Salim Does The Orient

The best thing since... ever.

2006-09-16T00:59:00.000-07:00

A Wedding

2006-08-10T23:48:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I went to the marriage of our driver Ansari's sister in law. Well, we went to part of it anyway. Weddings here can take up to eight days and involve thousands of guests. Since Ansari's family doesn't have much money, they only had a three day wedding with about five hundred guests!

It was a pretty liberal Muslim wedding in a large reception hall. The bride sat upstairs with all the women, and the groom sat downstairs with all the men. But I use the term "with" very loosely. In fact they both sat by themselves on small stages in front of all the guests who sat in chairs arranged facing the stage as though a performance was going to start. But nothing ever did. The groom just sat up there with bright lights shining on him being ignored by everyone but the occasional photographer. I can only assume the bride was doing the same thing because other than a brief moment when the rules were bent on my behalf, men were not allowed upstairs into the women's section.

I didn't stay long, but I arrived at around 9:00 or 10:00 at night, and there looked to be no end to the sitting around and ignoring the groom when I left at 11:00. I kept asking what everyone was waiting for, and the answer I got was consistently "Nothing", coupled with a puzzled stare as if they wanted to ask, "What on earth makes you think we're waiting for something?"

But at least I got to meet Ansari's family. I have met his mother and his wife before, this night I go to meet his four children who were completely out of control, and his father. It took him the better part of an hour to get all four of them to hold still in the same place, since there were tons of other children with whom they could run screaming up and down the stairs and out into the road. As one came flying by Ansari would reach out and grab hold of them by the arm and not let go. Then another would come by a few minutes, and Ansari would grab them with his free arm. But since there are four children and, like the rest of us he only has two arms, he would eventually have to let go of one of them to grab another, and then the first was off again.

The bride's family allowed us to take a photo with her veil lifted. It is an arranged marriage, as are most of the marriages here, and so it is customary for the bride and groom not to meet until the final day of festivities. When this photo was taken, they still hadn't met, and as you can see, she doesn't look as though she's looking forward to it too much. But then maybe she was just scared that her sister was lifting up her veil so some giant could take her photo. When I saw her I was taken aback because she looks like she's about thirteen years old, and the groom I had just met was at least thirty. But Ansari assured me that she was 22 years old. But apparently that wouldn't matter anyway, because he also assured me that girls of any age are married off if their parents find a suitable husband because I guess they're afraid another husband might not present himself farther down the road. Although I'm not sure this fear is entirely legitimate because thanks to the combination of uncontrollable population growth and a high rate of female infanticide, India is literally TEEMING with men. But that is a rant for another day...

Ansari's family was incredibly happy because it seems this wedding was hard to bring about. There were two major difficulties. 1- Apparently the bride was undesirable: I was told that because she's "short and thin" no one would want her, so the family had to settle for whoever would accept their meager dowry. 2- The groom had an older brother, who wasn't married yet, and his family had to scramble and get him a bride so he'd be married before the younger one.

In this picture we are standing in the room they had set aside to display the dowry gifts. Some clothes, a bed, and a few other articles of furniture. The three boys and the girl in red are Ansari's kids. The others are some cousins who wanted to be in the shot.

He're's some nonsense for you.

2006-08-01T01:05:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post this little clip to give you a small example of the nonsensical time wasting activities that go on around our building every day.
Much to my suprise, though, this man was working alone for almost three hours. You might watch this and say "Why wouldn't he be alone? How much good would it do him to have an assistant in this task?" But that has never stopped anyone here in the past.

I'm not sure if you remember the book The Phantom Tollbooth. But there is a scene described in the book where someone has to move an entire mountain from one place to another one grain of sand at a time, using a pair of tweezers. I guess the author got his inspiration in Hyderabad.

South Africa Videos

2006-07-25T02:26:00.000-07:00

Here are two videos from the restaurant Moyo in Cape Town.

South Africa

2006-07-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

Cape Town

Leaving Hyderabad Thursday night with quick stops in Mumbai and Johannesburg we arrived in Cape Town Friday morning. It was a long trip. In Johannesburg our trip from the international terminal to the domestic terminal involved a short walk outside and it was absolutely freezing. I was afraid hadn’t packed enough warm clothes, but we found the weather quite pleasant once we arrived in Cape Town. Sort of like the weather in San Francisco: warm enough but not too hot during the day, and very cold and foggy at night. The parallels between San Francisco and Cape Town definitely don’t stop at the weather though.

Cape Town is a coastal city situated on a bay, and though it has a lot more land to work with than San Francisco, it is similarly limited in its ability to grow by its geography. The first thing you notice about Cape Town is that some asshole put a mountain right in the middle of the city! Table Mountain rises up to over 3,000 feet with Cape Town spilling out in every direction as though someone had poured millions of homes over the top of the mountain and they just rolled down the sides, finally coming to rest as they spread out away from the hillsides. A few small wealthy neighborhoods manage to cling further up the slopes but the rocky steep angles prevent anyone from building very far up. A series of smaller peaks to the south called the Twelve Apostles and the solitary Lion’s Head to the north keep Table Mountain company.

Lion's Head peeking up from Cape Town.

There are three main languages spoken in South Africa: English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa. Xhosa is a mixture of the two main languages used by the tribes who were indigenous to the Cape. It involves different clicks and pops, and is really cool to hear when spoken. The “X” in the word “Xhosa” is actually one of the three different clicking sounds in the language so it is pronounced “*click*hosa”.

Afrikaans is also a hodgepodge language put together mostly with bits of Dutch, some indigenous languages, and Malaysian. It’s easy to think that Afrikaans is spoken by whites and Xhosa by blacks, but almost everyone in South Africa, black or white, speaks both English and Afrikaans as these are the two languages taught in school. Up until 1925 Afrikaans wasn’t recognized as a separate language, and was considered just a dialect of Dutch.

Jenni-Close
We were met at the Cape Town airport by Elisha (pronounced like ‘Elijah’), our butler. (More about that later). He had an SUV to help us with the luggage, and then we rented 2 cars to drive while we were there. Heather and I were rode back to the house with Elisha, Jenni drove the BMW, and Nick drove the Toyota. About ten minutes from the Mansion as we drove along the seaside street at a good clip I heard a smashing sound coming from somewhere outside the car. Although I couldn’t be sure where it came from, it seemed to have been behind us. It sounded as though someone had driven straight into a wall. Turning around and peering through the spaces between the suitcases I could only make out the passenger seat of the BMW. In it sat Brian holding his arms up and shaking his head in a sort of “why me?” gesture. We pulled the convoy over and as I got out and walked back towards the BMW I could see it was listing to one side. “Oh well” I thought. “A flat tire… We’ll just put on the spare and deal with the rental car company tomorrow.”

But when I got to the car I realized we were a bit worse off than I at first suspected. Jenni had somehow slammed not just one wheel, but the entire left side of the car into a protruding corner-curb. If this were at sea, it would have been the Exxon Valdese. Both left tires were blown and the wheels beneath them looked like they had been a chew toy for an enormous Doberman. This car was not driving anywhere. Most of us went on to the house, and Elisha went back with a couple people to wait for the people from Hertz. After everything was straightened out, Heather coined the phrase “Jenni-close.” A volleyball comes whizzing by your head and you’d say “That was close.” A plane flies into a mountainside, and you’d say “That was Jenni-close.” I’m sure it is not necessary for me to say that that phrase was used quite liberally throughout the week, and that it is less then likely Jenni will ever live the incident down. But no one was hurt, there were World Cup Finals to watch, and booze to be drank so everyone, including Jenni, soldiered on.

The Mansion
Our group was ten people and we stayed at an incredible place called The Hollywood Mansion in a small suburb of Cape Town called Camp’s Bay. They kept saying it was a suburb, but it was only like 5 minutes drive to the rest of Cape Town. Because it is their winter season the price was incredibly low and we ended up paying less than we would have at even a cheap hotel. It is a five bedroom mansion of modern design with a home theatre, a full bar, and a live in butler. There was a pool table, a swimming pool (though it was too cold to use), a workout room, two fireplaces, and a balcony off of practically every room. It was situated up a hillside and from every window in the front of the house you could see the ocean. The back of the house faced the Twelve Apostles and you could see them towering over the house from every window on that side. A creek ran by one side of the house, and if we were ever quiet enough we could hear it gurgling across the rocks. We all spent the first day just wandering around the house in awe. There were enough rooms that one morning we went to breakfast and left Nick behind because we couldn’t hear him watching a movie in the home theatre.

The house even had its own butler, Elisha, who I mentioned earlier. Elisha lived in a small cottage off the back of the house with his wife who was the housekeeper and their young son. He was from Zimbabwe and had moved to Cape Town three years ago for better job opportunities. Even though he wasn’t a local, he was very knowledgeable about the where and when and how of practically everything we wanted to do and it would have been a huge pain in the ass for us to do most things if he hadn’t been there. He wasn’t a butler in the traditional sense of the word. He didn’t wear a coat and tails and bring us breakfast in bed or shine our shoes or anything like that. He was mostly there to keep us from blowing ourselves up with the gas fireplaces and turn off the security alarm we kept setting off. Most mornings he would wander into the kitchen in a t-shirt and jeans or pajama bottoms, clutching a cup of coffee and just sort of stare out the window down towards the ocean, and not say much of anything. If he hadn’t told me he didn’t drink or do drugs I would have thought he had been hitting the bong first thing in the mornings. He’d give you a pleasant smile and a “Good morning” but mostly he seemed to be waiting for us to tell him what we needed and if there wasn’t anything, which was most mornings, he’d shuffle back out the kitchen door to his house after a few minutes.

There was an armed response to any alarm tripped in the neighborhood and our first morning there Jenni had to explain to two officers who we were and that the alarm was simply one of us opening the patio door. Each room had a panic button that summoned the security guards which made me feel safe until that morning with the patio door, when it took them about one hour to get to the house after we tripped the alarm.

Table Mountain
Our first full day there, a bunch of us hiked up one of the trails to the top of Table Mountain. According to the guide book it would take about three hours to reach the top, at which point we could take a funicular back down the other side.

I tried to make sure every time there was a camera aimed at me I shot the photographer the finger.

And pretty soon it was a trend.

The hike up was gorgeous. After the first half mile or so it was almost entirely straight up. There were steps carved into the trail and we scrambled up small boulders. At one point there was a section that involved ladders. After about two hours of climbing, when we were reaching what we though must be the top, we ran into a group of hikers who told us that it would be another three hours to the summit. Half the party wanted to go on and see if they could make it. But the rest of us, realizing that it was getting late and not wanting to get caught on the trail after dark, decided to head back down the way we’d come. The descent was a bitch. And it turns out that we were quite simply lied to about the time to the top. The ascending group made it to the top in about an hour, the same time it took us to get back down. So they got to ride the cable cars back down, but I didn’t feel too cheated. It was an incredible hike with expansive views of Cape Town revealing themselves through the trees seemingly every ten minutes.

Hooray! More fingers.

Aquila
About ninety minutes drive Northeast of Cape Town is a game reserve called Aquila. The name comes from the Latin word for “eagle”. We drove out there for a one-day safari where we were told we “might” see many different animals, but they couldn’t promise anything because the reserve was thousands of acres and the animals might be hiding out in a different part of the park when we drove out to look for them.

When we arrived, we were served breakfast in a huge lodge heated by fireplaces and smelling of burnt wood and stew. One of the women in our group is a vegetarian, and apparently this concept does not exist in South Africa. Every time we went to a restaurant they would look at her like her head had just spun around when she said “I’m a vegetarian.” When we were making the reservations for the safari the woman on the phone asked how many people would be eating in the lodge. We told her there would be ten of us, but one was a vegetarian. She said “Oh. So only nine of you will be enjoying the Tasty?” This blanket term used for meat used by the South Africans was our favorite colloquialism of the trip. We used it for every meal.

We got lucky and saw every animal on the list. From our open air truck we saw hippos, springbok, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra (Did you know a group of zebras is called a “dazzle”?), rhinoceros, ostrich, and lions. The driver was able to pull up to within 20 yards of most of the animals, and in some cases even closer. At one point we all got down from the truck and our guide walked us up into some rocks and pointed out a painting put on one of the boulders by Bushmen thousands of years ago. It was a painting of a group of stick figures each about 12 inches high. Our guide told us they used animal blood and water and mud to make the reddish ink the figures were painted with.

