeets fight in the trees outside them.

We managed to split ourselves up into two groups, foolishly, which meant Lorraine, Chris and I spent a few disturbing hours trying to find out if the others had been sold into sex slavery. They had not been, but we did get to see the Ramayana Temple, full of stone carvings depicting every last event in that long and winding story - I cannot say I knew what it meant, but it was a graphic novel in building format and I suppose that is cool enough.

We broke for lunch at the Mango Tree, a tropical oasis of a restaurant - no other word for it. You stop your rickshaw at the gate and walk down a lovely path through swampy, neon-green grass and lazing banana trees, past the river full of tan rocks and edged by rice paddies, stray dogs chasing each other through the rushes. The restaurant itself is a relaxed collection of straw-grass huts and benches, and you sit down and watch the water go by, eating spicy vegetarian curries off waxy green leaves, sipping fresh squeezed fruit juices. Aneesa and I shared a thali, a South Indian mixed lunch of curries and rices and crisp hot papadums, putting away more food then we could ever have anticipated, tickling the bellies of the resident housecats. We could have stayed there for hours or days or years, but we could not be such bad and terrible tourists.

The tour continued - we saw the Queen's Bath, the luxurious pleasure chamber constructed for noblewomen, formally fed by spring water and deep as anything. It stands in an area that must once have been a lovely garden, and you can easily imagine lying there half-submerged in the fresh water and smelling the jasmine flowers, totally content in Having It Made. I do not know if such luxury is available in the modern era. (I shall have to make my future Thai drug lord husband build one - I will lounge in it with my pet black panthers and drink expensive wines, and snap my fingers when I desire snacks.)

We visited the statue of Narasimha next. It's breathtaking, no other word for it. You amble along a path through the trees and gasp, astonished when you come onto the idol, grinning luridly in the lotus position, big round eyes flashing through the banana leaves. Narasimha is ornately carved and delicate - it's a miracle the statue has lasted so long and so well - and you can sit and look at him for a long time, watching the chipmunks wiggled in and out of his gaping canine teeth. (There is also a mysterious and thoughtful Shiva lingam next door, supposedly commissioned by a very poor and very reverent woman, as the stories go and always will.)

Next: Vittala Temple, the crown jewel of Hampi, a big temple complex set up along the river. You come onto it with your rickshaw, driving past the seemingly endless site of the old bazaar, storefronts and carved columns of fanged creatures riding horses. The avenue ends at the temple, and you disembark and head in, marveling at the big elephant-drawn stone chariot that sits in the middle. (The wheels apparantly used to actually turn, and it is fun to imagine latter-day tourists from long ago spinning the wheels, daring each other like tourists do today, because there always will be and always should be tourists.)

It is difficult to describe how ornate this place is: the peach colored stone wrought over and through with imagery and religious figures and various other characters, fresh detail emerging from seemingly ever portion of the complex. It is an archetiectural marvel and endlessly nice to look at - one cannot help but think of Kublai Khan and interesting opium dreams when you regard it - for surely this is what we think of when we consider forbidden temples and lost monuments, remnants of some sort of unconsidered and faded Asian majesty. This is not a Western monument and I personally find it far better - no dour religiosity, no blood on the cross or plump and idiotic cupids - but writhing carved panthers and screaming horses and smug looking reclining gods - it is at least more to my personal aesthetic.

And the weather - the rain had cleared off and we were in that period of honey colored brilliant sunshine that comes after it pours, when the sunlight reflects left-over pools of water and even the stone shines a little with slickness and wet. The water left behind shallow little reflecting pools all over the temple, rendering the stone warm, and I watched them, rapt, positioning myself on top of a stone elephant. (This meant every Indian guy in the complex had to have a photo with me of course, but you pay the price.)

One feature of Indian ruins is trees: there was one ancient tree in the center of the complex, shedding quivering yellow flowers that dropped into the pools, rippling inevitably away. You cannot capture what is so beautiful about falling leaves in spring, I think. I will stop trying, but I would like you to try to imagine it if you are reading this, to recall falling leaves and try to transition them to this temple, to a deliciously crisp day in early spring in India - and maybe you will understand a little of how I felt.

The last part of it all was the Monkey Temple, positioned at the top of a slightly nerve-wracking hill - you could hear the rickshaw screaming for mercy all the way up it. You disembark and walk through a small crack in the rocks, and find yourself within a palatial and high walled temple grounds, harems of monkeys ebbing and flowing out from the carvings. I was tired by now (and my eye was acting up, growing moderately evil as it sometimes does) - so I sat beneath the temple walls and watched the monkeys fight over coconuts, watched the supposedly ascetic sadhu's (or holyl men) rearrange the satellite dish that rose out of their modest white-washed home next door. Apparently the others followed a sadhu into his cave and were blessed, but I was content to just sit - an old woman who seemed to know all the sadhu's well padded up behind me in her bare feet, nodded languidly, and sat down within the shaded walls of the temple to knit. We watched the sun begin to go down and the moist earth dry up. Dinner time then.

We went back to the Mango Tree - how could we not? The place was lit atmospherically by candles, and fire flies spun in and out of the leaves as we ate. The vegetable do-piyaza was especially delicious, shot through with the flavor of caramelized, blackened onions - but all the food was delicious, simple and fresh, arriving quickly. We had to leave at 8:30 so we could make our bus out of Hospet and back to Bangalore, but we stayed as long as we could. We were all feeling profoundly silly, doubtless owing to how lovely the day had turned out to be, and teased each other mercilessly over coffee. I made a few passes at errant fireflies but had no successful captures. (Why must I always catch things, obtain them? It's a sport to me, like some people play chess.)

We took the rickshaw back in the dark - poor Chris, we were leaving him beyond to continue his journey onward - but he came up to see us off. We re-emerged into grimy and muddy Hospet again, dodging cows and random rubbish fires. Our bus had not arrived yet, and to our horror, we learned it would have no bathroom. Accordingly we found some particularly scary looking hotel bathrooms (there was a gecko in mine; Lorraine found an especially horrifying cockroach.)

The bus arrived and we bought blankets off the clever and American-accented blanket merchant who magically appeared at the right time. He was moving to Nottingham to work, and he told me he loved Pamela Anderson and wanted to visit California. I believe he will go far.

The bus - I found my top bunk and spread out. Adam and Aneesa were in the far back, and Adam and some young Indian guys broke out their guitars and began playing. The Indian guys were all ardent Pink Floyd fans, and we spent a good few hours singing half-remembered rock songs off key and attempting not to fall off the bunks when the bus took a particularly vicious turn. I did not get much sleep that night, as I slid constantly around and thumped against the windows, but the day made up for it anyway.

hampi day one part two CONVULUTED

2008-03-26T02:36:00.000-07:00

had intended to rejoin the others at one point or another but they were not present at the hotel. Presuming they were 1. lost, 2. dead or 3. had maliciously abandoned me, I took a nice satisfying nap on the outdoor bed at the hotel, dropping off just as (without my knowledge) the Holi festival reached its raucous 1 PM climax.

I was awakened by the sound of the others thumping up the stairs erupting in giggles, covered (not surprisingly) head to foot in powder in pink and blue and yellow, dripping wet. They were disappointed to find I was relatively pristine. Lorraine noted, "We were taking bets - we figured you'd either come back absolutely covered in it or spotless."

I must justify myself: I did not set out to avoid participating in Holi, it just sort of happened, mostly because I managed to avoid what was apparently the pulsing center of the celebration down by the river. Everyone else partied with the Indians and the boys even jumped into the river, disregarding the big DEADLY WHIRLPOOL DO NOT SWIM signs that crop up periodically on the boulders. Well, you only live once. Or are sucked into a whirlpool. I do wish I'd managed to participate more fully, but after seeing the state of their clothes (and noticing over the next few days that that shit don't come off easy), I felt a little better about missing out on the craziness. I looked slightly smug and dozed off again as they all took showers.

The rain started pissing down with fervor and malice again, and everyone else went up for a late lunch. I curled up on my mildewy floor mattress and dozed off to sleep again, raindrops coming in through the screen window and pinging off my head. (oh, i am living in a constant state of dampness, i will start contracting mildew spores beneath my skin.)

We wandered around downtown Hampi in a disassociated manner for the rest of the evening, regarding dazed looking Western hippies splattered with color weave in and out of the temples and tourist shops. (Why don't European hippies ever wear bras? Is there some sort of unspoken code?)

The others went into the Virupaksha temple but I stayed behind, unwilling to hand over my shoes and socks in the continuing drizzle, unwilling to splash through the mud and gunk of the floors. I dropped to a comfortable crouch and watched the shoes with the young girl shoe attendant, who asked me my name with a sort of amiable disinterest. (She and her father spent the next few minutes laughing and kicking about the damp shoes in the rain, splashing water and each other and the stray dogs that went by.)

Hindu families had turned out from all over to visit the temple on Holi and faded in and out of the structure, dodging the equally large monkey clan that lived among the ruins, cadging donations from the symbolic baskets of coconut and banana and jasmine flowerers worshippers purchased at the door. One monkey ran down a couple of young men and ripped the basket out of their hands, everyone in the courtyard erupting into laughter at the sight of the mugging, the men looking embarrassed as anything. (But what can you do?) An old dog stood out in the open and quivered pathetically as the rain kicked up again, woofing without conviction at the monkeys that tormented him from the rafters, clinging to protuberant statues of Shiva and various attendants. I was entertained.

Despite the rain, the others decided to walk up the granite hill to the Royal Center. I followed damply, muttering to myself about mad dogs and Englishmen, but they tactfully ignored me. We ducked under the trees in the growing darkness to see the Ganesh temple, spotlighted elegantly in the evening. Unfortunately, the perturbed looking park attendant locked the gate after us. "You will have to go the other way,"
he shrugged, and a couple of laughing teenage boys led us on a trail through the slick and slippery rocks, weaving through the ruins in the growing darkness.

I was reminded with slightly painful nostalgia of the scent of the Utah desert rocks, right after thunderstorm, and I went a little wild, ricocheting gleefully off rocks and slithering off overhangs, as the others demanded I COME DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW DON'T SLIP STOP DEFACING THE RUINS FAINE YOU ARE A WACKJOB

(I have heard these words from so many people over the years in reference to my behavior and they are all entirely true, and i will doubtless die of a blunt force injury some day or fall off something or be et by a cobra/feral pig/cannibal for not heeding them -but -but -i do so enjoy myself...)

In any case, we emerged into the damp and gloppy streets of Hampi again, passing by a couple of menacing bulls with particularly floppy humps and curving horns. We returned to the Villa and readied for dinner, Adam and I vying for possession of the nice wicker porch swing.

The others pulled themselves together and we departed. Unfortunately, I was obeying the terrible and vicious genetic imperative of what I like to call Dupuy Murderous Hunger, wherein people like my mother and myself suddenly become homocidal beasts in pursuit of sweet, sweet calories. Unfortunately no one else understands, simply becoming increasingly distressed as our eyes grow wild and our retorts become even sharper and nastier then usual - WE NEED FOOD. (Back me up mom.)

They did not understand and I stalked through the streets behind them in an increasingly dire state of bitchy hunger as they dispensed with various restaurant choices. Aneesa had noted that the Shanthi Riverside Restaurant looked busy and we popped our heads in, to be told there would be some sort of interminable wait. To add insult to injury the food was pizza, which I do not like one bit. (By way of explaination: I can eat pizza far too quickly. Also I dislike bread.)

In any case, I completely gave up and went across the street to get some gosh darn Indian food - palak masala and fruit salad, bam, done. Ate and paid. They were still waiting. We decided to play some sort of weird 20 questions Guess Who I Am game. (Chris was Scary Spice. This makes me laugh.)