It was a fairly cold day, and from time to time a strong wind would chill us to the bone, but they had blankets in the truck, and we were too excited to really notice anyway. The landscape was wide open plains, not quite desert, with a lot of scrub-brush and the occasional boulder formation or small hill. It was eerily quiet when the driver would stop near an animal or group of animals and turn off the engine.

Our guide was named Matthew, and he was incredibly knowledgeable and very passionate about his job and about wildlife in general. He asked many questions about the U.S. and what types of animals we had there and all about their habits, and luckily Spaz was there because he seemed to be able to answer most of his questions. Matthew couldn’t have been more than 21 years old, had a thick Afrikaans accent, and was obviously of mixed heritage. He was what the South Africans would call “colored”. (Not black and not white).

When we got to the Lions, Matthew who had been riding on the running board of the truck climbed inside. He told us that the lions probably wouldn’t attack him if he were out there, but they were very curious, and being investigated by a pride of curious lions could be rather painful. They had their own section of the park cordoned off by electric fences, otherwise they’d eat all the other animals, and there wouldn’t be much left. Matthew said that occasionally some of the other animals would jump the fence and the lions got a free snack.

Within the larger enclosure was a smaller one containing three young males. They had to be kept separate from the rest of the pride until they were older because they were not the offspring of the dominant male and he’d kill them the first chance he got in order to keep them from usurping his throne. When the young ones were old enough to defend themselves, the plan was to let them in with the rest of the pride. As we approached this smaller enclosure we saw that the rest of the pride were all hanging around the fence to be close to the young ones, and when we came to a stop we were about 10 yards from the entire pride. It was impressive. None of them paid us much attention, and just lay around soaking up the sun but when a group of people rode nearby on horseback, all the lions stood up and didn’t take their eyes off of them until they had rounded the bend and gone out of sight.

The pride consisted of one male and three females. After we’d been sitting watching them for about 15 minutes, one of the females got a little frisky with the male and in playing, he was chasing her around when she suddenly took a turn toward the truck and started to gallop straight for us. Matthew, who had been quite relaxed until that point, suddenly stood up in his seat and without taking his eyes off of her, he started nudging the driver and saying “Go, go, go…” in the way someone does when they are trying to emphasize the urgency of a situation without seeming like they’re panicked. She didn’t give chase, and we drove on.

Every time we stopped Matthew would give his speech about one animal or another and then ask if any of us had any questions. No matter what the animal was, hippo to beetle, Tuyen asked the same question every time: “How does it taste?” She said it with zeal. The previous night she’d had a shish kabob of mixed game. There was kudu, crocodile, springbok, and ostrich. Apparently the tastes had agreed with her because now she was riding around this game preserve as though she were in the butcher’s section of a giant supermarket. We saw a herd of springbok grazing on a hillside, and Tuyen saw a pack of hamburgers.

Yup. We're all holding chunks of rhino poo.

After about a three hour drive through the park, we were back at the lodge for lunch. There was lots of the Tasty. But first we had a chance to go into the cheetah enclosure two at a time, and pet the two cheetahs. They had been hand raised so they were pretty comfortable around people. At sixteen months old, they are considered cubs, but they were not small. They still had a lot of their downy cub-fur though. They were really relaxed and just purred and purred as we pet them. Just before it was my turn to go in, the female got a little over stimulated and hissed at Heather as she pet her. She was quickly reprimanded, and went off to the far end of the enclosure to pout while Heather just moved over to pet the boy who seemed to love having twice the attention.

While I was petting the male cheetah he got a little frisky and decided to chew at my arm and paw at me (their claws don’t retract). What I was supposed to do, apparently, was to get my hand away from him and step back, but it didn’t hurt so I just grabbed his exposed belly and shook my hand around to egg him on. The rangers were quite nervous but I could tell he was just playing, and the cheetah and I had a great time.

Wine Country
The lands around Cape Town are covered in vineyards, and we took full advantage since the lands all around Hyderabad are covered in rocks. We booked a day long wine tour with drivers so none of us would have to stay sober. Two SUVs showed up in the morning to take us north. One driver was Stephen, and the other was named Monique. Monique was 20 years old, sort of jumpy, and had the voice of a 60 year old chain smoker. Stephen was in his 40s, had a thick Afrikaans accent, and seemed as though he’d been smoking weed all morning on his way to get us. He was hysterical.

At the first vineyard Stephen gave us a little tasting lesson, and then took us up onto the roof top patio to drink. There were great views and great wine. The second place, Van Ryn, made brandy, and this absolutely DE-fucking-LICIOUS cream liqueur called Angels’ Share. The name comes from a phrase used in brandy making: When brandy ages in its barrels, it loses about 3% of its volume. The distillers call this lost brandy “The Angels’ Share”. This stuff was a bit like Bailey’s, but instead of a cream-whiskey, it’s a cream-brandy so it’s a much more crisp taste. There was no pretense involved in brandy tasting. The guy who worked there said something along the lines of ‘Don’t swirl your glass. Don’t spit it out. It’s brandy. Just drink it. If you like it, it’s good, if you don’t like it, it’s bad.’ I liked the ten year old stuff, but not the twelve and not the new stuff.

There was a stop for a nice lunch at a vineyard called Skilpadvlei (tortoise valley) and there was more wine over lamb stew. Their wine was called Skilpad Dop. Skilpad means tortoise, and Dop means “shell” but is also a slang term for going out to have a drink. The label has a cartoon of a drunken turtle on it who’s wearing a wine glass on his head.

The next place, Simonsig, made sparkling wine and a guy came out and opened a bottle with a sword. It was an amazingly clean break or, at least, I didn’t get any glass in my champagne. They had the best wines we tasted. Everyone bought a bottle of one thing or another there. Heather and I bought two bottles of their Gewurztraminer. Good stuff.

The last place was on a huge farm with by far the best views of the day. It was called Seidelberg. The wine was good, but not spectacular. There were two big dogs loping around the lawn and they loved all the attention we brought with us and they seemed nice until one of the black workers would come near the shop. The dogs would chase the workers up to the edge of the lawn barking all the while. The manager told me she thought they were a “bit racist” but she didn't seem too concerned about it. I guess I wasn’t dark enough to stir them up, though because they had no problems with me, and one of them even came up to Heather and I and rolled onto his back and stayed there, belly up, for about ten minutes.

Stephen, Heather and I after a day of drinking.

It was getting dark as we left and we went to our final stop of the evening. It was an amazing restaurant called Moyo. It was in a huge circus-sized tent with a buffet on one side and a stage in the center. By this time it was getting very, very cold out so we were glad to see there were gas heaters set up over the tables, and thick wool blankets on the chairs. Heather wore both her and my blankets. Upon each party’s arrival a woman came to their table and painted each persons face with a design. There was plenty of the Tasty to go around, and the desserts were unbelievable. Every half an hour or so a group would take the stage. They performed drumming, dancing, and singing. One of the numbers was a bit too much like performance art for my taste, but the rest were great. At the end of the night, when we were getting ready to leave they approached our table and sang an acapella, sort of doo-wop song. They told us it was a South African welcoming song. The chorus was something like “take of your jacket and stay a while.” I usually detest any sort of performances during my meals. I’m not sure if it was the wine or the Tasty, but I made an exception in this case, and had a great time.

Robben Island
It means “Seal Island” in Dutch. This is where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years for his anti-apartheid views. The tours through the old prison are led by ex-inmates, which gives a more personal feeling to what could otherwise be a very quick and very sterile tour. The conditions suffered by the inmates were appalling, and the lengths to which the government would go to degrade them were amazing. For example, black inmates were not allowed shoes, and were forced to shave their heads the whole time they were there. Both of these actions were considered very subhuman by the areas black cultures at the time. Nor were they allowed jackets or long pants, and as we experienced, it gets very cold during the winters. There are a few famous pictures of Mandela at the prison wearing a jacket, pants, and shoes, but our tour guide explained that the prison officials knew every time someone was coming to take photos, and they simply supplied the clothes on that day in order to keep the Red Cross and other organizations off their back. Our tour guide had been imprisoned there when he was 19 or 20 and was there as an inmate for 15 years. He described the many infractions for which you would be tortured. In the communal cell blocks, there were up to eighty men sharing one shower, so it was hard for them to arrange time for everyone to shower, but if you failed to shower every day, you were beaten. Nelson Mandela and the other prisoners who were considered too dangerous to keep around others were kept in separate cells. In these cells they were provided with three blankets and a bucket. No bed, no fixtures, just three blankets and a bucket.

But Robben Island was not always a prison. It was a shipping depot, a leper colony, and a military base at various points in its history, and you get to hear all this history from a tour guide as you are driven around the island on a bus before you visit the prison buildings.

The next day we left, and we were very sad to do so. Cape Town was an amazing experience that I will never forget. I got to eat crocodile meat (no it doesn’t taste like chicken), I got to pet a cheetah, and everywhere I felt as though I were surrounded by an immense history, greater than I had the capacity to fully understand. And the whole time, I felt incredibly comfortable and welcome, as though I were just visiting a new neighborhood in my own home city. I will miss it and I hope to go back someday.

I think they've had enough.

This sign means "Check under your car for penguins before you drive away." I thought it was one of the funniest signs I've seen.

Thailand Again!!!

2006-06-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

We left for Thailand on a Friday night and arrived on a Saturday morning with a few hours' layover in Singapore. Of course I didn't sleep at all, so by the time we got to Koh Samui, I was beginning to get delerious. Unbeknownst to us until we got there, it was the 60^th anniversary of the coronation of the King of Thailand. There were yellow decorations everywhere (yellow being the royal color) and banners and posters and everywhere you looked, the royal seal was stamped on everything from busses to restaurant windows.

The first three nights we stayed at a hotel called the Baan Hin Sai which was a group of bungalows nestled into the forest on the side of a steep hill over the ocean. This setup produced some very beautiful scenery as you looked out through the trees onto the pristine Gulf of Thailand. At night dozens of fishing boats would creep out onto the water only visible by their lights. On a starry night you couldn’t quite tell where the sea ended and the sky began. But this arrangement hit one major snag that we discovered the first time we left our cottage to head to the road to catch a taxi: The only way to the road was a beautifully lit, winding little path that led straight up the cliff-like hill. It’s hard enough not to sweat in Thailand, and scrambling up the sheer face of this cliff every time you want to go anywhere, was just too much. Even the swimming pool was at the top of the cliff. At first we thought of the “private beach” described in the hotel’s literature and how if the beach was nice enough, we could just live off of room service at night and hang out on the beach all day. But the second day, when we decided to go check out the water, we were sorely disappointed. Instead of a beach we found a small cove of rocks that plunged sharply into very deep water. As pretty as it was to look at there was no place to lay down a towel to lie on. Then as we stood there contemplating the situation Heather let out a curse as she was bitten by an ENOURMOUS ant with a mean looking head. We left the next day.

I called a place called the Imperial Samui Hotel which was just a few minutes down the road. They had a vacancy so we were off. Upon our arrival, the very baffled desk staff told us that there were no vacancies. I told them that I had just spoken with someone not fifteen minutes earlier who had reserved us a room. After a few minutes of “No you didn’t”... “Yes I did” one of the staff asked what number I’d called. I reached into my bag and pulled out the guide book, determined to show this woman her mistake. If any of you use the Lonley Planet Guide to Thailand and find yourself looking for a place to stay in Koh Samui, please take note that there are the Imperial Samui Hotel, and the Imperial Boat House Hotel, both on opposite sides of the island, neither affiliated with the other and these two numbers are mixed up in the book.

Our second resort was the Fair House Beach Resort, another few minutes down the road. They had a vacancy and were quite affordable. It was a huge place with a little par three golf course, two main buildings, and lots of bungalows situated right on top of each other. We had a very clean, though somewhat bland room in one of the main buildings that overlooked one of the pools. It was a short walk down to an actual beach with sand and everything. From our new home base we rented scooters and scooted all over the island.

On the main drag is a big Brazilian restaurant called Zico’s. They have scantly clad Brazilian broads that come out and samba every half hour or so. But more importantly they have all you can eat meat. The tiny waitresses walk around the restaurant with various meats and fishes skewered onto huge swords. It was great!

My drink has sparklers in it! I tried to drink all the drinks in the 'Specialty Cocktails' section of the menu. I only made it through 5.

It rained a lot while we were on the island but the rain never lasted for too long, so we managed to get out a lot in spite of it.

One day we went to ride elephants and see the “monkey show”. They have all day treks on elephants through the jungle, but we arrived too late for that so we opted for the 45 minute trek. It was less of a trek and more a slow walk up and impossibly steep hillside. When I saw the path we were taking, I thought there was no way the elephant could make it up something that steep. But they are surprisingly surefooted. She just slowly plodded up the trail switchbacking and stopping every few minutes to rip a branch out of a tree or find some fallen fruit to snack on. When she or the other elephants would pick up a group of pineapple leaves or a palm branch with their trunks they would smash it incredibly hard against their legs a few times as though flagellating before stuffing it into their mouths and munching it down. I guess it was to get the dirt off or help pulverize it a little before they ate it.

It was just Heather and I and a mahout on one elephant slowly climbing the hill. Every time the elephant would fart (which was often) the mahout would scowl at one of us and say “I think that was you.” Then he’d giggle so hard I thought he’d fall off.

No one else was on the path, which was nice because we could take our time. When we reached the top we came to a clearing and you could see for miles up the coastline and out to sea to the north. It was gorgeous, and on top of the slowly swaying elephant it was incredibly peaceful. The mahout scrambled to the ground and took a picture of us at the top of the hill. Then before we started to lumber back down, he stopped the elephant under a tree, pointed up and said quite casually, “Mengmoon.” I figured it was a type of fruit, but when I looked up I almost shat myself as I discovered a mengmoon is an absolutely gigantic spider about the size of a fucking dinner plate. It was about six feet above us and seemed content sitting on its huge web, but I kept a wary eye on it as we moved away, just in case it decided to drop down and suck out my eyeball juice or something.

Upon our return to the zoo/village, we were told it was time for the shows. The elephant show was a mildly entertaining 10 minutes of tricks performed by a four year old elephant named Murray. Murray did a handstand and played a harmonica and so on. The highlight was when Murray gave me a massage by stamping on my back with one of his front feet while giving me kisses on my head and face with his trunk. For those of you who don’t know, elephant kisses are very wet.

Then came the monkey show which was thoroughly disappointing. I guess I had expected more from primates. A soft shoe number… Maybe some show tunes. A rather angry looking monkey named Mikey demonstrated how the coconut farmers train monkeys to climb palm trees and spin the coconuts until their stem breaks and they fall out of the tree. Then Mikey came out of the tree and we had a chance to take a picture with him. We were told to only hold his hand and to “Please do nothing else.” As heather and I held Mikeys hand in turn, he did not seem amused or confused. He looked like he knew exactly what was happening and had the trainer not been bribing him with snacks, he would have eaten our faces right off our heads.

Later that day, after stopping for lunch, we got on our scooters to find that mine had a flat tire. We were, of course, miles from the nearest gas station. So I found a place for Heather to sit and have tea while I took the good scooter to find the closest gas station or guy with a pickup truck who can haul the scooter with the flat. And about a mile and a half later, I found a place.

It's off on some random road and the sign outside says "Motorbike repair". So I pull over and no one speaks even one word of English, and I cannot make any of them understand that the scooter I'm riding is fine, but there is another one a mile away that has a flat.

Finally one of the mechanics tells me to wait and runs into a shop next door. He emerges a minute later with another guy, who speaks some English. He's not what you would call 'fluent' but he understands what's wrong. So he tells me I'd better hurry because the shop is closing soon. But when I tell him I'll have to walk the scooter because the tire is completely flat, he tells me I won't make it in time. We both ponder silently for a minute, staring alternately at each other and the ground while the three mechanics stand by nervously waiting. Then, suddenly he yells something at one of the teenagers in greasy coveralls and the kid runs over and jumps onto my scooter. The man tells me "You take him with you. He drive you scooter back here. He not heavy like you." If you have any issues with self confidence, Thailand is not the place for you. Everyone (and I mean everyone) likes to point out how big you are at any given opportunity. Luckily I don’t give two shits. I'm too happy to have found the place to be insulted. I drive the kid to the scooter with the flat and he starts driving it at breakneck speed back to the shop. He's like 50 pounds with his boots on, so riding a scooter with a flat is no problem for him.

So when we get back, the guy says he'll have to replace the inner-tube and it'll take a half an hour. What to do? The place next door I mentioned earlier is a gaming shop. I ask him how much to use the internet and he says it’ll cost the equivalent of about $1 an hour. So there I sit, surrounded by little Thai kids playing really, really loud video games online checking my email. But at least I got the tire fixed.

Oh. And the mechanic's little dog took a piss inside one of my shoes which I had left outside when I went in to use the computer. Putting on a wet shoe is always a little gross, but when you know the reason it’s wet is dog piss, it takes gross to a whole new level.

Good times.

The next day, Heather went to get treatments at a spa, and I went to a gun range for a little relaxation of my own. It was AWESOME! I started out with a .45 caliber Glock, then moved on to a .38 revolver of some sort. Then I fired a silly version of an AK47 that chambered these tiny little .22 rounds. That kinda sucked so I didn’t fire that one again. But after that came the highlight for me. Who knew a 12 gauge pump shotgun could be so much fucking fun? I need to buy one of my own. If I hadn’t run out of cash, I’d still be there right now.

Twelve gauge shotty, bitches! I got your enlightenment RIGHT HERE!!!

I was the only person on the range, so the little lady who worked there was nice enough to use my camera to take a couple videos of me shooting. I look like I’m concentrating, but I’m really jumping for joy on the inside.

I'm aiming with my third eye.

Then I shot the .45 some more, and then back to the shotgun again. It went on and on and on… And I smiled and smiled and smiled…

Our next stop was Bangkok. The last time I was there was without Heather, so this time it was nice to have her with me. Our first day there was a Saturday, so we took the sky train to the Chatuchak Weekend Market. It was just as hot and just as crowded as the last time I had gone, and it quickly got the better of Heather. I shouldn’t say “quickly” since I really have no concept of time when I’m shopping. I’m like a machine in places like that, mentally marking down items and their prices and then comparing with the next vendor who’s selling the same stuff. I can keep that sort of thing up until I’m absolutely sure I’m getting exactly what I want at the best price, and this whole process usually takes hours if not days. So Heather’s need for rest and food was probably perfectly justified. Our shopping day ended early when I either lost my wallet or I was pick-pocketed. So we headed back to the hotel where I sulked and fretted about my wallet for the rest of the day.

The next day we went on a whirlwind temple tour. Our plan was to visit the Grand Palace and then just see where the rest of the day led us from there. As we arrived at the Grand Palace a man in a civil service uniform came running up to us and told us they were closed until 2pm. He was a very excitable middle aged guy whose English was pretty good, and who turned out to be one of the managers of the staff of the Palace. It was about noon and he said we should come back in two hours. He showed us on a map of the city a few other temples we could visit in the meantime. Then he flagged down a tuk tuk and told the driver that we were to go to these temples and he even told the guy how much to charge us, which turned out to be the equivalent of about $2 U.S.

We saw the Standing Buddha at one temple. It was a towering golden statue that stood outside and towered over the temple. Inside the temple as we stood gazing at the intricate murals a man approached us intent on having a conversation. I think he was looking for an excuse to practice his English, but whatever the reason he just kept talking and asking questions and in the heat and humidity it seemed like forever. He told us stories about his wife and kids. He told us about the time he had spent in the States. He worked for a local newspaper( I think he said he was a writer). Then, when he could see us getting antsy he bid us farewell and we were on our way to another temple.

The next temple featured a huge collection of different Buddha statues from all over Asia, each from different eras in history.

There was a dog sleeping in the temple near some of the statues, but he didn’t like me trying to take his picture and got up with a heavy sigh and shuffled off to a more secluded spot. But not far away was a cat and he seemed perfectly fine with me getting close to him for a few pictures.

Then we stopped at a wholesale jewelry factory outlet, and Heather got a gorgeous ring for about a third of what she would have paid in the U.S. Much to the chagrin of the salespeople it was a rather small ring. They kept showing us huge and expensive stuff, and we would have to politely remind them that we were not millionaires. The manager of the outlet was a soft spoken and friendly man who had lived in San Francisco for about 14 years. We chatted with him for a while and Heather tried on just about every piece of jewelry in the place. At one point she had on a FIFTEEN karat ruby ring!!! It was ridiculous. It was so big it looked as though they must have stolen it from Liberace’s grave. Then we went to another temple, and then back to the Grand Palace.

The Palace is simply enormous. Acres of land containing gardens, parade grounds, a royal palace, and several huge temples. Almost every inch of the place was swarming with tourists from China. Every few minutes another tour bus would pull up at the gate and spew out a swarm of frantic and overdressed little people. They would scurry around, screaming to each other and taking pictures of everything in sight. It was less annoying than it sounds and was actually very entertaining.

Some people prayed. Others just took photos.

The main temple at the Palace was a huge affair with intricate carvings along the outside and a cavernous main prayer-hall with many different sized statues of Buddha clustered at the far end from the doors. This was the only temple we saw where photography was forbidden inside the hall so I took a shot from the outside looking in one of the doors.

Three young monks walking through a courtyard at the Palace.

The Palace building is guarded by motionless guards in pristine white uniforms, each armed with an M-16, which was good because none of them was taller than four and a half feet, so without the assault rifles they couldn’t have stopped anyone from going inside. The tourists, of course all took turns standing next to them and snapping photos as though it was Buckingham Palace. But unlike the guys in England with the big furry hats these guards seemed not quite sure what to do about this, and though they didn’t move, they side eyed the people standing near them nervously. So of course I went and stood next to one. I had to fight the urge to throw an arm around him or make bunny ears behind his helmet.

Heather left the next day and the plan was for me to take a train up north to Chiang Mai. But I found out that the rains had washed out some sections of tracks along the route I was to take. Since the only other affordable option was to take an overnight bus, I decided I’d just stay in Bangkok. And I’m glad I did. I got to go on a short boat tour along some of the canals of Bangkok. The city is bisected by the Chao Praya River and in the old days before cars, the only way to get around was a network of canals all converging on the river. King Rama V filled in a lot of the canals back around the turn of the century as he began to modernize Thailand with things like the automobile. But many of the canals are still around, and boats are still the main means of transportation for some neighborhoods.

My boat was a slow long boat and I was the only passenger. Many of the other boats were the high-bowed longboats with shallow hulls and outboard motors like you see in the movies. I soon realized how fortunate I was as I saw that these other boats just flew up the canals and my driver seemed to be in no great hurry. I got to see a lot more that way. We slowly chugged our way up the river that was swollen and murky from the monssons. Along the canals you can see life as it used to be in Bangkok. Corrugated tin houses on wooden piers, one end facing the street and the other slowly being consumed by the clay colored water. It was a nice leisurely afternoon.

I bought some snacks from a lady in a boat as well as some beers for the driver of my boat.

We made a long stop at a snake and alligator farm to see a show. I didn’t see any alligators, but there was a mildly entertaining snake show involving cobras and three or four other snakes. But the best part was a baby gibbon named Junior. I got to hold him and had my picture taken with him. He was tiny, about the size of my forearm, and he had arms about twice the length of his body which he used to cling desperately to me. He didn’t like not being held and so if I didn’t hug him tight he would make these pitiful little whimpering and crying sounds that broke your heart because they were almost human. I love monkeys!

I just realized that this post is getting ridiculously long so in the spirit of brevity I’ll just sum up the rest of my trip with pictures and as few words as possible.

One night after I had been to the fights and drank way too much beer I decided to take a motorcycle taxi back to the hotel. We almost died several times and everytime another motorcycle taxi would pull up next to us, they'd look at my gigantic ass on the back of the tiny motorbike and laugh hysterically.

This was probably one of the best meals I ate in Thailand. The street food is fucking amazing.

Do you have an oily head? Apparently this stuff will clear that right up.