We waited. Hippies flopped over on the couches provided for their hippie lounging pleasure, beneath deeply distressing black light neon posters featuring naked chicks and shrooms and Tolkien imagery. I ordered another watermelon mint juice. (Yum.)

And waited some more. It was by now after ten and the others were Very Hungry, as food appeared at sub glacial rates from the dark and mysterious kitchen. I considered snuggling up with the hippies on the couches to get some shut-eye. However, I am trying to avoid contracting head lice.

The evening wore on and the hippies began to file out, the owner shutting down the lights and clearing the tabes. We were left in a pool of light in the darkness and still the food had not arrived. The owner shrugged and looked non-commital, and finally Julie got some potatoes. Then the pizzas arrived. Which were eaten in irritated silence.

Lorraine, entirely understandably, tried to convince the stoney-faced owner that they should only pay half price, but he insisted he was the nice guy here - "Hey, I have to close down at 11! I was very kind to you to serve you at all." Protests that he'd said earlier the food would take an hour tops fell on deaf ears as the wait staff (and me) yawned all around us, the rain kicking up outside. We gave up and went outside and splattered to the mud.

My bed was unfortunately still damp.

Saturday in Hampi (part one)

2008-03-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

We arrived early in the morning to the dusty orange dawn of Hampi, the conductor jarring us rudely awake at half past six, demanding our blankets and pillows and god knows what else. I packed up my stuff in a bleary-eyed stupor and sipped a tiny plastic cup of oversugared chai.

We disembarked at the Hospet train station, and found the rickshaw drivers dispatched from Vicky's Guest House in Hampi. They guided us to our rickshaws through a crowd of over-stimulated children (and adults) slinging colors at each other with special attention to foreigners - Holi had begun. We managed to escape being transformed into technicolor abominations and sped off through town.

Hospet is what you think of when you think of rural India: grade A quality squalor, kids leading water buffalos through fetid rivers of shit and trash, chickens picking in dust heaps, herds of pigs rooting up against the corners of cement lined huts. It was drizzling in a half-hearted sort of way when we arrived and everything looked muddy and dreary and damp - I was glad I had my pashmina.

Hampi proper is located about 40 KM out of Hospet, among a dramatic boulder field set among tropical banana plantations and rice paddies. As we approached through the banana trees, we could already see the foliage-shrouded remains of temples and columns, advance emissaries of the ruins we were about to see. We passed quickly by the Ganesh temple, the idol drying off slightly as the rain slacked off, rounding the hill.

We splashed through the mud into Hampi, which is definitely nothing much to look at - a series of flimsy tourist geared structures set among a particularly unattractive and gloppy stretch of mud road. But the magnifencet heights of the Virupaksha temple rise impressively above the glop, evoking instant thoughts of Indiana Jones and various tacky adventure movies - we had arrived.

Vicky's Guest House was also not much to look at, located along a particularly squashy stretch of road. The rooms were somewhat clean and that is about all that could be said for them, as a faint aroma of mildew percolated up into the air as we opened the door. No AC and no hot water, of course...you think this is the goddamn Ritz?

I was feeling antisocial and in a hurry to see the ruins, so I bid the others farewell as they peered with bleary eyes into their first cups of coffee at the upstairs restaurant. I walked up the main street of the bazaar and headed through towards the river, picking my way along a path studded with boulders and banana trees, perking up slightly in the morning sun. Holi had turned out the locals, and groups of jubilant young men carrying beer walked past me, readying themselves for the inevitable technicolor battle to come. A guide accompanying a Western tourist took me aside and warned me: "You should really try to be back by one or two to Hampi, you know..these guys are gonna get drunk and rowdy." I decided to take that to heart.

I passed through a hole in the boulders, ambling past a couple of begging sadhus or solitary holy men (how holy, I guess, if angling for donations), groups of already-drunk people banging their laundry against rocks and having a grand old time, yelling god knows what at me as I passed on through. I rounded a corner and found myself almost alone amongst the ruins, on the trail to Vittala Temple.

I really find it difficult to express how downright cool it was to have such open access to these ruins, especially ruins of this caliber and this scale. In the USA and Europe, historical remains like this would be fenced off and curated by guides - here, no one is keeping an eye over your shoulder or advising you to avoid touching anything. I know this is probably contributing to the degradation of the ruins in one way or another, but part of the appeal of Hampi is that it is still alive, that people go about their standard lives and do their laundry and drive their goats in and amongst monolithic statues and gorgeous, graceful temples - it has not yet been rendered sterile.

So I spent a happy time looking at the curious carvings on the rock floor (hands and feet and women), Shivas and Garuda's staring up through half-collapsed rock panels, tablets bearing incomprehensible writing jutting up through the sand and scrubby dry-weather foliage. Hampi is a renowned bouldering area (among its other strong points), and I found myself a particularly big set of rocks to clamber up, finding a small cavern in the rocks to shade myself (and avoid the various packs of all too curious Indians on holiday from asking me for "one snap with you please!").

I sat up there for a few hours, watching the world go by, groups of young men roaring into the little sanctum by the river with beer, pelting each other with colors and playing Bollywood music at ear-shattering volumes among the quiet splendor of the King's Balance and collapsed columns. Huge families wandered through, little girls and women dressed in luminescent saris, waving at me and yelling for me to come down (I politely declined.) Little lizard-like chipmunks regarded me momentarily then went about their business, vying for rock space with big monitor lizards in yellows and greens, and gorgeous emerald tropical starlings, darting in and out of the cactus plants. It was entirely possible to watch the river go by forever, watching partiers dip into the water and birds take dust baths in the rockyard below - but as always, I was getting hungry, and I slithered down from the rock pile before anyone noticed me.

I was thumping earnestly up the path back to the village when I heard a curious hissing sound and saw, to my profound surprise, a cobra of healthy and respectable size slither out from under my feet and beneath a rock. I know that they are More Scared of You then You Are Of Them or some bullshit like that, but I still stood there in stunned silence for a minute or two. Welcome to India.

Cheerily reminded of my own mortality, I found myself a rooftop restaurant and ate aloo palak (spinach with potato) and kimchi (really) in contemplative silence. I was mostly just glad I had been wearing cowboy boots at the time.

friday

2008-03-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Friday was yet another curiously free-wheeling Indian holiday - Holi.

(http://www.lonelyplanet.com/theme/festivals/festivals_holi.htm)

This is basically an excuse for all of India to turn out and spray the shit out of each other with various colors and dyes, all while drinking potent bhang lassis, playing music, and generally having a wonderful time. However, the big shindig doesn't get going until Saturday - perhaps Friday is a day to ready for battle. I cannot be expected to know everything.

Aneesa, Chris, and Adam decided to go to a tiger reserve for most of the day. As we were slated to get on the train for Hampi that evening (and it was raining in that miserable dreary way), I declined and decided to spend the day shopping and steeling my nerves for my first sorty with the Indian train station. I definitely will make it to the tiger reserve at some point.

Lorraine saw the logic in my plan and stayed behind as well. We took a rickshaw down to Commercial Street in the deeply miserable weather, and I proceeded my systematic survey of Kashmiri stores on a mission for the perfect silk coat. I visited quite a few establishments, doing my best to look bored and mildly disgusted by the wares in fufillment of the ancient and majestic Haggling Dance. I did find a few lovely specimens, but nothing that attracted me quite as much as the one I found on M.G Road - all that gorgeous colorful embroidery on a jet black background - perfect. Maybe I'll just buy it and hope I can take the damn thing in. Or wear it with a belt.

The rain was really pretty misery inducing....too early for the monsoon my ass....so we headed back to Thippasandra. I was starving as always, and we went to the Clay Pot once more. I had a delicious dish of fish molie with kingfish, a thick, mild curry made from coconut milk and a little bit of chili. This was reminescent of a Thai curry - not surprising since the Southern Indian ecosystem is pretty similar to the Thai one - and very delicious indeed, full of firm, white fish. I have discovered the Clay Pot's secret by the way....the local fish market is right down the street.

We went back to the Katari Villa and napped. It was wonderful.

The others appeared in the evening. Dinner was egg curry, which gives me shivery nightmares, so I went down the street to the local biryani joint instead. I had a decent fish biryani which certainly included plenty of spicy sauteed fish along with rice - not a bad way to go.

We managed to pull ourselves together and hailed a rickshaw to the train station by half past eight for our 10 PM train to Hampi. This took a bit, but we made it to the train station, overflowing with people in various states of disarray from long journeys - whole families carrying their wordly possesions in rucksacks, camping out on colorful blankets in front of the station, stray dogs and worried looking European hippies wandering among them.

We found our way to the right platform - miracle! - and the train came chugging along on schedule, looking rather atmospheric in the evening fog and humidity. We found our berths - not bad, and actually pretty comfortable. I settled in presently and made my way to the bathroom. Some guy attempted to unsubtly grab my arse when I walked past him, and I responded (naturally) by slugging him hard....I will always treasure the look of profound suprise on his face. (Not expecting THAT were ya?)

Anyways, I dropped off surpisingly quickly - I sleep well in moving vehicles.

thursday

2008-03-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

I was a lazy bum yesterday and thus this will be a boring post. Hopefully you shall survive.

Woke up nice and early, baffling the others with my bright eyed and bushy tailed manner after the previous night. (Being 19 rocks.) I was feeling no collateral damage from our adventures other then the discovery of various mysterious bruises all over my body. Also a knee ache. Such are the dangers of dancing.

Trucked off to work at the usual time with Aneesa and Adam - took slightly less long then usual. We had decided to meet Chris downtown at a coffee house, so we faffed around for roughly an hour due to getting there so late, then headed off to M.G Road.

Unfortunately, the 'authentic' coffee house Lonely Planet described turned out to be a piss-scented den where glowering Indian men lurked over masala dosas and endless plates of toast with scrambled eggs. We left quickly, deciding on Emgee's Restaurant (or Veggie Veggie Healthy!). This was a pleasant wood paneled space that sort of reminded me of a Denny's. The food, however, was anything but - the novel of a menu encompassed seemingly every chaat, fruit juice, and vegetarian dish known to Indian cuisine, and we agonized happily over what to choose.

Aneesa and I split the special bhel puri, a nice rendition full of finely chopped tomato and cucumber. Served with idli or tamarind sauce, this was divine. Next course was paneer chaat-something, a spicy cheese curry filled with lots of different vegetables and spices. We also tried the corn palak, essentially spicy and neon green creamed spinach with corn...looked repulsive, tasted delicious. We also tried Chris's tasty mattar paneer (cheese curry with peas) and Adam's masala dosa - big and spicy, served with coconut chutney and sambar. The only misfire was the deeply distressing custard infused fruit salad Aneesa and I ordered, but that was a minor complaint indeed. I'm definitely returning to Emgee's.

Unfortunately, it began pissing down buckets of rain by the end of our meal, which meant we got to sprint damply out to a rickshaw, huddling under the middle of the open vehicle as we sped back to work. Rain sucks.

Chris came to work with us and saw how boring our daily jobs really are, although he claimed he had a good time. Chris is an optimist, and I admire that deeply, especially since I am the kind of person who can find something unpleasant, tasteless or annoying about pretty much anything, including puppies, kittens, flowers, and sunshine. Maybe even rainbows. Whereas Chris will look at a TERRIFYING KILLER BULL and go 'Oh, how cute', while I am debating whether I should run away or not.

I don't like terrifying killer bulls at all.

We returned quite late and had dinner at the house. The others wanted to go to Mocha, but I was feeling exhausted and a bit gross, so I decided to stay behind. I had a rather blissful evening eating left over pineapple and drawing weird cartoons. Sometimes that is all you need.

Wednesday

2008-03-20T04:02:00.000-07:00

Woke up per usual protocol and wandered down the street to purchase my nutritious daily pineapple. There's few better ways to wake up then dodging various forms of Indian traffic first thing in the morning. I also had to avoid the Terrifying Bull that's always tethered outside the turnoff to our street. I swear to God, they sharpen that monster's horns - which are painted a fetching sort of red and blue.