Yes. This is indeed two Thais playing country music. I think it was more of a novelty to help sell records at the shop they were in front of.

A Buddah in the Chatuchak Weekend Market.

Three schoolboys jamming in the street for money.

A Hotel Bar in Bangkok

2006-05-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

It was only recently explained to me how to upload videos to my blog or I would have put this up sooner.
This is a band that was playing in a random hotel bar in Bangkok last time Heather and I went. They were playing the type of cheesey music you would expect a group of middle aged guys to be playing in a touristy hotel bar. Propped up on top of a baby grand piano right next to the stage was a huge television which was showing videotapes of Pride Fighting Championships, which is a no-holds-barred fighting competition. It looked like the few patrons in the place were paying less attention to the men on the screen beating each other bloody than they were to the lead singer of the bands horrible toupe. It was one of those hair pieces you get anxious watching because you fear it may come flying off the wearer's head if they make any sudden movements.

I was so shocked by what I was watching I didn't have the presence of mind to record it until the very end of the song. Unfortunately due to the "mood" lighting you cannot see the singer's toupe, but trust me, you aint missing much.

They are singing "With Love to You, Thaiwan". I had never heard this song, and wondered why they would sing a song about Thaiwan when they were in Thailand, and if they had written the song or was it someone elses lovely work.
Well, upon further research it appears the song was written by someone named Lobo back in the seventies. Here is a picture of Lobo. It seems that the singer of this cover band in Bangkok was trying to emulate Lobo's wonderous hair with his toupe.

MAN! I can't fucking wait to go back!

Cinco de fucking Mayo!

2006-05-09T02:20:00.000-07:00

For Cinco de Mayo we decided to have a little gathering. There aren’t a whole lot of expats left here in India, so it wasn’t as though we could really organize anything bigger than a gathering. But sometimes a gathering is just the right size.

As with any party, we of course took it as an excuse to buy fireworks. I spent the afternoon running all over Hyderabad and managed to find shitty rum, good tequila, and questionable fireworks. And really what more could you want?

The new guy, Durand. He's been here about a week. And the sorta new girl, Jenni. She's been here a month or so.

No that's not photoshop. Nick's coat is really that color. It is a thing to behold.

Here is a video of the last one minute or so of a fifteen minute fireworks show. I wish there was a way to convey the sheer volume of ten thousand firecrackers going off as starbursts spit from a tiny cardboard box on the ground nearby. Unfortunately the microphone on my camera is on the back facing the user instead of the subject being filmed. I’m not sure what the logic behind that is but the result is a fireworks video, punctuated by my girlish screams of glee.

We got the fireworks out of the way before anyone got too wrecked, and then went back upstairs and got wrecked. There was eating. There was drinking. There was dancing. I avoided the last of these accept for a brief moment when Spaz and I reenacted the knife fight from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video. Oh, if only we’d had switchblades and red leather jackets!

Dancing on the floor with everyone else wasn't enough for Spaz.

I wish I could tell you what's going on here. I just don't know.

Aaaaawww...

Heart shaped balloons for Cinco de Mayo? Why the hell not?

More Goa Pictures

2006-04-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

Here are some more pictures from our recent trip to Goa with Lisa.

Heather, Marilyn, and Lisa

Here I am trying my best to look like I'm suffereing from blunt-force trauma to the head.

All of us at a great restaurant called Fiestas. We would have to get used to the pig-nose pose from Marilyn. She did it every time there was a camera around.

The pool at our hotel. Bitchin'.

One of many handicraft-bazaars. This one was mainly vendors from Tibet.

Hey, look who's doing the pig-nose again.

Here we Goa again...

2006-04-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

Heather's cousin Lisa was in town last week and since Hyderabad has very limited entertainment options, we went to Goa. Lisa brought her boyfriend's sister Marilyn and the four of us had a great time there.

We stayed at a great little place called Sonesta Inn. It was not nearly as posh as the place we stayed last time, but I loved it just the same. Plus it was closer to all the hustle and bustle, so we had no shortage of stuff to do and restaurants to try.

This place wasn't right on the beach, but since the beach there was overrun with Europeans and filthy beach shacks whose proprietors wanted you to pay to use their lounge chairs, we didn't miss it much. It was only a couple of hundred yards walk down a thin forest path from our hotel to the sand so we did go once. While we were there sitting on the tiny unoccupied stretch of sand between the beach shacks and the Arabian Sea a pack of about 20 dogs came barking and howling down the beach. They all seemed to be following one particular female who I can only guess was in heat. Each of the beach shacks had their own dogs that would start howling and barking as the pack passed by, which would in turn set all the dogs in the pack to howling and barking and it was simply cacophonous. I found the whole thing quite amusing, but Marilyn who doesn't like dogs was quite irritated. This made it even better for me. I don't trust people who don't like dogs. Don't get me wrong, if Marilyn had been mauled by a giant mastif or something I would be sympathetic, but her reason for not liking dogs: One time she stepped in poo.
The absurdity of a person condemming an entire species just because that person can't watch where they're walking baffles me. Heather and Lisa both shared in my amusement for the rest of the trip, when no matter where we were, dogs seemed to ignore everyone but Marilyn. But as I would learn over the course of the week, the dog-hating was the least of Marilyn's neuroses.

After a dip in the ocean, we checked out some of the millions of street bazaars and I got myself a hammock(which I already have set up on our balcony and have fallen asleep in daily). I also got the greatest pair of gloves ever made, and had the heat not stolen my wits from me I would have bought a pair for everyone I know. I bought them from a Tibetan man who had a leather shop.

And, once again, my old friend Seafood and I were reunited. I think when I return to the states I'm going to get a houseboat so I can just wake up every morning, reach out my window and paw fish out of the water like a bear.

We returned to Hyderabad Saturday morning and Lisa and Marilyn left for the states at 12:30 that night. Then about a half an hour later, my cell phone rang. It was Lisa. "Our plane doesn't leave until tomorrow night." Apparently they had to get packed and go all the way out to the airport and even argue with an airport employee before they decided to actually look at the date on their tickets.
Needless to say I laughed A LOT.

So 24 hours later we did the goodbyes again, they got on their flight, and we haven't heard from them since.

My Dance Partner

2006-03-28T04:14:00.000-08:00

God DAMN I miss Home Depot!

There is a long list of complaints I have about our apartment. The management of the building has provided us with a “Complaint Log” in which we are supposed to write down said grievances and they will be addressed. This is the system as it was explained to us.

The system actually works like so:
*We write down everything that is broken or doesn’t work properly in this log and someone in management writes the words “Done” or “Repaired” next to it within a day or two. We look in the log and realize that it says “done” but it isn’t. We write down something along the lines of “No it isn’t. Get that ‘carpenter’ or ‘plumber’ back here and fix this shit.”

*A few days later a “carpenter” or whomever shows up with no tools, walks sheepishly into the apartment and stands there like an idiot until I physically take him to the offending appliance or piece of masonry or light bulb, etc. and (since I don’t know Hindi) pantomime to him what the problem is. He nods his head, leaves, and the complaint log shows up back in our apartment the next day, with the words “done” or “repaired” written next to our comments about the work not being done. We call one of the managers and explain that it isn’t done.

*A day or two later one of them shows up at the door. Usually a particularly shiftless worm named Charry. This happy bastard is all smiles and apologies and explanations about the “carpenter” being on his way. Neither hide nor hair of the tradesman is seen for another day or two but when he does show up, he is holding some sort of Neolithic tools and gets right to work. I leave the room (like a fool) and anywhere from one to eight hours later he rushes from the house. Wondering why the banging has stopped I ask my housekeeper where he has gone. The answer is always the same: “Finished, sir.” I go to inspect the work and inevitably it is done incorrectly if not just made to look like something was done. And three out of five times he has managed to break something else in the process.

*I phone the managers and we start the dance all over again. This time I stand there and tell the “carpenter” exactly what to do and how to fix whatever it is, he looks completely baffled but does as he’s told, and the work is finished.

Today they “repaired” a curtain rod, and the kitchen sink. The curtain rod is too short so every time the curtains are drawn, it falls clattering to the floor. I thought I’d get a head start on all of this by writing down very specifically what the “carpenter” should do. I wrote down that he needs to either A: get a longer curtain rod, or B: move the brackets that hold the rod closer together. Today while I sat unsuspectingly in the other room he re-drilled the exact same holes in the wall that the brackets were in and precariously balanced the rod in its usual place. When I came downstairs and tried to open the curtains, they fell down again, and he was no where to be found.

The faucet in the kitchen was never properly attached so when I move the stem, water comes squirting out from around the base and the whole thing, knobs and all, spins with the stem. The “plumber” came to fix that today (also while I wasn’t around), and now it seems to be securely fastened to the sink. What I didn’t realize until after I turned the water on, is that somehow during this repair he either pulled loose or purposely detached the drain from the sink, and did not bother to reattach it. So now the water runs down the sink and down into the cabinet underneath. The plumber was also, of course, nowhere to be found.

Heather always asks me why I don’t give them very specific instructions about repairs so I won’t have to get so angry at them when they screw it up. The reason is very simple: In order for these instructions to be truly detailed I would have to not only tell them what to do, but also what not to do. For instance, in the example I just mentioned, I would have to tell the plumber NOT to detach the drain when he fixed the faucet. How am I supposed to see that one coming? There are too many variables. So the next time the carpenter comes to, let’s say, fix a door, I have to tell him to fix the door, but not to remove any windows?

No. I’m afraid I will just have to take some Advil, not use the sink, and wait until tomorrow when the manager and I get to start our little dance all over again.

God DAMN I miss Home Depot.

Who's the Mack?

2006-03-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

I'm willing to bet none of you have ever had your picture in an Indian style and living magazine. Well Josh, Spaz, and I have.

We were in Chennai standing around the lobby of our hotel waiting for our rickshaw driver, when we were approached by a beautiful young Indian woman and asked if we had a few minutes to spare. She said she’d like to have our picture taken in the bar for a local magazine. We were curious, and so we followed her into the hotel bar, the Leather Bar.

When I first saw the name of the place I was rather shocked, but very curious because homosexuality is illegal in India and I couldn’t wait to see what a gay-bar would be like here. I imagined the old smoke filled, speakeasy-type places I’d read about, where young men met in secrecy. Would we have to tell a password to a pair of eyes behind a peep hole to gain entrance? And why is this Leather Bar so openly displayed in the lobby of a nice hotel? I though maybe the speakeasy was in the back, the name of the bar an irony only understood by the initiated.

As we followed this woman in her neatly pressed blue sari it hit me: Why did she ask us of all people to pose for this picture? She thought we were gay, didn’t she? We were to become poster boys for the jet setting, intercontinental, gay, leather bar crowd. Perhaps I could give some young man somewhere the courage to come out to his Hindu parents.

Not that I wasn’t enjoying the thought of having my own fan club (perhaps based in Malaysia somewhere) but I thought it a little improper to misrepresent myself and was looking for a good time to tell the woman that she should find her mascots elsewhere. My delusions of glory soon came crashing down as we entered the Leather Bar and it became blatantly obvious that there was no irony intended at all in the name. It was just a bar with lots of leather. The chairs, the benches, the stools, a bumper around the edge of the bar were all black leather. Even the walls were leather; a grey suede.

She wanted us to be sitting at the bar, all three of us drinking one of the establishment’s flaming drinks at the same time. As you can see from the picture, this involved a several drink glasses precariously balanced atop one another. One liqueur after another was slowly drizzled over the tower. Finally the bartender lit it up and we stuck our straws in and tried to finish it before the straws melted or our eyebrows burned. The photographer wanted to do a couple of different takes, so we had to repeat the process again. The first drink tasted of citrus and the second was more like coffee. It was about 11:00AM and neither one of these tastes was very appealing.

I did manage to keep from retching, and the photos turned out fine. Afterwards we went back into the lobby of the hotel with the woman. She was in her twenties and had a lot of energy. A little too much energy for me, but since Spaz was the only one of us who's single, Josh and I set about trying to get her to invite him out.

The nickname Spaz did not just materialize out of thin air. The woman tried to tell us about some parties she was promoting and Spaz kept asking her where we should go to get sushi. She politely steered the conversation back to clubs where she liked to go dancing and Spaz, steered the conversation right back to sushi. He wouldn't shut up about the fucking sushi. I wouldn’t normally give a shit one way or the other, but he wastes an awful lot of my time complaining about his involuntary celibacy. So after banging our heads against that wall for a while, Josh and I decided it wasn’t our problem.

Needless to say Spaz did not get laid. But at least we got our photo in the magazine.

The next day...

2006-03-25T22:13:00.000-08:00

Later Thursday night, after the exterminator had sprayed all my belongings, I had to go around the house killing things that didn't happen to be in the direct path of his extensive floor-spraying. Two bizarre black beetles were mating in the bathroom while I was trying to do the dookie, I was swatting mosquitoes in every room, and the Giant Honeybees which have taken up residence in on the building across the courtyard seem to be actually attracted by the poison because they are squeezing their way around screens and under doors to get in our house.

But not to worry. As if to emphasize the utter uselessness of the exterminator’s activities, our housekeeper fastidiously scrubbed and mopped away any traces of his poisons less than 12 hours after his visit. Unfortunately she cleaned it all up before any insects had a chance to stumble inadvertently into the poison puddles.

I'm done.

2006-03-22T23:48:00.000-08:00

The man came just a few minutes ago to spray poison on everything we own.
Apparently it's not his job to move things out of the way as he does his part to keep this society rolling by performing yet another the mindless and useless task.

This is probably the 4th or 5th time I've witnessed the spraying of poison since we've been here. The poison (which I promise you is horribly unsafe for humans to be near) is applied liberally everywhere a wall meets a floor. And I mean everywhere. But there is no regard given as to whether there are objects -towels, shoes, magazines, furniture, drapes, electronics, whatever- in the way. They just spray away, mindlessly following the line of the wall along the floor. Like a machine.

All of this moves past a mild irritant to a blood pressure raising incident when one takes into consideration how the buildings are constructed. The floor is marble mounted directly on concrete. The walls are brick covered in a smooth concrete skin. There are no spaces anywhere for anything to live. Spraying that shit on the floor is only poisoning the human inhabitants of the house. The electrical outlets or plumbing? Not only are the wiring and pipes chiseled out of the concrete and then immediately filled over, but the outlets are all set about 3 feet from the ground. So even if there were roaches living in my outlets, they are safely out of harms way.

So you might ask why I do not do anything to stop this. Because like most things I witness here, I am always caught like a deer in the headlights. As though I am watching it on a television screen and I have no way to influence the outcome. Most who know me know that I'm not necessarily a quick thinker to begin with. But I am exceptionally dumbfounded when required to think on my feet here.

But the real puzzler is this: The times we have seen roaches or mouse droppings, they are in the spaces well off the floor- cabinets, cupboards, false ceilings- but the "exterminators" have NEVER sprayed that crap in any of these spots.

I put "exterminator" in quotes because like most jobs here, one does not actually need to be trained in any way to perform it. Someone who has never cut wood is no more a “carpenter” than that guy whose only tools are a hammer and chisel is a “plumber”.

If I sound unnecessarily bitter, it's because I am. But I have come to a decision regarding this blog, and indeed my whole life here in India. I am tired of trying to remain positive. I'm done giving people the benefit of the doubt. I'm done trying not to sound like I don't appreciate my experiences here.
I do appreciate the fact that I get to experience a foreign culture, and that not everyone can have the benefit of common sense. But no longer will I hold my tongue when said culture repulses me in some way. No longer will I refrain from calling a fucking idiot a fucking idiot.

Watch out world. There’s a new Salim on the block, and he hates you.

Goa photos

2006-03-20T20:41:00.000-08:00

Blogger wasn't letting me post pictures for a couple of days but everything seems to be in working order again. Here are some pictures of our trip to Goa.

The view from our balcony.

I don't think Heather has any problems with the view either.

If a bed can't hold up to a Salim-sized body slam, it's not worth sleeping on. Fortunately, this one held up just fine.

Lots of sculptures thoughout the resort, some old, some new.

What the hell kind of scary ass bird has people-teeth?

Miniature Herons drinking at the lagoon.

Goa

2006-03-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

It was Heather’s Birthday this past weekend and to celebrate we went to Goa, a small coastal state on the western side of India on the Arabian Sea.

Our weekend started as typically as most of our traveling in India has. Our flight which was supposed to leave from Hyderabad at 11:40 AM left instead at 2 PM because of an airport closure. We were to fly through Bangalore, but just before our flight boarded a flight landing in Bangalore somehow lost its front landing gear and ran off of the runway, which closed the airport. I pieced this together later from newspaper reports. The information we were given at the time ranged from an aircraft had “broken down” in Bangalore, to an aircraft had “crashed in Bagalore”. One airline employee even told me that a plane had “bumped into the runway”. I knew better than to ask what exactly the hell that meant and just resolved to sit back and relax and we would fly to Goa whenever they let us.
As we landed in Bangalore for our short stopover, we passed the plane responsible for all the trouble as it lay helplessly off to one side of the runway. It was missing the front wheels, the propellers were bent up and the rear wheels were not looking to hot. It was surrounded by about 600 people, 555 of whom appeared to be doing nothing and probably didn’t even work at the airport to begin with.
Most of the passengers got off in Bangalore, but we and the other four people who were going on to Goa got to sit through the 15 minute shit-storm that is a Kingfisher Airlines cleaning crew. It was astounding. As with all jobs in India, there were WAY more people than there needed to be, and as a result there were basically a lot of people making noise and getting nothing done. The plane was left just as dirty as it was found even though there were at least fifty people running around the plane throwing things in garbage sacks, vacuuming, and replenishing magazine racks. Even with the five or six guys who appeared to be foremen or managers of some sort screaming and yelling at the cleaning crew, there was still just as much crap left behind as was taken away.
But after a half hour we were back in the sky and an hour later we landed in Goa.

Goa is beautiful. There’s no denying that. It was taken over by the Portuguese as a shipping port for the spice and silk trade in the early 1500s. It remained a territory of Portugal all the way until 1961.
It was a 45 minute drive from the airport and it was a great drive. We drove for a few minutes across red rocky ground a mile or two from the coastline which we could see past a seemingly endless forest that ran by below the left of the road. Then we turned off and plunged into the forest ourselves, driving along a winding road lined with palm trees. Occasionally a small white Catholic altar or Portuguese style adobe house would pop up through the woods. It was a small road without much traffic. Aside from the small truck we were in, most of the traffic was scooters and motorcycles. From time to time we would pass through villages which usually consisted of a bar, a general store, and some type of eating establishment clumped together against the road with a few houses scattered about the woods behind them.

We stayed at a resort called The Leela. The Leela is a HUGE resort covering acres and acres of palm forests with a small golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools, a spa. And even a little casino. One side is bordered by a large river, and the other side by the ocean. We lounged in the sun by the pool, on the beach, and on our own deck. Our room looked out over a manmade lagoon packed with brightly colored flowers and more palm trees. As we opened the doors to the deck we were engulfed in sweet flower scents and surrounded by birdsong from all sorts of tropical birds. The most abundant bird was the Miniature Heron. They swooped around the resort all day either lounging around the golf course, or on the island in the lagoon.

Even surrounded by all of this, it was something manmade that ended up being the highlight of the trip for me. Crème Brulee French Toast. They had it at the breakfast buffet, and they may as well have had nothing else. Although I enjoyed all my other meals, I found myself giddy waiting for the next morning so I could get my hands on some more. I cleaned out the steam tray every morning, and the nice Canadian chef even gave me the recipe so I can make it myself.

The first morning we were there the chef was walking around the seating area of the restaurant when he saw me and stopped me to ask if I had been there before. I said no and he told me that I looked exactly like one of the Secret Servicemen who had been there with Bill Clinton, who had visited the resort a few months earlier. That’s definitely a new one for me. I assured him it wasn’t me, but I don’t think he believed me.

And OH MY GOD the fish! How I’ve made it this long without fish I’ll never know. I miss it and I love it. And there was plenty of it in Goa. I had snapper, salmon, calamari, fish curries, and prawns, I shit you not, the size of my fist. When I get back to the U.S. I’m going to go completely ape-shit on fish and probably give myself mercury poisoning.

Going through every aspect of the weekend would take far more than I feel like writing, but all the highlights seem to be of things that, even though we were in India, struck me as being surprisingly non-Indian:

People in shorts.
Very clean facilities.
Easygoing locals.
Women in bikinis.
People who stared, but only after saying “hello” first and smiling.
Beef (Good beef at that).
Peace and quiet.
Clean Air.

We were sad to leave.

We ate one night at The Riverside Restaurant. It has a deck which was set right on the bank of the river I mentioned earlier. The deck was, of course leaning slightly towards the water, but I put this out of my mind. I ate salmon and fettuccini as we watched the fishing boats coming back up the river after being at sea all day. On the bank opposite of the restaurant most of the boats were docking and unloading. The river was wide enough that we couldn’t see exactly what they were unloading through the darkness. We could, however, hear the men yelling from the shore and listen to the music some of the boats had playing on their radios. Even though the restaurant was trying its best to be a bit on the fancy side, all the sounds of a working river dock combined with the sounds and smells of the surrounding forest made the whole thing seem pleasantly informal.

Goodbye, Saamra...

2006-02-28T03:28:00.000-08:00

This is our roommate Saamra. Her tour in India is done and she's leaving tomorrow. I'll miss her even though she kinda scares me sometimes.

She was fun to live with. I have a link to her BLOG on the right of this page. Make sure you check it out often, because after she leaves here, she's going to be in Thailand for 3 weeks rock climbing, getting her SCUBA certification, and partying. She should have some fun shit to post from that trip.

I'm back, baby!

2006-02-28T02:17:00.000-08:00

So, I’ve returned. Hyderabad is just as I left it: loud, dirty, and stinky.
I haven’t posted in quite some time. I guess I haven’t had the patience to sit down and recount the very busy last few months.

Heather and I celebrated Christmas, just the two of us, here in Hyderabad. We mostly just slept in and lay around all day. We were both too preoccupied by thoughts of our impending trip home.

Halfway through January, we boarded a plane and headed for the U.S. After a 12 hour layover in Singapore, which sucked, we were back on a 13 hour flight home. It takes longer from the U.S. to India, because you are flying into the jet stream.

Once back in S.F. we had a day to collect ourselves and we were back at SFO headed for Heather’s family in Indiana. The morning we were heading to the airport we awoke to one of the biggest rainstorms to hit the Bay Area in decades. At least that’s what the news was calling it. It just seemed like a slightly heavy rain to us. But our Shuttle driver was acting like God himself might fall from the sky at any moment. He drove the entire way to the airport at around 30 miles an hour leaning forward in his seat as though he couldn’t see the road, and pulled off towards the shoulder every time a car approached him from behind. He’d shake his head and say “This guy’s crazy! Look how fast he’s going in this weather.”
I wanted to hit him over the head and scream, “It’s just rain, you pussy!” But I felt this would not get us to the airport any faster, so I just sat back and watched the cars zip past us like we were standing still. At one point a bus passed us and it whipped up some turbulent air and mist from the road. I thought our driver was going to shit himself. He came almost to a complete stop and muttered something like, “Holy shit. That was close.”
But it wasn’t.

Our flight to Indiana was uneventful and Heather’s sister Heidi came to drive us from the airport. It was a nice relaxing drive back to her mom’s house from there, and the next day we got to meet Heidi's son Simon for the first time. He was born a few months after we got to India.
He’s an amazingly well behaved kid who seems perfectly happy to do anything at all, as long as you don’t try and make him sleep. For the entire 2 weeks we were there, he slept for a maximum of 3 hours at a time, day or night and cried ‘bloody-murder’ if you tried to lay him down.
Both Heather and I got colds from all the sleepless traveling, but once we were feeling better we had a good time.

Back in San Francisco we got to see my parents and all our friends. That was nice, but it made coming back to Hyderabad that much harder. Heather had a sales conference the first week we were back and then she had to fly back to India without me. Then there was a week of debauchery with the fellas. Then I had to come back to India.