Usual long long long rickshaw voyage to work. Trucked merrily away on the World Music page, then not so covertly trolled Metafilter for a bit. People love to ask the oracle that is the internet intimate questions. I cannot explain it.

(internet - why is my life so strange? oh internet, why do i have opposable thumbs? internet, does my butt look big in this?)

Aneesa wasn't feeling well due to the lurking Bangalore crud, so we went for a long lunch at Juice Junction. I had my usual delicious fruit bowl - mmm, papaya - while they had extremely suspicious looking "european" sandwiches at Casa Piccola, the Indian answer to Western food. This apparantly means dousing everything in wine flavored cream sauce. Indians love them some cream sauce.

We stayed later then usual at work, then tooled on home, where I had another satisfying nap. I love taking those kind of hot weather afternoon naps where you stretch out as much as humanly possible to catch just a tiny bit of cold air, limbs dangling off the edge of the bed in all directions. I can stay like that for hours.

Ran out to my beloved Clay Pot for a dinner of prawns thoran, a Keralan dish of fried spicy prawns in shredded spicy coconut, seasoned with onion and two kinds of chili. Totally unhealthy and ridiculously delicious. I highly reccomend it. I may suffer from heartburn for the rest of my life but it will be a happy sort of heartburn.

We all wanted to Go Out, so I called that guy we met the other night at the Beach to see what was what. He claimed he could take us to the Beach, get us free drinks, then drive us over to Athena, the swanky dance club located in the Leela Palace hotel. I was suspicious, figuring he was just acting as a tout for the Beach to get our asses in the seats once again - but then again, I never argue with free drinks, so we rickshawed ourselves over there.

I was initally in a curiously antisocial mood, glowering moodily over the Beach's spread of artificial palmtrees, but a couple of glorious, glorious free whiskies perked me up considerably. I found myself dancing with extreme ineptness to Justin Timberlake's incomparable "SexyBack" with a nice-looking Indian boy, who was tragically a much better dancer then me. (Why do I attract the boys who CAN dance? Do I make them feel especially talented? Do they simply pity me?)

To my surprise, our benefactor waved us over and told us that, yep, we were gonna leave for Athena now if we so desired, he had two cars for us, and hey hey hey free drinks. Pleasantly surprised, we rounded everyone up and left - he and his friend both had very nice cars blaring the latest Bhangra hits as we made the short trip to the Leela, which was glowing luxuriously in the darkness. I have always had the occasional secret fantasy of pulling up to a luxury hotel then disembarking from a car looking deeply disenchanted with the universe, wearing very high heels. This fantasy has been fufilled.

In any case, we were ushered into the Special VIP Entrance, which meant we got to skirt the usual 1000 rupee entrance fee, presumably by virtue of being, well, Special. The club itself was actually very nice - set up in dark, moody colors, with white cubicles arrayed around the place for people to lounge attractively in. The music was good too, a nice midpoint behind the kind of hard ass techno that makes your brainstem ache and completely skanky ass hip hop -they even threw some fabulous Bollywood dance tunes in there. The crowd was upscale, laidback, and generally really cool, free of the glassy-eyed creeps that tend to hang around other Indian dance clubs. I also appreciated the quantity of women - being one of a couple girls in a real sausage festival sort of bar is always a spot awkward.

Being in the VIP area, we even had our own bar, which meant I got to enjoy requesting drinks from various men I'd just met and watching them scurry over to fetch them. If you had known me in my early life, you would realize this is not exactly an outcome I had anticipated while capturing cockroaches in jars while wearing an odiforeous Jurassic Park t-shirt. Life brings us to strange and curious places, or in this case, brings us free liquor and totally unmerited perks.

I may have got swozzled. I do know that I won the nightly Best Dancer award which was crystal and came in a nice little box. I presume this means the (attractive) DJ is either stupid or totally blind. But I appreciate it.

On the way out, we met one of our benefactor's brother, who apparantly is a Bollywood actor. He was decent looking enough and rather shy. I will look for him in a film someday.

We returned to the Villa at god knows what ungodly hour and I enjoyed a McVities Chocolate Disgestive Biscuit, possibly my new obsession. I do not know if they actually aid with digestion or if this is just an elaborate lie the English tell themselves. In any case, it was delicious.

tuesday

2008-03-18T23:42:00.001-07:00

Woke up and did the usual – delicious pineapple, cornflakes, shower. The showerhead has been replaced, which means I no longer need to squat gnome-like under a spigot to bathe. Things are looking up.

We took an incredibly long rickshaw ride to work. Traffic was absolutely vile and we ended up running out of things to say to each other, breaking out our Ipods almost simultaneously. I ended up consoling myself with Ziggy Stardust as I sucked down exhaust fumes.

We arrived at the office and I kept on thumping away at the World Music page – I think I’ll discuss the new Bob Marley documentary and Damon Albran’s new African music collaboration. Well, it’s interesting to me.

Due to the office move, the internet was shut down after noon, so I decided to grab some fruit at the friendly neighborhood Juice Junction and head home early. I hopped in a rickshaw and went back to Thippasandra.

On the way, I saw Raul – the guy who invited me to his afterparty last Wednesday – again, riding to work on his motorbike. I explained why we didn’t show at The Beach on Saturday (Two words: torrential rains), and he gave me his phone number and told us we should give him a call tomorrow and see what’s up. Perhaps I will do that. He also gave me a lift back to the villa on his motorbike. I love motorbikes.

I took a long and deeply satisfying nap when I returned. Just finished David Lodge’s hilarious “Trading Places” and have moved on to the very interesting “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, centering on a rash of female suicides in a backwater Turkish town. Not exactly uplifting but fascinating reading on the modern Islamic movement. (Dork.)

We left to have dinner at the Oasis restaurant at 6:00, meeting Aneesa and Adam. The food was even better then the first time. We began with channa aloo chaat, a cold dish of chickpeas and potato tossed with a salty, piquant mix of onions, tomato, mint and lemon. Chris tried the chili squid, which was as tasty and pungent as before. Aneesa and I went with the whole tandoori pomfret – a whole fish rubbed with spices and roasted to perfection, sweet meat lifting nicely off the bone. Lorraine’s fried pomfret was also delicious, crispy and not too greasy. We also tried the gobi tandoor (cauliflower) which was fabulous – roasted cauliflower tossed in some sort of slightly cheesy spice mixture, served with a fresh relish and some coriander and mint sauce. Adam also had spicy fried squid – grease free and not too chewy. The Oasis is definitely a must-eat if you’re in Bangalore. Only complaint: the service is perhaps over-eager, waiters lunging at you with desperation in their eyes if you even attempt to serve yourself something off a communal plate They will do it for you. They MUST do it for you.

We adjourned to the usual comforting skankiness of the Guzzlers Inn, then popped into NASA for a lark – the infamous space themed pub that was probably super cool 30 years ago. It’s now almost intolerably outdated, pounding, bubble-gum techno assaulting your innocent ears as old businessmen sip beer and wish there were more women present. I was happy to leave.

monday

2008-03-18T23:22:00.001-07:00

Awoke feeling curiously slammed from the usually innocent Tylenol PM I took before bed. Limping to the mirror, I discovered I had developed a really impressive specimen of Evil Eye, tiny blood shot veins tracing morbidly across my pupil. I tried to convince myself this was not a manifestation of exotic tropical eye parasites, and headed out with Aneesa to visit the travel agent.

We had been talking about visiting Hampi, one of India's best preserved ancient cities for a long time now, and finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy the tickets. Thus, we took a rickshaw over to the travel agent and proceeded to immerse ourselves in Indian bueuracracy, bastard child of the English system. (I blame them for everything.) I wanted to help, but when the plump and eminently confident looking woman behind the counter said, “What is wrong with your eye?”, I sunk into a chair in discontent. I was pretty much certain I was going to have a bloodshot evil eye forever.

In any case, Aneesa was a trooper and booked our tickets – second class AC train on the way there, sleeper bus on the way back since everything else was booked up solid. We then proceeded over into town to attend the new volunteers orientation, since we had to Officially Meet the new people though of course we already had.

Aneesa and I had a bizarre interlude where the rickshaw driver kept on attempting to take us over to a “veddy veddy nice fruit seller” who would apparently provide with an “excellent pineapple, very excellent.” I am usually a sucker for pineapples but I passed as I did not want to carry one around all day. In any case, we managed to shake him off (still muttering in broken Hindi about pineapples) and found the hotel for the buffet lunch.

The lunch was actually quite good, and as appears to be traditional, the new volunteers barely touch the food, while the old volunteers eat as much as is humanly possible, especially the free (!) meat. I downed chicken, lots of spicy fish curry, mutton shanks, some sort of tasty spinach paneer dish, and lots of spicy tomato chutney. I felt sorry for the new volunteers who spent most of the lunch watching the old guard devour their food like hungry, miserable wolves, but they couldn’t understand. We finished off with fruit salad and delicious, icy strawberry ice cream, then waddled off to Commercial Street to show the volunteers around.

I popped into FabIndia to look for shirts for my dad, but after visiting by far the sketchiest bathroom I have ever encountered (up some dark gungy stairs, guarded by a toothless, chainsmoking woman in a yellow sari, people upstairs playing cards and glowering as you latch the door securely behind you), found the others had apparently abandoned me. I attempted not to melt in the heat and waited for them to return. Then, thankfully, we decided to return to the Villa where I could have a damn nap.

We had decided to go clubbing that evening, and along those lines decided to try Amnesia at the Cavery hotel. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in the rickshaw of a new driver, who manifested this by driving his rickshaw at exactly 2 miles an hour while inching, carefully, over every single bump and pothole and crack in the road- and in India, there are many. To add insult to injury, he had no idea where he was going, and stopped for directions constantly – including asking other rickshaw drivers. Now, it is a bad idea when other rickshaw drivers conspire because they usually attempt to jack up the price, which is exactly what happened. Chris noted, “Look, I understand what you’re saying,” but they rolled their eyes and kept on attempting to screw us, wherein I got a little pissy (surprise!), and managed to get into an argument with the rickshaw driver, who tried to act all put upon and offended because I was not interested in getting cheated. I was just about to eat him when Lorraine and Chris held me back , and we putted off to the hotel.

Unfortunately, the club ended up being pathetic – two couples sitting around and the promised “Retro” music being really really retro, as in “Johnny Mathis,” which meant we escaped to Taika, the techno club I think I have mentioned before. I have.

This was fun. Lorraine was a bad influence and induced me to dance on a table which I would NEVER do on my own, except we almost got kicked out. However, this made me an instant rockstar to all the men in the club, meaning I cleaned up on the free whisky and offered dinner dates (yes, no.) We also met a couple of Americans from Chicago – Tan and James (I think) – who might meet us at the Leela Palace on Wednesday. Perhaps.

We drove back snockered in the rickshaws. The rickshaw guy dangerously was a little bit snockered too (no problem! No problem!....problem!), but that also meant he let Lorraine and Adam drive the damn thing, which admittedly was all kinds of hilarious. Incriminating photos will make their way to a Facebook near you.

sunday

2008-03-18T23:21:00.000-07:00

Woke up to a refreshingly dry sort of day. New volunteers were coming in, and we met Lorraine, who I like very much. She's from England and has taken the commendably brave move of coming here to volunteer with children after the death of her husband. She also promotes techno concerts and parties (Dutch gabba to be specific) in England, which I am now rather eager to attend. She's a hell of a lot of fun and is eager to go out and enjoy life as much as possible - what a cool lady. In any case, she was tired from the inevitable stresses of the Third World Bus In The Sky (international flights) so we let her nap.

We decided to make yet another excursion to Commercial Street since Adam needed to buy some shirts. Thankfully, the weather was a bit cooler then the day before, meaning I felt slightly less need to dissolve into a puddle of miserable sweat then before. (Almost.)