After flying to L.A. where I was to make a connection to Singapore, I found out I left my ticket back in San Francisco. I thought this would be no problem, but boy was I wrong. Apparently I had been issued a paper ticket. It never occurred to me that this might be the case, since I don’t even think I’ve heard the term “paper ticket” since I was a wee lad. So forgetting ones paper ticket means one must either go find it, or one must buy another $1300 ticket to India.

Balls!

So I spent the night in L.A. at a hotel, got REALLY hammered with Jesse Kane, and then flew BACK to San Francisco the next day, got my ticket, slept for a few hours, and got on ANOTHER plane to L.A. the morning after that. Then I had to sit around LAX for 12 hours before my flight to Singapore. The Singapore airport is set up to handle passengers with long layovers. There’s tons of shopping, lots of restaurants, places to sleep, and even health spas. The International terminal at LAX is equipped with none of these things. A restaurant or two, a couple bars, and one crappy duty free shop. I was tired anyway so I just found a secluded corner and slept most of the time.

The flight back was not too bad and I got to see some good movies, and to my own surprise I even slept for a while. Then once in Singapore, I got a massage, got a cheap hotel room for a while, did some shopping and was back in Hyderabad the next day.

All in all we had a great time at home, of course, but I would have rather not gone, because it just reminded me of what we miss:
Friends
Clean air
Clean clothes
Clean water
(OK, anything clean)
Not getting stared at
Variety of food
Variety of People
Being able to walk down the street and buy a soda or some toilet paper or whatever
Public transportation
Paved roads
Non-scary hospitals…

The list goes on and on, but I’ll stop before I get depressed.

ew... I think I stepped in a pile of Mumbai.

2005-12-20T03:07:00.000-08:00

So it's been a while since I posted. So I figured now would be a good time to go back and revisit a trip we took within India a few months ago. I'm not sure why I didn't post about it at the time. Probably because I was thouroughly unimpressed with Mumbai.

For those of you who don't know Mumbai is the city formerly known as Bombay. Bombay means "good bay" in Portuguese. They took the city to use as a trading port in the 1500s and it wasn't until the mid 1990s that it started being referred to by it's older name which comes from an ancient fisherman's goddess named Mumbadevi.

It is a HUGE metropolis, which is normally right up my alley. Towering skyscrapers, choking pollution, and rampant poverty are but a few of the charms you are greeted by as you step off of the plane. The roads are not as congested as the ones in Hyderabad, mainly because Hyderabad is a large city using roads that were meant for a small town. But also there are no rickshaws in Mumbai. As much as I enjoy riding in tiny auto-rickshaws with the wind in your face and a devil-may-care driver, they cause more traffic problems than they are worth, and I can't wait until Hyderabad outlaws them as they have in a few other large Indian cities. They aren't quite as small as a motorcycle, not as big as a car and slower than both. Their tiny little two-stroke engines spew gallons of smog into the air as they struggle up the tiniest hills packed with as many as 12 passengers.(This is NOT an exaggeration, they are designed to hold 3 people comfortably and four in a pinch). Here’s a picture of one. Try to imagine more than a few people in one of these.

So we traveled by taxi in Mumbai. Our hotel was unimpressive and expensive. Our first room WREEKED of cigarette smoke and the woman at the desk seemed utterly perplexed that we wanted a room that didn’t stink. The non-smoking rooms smelled of mold, but not smoke; you give a little, you take a little.
These inconveniences would have seemed much less inconvenient, if we weren’t being charged an arm and a leg to stay there. The place was supposed to be one of the better hotels in Mumbai.

Our room was up on the twenty something floor and looked out across the city and over the bay. This would have been a great view if it weren’t for the filth that hung so thick in the air you could hardly see two blocks away.

At one point we took a trip out to Elephanta Island, which is about a one hour ferry ride out into the Arabian Sea. The Arabian Sea is even dirtier than the air. The ferry chugged its way though huge slicks of oil, floating rafts of garbage, and flotsam of every kind. You would get hepatitis just looking at this muck for too long.
One of the locals on the ferry with us told me that the water was so dirty, “…because on the other side of this water is the Arabians.” I found this very puzzling because everyone around him was throwing their garbage over the sides of the ferry, and from what I could tell they were all Indian.

Elephanta Island has the oldest stone carvings in the area or some shit. I’m so sick of ruins. Apparently the Portuguese felt this way as well, because most of the carvings are missing appendages or noses from where the occupying Portuguese soldiers used them for target practice.
Even though tourism is a major source of income in Mumbai, the people still managed to gawk and stare at us everywhere we went with that ever pleasant slack-jawed scowl you’d think I’d be used to by now. And before you give me that but you’re so big, of course they stared-crap, let me tell you that when we were in Thailand we were hardly stared at, and I’m practically the size of a building there.

Anyway here is a picture of the Gateway of India, which was built to commemorate Indian independence from the British back in the 40s. As I passed underneath I couldn’t help but wonder if the British were as glad as I was to be leaving.

Betcha can't guess where Heather's going.

Here I am praying to whatever god will hear me that our ferry won't sink into the repulsive Arabain Sea.

There's a city somewhere through all that smog.

Thailand-The Land of The 7Eleven

2005-11-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

When planning our trip to Thailand there was one thing I never expected in my wildest dreams. There are more 7 Elevens there than I have ever seen ANYWHERE else in the world. When I got home I went to the 7 Eleven corporate website and found the they have 5,800 stores in the U.S. and Canada. In tiny ass Thailand there are 3,095! That’s a shitload of 7 Elevens.

We left Hyderabad on Saturday morning headed for Thailand. After a few hours in the Bangkok airport, we boarded a tiny little puddle-jumper bound for Koh Samui.
Koh Samui is a small island off the southern coast of Thailand. For years it was mainly a backpacker destination that was known for its raves on the beach and most people went there only for partying. But over the last decade there have been a lot of resorts built on the island that provide full services for those travelers who like to be pampered on their vacation and don’t want to hang out with a bunch of sweaty hippies all night. And since we fall somewhere in between the two, Heather and I found ourselves right at home.

I began sweating as soon as I stepped off the plane, and didn’t stop until about halfway through the flight back to Hyderabad eleven days later.

We stayed at a place called the New Star Resort. They call it a “resort” but it is really a series of only about 20 bungalows set right on the beach. It was absolutely gorgeous. From the front door of our room it was about ten steps to the water. The bungalows have air conditioning and some of them have TVs, but other than that there isn’t much in the way of luxuries. The hotel does have a little restaurant with the tables set up in the sand, and a swimming pool next to that. There weren’t a whole lot of people in our resort or on the island in general as it was the off season. The resort was fairly quiet until our second to last night there, when a big group of Canadians showed up and stayed drunk for the next two days blasting classic rock from their cabins. Until they got there I was complaining about having to see all these Europeans in their tiny little Speedos. But at least the Europeans had the decency to get a tan. If it weren’t for their dark colored hair, I would have thought the Canadians were all albinos. Now, I have nothing against someone not wanting to tan, I mean who wants skin cancer, but at least have the decency to cover you chubby white ass while I’m eating. As if just the sight of them wasn’t enough of a spectacle, they preferred to have every conversation at the top of their lungs. I would have been afraid people would think they were Americans, but every chance they got they reminded everyone (including each other) that they were not from the U.S.
“Boy, the weather’s not like this in Canada, eh?”
“You showed him, Joe! He’ll remember us Canadians for a while!”

The first day on the Island I thought it would be nice to take a walk to a 7Eleven I’d seen and get some snacks and supplies. I had been looking at a map of the place for so long I wanted to get out and really see all these things I’d been reading about. Unfortunately cartography isn’t one of my strong points and what I thought was going to be a nice leisurely walk to the store ended up being a four hour forced march under the tropical sun. It was during this walk that I noticed the abundance of scooter and motorcycle rental shops on the island. I guess I could have rented one, but I kept hearing my dad’s voice in my head telling me not to be a wimp and that the walk would do me good. Three hours into the walk as I sat down on a beach sweating profusely, and trying to get my bearings I think I heard his voice saying “What’s wrong with you, boy? It’s hot as hell out here, why didn’t you rent that scooter?”
That’s the problem with the voices in my head. They’re never very encouraging, and they always seem to tell me things I already know. But then I guess I’d have more to worry about if they told me things I didn’t already know.

When I finally got back to the bungalow, I collapsed on the bed and wondered if it would be stupid of me to stay indoors for the rest of the trip.

For the rest of our stay in Koh Samui Heather and I rented two scooters. Sure, the two of us could have easily taken one scooter, but they were really cheap, and I think we both knew it wouldn’t be much fun for Heather to ride around on the back of a vehicle that I was piloting. If you’re ever looking for a thrill, just hop on a two wheeler with me sometime. My complete and utter lack of control over the thing is matched only by my complete and utter disregard for the rules of the road and my own life.

The main strip is called Central Chaweng. Chaweng Beach is the main beach and the road that runs parallel to it is populated by almost every imaginable type of shop: Bars, restaurants, clothing stores, knife shops, dive shops, and the ever present massage parlors. Other than the fact that they refer to their places of business as massage parlors, the prostitutes make no attempt to hide what they’re selling.

This brings me to an interesting point. As far as prostitution goes, Koh Samui has a very unique scene. Because it’s so in the open, it seems to lose the usual seediness you would find associated with it in a place like the U.S. I found this to be true to a certain extent in Bangkok as well. But in Koh Samui there also seems to be this strange relationship between the girls and the men paying for them that is a sort of compromise somewhere between prostitution and romantic dating.
I can’t speak for what happens in the massage parlors themselves, but around town, day or night, you find a lot of older men, usually European or American, escorting around these bouncy little Thai girls about half their age and usually dressed in not much clothing. I had read about this before, but never like this. In Bangkok it’s not unusual for guys to go there on a business trip or whatever, and if they are staying for more than a few days, rather than go out and find themselves a new hooker every night, they just sort of rent a girlfriend for the duration. These girls will stay with them at their hotel and go out to dinner with them, as well as show them around town. (Sort of a prostitute/concierge.) In Koh Samui, however, since the guys aren’t there for any sort of work the girls are with the guys all day and night. The girls just look cute and pretend to be happy to be with the guy, and the guys buy them their meals, take them to clubs, and from what I could see, they love to take the girls shopping for clothes and jewelry and whatever else the girls giggled at. Again, I can’t speak for what went on behind closed doors, but in public anyway, the men were very, very polite to the girls. The politeness didn’t surprise me too much though, because I found all the Thai people I encountered to be extremely polite and there seemed to be no tolerance for impoliteness.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure most of the girls would rather not be prostitutes, and most of the guys would rather not be greasy old men with no social skills, but these arrangements, once you got used to seeing them everywhere, almost had a strange charm to them and in the end they were just another aspect of the everyday Thai life that I found fascinating.

Most of the shops in Central Chaweng, were selling knock offs of some kind or another. There is a good amount of knock off clothing available in India, but most of it is utter crap: Poorly made T-shirts with a backwards Nike logo or pants with Adidas or someother brand misspelled on the side. And while some of the things in Thailand weren’t of the highest quality, you never had to look far to find Louis Vutton or Nike or Burberry knock offs that were pretty damn good. As some of you know I have a bit of an obsession with shoes, but alas I searched far and wide and not a single store in Koh Samui of Bangkok has shoes in a size 14. If your feet are not freakishly large though, for about $25-$50 you can buy youself a pair of fake Nikes that are almost an exact reproduction of the ones that cost between $100 and $130.

They had recently opened a Muay Thai stadium on the Island, so our second night there we got to go to the fights. It was great. For a few more dollars than the regular seating we got to sit in the VIP section which had little tables and we sat and drank Singha beers and watched some great fights.

We had an absolutely great time in Koh Samui. It was relaxed, we ate GREAT food every night, and met cool people almost everywhere we went. I started noticing more and more westerners living and working there than I had expected. They all came from different parts of Europe or America, but all their stories started the same way: They came to Koh Samui for a two or three week holiday and never left. By coincidence, we met someone from San Francisco who’s two week vacation turned into ten years.
There is a restaurant called Betelnut in San Francisco that Heather and I love and when we saw that there was one in Koh Samui we made sure to eat there. It turned out that the owner used to be one of the head chefs at the one in S.F. We were the only people in the cozy little restaurant so he came out and talked with us for a while and then helped us with some stuff on the menu before disappearing into the kitchen to make us what ended up being the best meal we’ve had since leaving the States.