We began to starve and ducked into the Bay of Bengal restaurant, featuring a wide variety of bizarre sounding seafood dishes we had never seen before. I was tempted to stick it out but the others have less tolerance for dodgy sounding sea life then I do (imagine that!) and we adjourned to the Chung Wah Chinese restaurant.

Chinese food is an obsession in India, almost as common as Chinese food in the USA. And just like in the USA, Chinese food has been merrily bastardized here, mainly in the form of making everything even spicier and adding gloppy sauce wherever it may be required. Indians also love chop suey, which I can accurately report does not actually exist in China. The premier ChIndian dish is chili chicken, which is of course delicious: fried chicken bits in a bright red sinus crushing sauce that happily blends Indian and Chinese tastes and proclivities.

In any case, I ordered a pretty good Beijing chili fish dish, which came with a nice pungent gingery sauce, not too sweet. Chris had a tasty version of salt and pepper vegetables (another mostly Indian chinese dish), although the other dishes were fairly forgettable- mushy vegetables and noodles in the disturbingly titled White Sauce.

We left the restaurant and shopped a while longer, finally giving in as the usual suffocating afternoon heat set in.

One thing I would like to make clear: I love the weather here because it is *just like* the weather in Sacramento, down to the dry hot heat mixed with occasional, worrying intervals of torrential rain. I have also adapted to it (much like a desert dwelling monitor lizard or snake), making sure to retreat to the comfort and darkness of my rock (well, room) during the heat of the day. I am attempting to make the English see the wisdom of this with limited success.

Aneesa, Lorraine and I decided to go out for dinner, to the little Kerela place I'm partial to called the Clay Pot. It's just down the street, and we moved quickly, hoping the ominous sky wouldn't open and drench us with extremely dodgy rain. We got to the restaurant and were ushered to our seats by the impressively mustachioed owner. We decided on fish biryani and a prawn curry (dirt cheap) and settled in, watching enviously as the women next door picked apart a whole tandoori pomfret fish.

The food proved to be, in a word, spicy. Possibly hellaciously spicy. Now, this was wonderful news for me. I love spicy food. It's a genetic perogrative - I am the granddaughter of a man who takes pleasure in consuming Indian Ghost chilis whole as an interesting after dinner digestive. I also love driving my mother crazy as I ladle more and more bright red chili paste onto whatever carefully prepared curry or soup she's laid out for dinner - "Why do you DO that? You can't even taste it anymore! Stop it!" I smile and keep on adding it until my mouth achieves that just-east-of-numb feeling I crave. In other words I am Asbestos Mouth.

Unfortunately Aneesa and Lorraine have not torched their taste buds into happy oblivion like myself, and ended up unable to eat most of the food (though they did say it tasted good until the horrible, horrible pain began.) I thought it was great, the sweet prawns floating in a downright malicious curry sauce flavored with two separate varieties of chilis - red AND green! The biryani was great as well, red hot spice coated chunks of firm white fish immersed in sauce and slightly perfumed rice...delish.

It began raining as soon as we finished eating, and we hurried down the street with plastic bags over our heads like the horrible disfigured, until we managed to find a grocery store willing to sell us a brolly (as They say).

Later that evening, we decided to go out, deciding on Couch on Residency Road. Couch turned out to be true to its name - a very nicely designed mahogany and wood accented lounge with, well, lots of couches - and unfortunately was profoundly boring, thumpy dance music eliminating any chance of actual conversation. We left quickly, heading for the hookah lounge down the street the others had been to before. I wanted to dance goddamit and felt rather frustrated, but the feeling lifted slightly when I spotted a sausage-fat gecko stalking mosquitos by the bug zapper. (I couldn't catch him. Damn.)

Saturday

2008-03-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

Woke up nice and late - perfect. Aneesa was in need of some nice material for her custom made sari, so we decided to take a rickshaw over to Commercial Street, which is nothing if not full of fabric stores.

Indian fabrics are mesmerizing, generated in an obscene array of colors and patterns and textures. It's a marvel that they manage to manufacture so many different varieties, and insofar as I can tell, no woman steps out dressed the same as another, completely eliminating the western mortification of Wearing The Same Thing To The Party. No, Indian women dress in every color and pattern they damned well like - it's only the shape that seems to be set in stone.

Shopping for fabrics is a similarily dizzying experience, as the grinning and slightly oily salesman or woman unfolds and lays out linens at you at warp speed - "You like this color, you like this shape, you no like....like?", everything running together into some deeply confusing retail rainbow. Aneesa is much better at this then I am (I'm just looking for now...waiting until the last week to buy) and managed to find some nice material, sifting through the seeming oceans of possibilities to find something she liked.

We stopped for lunch at the Oasis seafood restaurant on Church Street, which was excellent. It's a big and dark and slightly formal looking place, but the prices were eminently reasonable - and the food was great. We began with chili squid, lightly fried squid rings tossed with onions, peppers, and chili sauce. Next was spicy and sweet tandoori crab, cooked for just the right amount of time, served in a generous portion (i spent a happy hour gnawing at its blackened little legs.) Finally, an excellent vegetable kadai curry, filled with mixed vegetables in a creamy and spicy curry sauce, washed down with some thick and buttery naan bread. Perfect. I intend to return soon.

Commercial Street turns into an oven during mid-day, as shoppers limp through the streets drenched in sweat, licking at soft-serve ice cream cones. Part of Commercial Street seems to be mainly Muslim, and you'll encounter veiled women leading children by the hand, tiny sparkling flashes of embroidery showing through their black clothing. (I especially like the women who wear neon-yellow or turquoise pants under the chador...I think that's what it's called.) In any case, everyone is hot and miserable and cold drinks are few and far between.....but we were saved by the Natural Ice Cream Shop.

This magnificent place sells all natural, coloring n' fake flavoring and cream and egg free ice cream, and it is amazing. I ordered sugarcane ginger and guava, and the flavors were intense, the ginger full of tangy, chewy spice and the guava sharp and pungent as the actual fruit. This stuff is reminiescent of gelato but a little icier and a little faster to melt - delicious stuff, and inexpensive too. They offer elaborate ice cream cakes, and I am sorely tempted to make up an excuse to get one. In the shape of a tiger.

In any case, we met up with Christian again (who was leaving that evening), Mira, and Sepna, who had been shopping as well. Christian amused us with a story about being unsubtly pinched by a pashmina seller in exchange for modeling some of his wares (but she got free pashminas out of it, no?.) After a stop at Coffee Day, we returned to Katari - it's not worth moving around in the heat of the day.

We had plans to go out on the town that night but unfortunately nature intervened, in the form of a God Hates Us sort of torrential rain. It began with a few innocous little spatters then suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a movie-set esque flood, pounding viciously on the ceiling and windows, quickly and efficiently cutting the power. We sat in the dark, discontented for a bit, then decided Goddammit We Were Going To Go Out. Unfortunately rickshaws weren't running and cabs weren't interested either, and none of us was walking.

Everyone was hungry, and I decided I could really use a Diet Coke (my one Western addiction) and some chewing gum, maybe take a look at the destruction outside. I put on my cowboy boots and took along an umbrella. Completely under-dressed unfortunately. I discovered our street had turned into a churning, muddy ocean, trash and god knows what floating along the currents. (Chris told me he saw a severed chicken foot float by that night, which I do not disbelieve.) I tried hopping from rock to rock for a bit, and almost stayed dry until a car charged by, sloshing piss water almost up to my knees. The battle was lost now and I decided to go on, sideswiping abandoned bicycles and melancholy, submerged motorbikes, waving at the packs of laughing men sipping tea underneath their dripping awnings. I made it to Thippasandra road, up to my knees in India brand Toxic Waste and decided to turn back, but not before buying some biscuits and chewing gum for Christian by candlelight, dripping water from seemingly every pore.

The others decided to make a break for the bar but I stayed back. I'd had enough water for that night. Apparantly they made it but I'm not sure any stiff drink is enough to compensate for being transformed into a drowned rat.

f-f-friday

2008-03-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

This was a very odd day but I will attempt to tell you about.

I woke up feeling pissy for some reason (oh wait, like every other day), a feeling only intensified by the disarray of the office. A few guys were sitting in the room with the computer I use glowering and looking irritated, and I found it hard to ignore them as I attempted to research my damn world music page or whatever. I sent a few emails then dis-contentedly went off to wander, mainly because the cleaning lady kept on tapping me on the shoulder and requesting bubble gum NOW.

I encounter Louise in the lobby, who was attempting to rally people to go to the India Rocks Megadeth concert - the historical very first time Megadeth has ever played in india (what distinction!). She asked me if I cared to join her. Now, my life philosophy is generally to stumble blindly into weirdness whenever weirdness presents itself, and this seemed pretty much ideal. I said yes yes yes. We trolled the office for a bit looking for other takers, found none, and went off with our Indian coworkers. Since they both had motorbikes, Louise and I took on the back of theirs, all the way to the Bangalore Palace Grounds.

Now, I thought I would be scared shitless by this travel arrangement but to my complete surprise it proved to be exhilarating, my hair blowing every which way as weaved dangerously through rickshaws and buses and innocent pedestrians, guys on motorbikes yelling god knows what to me in the crush of traffic. It was such an effortless way to get around, forgoing the usual torturous process of negotiating rickshaw fares or being crammed into unnatural and miserable positions in a sweat-infused bus - this is the way to travel. If I lived here I would get a motorbike. And update my organ donor card.

We stopped briefly to get a huge amount of food for 100 rupees (nothing whatsoever), then arrived at the grounds, a dusty and slightly apocalyptic stretch of nothing in particular. The crowd was rather Woodstock esque, huge numbers of Indian males in their best metal t-shirts lounging around on the grass, sucking down alcohol and smoking copious amounts of weed (you cannot bring such items into the concert.) We parked ourselves on the grass next to a group of young gentlemen smoking up merrily away in an abandoned auto rickshaw, watching a group of wild horses wander among the punk kids.

A small fracas ensued when it turned out I could not take my dinky little camera into the concert grounds because I was not Official Photography Staff, but I managed to convince them to let me in when I threw away the batteries. A large and very drunk Indian man convinced himself I was staring at him and began posturing inexplicably at Louise who, he judged by her pen and paper, was somehow running this whole thing. "Why the fuck can't you bring in booze, maaann?" he slurred at her, and they began arguing until we managed to pull her off.

The concert itself was one of those festival format things that go on for too long, but we found a spot on the foam floor to sit down and watch some Indian metal bands rock out, which they actually did serviceably well. This was interesting enough for a while, but I was beginning to grow slightly concerned by the realization that Louise and I were one of about 20 or so actual women present, and two of four Western women present, which meant the stares were rife and only getting worse since everyone was very very trashed. Now, this is normal, expected behavior at USA metal concerts, but those usually tend to feature more, you know, women. Another issue was that the official sponsor was Royal Challenge whiskey, which meant whiskey was 1. very cheap and 2. very available.

In any case, Louise and I went looking for drinks and found our drunken buddy yet again, who immediately began the argument where it left off. Things went to a head when he called Louise a "bitch" and she immediately went off, smacking him around a bit while the security guards giggled and the guy's friends attempted to pull them apart. She gave in and we went in the other direction and determined that,yeah, it would be a good idea to leave. There was too much rockin' going on.

I returned to the villa after yet another awesome night-time motorbike ride - the parks look great lit up by streelights - and had a nice chicken dinner at the villa. Then we put together some half-assed plans to go out to a swank bar called the 13th Floor, which ended up wanting a 400 rupee cover charge - hell no. And so we ended up at the Guzzlers Inn once again, sucking down pitchers of beer and trying not to think about the stickiness of the floor.

thursday

2008-03-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

I woke up curiously bright eyed and bushy tailed. Youth is nice. In any case, we went off to work in the usual fashion - I was feeling good and less socially inept then usual!

Began work on the world music section which I have been assigned. I found some interesting information about a world music festival in the Malaysian rain forest I might like to cover. I happen to really enjoy world music so this works out well for me.

Since the office was being moved upstairs and thus in a state of profound disarray, Aneesa and I decided to leave early, adjourning for lunch at Beijing Bites. We had an interesting but delicious tropical chicken salad (pineapple can be a nice addition!) and some merely okay fried mushrooms and chili chicken. Finding a rickshaw thankfully proved to be less traumatic then usual. We hung out at Crosswords for a bit (the Nice Bookstore) and I perused yet more awesome Indian cookbooks.

We had decided to go to South Indies for dinner - a rather famous vegetarian restaurant apparently run by a 19 year old - (gosh i feel so useless) - but unfortunately we were completely unable to find it despite being repeatedly assured it was totally located on 100 Ft Road. We finally gave up, got out, and despite the protests of the rickshaw driver who TOTALLY KNEW WHERE IT WAS, went to the Bombay Post restaurant instead.

This place had an old Bollywood theme and was amusingly affected - I loved the doorman with a full twirly mustache and some sort of jodhpur afflicted safari outfit. The servers wore either glittery naval-blue uniforms or turbans, and some paan guys (chewy spice things wrapped up in leaves...hard to explain) waited at attention. The place specializes in Bombay style kebabs and tandoori, and the menu was salivation worthy. The kitchen was open and you could see the guys with their big white hats skewering delicious animal flesh upon silver rods and charring it over the fires. I took a few photos but they turned out crap. Most of my photos do.

I chose the stuffed tandoori broccoli, which sounds bizarre but ended up delicious. Broccoli was stuffed with paneer, nuts and pomegranate seeds, coated in a spicy flour, then roasted for a bit. This was super rich and very delicious, the charred and slightly bitter flavor of the broccoli playing nicely off the cheese.

We also tried the Bombay mutton kebabs, delicious chunks of meat cooked to a melty consistency with a thick coating of tandoori spices. This was served with super salty sambar (which I have not and never shall learn to like) and some delicious butter-coated garlic naan. The others got a few decadent looking paneer infused curry, and I did try their hyper spicy and delicious tandoori mushroom "salad".

The others wanted dessert, so we went to the Corner House ice cream shop, which proved disappointing. I passed, but the others claimed their chocolate ice cream tasted rather like soap. This didn't seem to stop the contented looking Indian youths sucking down Black Forest milkshakes (a national obsession)from patronizing the place well into the wee hours.

We decided to walk back, passing by the Leela Palace, probably the most swish hotel in Bangalore. It's a glorious and moodily lit edifice that seems to go on forever, with enough room to host seemingly every over-privileged potentate who swings through town. (Oddly enough it overlooks a particularly nawstry sort of shantytown, which presumably people can contemplate as they sip their tumblers of extremely expensive whiskey. Welcome to India.)

We walked down some back alleys which were deeply disorienting, mostly because there were lots and lots of stray dogs displaying entirely too much interest in our whereabouts. The stray dogs here generally are healthy and deeply unafraid of people, which is good for them but discouraging for me, mostly because I don't have a rabies vaccination and I do not like the idea of things biting me. (Or dying from convulsions and foaming at the mouth and God knows what else because I pissed off Fido.) Needless to say I tried to walk quickly.

day 11

2008-03-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

Woke up nice and early. After the usual waiting for a very long time for Adam to complete his ablutions (what does he do in there?), we went across the street for coffee then went to work.

Yet more CD reviews: good thing I like doing them. Thelonious Monk and Peter Frampton this time along with a healthy dose of Whitesnake. (Whitesnake's early album = quite good. Surpising.)

Went for my usual lunch at Beijing Bites - roast chicken with vegetables this time. I love Chinese roast chicken with its usual little hint of sesame flavor. This was served in a curry sauce and was pretty darn good. Unfortunately the usual communication errors meant I got a soup I did not want, but this was resolved. Mostly.

I grabbed a rickshaw home and the driver took me on quite possible the longest route ever - a pretty impressive feat. I was exhuasted and took a brief nap, trying to blank out the sound of the dogs outside (success!) then woke and went for yet another walk. Walking down the street in India is a much more dangerous and exciting process then in other countries - sort of like playing Frogger in all too real-life. You have to develop nerves of absolute steel unless you plan to spend the majority of your life standing like a frightened deer on parking islands - one must learn to simply walk into traffic and pray. I'm getting better at this.

After a decent dinner of caulifower and daal (I passed on the egg curry. Eggs terrify me.), we all set out for The Beach, the aforementioned silly theme dance club of a few nights before. Wednesday was Ladies Night, which meant we members of the fairer sex got to drink free free free. I immediately cashed in my chips for a nice whiskey and hung out.

I proved to be pretty popular that night, cadging free drinks (that I didn't even need) off a guy hanging out at the bar and bouncing between seemingly everyone present, including some fetching guys from Cameroon and a guy who's apparantly a club events coordinator. (Good to know!) Christian desired another whiskey and I told her I'd obtain one: true to my word, I returned with a free one in under ten minutes. I should start timing myself.

Aforementioned events coordinator invited us to an afterparty, and although the others declined, James, Christian and I decided hey what the hell let's go. (I justify these things by calling them cultural experiences.) The event coordinators buddy, Manu (I think) drove us in his rather swank car, although he kept on calling me "Fame" insead of "Faine." "Seriously, it's Faine, not fame." "Ah, but you will be famous someday!" "For what? Being irriating?" etc etc all

We stopped at an extremely nice house belonging to one of their friends, waiting carefully outside for the cops to leave. (Apparantly they like to spend their time collecting bribes from partiers rather then stopping crimes. One is more lucrative.) We went in and I, being me I guess, immediately began to mingle. Someone poured me an extremely generous Smirnoff which I pretended to drink (I go so far and no further), talking to almost everyone present. Most of the Indians had California connections, went to school there, or were going to school there, and they immediately lit up when I said I was from near San Francisco. I found out one particular guy (who was wandering around shirtless in a top hat and going HELLYOO) stays at the Clift Hotel, right across from the Adagio, where we always stay in San Francisco. Bizarre.

In any case, following my dad's eternal command to Collect Business Cards At All Costs, I racked up a nice collection and put down everyone's numbers - I now know who to call if I am in the mood for some wacky hijinks in Bangalore now. Christian was feeling poorly, and we left around 3 AM in a taxi, which was air conditioned and civilized. I think I am done with the damn autorickshaws.

day ten

2008-03-12T02:53:00.000-07:00

I apologize: had a pretty boring day yesterday.

Got up early and went for my usual diet coke seeking stroll. Unfortunately it was too early even for India (but not too early for the air-raid like siren from the paper mill to sound), so I returned home empty handed. And thirsty.

We got to work and I proceeded to do my usual CD reviews, though I adjourned to Juice Junction for a nutritious lunch of bhel puri. I really can't overstate how delicious this stuff is: like savory cereal with a hit of tamarind and spices and tomato mmm mm crack. Also discovered an odd looking Italian place next door featuring pizza and (gasp) beef steak. WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

Aneesa and I left, stopping off at Crosswords again - the schmancy bookstore on 100 Ft Road. I did find the Madphur Jeffries cookbook I lust over and an awesome book on Indianized English I'll definitely pick up before I go. We walked back along the road (nice cool evening) and even managed to avoid getting splattered with something that was probably shit like the day before. You learn your dodge reflex real quick around here.

We arrived back in time for dinner - tasty chicken curry, chili fried chicken, appams (a kind of rice pancake.) Everyone else wanted to go see Sweeny Todd, but I was feeling bored and exhausted and decided to stay behind and sleep early. This is easier said then done in India, since after-dinner time means: Bollywood videos played next door at eardrum shattering volumes, vicious Hindi-English arguments coming from God knows where, international jets taking off from the nearby HAL airport and dogs engaging in vicious rabid gang wars. And yet I managed to fall asleep. One thing: India has cured my insomnia.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:
Indian women are fed up with the staring epidemic as well. Now, the staring thing has been bothering me a lot less then the other women in this program. Honestly, I find staring less irritating then the dirty comments-and-following bullshit that American men are prone too. At least the Indian men generally don't have the cojones to actually 1. approach you or 2. make vivid commentary on your arse. (This is usually done from moving vehicles so you cannot actually whump them.) I found the Chinese guys even worse, to be honest: they'd follow you, make commentary, stalk you, approach in packs and ask for pictures....thus far, Indian men haven't pulled that junk.

However, the situation apparantly sucks for Indian women, who experience the same sort of "eve teasing" (term for this stuff) but don't get the same attention that wronged foreign women do. Along these lines, there's the movement, which seeks to give Indian women the right to wear whatever the hell they want without being accused of being a cheap slutwhore. I fully support this and wish I could have attended the march last weekend. (Unfortunately I had no frickin' clue how to get a rickshaw there.)

From my own extremely limited observation, Indian women are in an odd place rights-wise. When comparing China and India, one thing that leaps out at me is that Chinese women are much more visible in daily life. Chinese women are running stores and business, working in restaurants and hotels, and generally are extremely visible on the street. They're very vocal in daily life as well: I saw many Chinese women get up in the grill of a man they felt had wronged them in any way (including one memorable incident where a very small female shopkeeper went at a guy she felt stiffed her with fists and teeth until the usual rubbernecking crowd pulled her off.) Chinese women also dress in a very independent-minded, Western way: tight tops, high heels, crazy hairstyles, weird jewerly. Admittedly this is much more in evidence in Beijing then in, say, Xi'an or Xinjiang, but it's definitely noticeable.

Not so in India. Indian women just aren't filling these public roles in the same sort of obvious way, and they're definitely not on evidence on the streets or in public life the same way they are in China. Women do work high powered jobs here and (obviously) have attained the very highest levels in politics, but the average woman does seem to be leading a much more closeted and traditional life here. You do see women wearing Western dress here, but its generally in the fanciest malls and at clubs, usually with a boyfriend keeping an eye out for them.

Still: I've been reading Indian Cosmopolitan magazine (we have many in the lounge here), and the articles are all very womens-rights oriented and sex friendly - hookups, controlling men, advancing in your career, and so forth. Now I know Cosmo is not exactly a barometer of women's cultural status, but its mere existence and popularity must mean something. Are things different for women in Mumbai and Delhi? Is Bangalore, despite its wealth and multitude of job oppurtunitis, just more traditional then the other two big Indian cities? Hm.

Day ten

2008-03-11T00:41:00.000-07:00

Woke up and wandered down the street to have my nutrient filled morning Diet Coke. It's curious: I'm used to India now. I walk down the street and I am curiously unmoved by the beggers and giant bullocks with tasseled horns and sharp smelling cilantro sellers: they're part of daily life now. i guess one can grow accustomed to anything.

In any case, we left for work at a respectable hour and did not even get ripped off by the rickshaw guy, which is always a refreshing change. I'm beginning to enjoy the morning rickshaw ride, motoring by the mediterrenean-colored military housing and the morning markets and all the varied and colorful sari shops and of course the dangers: the Stinky Bridge and the road that isn't paved and fills your lungs with a delicious mixture of silica dust and exhaust. (Slap your pashmina over your mouth and pray.)

I reviewed more CD's and did some research for the world music page, which I apparantly am overseeing. Lots of good possibilities there.

Hopped a rickshaw home and went for another of my long and aimless walks. The villa really is in a nice portion of town, leafy, affluent, and quiet. I found myself in some sort of cluster of private schools - Montessori is inexplicably huge here - then wandered among some apartment complexes and leafy green parks. Women gather to gossip in the parks and men gather outside the tea joints to do the same as the sun goes down.