I also worked out at the first decent gym I’ve been to since leaving the U.S. It was a World Gym that reminded me of the old Muscle Beach gym I saw when I was a kid before they remodeled it. It was pretty cramped full of almost entirely freeweights that were all rusting from the salt air. But the big shop-front windows let in lots of light and they had everything you needed.

After our six days there we flew north to Bangkok for a couple of days. Bangkok is a HUGE city that feels thoroughly comfortable at any time of day or night. It’s smoggy and grimey and hot as shit, and I love it. As soon as I stepped out of the hotel I knew that two days wasn’t going to be enough. I called the airline that night, and although Heather had to leave as planned I stayed behind for four more days.

The hotel was a great find as well. When I had called the day before to make a reservation I was told the only thing they had open was a Suite. I thought that would be too expensive, but it was actually very reasonable. Le Residence hotel wasn’t the easiest place for our cab driver to find, but that was a good thing. It’s not on a main drag so it’s relatively quiet at night, and there aren’t a lot of rooms in the place so you don’t feel like you’re crammed into a box full of boxes like some of those big hotels. The front desk was manned by one of three people: A constantly stoned teenage kid who spoke absolutely no English, a constantly stoned kid who spoke pretty good English, and a borderline psychotic but extremely good natured middle aged woman whose English was great but sometimes when you were talking to her she’d sort of rub and scratch franticly over her whole body like something was crawling on her. When she laughed it was sort of a deranged cackle as though the laugh had been bottled up inside her and was now flying free into the world. And she laughed a lot. Mental deficiencies and drug habits aside, the three of them seemed to keep the place running quite smoothly, and I felt quite safe knowing they were on watch downstairs.

The suite was basically a one bedroom apartment. It was very clean and had a shower that blasted out steaming hot water. Heather was absolutely delighted with the shower, and spent almost the entire first morning in it. Hot water for more than a minute or two is hard to come by here in Hyderabad.

Near where we were staying was a huge night market surrounded by massage parlours and strip clubs. You could get just about anything other than fresh fruit here. It was almost overwhelming. It was packed and sweaty, but it was fun. As well as all the usual knock off Nikes and such, the have an absurd amount of pirated DVDs, CDs, and video games. Each one costs the equivalent of $2.00. But the more you buy the more they are willing to discount things. I saw a few people who were buying hundreds at a time.

We went to a little whole in the wall restaurant that we read about and had great fusion food. The next day Heather went to an actual massage parlor near our hotel. In addition to the brothels, Bangkok has plenty of real massage parlor/salons. Heather got a two hour long facial-full body massage thing while I wandered around town some more, and then we went and had more great Thai food.

Heather left the next morning, and I moved into a single room. The single room was tiny with a little bed and tiny TV and fridge. Since it was just me I found it quite comfortable. I spent the next few days exploring as much of Bangkok as I could. I got to go to Lumpinee stadium one night which is the Mecca of kickboxing. I went to a huge shopping district called Khao San and found out just how cheap and efficient and clean the Skytrain is. (It’s sort of like the MUNI light rail system back home, only cleaner.)

On Sunday I went to the Chatuchak weekend market. Words do not exist in the English language to describe the sheer size and density of this market. When I got on the skytrain I was worried I wouldn’t know which direction to go to find the market when I got off. As we approached the station I looked out the window and realized this would not be a problem. The market began passing under the tracks a good thirty seconds before we even pulled in to the station. Then when I got off I looked over the edge of the platform, and saw the market was everywhere. It was under the station and just sprawled out in every direction. It was impressive, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. This picture is from when I first came in one of the gates, and thought, “Wow, there are a lot of shops here.” Then I turned into one of the shops, and realized that they weren’t shops at all, but rather entrances to long, long narrow little hallways that were absolutely crammed from floor to ceiling with anything and everything you could think of. There was a dried food section, an army surplus section, a cooked food section, a furniture section, a section for flowers, a section for fake flowers, a section for pets, a section for art, handicrafts, shoes, musical instruments, glassware, flatware, trinkets, linens, used clothes, new clothes, the list just kept going. Every time I’d turn a corner I’d think “Holy shit. I would not have thought of that.” It was just endless. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good picture of it because it was too cramped and crowded. Just suffice it to say that the picture you see here is one of the least crowded areas of the place.
After about three hours of wandering, I noticed a very strange change in the weather. It was unsettling and I couldn’t quite figure out why until I turned one corner, popped out into the open, and saw a huge funnel cloud descending onto the city just a few miles away. No one else seemed bothered by it and everyone just scurried about their business. Two Australian girls were watching it nearby and one asked the other if they should be worried. Her friend said “Well no one else seems too worried about it.” And she was right, so I just went back in to the market and found a place to eat between the pet section and the sculptures section. Then the sky opened up and it poured rain for about thirty minutes, which was nice because I just sat back and enjoyed my food at an outside table under an awning and watched the monsoon try and consume the city. By the time the rain stopped, the funnel cloud was gone, and I went back to sifting through the market.
By the time night fell I had probably seen less than half of the place, but I was exhausted so I headed back to the skytrain and went home.

In Bangkok I got to work out at a big gym that was basically a 24 Hour Fitness type of chain-gym. It was clean and they had tons of equipment and classrooms spread over 4 floors of space. It was really quite nice. I apparently missed the signs my third day there because I was completely caught off guard by what I have now come to refer to as “Gay Day”. I walked into the gym to find it absolutely packed. I didn’t really think too much of it until about halfway through my workout I realized that I was the only blatently heterosexual man in the place, and I was the only person training alone. In Bangkok it’s not uncommon to see middle aged European men escorting around little Thai boys just like the girlfriends for hire in Koh Samui. And this day in the gym they were all working out together. Much like the meat-market gyms on Market near Castro, there seemed to be more socializing than actual working out. But no one got in my way while I was lifting so I didn’t really care how they spent their gym time.

All in all I found Thailand to be the single best vacation I’ve ever been on and can’t wait to go back. Koh Samui is ridiculously relaxing, and Bangkok is too in its own sort of hectic way. The one thing that I will remember most is how genuinely friendly the people there are. There is a real sense of casual ease there that I think anyone would get along with. I miss it already.

A family fishing in the ocean.

What the hell is Schmuck and why do fairies dream of it?These are, I shit you not, knock off pumas made out of real python!Aaaah... Massage parlors and 7 Eleven.
I always wondered where the mooks shopped.Ronald McDonald giving the traditional Thai greeting.
Me and a baby elephant in downtown Bangkok.

Elihue Hill

2005-10-15T21:29:00.000-07:00

Last week my grandfather, Elihue Hill passed away. He was hospitalized for two months, but before that was in decent health for a man his age. It’s very hard to be stuck out here at times like these. I didn’t even know he was in the hospital and while everyone else back home had two months to adjust, the news came very suddenly to me.
On the brighter side, my grandpa was one of those men about which you can say quite honestly and without fear of sounding cliché ‘He lived a full life.’
He grew up a country boy in Arkansas. When the second world war broke out he joined the navy. But he once told me the navy was boring, when his tour was up he went and joined the marines, and with them he saw combat. He made it home and moved to San Francisco where he met grandma.
I will miss his soft southern drawl. I will miss his never ending optimism. I will miss the way he acted like a wise grandfather one minute, and the next he was giggling like a mischievous teenager.
My cousin Brian passed away almost two years ago and while I know t isn’t right to say a grandparent played favorites, I think all my cousins and I know that Brian and Grandpa shared a very special bond. When Brian passed, a huge part of Grandpa went with him. I like to think they are together now, laughing the way only the two of them could make each other laugh.

Fuckin' Sri Fuckin' Lanka!!!

2005-10-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

As you all know from one of my previous posts, Sri Lanka ROCKS!
We went back there last weekend and did nothing but drink booze, swim in the Indian ocean, drink booze, eat kickass seafood, and drink booze. OK so more accurately I should say that Heather swam in the Indian Ocean, and I ate seafood and drank. Did I mention the swim-up bar? I am puting one into our apartment when we get back to San Francisco. I suppose some of you would argue that puting a cooler of Coors Light Tall Boys next to the bath tub is not really a swim up bar. To you naysayers I say don't knock it 'till you've tried it.

Brian kept asking the bartender for more ice in his pina coladas. This makes a pina colada a lesser drink in my opinion. But then he asked the bartender to throw in a banana. Now, a banana in a pina colada makes it just plain old better. I had more than a few.

As we were driving in to the hotel our driver Hami told us to watch out for the rickshaw drivers who were hustlers. He then gave us a cryptic warning that even after I deciphered it I had trouble taking seriously. "Don't trust the Beach Boys," he said. "They are poisonous like the sea-snake."
I laughed, but I had no idea what he would have against the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson may be a little strange, but I would never think of him as dangerous. And besides, what the hell were the Beach Boys doing in Sri Lanka? I thought they broke up decades ago. Were they now hiring themselves out a s hitmen? I imagined some poor schmuck who owed the wrong people money being beaten with a surfboard as "California Girls" blared over a juke box.
Later that day as we shuffled down to the beach in our flip flops, keeping a wary ear out for "Good Vibrations" or "Cocomo", one of the hotel staff told us to be sure to talk to the Beach Boys if we wanted to rent a surfboard. He pointed down towards a group of slackers, most of whom were napping in the snad under a cluster of palms. Propped against the trees were a motley assortment of surfboards and boogie boards.
I was releived not only that I wouldn't have to watch my back for Brian Wilson, but that even if these guys had intended us harm, they had long ago smoked enough weed to render them harmless. I was much more relaxed after that was sorted out.

I never realized how much I missed the ocean. You can eat pretty much anything moving in it, it lulls you to sleep at night, and it's one of those things you can just sit in front of without feeling unproductive. If you were to walk up to a bank, take your shoes off, sit down and just watch it, people might find you more than just a little strange, but more importantly you would just feel like you were wasting your time. It's the same with a tree or a parked car. After about five seconds of staring at any of these things, you need to move on. But with the ocean, you could just sit there all day, doing nothing and no one would think you're crazy, and you can say to yourself afterwards, "Now that was time well spent."
I defy you to say that to yourself after staring at a parked Honda Civic for a half an hour.

The sunsets were gorgeous, the water was warm, and those Sri Lankans are some friendly sonsabitches. We swam in the ocean for hours on end and on Saturday and Sunday we stayed out in the surf until it got dark. It was great watching the light fade around us and pretty soon the night blended with the ocean and you could just feel the waves toss you around as you swam to shore guided only by the lights of the hotel behind the beach.

It was a great trip.

Comments

2005-09-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

So I didn't realize that Blogger has a word verification option for people leaving comments. So if I set it up correctly you should now be able to leave comments without joining the blog.

This is a picture from our trip to Sri Lanka a while ago. I tried to load it when I posted all the others, but for some reason it wouldn't let me until now.

More pictures from Hampi

2005-09-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

As you can see here, Sara is fucking TINY! We tried to pass her off as somone's kid so we could get her into the monuments at half price.

Miniature train bunk... thou art mine ENEMY!!!

This was breakfast the morning after a few of these poor bastards decided to get shitfaced on Indian malt liquor after we'd eaten the very questionable hotel restaurant food. Dumb sonsabitches. None of us felt all that great, but the drinkers were in a bad way, as you can clearly see.

Hampi

2005-09-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went to Hampi (pronounced either ‘hawmpy’ or ‘humpy’ depending on who you talk to, so my guess is the true pronunciation is somewhere in between the two). Heather and I and 5 others boarded the South Central Railway at 9 pm Friday night and headed south. Trying to estimate traveling time in India by looking at the distance on a map can be quite deceptive. The distance between Hyderabad and Hampi is around 300 miles. That’s less than the distance between S.F. and L.A. To cover these 300 miles it is a 12 hour train ride. They don’t have an interstate highway system like we do in the States so driving a long distance takes a ridiculously long time. And the railways aren’t much different. Although India has a very extensive system of railroads that can get you just about anywhere in the country, they have, as with most things in India, gone for quantity, not quality. So this extensive railway system is serviced mostly by rusty dilapidated trains, pulled by clunky, old, first-generation diesel engines along rusty dilapidated tracks. Because everything is so old and questionably maintained, the trains cannot travel faster than 30 or 40 miles an hour, even in wide open flatlands.