It was Mira's birthday, so we had plans to go out. I had a delicious pineapple and some cereal and strawberries for dinner, then we went over to Mocha, the same somewhat bizarre Euro-ish dessert bar we went to the first day. We hung out there and chatted, while I amused myself by watching tragically hip young Indian guys wearing bandannas and creative facial hair smoke shisha (hookah.) They brought out an incredibly huge slice of chocolate cake for Mira (which was pretty much half a cake) inducing sugar rushes in everyone but me. I may be the one person on the planet who dislikes chocolate cake. I did have a nice Moroccan mint tea.

We adjourned to Taika, yet another covert Bangalore dance club. This place was billed curiously as a "spa bar" which pretty much meant lots of blue and white accents and many potentially dangerous little flickery candles. Drinks were expensive and the clientele was upscale: rich Indian businessmen in tailored rocker-wear outfits sipping Merlot, giddy looking businesspeople from England and the USA, and an interesting contigent of totally zonked looking Asian girls. (One just kind of stood there and swayed in a space cadet way for hours.)

I ordered an overpriced whiskey and sat on the curious bed-esque seating for a while. However, this became progressively more awkward as quite a few of the guys at the bar were staring at me then making giggly wink wink nudge nudge commentary to his buddies. Since I don't understand any Kannada or Hindi or Tamil or whatever they were speaking, I like to pretend they're saying things like "Oh, what an excellent taste in clothing you possess, madame! I salute you!" but I suspect in fact they're saying something akin to "lol you know them american chix r nasstttyyy you feel me bro hur hurr." Sigh.

One particularly impressive specimen had long black hair and a stripey Frenchish t-shirt. He would look at me pointedly, toss his hair like he was starring in a Herbal Essences commercial (he's got the urge!) then take a suggestive sip of hi wine. Not that this wasn't amusing, but one can only take so much.

So I decide that screw my lack of talent, I was going to get up and dance. Tragically, the music was that kind of thumpy alien-noises sort of house music that is only attractive if you're on Ecstacy or from Mars, but I made the best of it, attempting to avoid occasional pitfalls such as pervy old English guys attempting to get down wit da bidness or whatever and aforementioned cracked out Asian girls. I also accidentally sustained a minor cigarette burn. (does this make me a skank? do accidental cigarette burns make you a skank? does anyone know?)

The others got sick of avoiding cigarette-related injuries and large drunk sweaty people and got up to go to the other room. I however was kind of enjoying myself and decided to plunge back into the fray, after setting myself a half serious challenge: if those guys were gonna stare so openly, I should at least get a free drink out of the deal.

So I did. I spent a bit on the dance floor, some guy wandered over - the same one who'd shown us to Taika's covertly hidden door actually - and began giving me the universal Guy at A Club spiel. "Where are you from?" "What's your name?" "I am very highly paid and successful! And drunk!" I smiled and nodded until he offered to buy me a drink, successfully scored a not cheap whiskey and coke, then continued to smile and nod a while more as he hit yet more of the neccesary Spiel high points (low points?) - "Do you think I'm sexay?" "Phone number?""Wanna go out for dinner?" "Can I hold your bootiful hand?" I continued to play along until an oppurtune moment hit then acted very guilty and put out about the tragedy of having to return to my friends, but maybe I'll see ya around sometime, you never know! Then I skedaddled.

I suppose this means that I am a. going to hell and b. taking cruel advantage of drunken, horny men, but I see it more as revenge for open-mouthed drooly staring. I might as well make it slightly more expensive for them. Anyway, I hauled back over to my friends who were sitting somewhere nice and quiet and civilized. Mira wondered if we could score some free drinks for her as well, but I don't know if he was going to fall for that one a second time.

It hit 11:30 and as usual in Bangalore, we were hustled with great haste out of the club. My new boyfriend stumbled on by but I don't think he saw me. I may also have been hiding behind Chris.

Okay, I probably am going to hell.

day nine

2008-03-10T02:22:00.000-07:00

To my complete surprise, I woke up feelin' fine and curiously hangoverless. Being 19 is good sometimes I guess. Pipa, Adam, Jimmy, Claire and I all decided to go on a small expedition to cruise the bookshop area of town and see the Botantical Garden, and so we set out. After yet more irritating rickshaw negotations (no, we do not want to see a shop on the way, go die), we made it to the area near the City Market. This was a dusty, crowded, and rather unpleasant street specializing in selling technical manuals and software guides. It was rather like the wastebin of silicon valley, For-Dummies guides to Linux and Auto-Cad meeting their maker after failing to find US owners. The book shops also sold huge quantitis of photo-copied and illicit copies of American best-sellers. Too bad John Grisham makes me catatonic.

The bookstalls soon gave way to fabric stores, and then we found ourselves at a busy and extremely dangerous looking roundabout. It was hot as hell outside, but Claire proposed we walked to the gardens. I was skeptical, remebering my earlier in the week Bataan Death March, so we checked with a cop, who told us that yep, it was 4 km away, and we really really didn't want to walk. The cops here are always impressive - usually tall and brick shit house like, wearing big white hats and sunglasses and sparkling belt buckles, almost always bearing bristling, forceful looking moustaches. He barked down a rickshaw for us and, leaning in and looking mean, sorted the drivers out for us quickly and efficiently. I am now going to ask cops to handle the rickshaw drivers for me whenever possible.

We made it to the garden and had a nice stroll. It's a lovely green place, built in the late 1700's and modeled on an English park - they even imported a glass house and some real live English gardeners. The park is full of strolling families and dogs and gooshy in love couples, walking hand in hand under stinking jackfruit trees and obscene sprays of tropical flowers, down paths filled with palm trees in perfect alignment. There's a very large rock formation in the center of the park, baking gently in the afternoon sun, and we climbed up it to discover a majestic view of a buring trash-pit and some goats. One should not go into life with expectations.

We bought some icy water at a concessions stand nearby. I had to feint for a while at the fridge since it was covered in angry bees, but one of the shop-keepers grabbed a water for me. I listened to a man carry out a protracted investigation over the sugr and fat content of the ice cream. Weight insecurity has come to India. (Lose weight now! Bollywood Body Sculpting! Low fat ghee! Fat-B-Gone sugar free kulfi!)

We desceneded again to the grass, and I decided it was time for a nap, wandering masculine eyes be damned. I flopped down in the luscious green grass and was perfectly content, watching up-side down as packs of teenage girls dressed in technicolor sarees strolled by, giggling underneath their pashminas. A few stray puppies fought in a half-hearted manner nearby a family of picnickers and (like everywhere else) an older sister tortured her younger siblings with a volleyball. The others got up to go and I reluctantly joined them, returning the smiles of a couple of good looking boys who had splayed down on the grass nearby me. (Indian men are cute.)

I found a very nice technicolor butterfly and chased it for a while. I think my fellow tourists were more mortified then the Indians, who probably just found it amusing. Or assumed I was crazy like everyone else.

We found another rickshaw after some fighting. I noticed too late that the meter was suspiciously shiny and new, and my suspicions were confirmed as it began racking up the rupees incredibly quickly. The driver dropped us off on Residency Road near the main shopping area and flatly demanded the incredible price of 170 rupees for what should have been a 60 rupee trip. We all got a bit puffed up and talked him down, and he finally relented when Adam whipped out his camera and began looking for his license so he could photograph it. (More fun and adventure!)

It was almost 4:00 and we were starving, so we went to a nearly deserted Northern Indian restaurant. The waiter initally said the kitchen was closed but relented, and the others ordered tons of food - biryani, chicken do-piaza, roti. I was feeling oddly un hungry and just had some Chinese cauliflower - a bit greasy for me. The place was however air conditioned.

We trekked down to our beloved discount whiskey store,and I found salvation: an ice cream joint. I ordered an excellent Indian treat: fruit salad topped with strawberry ice cream and those little crunchy breath freshener seeds that appear at the end of every Indian meal. This was delicious, and I ate it while sitting at the open air bar, a fat and rather drunk Indian man smiling serenely at me, occasionally hitting the candy seller next to him when he stared at me too long.

We braved the shiny and new mall to check the movie showing times - no dice - although I was impressed by the lavish food court and the various Indian sweets vendors vying for space with Hugo Boss and Staples. I was tired and decided to go back while the others tried another theater.

Thinking I was smart, I got a cop to hail me a rickshaw, but unfortunately, I found out about a mile and a half later the driver actually had no clue where he was taking me. In fact, he was taking me the exact opposite direction from where I wanted to go, highlighted by the fact that he was asking every other rickshaw driver we idled next to where my destination was. I got fed up and got him to stop, and after a brief but satisfying argument, I gave him 10 rupees and told him to fuck off, although he kept on pleading that he totally knew where he was going. Unfortunately, it was getting dark and I had no clue where I was, so in lieu of other options, I walked for a while in search of a decent rickshaw driver. I finally found one (although his rickshaw was slow as molasses and he had to stop for gas), but we finally got home.

I had some chicken and yet more pineapple for dinner, then stayed up to watch the startlingly bad "Small Soldiers" in an exhausted stupor with the others. I live a life of danger and glamour.

day eight

2008-03-10T01:17:00.000-07:00

I slept in scandalously late. I am one of those obnoxious human beings who likes to wake up early. When the sun hits my window, I'm up and out of bed and ready to DO STUFF OH BOY. This is repulsive and I apologize. After a nutrient filled breakfast of strawberry cornflakes and half a pineapple (they are not very large pineapples), I decided to go for a walk.

Another thing about me: I like to walk. I don't place much importance on going anywhere in particular (this is beside the point). I prefer to aim myself in one direction and keep on going until a. I get tired, b. I find myself menaced by drug lords and rottweilers in skid row or c. i am attacked by a cow (likely here.) With that spirit in mind, I walked out the door down Thippasandra Road and up 100ft road for quite a ways indeed.

It was a hot dry day - the weather here reminds me of the weather in Sacramento in summer, hot, dusty, dry and moistureless, but with a leafy green spray of foliage that somehow makes everything okay. I walked past fancy multi colored houses that almost reminded me of Cuba, and various supermarkets packed with ladies bartering viciously over okra. I stepped into Crosswords, a Barnes and Noble-esque oasis of calm and air conditioning from the street. They also had a fabulous bathroom. One learns the location of every good bathroom with toilet paper and minimal insect life fast when traveling in Asia.

I kept on moving (all i know to do most of the time), hopping over gaping holes in the pavement and evading eager rickshaw drivers, chaat vendors, luxury cars and various begging children. I found my way to a luxe part of 100 Ft Road, full of shiny Dockers emporiums (they love Dockers here) and custom pillow emporiums or something. I suppose you can measure the economic level of a country if there are custom pillow emporiums. India has many.

I was hungry and decided to splash out on the rather fancy North Gate punjabi restaurant at the top of one of the shopping malls. The space was lovely, accented in white and cream and profusely air conditioned, and I enjoyed chomping on air-crisp papadums and electric cilantro chutney as I waited for my food. I am Southern and I love okra, sliminess and curious shape be damned; it is repulsive but it travels in my blood. As a result, I adore bhindi (okra) masala, and the version here was masterful: sauteed with spices and a bit of tomato and onion, the okra retained its vibrant green color and satisfying snap without too much grease: delicious. At 175 rupees, the dish seemed expensive to my currency converted eyes - but that is another common travel trap, as that came to about four or five bucks in US dollars.

It is embarassing to see well-off foreigners getting into down and dirty arguments with a shopkeeper over one rupeee off some knick-knack to me. Yes, they are out to screw you, yes, it probably is not Morally Okay, but let us get some perspective: they are screwing you out of a couple of rupees, which amounts to the pennies most Americans commonly throw away because they are sick of looking at them. Surely you can accept getting upsold a little bit on a Taj Mahal model. Perhaps some of the profit will go to the sad eyed poverty stricken childen of the shopkeeper, just like the ones that make you feel guilty on TV. Or maybe it will go to beer. I'm not saying you can predict these things.

Anyway, I was very tired indeed by this point and limped back home. Chris and I popped out again to change some money and buy yet another pineapple. I wonder if one can OD on pineapples.

I napped a bit and then we decided to go out again to the Beach, which was rumored to have (gasp) dancing. In recent months, Bangalore has instituted a moral prohibiton on dancing, perhaps attempting to avoid the definitely-not-moral practice of freak dancin' from invading their territory. (It's too late for China. The Chinese have taken to the bump and grind like they have been doing it forever. Perhaps they have.)

Now, I am one of the worst dancers on the entire planet. I still remember the look of confusion and agony on the face of the charming Cuban I met at a Beijing dance club when he realized that I really could not be taught despite his good natured attempts. A friend of mine said once, after witnessing my whiskey fueled attempts at getting down, that I dance like a "crazed cavewoman" and I presume she is correct. However, I'm an eager person and I happen to possess little shame, and I will continue trying to dance in foreign countries. Even if James Brown is sending tears from heaven, becaue I do not bring the funk but I taketh the funk away.

Anyway, Indians love them some theme clubs, which meant that we were sitting on unstable tables made of coconuts on top of a nice bedding of sand, which happily migrated between my toes. (Son of a bitch!) But we had a good time anyway: the owner sent us funky tasting tequila shots, the music wasn't half bad, and to my immense relief, no one else at the club could dance either!

So we got really drunk (you may find pretty much all my travel stories end this way), and we managed to sway out to a rickshaw and find our way home. I was the least drunk of them all and apologized profusely to the rickshaw driver for the interesting commentary he was recieving from the back. He seemed understanding and didn't even rip us off. God speed, man.

We returned to the villa and proceeded to get even drunker. Then we went up to the roof becaus Chris kept on insisting it was Very Important through a whiskey induced haze, but managed not to fall off, which was very surprising. Getting drunk in foreign countries is highly satisfying and I reccomend it to everyone.

day seven

2008-03-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

I got up early and purchased yet another pineapple. After discovering pineapples cost only 30 rupees (pretty much nothing), I've been devouring huge quantities of them. I feel unguilty. They are delicious and fun to butcher.

Aneesa left for Mumbai in the morning, so James and Adam and I caught another rickshaw. Rickshaws are definitely the worst part of India for me. They are poorly regulated, which means the khaki-attired drivers can pretty much torture you in any fashion they please. This may include egregious overcharges, getting you lost, deciding upon arrival that you suddenly must pay more money, or simply scaring the shit out of you. The autorickshaws are also open, which means you are placed in the exciting position of sucking huge amounts of exahust at pretty much all times. I'm getting to the point where I know where I'm going (mostly) and can offer directions, but they're still a nerve wracking part of daily life.

I got to work and began doing reviews - a Meatloaf CD (yes!) and a few unmemorable girl group type things. This took up most of the day. I also went back to the Chinese restaurant for lunch - what can i say, Chinese food here is pretty good.

I decided to go for a walk when I got back and wandered up the street - the neighborhood near the villa is pretty posh, and I enjoyed looking at the nicer houses and their gardens. It was around 4 and all of Bangalore was getting off work -kids in silly looking knee socks and school uniforms, IT guys talking feverishly into ear sets, guys carrying bundles of who knows what on their heads. One guy was walking down the street with a Neopolitan Mastiff, which if you were not aware are one of the ugliest, hugest dog breeds I am aware of. I guess that works if you can't invest in a security system. I wonder what the omnipresent litte pariah dogs must be thinking.

I got back to the villa and decided, rather impulsively, to get dinner out. I walked to a nice place near the villa called the Clay Pot, a Kerela restaurant. Keralan food focuses on spicy seafood curries, so I went for fish karahi. This was delicious and slightly nutty, with firm pieces of white fish interspersed with spicy chilis and green pepper and onion. The restaurant was spotlessly clean and the service polite....I'll definitely return.

We hung out at the villa that night and shared a few illicit drinks while eating really really bad Indian Assorted Chocolates.

Day Six

2008-03-06T21:50:00.000-08:00

The day began as usual, and Pipa, Aneesa and I wandered down the street to catch a rickshaw. Unfortunately, we had a hell of a time finding one that actually was willing to take us. We finally found one and after some spirited bartering, managed to get him down to a price that was only a tiny little bit short of highway robbery. (Of course, I realize I am fiercely haggling over what is about 50 cents to me, but it is the principal of the thing.)

The rickshaw driver took us on the longest route ever and actualy stopped for petrol in the middle, forcing us to sit in the rickshaw and look profoundly uncomfortable while everyone for blocks around came to stare. (Including the guys at the Chinese restaurant.)

We did manage to get there, and I got back to my CD reviews - a good blues review featuring Leadbelly and Art Tatum (weird to listen to in India), John McLaughlin, and oddly enough, Cypress Hill. I wouldn't be suprised if they're big around here, to be honest.

Went for lunch at Beijing Bites, a rather posh but inexpensive Chinese place near the office....vegetables with tomato-chili sauce (actually spicy!) and the neccesary for survival diet coke. The restaurant was empty and the servers looked at me with interest as I chewed, but one gets used to that when dining alone overseas. Really.

Met Steve, another employee here, when I returned. I mentioned I lived near San Francisco and we got into a discussion about how crazy people in Berkeley are. (Very crazy.) He also gave me a granola bar, so I suppose that means I have been accepted into the tribe or something.

Pipa wanted to cut out early since she was changing placements, so we left together (I was pretty much tapped out for the day), stopping in for coffee at the curiously good and nicely decorated Coffee Day cafe. After yet more bargaining, I returned to the Katari Villa and read a little before dinner, which was characterstically good: tandoori chicken, paneer cooked with green peppers and onions, daal, and raita. Apparantly the people staying at Shirley's nearby are getting fed tiny amounts of poorly cooked lentils and must endure a padlockd fridge, which makes me feel lucky indeed. (But sorry for them.)

We decided to go check out yet another lounge, this one called H20 and located along an unusually wide freeway a ways from where we stayed. It was pretty damn cheesy inside, a nice example of Indian new-money chic - white leather furniture, tables made of goldfish tanks, giant crystal glases. It was Special Corporate Night, which meant progressively boozier business men were everywhere, including a fat, jubilant white guy (he kept on clapping.) The place was also a restaurant, and packs of well dressed Indian families circled through to hit the buffet and drink tremendous neon daquiries.

I had a tiny little sniff of brandy (they really don't do so hot on the portion sizes here), and stopped, enjoying the people watching more then anything. There was a cool open-air rooftop lounge above, so we may return.

After yet more rickshaw negotiations (a part of daily life here), we headed back to the villa. We did see an incrediby huge dead rat in the road. Chris wanted to throw a rock at it to see if it was really dead, but I was fairly certain that was a bad idea. And then we went to bed.

Day Five

2008-03-06T00:40:00.000-08:00

Woke up and per usual, ate a pomegranate. And some honey corn flakes. (I will try the exotic mango variety next.) We had the day off due to the Hindu holiday of Mahashivaratri, celebrating the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, wherein Shiva drank poison to save the world, giving him a blue throat. He had to stay up all night to save himself but was entertained by the people who stayed up with him, giving rise to the holiday's tradition of fasting and chanting. For us, this mostly meant we got to sleep in.

In any case, Aneesa, Adam and I took an incredibly long and convuluted rickshaw ride to the Bull Temple, where a huge black statue of Nandi, Shiva's bull, is erected, dating from 1786. We arrived and after braving the souvenir sellers, walked up to the nearby Ganesh temple, where some sort of ceremony involving a drum machine, flowers and elderly men wearing white loincloths. (I am admittedly no expert on Hinduism.) It is customary to walk around the temples inside an odd number of times and we went for three. Hindus like to touch the walls a few times during each circumnavigation.

We then walked up to the Bull Temple, which was much less crowded. You take your shoes off at an elaborate white entrance-way full of statues, and then pass by the priests, who offer you blessing flowers for a small and negotiable fee. (This deeply offended Adam, but I found it kind of amusing...proving I have the black and shriveled heart of a capitalist I guess.)

The bull itself was dark black due to application of supplicatory coconut oil to the granite surface, and certainly impressive, seeming to glitter slightly with moisture. Chalk drawings of attractive woven symbols ran around the temples stone floors - the same drawings that grace the entryways of many of the houses on our street. We rounded this temple as well, bypassing sunburnt German tourists and stopping to look at the tiny lingnam alcove inside, then went out again.

The map decieved us into believing we could walk to Tipu Sultan's Palace, but it was unfortunately full of lies, and went on a rather Bataan-Death march esque walk down the heat of the day streets, breathing in dust and exhaust. It a curious fact that in the hottest places it is hardest to find a drink, and I soon became dehydrated - I could fairly feel my poor palate withering away inside my mouth, and although there were plenty of tiffin shops and sari makers, none of them actually contained a refrigator with a nice chilly Diet Coke. We limped along a while longer until we found ourselves underneath a particularly poverty-stricke overpass (seedy bars and chicken parts all covered in dust), and hailed a rickshaw to Tipu's.

I by this point felt like a cowboy stricken in the desert, and sat myself down to try not to dry up and blow away while Adam and Aneesa went inside the palace. Like many world attractions, the British packed up all its original treasures into crates and put them in the British Museum - which means there's not much to see at the palace itself. (It has also been tragically badly restored.) I am trying not to regret wussing out.

We went back to Commercial Street and shopped for shoes for Aneesa in an Islamic region of town, hijab-attired women walking through the dusty streets, carrying live chickens and coca-cola bottles. I finally found a drug store with Diet Coke - chilled!- and bought two cans. I almost felt human.

We returned to the Katari Villa to pull ourselvs together, then headed out for a cooking class at a nearby lady's house. The house was one of those large and almost-luxe affairs you see in India, hyper modern kitchen and flat screen plasma TV juxtaposed with unfinished walls - and it was a nice place to relax in. Her high school aged children hung out in the living room and looked sullen like kids do across the world, and she would occasionally yell at her son to go do his darn math homework, whereas he would cagily slink across the room and out of earshot. We are not very different across the world.

We sat around the kitchen and she told us how to make a few dishes, beginning with onion pakoras, dusted with garbanzo bean powder and a little coriander then quickly fried. These were tasty and crispy, like highly evolved onion rings.

She then moved on to saag masala, the Richest Dish On The Planet. You begin with oil then you add some milk, then you add some pureed cashews, then you deep fry the paneer, then you add tomato, onion, and spices, then you add more milk, more butter, heavy cream, and what the hell why not some more oil. This naturaly comes out tasting like one would imagine crack would taste if turned into food. I only had a little lick of it.I like my arteries functional.

We also made channa masala, garbanzo beans cooked in a spicy curry sauce. This was delicious and not as likely to kill you, prepared without aid of milk or cream.

Finally, she showed us how to make aloo parathas - indian stuffed bread - beginning with mashed potatoes mixed with plenty of spices and coriander, slapped into the middle of some bread which is composed of something like a dumpling, then rolled out flat. These were excellent and suprisingly easy to make. We finished with a carrot dessert that begins with nice healthy grated carrots, to which you add milk, cream, butter, condensed milk, sugar, and deep fried cashews, coconut, and raisins. This is also delicious, although I am beginning to wonder why most of India is not dead.

We finished the meal and walked home, watching people lay out flowers at the nearby temple for the holidays and dodging the usual bulls, cows, rickshaws, and cranky dogs. And then I slept again (really well.)

fourth day

2008-03-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

I woke up early as usual (what's up with that) and took a shower or rather a dribble under the spigot. At least the water was warm. I waited a bit for my hair to dry out, then walked down the street to engage in my now daily struggle with the Pomegranate Day. The lady who runs the villa advised me that one must never pay more then 20 rupees for a pomegranate and I have taken this to heart, bargaining brutally over the tasty little things, regarding the primitive weighing system the cart uses with steely-eyed scorn. (I am as always myself.)

This was our first day of work, so we hopped in a rickshaw to the office, which is next to the Citibank and actually rather nice - marble must be dirt cheap here in India, since pretty much everything is made of it.

I met the senior editor and the associate editor, Louise, and was assigned to do CD reviews - one Hilary Duff album (gragh) and one Birth of the Blues album (hooray!). After scrambling to find a computer with something approximating a working sound system, I listened to the musical stylings of Hilary Duff and attempted to say something that wasn't overtly vicious. Hopefully I suceeded.

Aneesa, Pipa, Adam, James and I all went out for lunch around one, turning the dusty corner to the local Juice Junction, which also sells chaat - yummy Indian snacks. I sprang for my favorite chaat dish - bhel puri, a mixture of puffed rice, sev (fried rice noodle things), coriander, tamarind chutney, and a bit of potato. Squirted with hot chili sauce and a bit of cilantro chutney, bhel puri becomes a thing of profound beauty, especiallly when consumed out of a paper plate while sitting on the ground. (Whaat? You want seaaatting? You crazy missie?) Another fun fact: unlike many delicious things, bhel puri is low fat and actually good for you. I sense the next food trend to sweep the nation. The frothy freshly made papaya and pineapple shakes looked tempting as well.

Anyway, we came back to the office and finished up the day, as I began another blues CD review and watched the poor design interns attempt to find something, anything, to do.

We took a rickshaw back and I got out halfway at 100 Foot Road to walk home - I was feeling energetic, and walking in India is always an exciting experience. You may encounter terrifyingly huge cattle, tranvestite beggers, run-away-auto-rickshaws and poorly managed construction sites...it's all part of the fun! Another interesting aspect of Bangalore downtown: immaculate, luxury shops selling Gucci and plasma screen TV's next to falling down poverty ridden houses and bullock carts. Unlike in the USA, there doesn't seem to be any "luxury" district of town. Everything is thrown together. (Welcome to India!)

Dinner at Katari was excellent - they had ordered out the food. Chicken masala, chicken saag, curried peas, chutneys, cucumber salad...delicious.

We went out to Le Rock, a very poser-riffic bar on Commercial Street afterwards. The drinks were scandalously expensive for India and I refrained (wasn't in a sloshy mood), but I did enjoy the people watching, as nattily dressed Indians schmoozed over baskets of Deep Fried Potato Treats and foreigners of all inclinations wandered on through. The African guys at the next table took a liking to me and one stopped me on my way back to the bathroom: "Excuse me missy - can we have your numbers?" "My what?" "Your numbers!" "...I don't have a telephone here, I'm very sorry." (I beat a quick retreat, and they kept sneaking vaguely scorned glances for the rest of the evening.) Le Rock also features humongous, elaborate beer spigot things with a core of pure ice in them. Modern technology!

Bars in Bangalore shut down at exactly 11:30 and you had best get your butt out of Dodge well before. The bar was air conditioned to sub-arctic levels and I hopped outside to enjoy the evening air, watching as a horde of sloshed English kids spilled out of a bar across the street, drunken Indian men staring right back. I felt perfectly safe, as local security guards with ample moustaches and khaki clothes stalked around, real honest-to-god blunderbusses over their shoulders. Just as the fetching English guy I was making eyes at began to wander over with a big friendly smile, the owner of the bar tapped my shoulder.

"Ah, why do you let yourself be harassed by this?" he said, gesturing at the begging lady nearby. I shrugged -"I think it's safe, isn't it? I'm standing right here..." and he shrugged, tragically, imploring me to step inside the fence. (The English boy sadly turned away. Dammit!) The owner, in any case, discussed California with me for a bit, and then gave me his card. (He also told me Rolling Stone is opening up in Delhi and Bangalore which offers interesting career possibilities.)

In any case, we went back to Katari Villa, and I as usual passed out asleep almost before my head hit the pillow. If nothing else, I'm sleeping great.

Day Three

2008-03-03T23:15:00.000-08:00

Woke up immediately feeling the ominous onset of Tummy Lurgy. After a brief moment of communing with the nice cool tile floor (always makes me feel better), I revived and managed to choke down some suprisingly tasty honey corn flakes and yet another pomegranate. I pulled myself together and took a walk down the street.

School kids gathering for their rickety blue school buses, endless rows of vegetable sellers filling the air with cilantro, rickshaws honking at everything (the air.) Men gathered in packs around the morning chai seler, arms around each others shoulders, poring over the times of India. India is olfactory curious: one moment you smell gorgeous jasmine scented air, the next, a nice hit of steaming shit. It's almost enjoyable.

A dog was startled by my blondeness and chased me, barking, down the street. I managed to shake him behind a cow.

I returned to the villa and sat on the stoop for a while with Bimbo, the dog. We looked at the same things and scratched each other at roughly the same times. I suppose we had an understanding.

We left at 10:30 for orientation, meeting Adam, Claire and Pipa outside the Katari Villa. We then drove over to Asha's house, which was very nice indeed, full of various items from her and her husbands world travels - it reminded me favorably of my grandparents house. Asha was out sorting up I to I's current troubles in Darjeeling, so her friend Meena did the orientation - getting to know you business mostly. We discussed various dangers of hygiene and Indian men, and then my Tummy Lurgy returned, ferociously. I retrated to their nicely turned out bathroom and laid down on the floor and tried not to die again. Miracously, I recovered.

We were invited to a South Indian wedding next weekend. I must go. I even have a shalwar kemiz, so I will blend in........well, probably not.

We went to lunch at a incredibly outdated but fancy hotel - it fairly reeked of the Raj. Wooden walls, lots of carpeting, tastefully illuminated bottles of whiskey and Bombay Sapphir. We made somewhat awkward small talk and waited for the other volunteers to arrive, which they did. After a very English Mandatory Soup Course, we went through the buffet, which was passable - I did have a bit of mutton and some fruit salad. I wasn't exactly hungry.

In lieu of anything better to do, we returned to Commercial Street. I walked into FabIndia, an upscale chorta shop, but I was swimming in all their lovely multi-colored wares....maybe I will visit a tailor. We stopped for an overpriced water at Le Rock, an Indian intepretation of a glam rock and roll bar, then went to a coffe place instead - I did have a nice cup of Darjeeling. (Too bad I felt like an animate case of jet lag.)

Everyone else went into the mall, but I, exhausted, parked myself outside and watched the endless parade of saris and screeching autorickshaws go by. Not suprisingly, an Indian guy walked over and inquired about my health: "You look drunk. Are you well?"

Thanks man, I'm not drunk, I'm just..jet lagged. He claimed to be a fighter pilot (I bet!) but also noted he works at the Amazon.com call center here in his, uh, spare time. I imagine you may have had a convrsation with him before. He asked me a few questions about California til' the othes came over, then high tailed it.

We went for dinner at Coconut Grove, an excellent South Indian restaurant, all ambient and outdoors and covered in drooping palms. I wanted everything on the menu, but we managed to decide on masala crab curry, coconut milk fish curry, and tamarind chili fish. The food was killer, served on big waxy banana leaves. The crab curry was spicy and rich and messy as hell - perfect - and the fish curries were both flavorful, generously portioned, and interesting. I must return.

day two

2008-03-03T21:48:00.000-08:00

I arrived at a good (ungodly) five in the morning. I enlisted the nice Oberoi guys to help me call my driver who was lurking, but I found him and we went to the Katari Villa, where I signed in my name and walked upstairs. I got plenty of rest on the flight in (really), so I wasn't sleepy, and went upstairs to accidentally awaken my roommate, Aneesa, and the other girl staying with her. They were very game about it, and the other girl took me down to the Ganesh temple, where people were hanging jasmine scented garlands on the statue. We dodged a few cows then had masala chai at the coffee joint across the street (good!)

Since I had nothing to do, we decided to go downtown to meet Emma, another volunteer. We hailed an autorickshaw, a little motorized bike with a cab-like thing on the back, and zoomed downtown. Rickshaws follow no traffic rules but thankfully no one else does either, which means whoever has the quickest reflexes wins. (Note that Rickshaw drivers are required to state their blood type on the certification card. Not difficult to figure out why.) You honk instead of braking. Get good at dodging.

Bangalore really is a garden city - there's trees and jungley greenery everywhere, flower gardens and blooming purple trees on every corner. The weather is nice as well - hot and dry, none of that sticky misery inducing humidity you apparantly encounter elsewhere. However, it is dusty. Lung cancer may be inevitable.

We met at Mocha, a Western coffee shop run by Chinese - don't ask me. I had a curious chicken baguette thing, and we waited a while for Emma, who was giving a speech at the Rotary Club. Anyway, she arrived and we hung out and chatted for a bit, then walked down to have a look at some government buildings....very attractive, but unfortunately closed. We also walked through the park, which was nice and green and full of twisty trees, chaat sellers, and contented looking stray dogs. (The stray dogs here tend to be fat and happy looking.) And of course cows.

We went shopping on Commercial Street afterwards, poking through saris and Kashmiri souvenirs, as the shopkeepers stared. I'm going to scope out prices before I commit to anything, though.

We returned to the villa for dinner (okay...chicken curry and daal), then went out again to the Guzzlers Inn, a psuedo-English pub blaring loud rock music and full of progressively drunker Indians watching footballs matches. I was somewhat shocked at how little rum they serve you at a time, but on the other hand, it was inexpensive.(Like everything.)

We stayed there till' eleven, wherein my jet-lagged self was almost hitting the table from sheer exhausation. I slept much better then I thought I would.

successful arrival etc

2008-03-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

I'm here in India. My flight was less traumatic then I'd expected...I had an entire row to myself on Virgin from San Francisco to London, which meant I slept like a rock all 10 hours. My British Airways flight from London to Bangalore was also fairly peaceful. I did arrive this morning at the ungodly hour of 5, but I actually feel rather rested.

Couldn't find my driver initally, but the nice fellows from the Oberoi called him for me. The villa I'm staying at is nice and clean, and I like the people I've met thus far already. Bangalore is leafy and green and full of flowers - not a bad place to be. It feels a lot less madcap then China, believe it or not. (They haven't completely eradicated nature here yet like they have in Beijing.)

Thus far, I've drunk a lot of chai (yummy), bought some cornflakes and am now attempting to procure a copy of my passport so I can buy a cellphone card. Developments awake.

People honk instead of braking here just like in China. Good ol' Asia.

some explaination

2008-02-26T14:44:00.000-08:00

Hey there. I'm Faine, and I keep a food blog. (This is just as lame as it sounds.) In my time that is not spent writing about delicious food, I like to travel. I have unlikely and curious ambitions of becoming a food writer (though I would settle for gentlewoman adventurer I guess) and along those line, I'm traveling to India. I'll be interning at a music magazine in Bangalore for six weeks, and hopefully traveling up to see family friends in New Delhi at the end of that stretch.

I don't know that much about India other then what I've accumulated in various books and breathy Discovery Channel documentaries. I've certainly heard about it, though. My grandparents and my mother both love India and have visited on multiple occasions - you hear enough about the sandalwood scented boats of Kashmir and the Taj Mahal and snake charmers and giant monkeys and you'll want to visit somewhere too (if only out of curiosity.) I can't say I have any expectations about what I'll find other then that it will probably be noisy and crazy and overwhelming. (More so then Beijing? Who knows.)

Thankfully, I adore Indian food, so at least I won't starve to death. Unless I get a deadly gastric bug and must be med-evacaed home in a helicopter where I will be profiled on CNN as the first American victim of Flaming Delhi Belly. I will keep y'all posted.

I leave on the 29th on Virgin Atlantic. I hear they have videogames. Sweet.