Our tickets were ‘sleeper class’ which was the best class you could get on this line. I had never ridden in a sleeper car anywhere. I’ve always seen them in the movies and imagined myself strolling down the carpeted aisle of a gently rolling train past well dressed conductors to my semi private berth where I would drift off to sleep while watching the water colored sunset swirl past the window outside, like in Strangers on a Train or Some Like it Hot.

Instead I found myself desperately trying to find someone to help us figure out the dewey decimal system berth numbers, shimmying sideways down a metal-floored rusty tin can as it bucked unpredictably throwing me randomly into the creaky, cramped bunks. It was more like Das Boot or The Enemy Below. On the up-side, it only took about 5 or 6 hours for my olfactory senses to acclimate to the pungent smell of formaldehyde which seems to be the main ingredient in all industrial cleaning products in India.

There have been a lot of studies done in the last few years about the effects of too many antibacterials being used in the U.S. They say all these soaps and dishwashing liquids are creating resistant strains of bacteria and viruses. The sponsors of these studies will be glad to know that rather than kill the germs here, the Indians have decided to go in completely the other direction and preserve them using formaldehyde on every floor, countertop, and fold-out train bed.

After convincing one of the slack-jawed conductors to stop staring at us and lead us to our beds, we stowed our luggage, stuffed ourselves into our tiny beds and let the soothing sounds of other passengers gaseous expulsions lull us to sleep.

I may have slept for a total of 5 hours that night. But poor Heather slept a total of about 2 hours. Her bunk was not only cramped, but since it was made by lowering the backs of two seats that were facing each other, it had a wonderful ridge that ran straight across the middle. No matter how she tossed and turned it was either stabbing her in the pelvis or the spine. I’m guessing she got more sleep when it was in her pelvis.

Just before dawn I was awakened by the feeling of sweat dripping down my face. The car we were in was an A/C car, but it is turned off whenever the train is standing still or needs more power to climb a hill. As I awoke I wasn’t sure how long we’d been standing still, but it must have been a long time because it was absolutely sweltering. After a few more minutes at a stand still and a few more degrees rise in temperature, we began to slowly creep forward. The A/C still didn’t come on. The sun was beginning to rise now and the rapidly rising temperature was accompanied by the sounds of the train’s metal walls heating up and expanding. The train belched and groaned, I sweated, and we crawled through the morning corn fields for about an hour more before I decided to just give it up and get out of bed.

The sun was well into the sky but I couldn’t tell it inside the train because the windows were either chipped, filthy, or both. I made my way down the compartment to the more open area between us and the next car. There was an open door there and I could watch the countryside roll by as I stood in the fresh air. This was by far the best part of the ride. The first thing I saw was the fluorescent beetle you see in this picture. Then, looking out, I watched corn fields, rice patties, endless herds of goats, water buffalo, and one tiny village after another. At one point I saw what looked to be a nuclear power plant being built out in the middle of nowhere. I’m glad I won’t be around when they try to fire that thing up for the first time.

A few hours later we pulled into our station, took some rickshaws to the hotel, dropped off our bags, and headed out to the ruins.

I learned three things during this trip I’d like to share with you:
1. Indian train beds are very small.
2. I don’t really care for touring ruins.
3. Monkeys are even cooler in person than they are on TV.

Hampi is a series of cities built sometime in the early 1500s and spread out over nine square miles. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was glad we went and we got some great pictures of some very beautiful things, but I found myself very bored after the first 30 minutes. I would have been more interested in how these people danced or what their music sounded like. As for architecture, a few of their temples were still standing, but everything else was made out of wood, and was burned to the ground back when the Moors invaded.

Our tour guide, whose name I have forgotten, was a short, round man, with barely intelligible English, and a bad attitude. Looking back to when Heather and I went to Golconda Fort the tour guides were very pushy and became indignant when we finally convinced them we didn’t want a guide. This guy was no different. At our first stop, the giant stone Ganesh, he yelled at a group of school kids who were part of another tour group because they were being too loud. This was the last time he would yell at anyone other than us.
“Please listen! This is very important information I am trying to tell you, here!”

“You will now have five minutes to take pictures!” he would bark after finishing his spiel at each new temple or monument. Some of us would take some pictures and mill around while others would wander off into the surrounding ruins and explore.
As people finally returned to the truck he’d say “You must not take so long. We have no time for this!”

After an hour or two of this I tried to explain to him that we were not in a hurry. “But you will not see everything. Some areas will close at six o’clock.” I tried again to explain that we didn’t care and however far we got by six was fine with us. “No! It is all very important. You must see it all!”
There was no dissuading him, but we did begin to laugh at him when he got irritated with us, so it became a little more fun.

The Hampi Bazaar was originally a huge open market where jewels and precious metals were sold. I’m assuming there were other things sold there as well, but according to our guide it was only “Diamonds and golds”
He also told us that if we looked we would notice that there were no doors or windows on the old stone stalls of the bazaar “Because in those days, no one was robberies.” He told us this several times throughout the day. I guess it was his passive aggressive way of telling us dishonesty was a western import.

Today part of the Hampi Bazaar is again a working marketplace. It’s packed with tiny shops and booths where you can buy just about anything. Ironically the two things I didn’t see in any shops were diamonds or gold. Much to our guide’s chagrin, we spent quite some time at the bazaar, buying knick knacks, and handicrafts. As with everywhere you go here there were a shitload of kids begging for money or trying to sell you postcards and such. Some of them spoke English pretty well and a few of the members of our group spent some time talking with them and handed out our apples and oranges to them. I knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out I was good for climbing on. Sure enough, one of them coaxed Josh into picking her up and then they all wanted see how many of them I could hold on one arm. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not all that fond of kids to begin with so all this isn’t as fun as it might sound to you.
Once the barriers had been broken by the kids a large group of elderly men began to gather around us. Rather than the usual gawking stare, these guys seemed to be pointing at us and discussing something very serious. Then one of them asked me, “What is you weight?” Luckily this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked that here, so I figured out my weight in kilos a long time ago. If I told them in pounds it wouldn’t make any sense to them.
“145 kilograms.” I told them, and waited for a response or comment. But one never came. A few of them nodded and a few of them turned to each other and began talking and gesturing urgently again, but they all just kept staring.
I found the question a little upsetting not because I thought it was a rude question, but because my answer only seemed to spur more discussions and arguments. There seemed to be no point to the question. I wasn’t sure if they planned on making me to wrestle a Bengal Tiger or gigantic monkey. Maybe one of them had an enormous daughter he was trying to marry off. Either way I saw myself in prison or a hospital, so I became a little anxious.
Then one of the men asked me, “What is your age?”
Now it looked like I was definitely being sized up as a potential groom. I wanted to leave. We had to wait for some more of our group to finish buying their hippie wall hangings or hookas or whatever so I just had to sit there with the old guys staring at me and their children climbing on me. No great cage match was announced and no weddings proposed we just stared at one another for a few more minutes until our group was ready and we all headed for the truck.

Our guide hurried us through the rest of the major sites and we got some great pictures at the last stop. The sun was just setting and as you can see in the pictures the light through the columns and on the carvings was amazing. Heather has a great Eye for that sort of thing so most of these shots are hers.

That night we had a decent dinner at the hotel restaurant, a decent nights sleep, and the next day we went back to the ruins, this time without a guide, so we could wander around at our leisure. We scrambled on rocks and shopped at the bazaar some more. We had a great day.

At one of our stops I got to spend some time watching a troop of monkeys. There were about twenty or so, and I found them fascinating. They were eating some type of seeds or fruits up on a rock and getting very frustrated that they couldn’t keep the crows away. I’ve never seen monkeys up close before, but they kick ass just as much as I thought they would. I’m going to see about smuggling one home in my baggage.

As evening approached we went to a restaurant called The Mango Tree. It was just that. A tiny restaurant situated under a HUGE mango tree which sits high above a big brown river. There are two tables inside. All the seating is outside on the ground above the riverbank. It was beautiful. To get to the restaurant you have to walk for about 3 or 4 minutes down a thin winding dirt path which crosses a field and then passes through a grove of banana trees. If there was one reason to go back to Hampi I’d say it was this restaurant. The food wasn’t spectacular, but it didn’t need to be. (Although Sara thought the veg. noodles were the best thing she’s had in India.) About halfway through our meal the wind started to blow HARD. Everyone scrambled inside and got in just as the rain started. It dumped down out of the sky until a few minutes before we were ready to leave. We made it out of the banana grove and back to the hotel with no problems, and had a few hours to kill before our train left.

We killed those few hours rather brutally by watching Rocky III. It’s been a long time since I last watched that film, and I can tell you the one thing missed when I watched it as a kid was the blatant homosexual relationship between Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers. If you don’t own a copy, and I’m guessing you don’t, go rent it right this minute. It is worth the $3 Blockbuster charges to see two grown men frolic shirtless in the surf, and get oiled up wearing brightly colored codpieces. For Christ’s sake, there’s one scene where Stallone is wearing short-shorts, a headband, and a cutoff tank top, a la Jamie Lee Curtis in Perfect Ten.

The train ride back was just as nightmarish as the one there, but this time I slept about 2 hours because some fat slob in the bunk across from mine was snoring like something was wrong with him. Then every 2 hours or so he’d get up and turn on the overhead light so he could find his sandals and go to the bathroom. He was your basic run of the mill inconsiderate, fat fuck.
But a mere 12 hours later we were back in Hyderabad. All in all a good weekend.

So many advertisers, so few bullets...

2005-09-12T00:57:00.000-07:00

Some of you have been kind enough to post your comments from time to time about my blog updates and I always enjoy reading them. But recently I have started getting spam posted as comments, so I have decided to require that only members of my blog can post messages. Please take a minute or two to fill out the info and join my blog because i really do enjoy reading what my friends have to say about what I post.

Thanks

Princess Sparkles' Birthday

2005-09-11T04:26:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was Sara’s birthday, and it was a LONG day. Everyone here calls Sara "Sparkles" because of her penchant for wearing glittery makeup. We had a scavenger hunt, using cameras to capture pictures of whatever items each team could find from a list of 69 actions and items. The items were anything from absurd to dangerous, and we had only two and a half hours to get it all done.
We broke into three teams donned our uniforms, and began scouring the city and countryside with our lists.
At the end of the day we all met at a Chinese restaurant had too much food and drink, then went home and put everyone’s pictures up on a projector. The one sober woman amongst us was the judge, and we pored over our photos, tallying points for stuff from the list we’d managed to take pictures of. My team won by one point, but I have to say if anyone deserved to win it was Sara and I’ll tell you why: One of the items on the list was “Kiss a water buffalo”. Everyone else decided after taking one look at this that they would just skip that one. Not Sara. We now actually have a photograph of her kissing a water buffalo on the ass. ‘Disgusting’ some might say. I say ‘Devoted’.
The thing that most helped us win was the fact that we got one point for each beer we consumed during the day, and since we had a driver shuttling us around my two teammates and I were able to drink beer in the car all afternoon. I have no idea if that is illegal like it is back home, but most laws are very loosely enforced here anyway.
The one picture of Brian holding money is taken inside what has become one of my favorite stores here:The fireworks store. As you can see in the background of the photo, it's wall to wall poorly made explosives in there. IT KICKS ASS!! We bought a bunch of mortars that only professionals would be able to get in the U.S. and a string of 10,000 firecrackers. No misprint here. Ten fucking thousand firecrackers! They were supposed to go off in a long string, but they kept falling off as i tried to unroll it so we just lit it in a big pile. Imagine ten thousand firecrackers all going off within about 10 or 15 seconds. It was intense. It gave off heat like a bonfire. A huge, LOUD bonfire.
As with most stories, there is more than one moral to be learned here:
1.Don't kiss waterbuffalo(unless someone dares you to, you pansy)
2.Fireworks ROCK!!!

Katrina

2005-09-07T00:28:00.000-07:00

Kanye West and Keith Olbermann are on the same page. West may not be all that well spoken here, but his anger and despair are blatantly apparent. The more well spoken Olbermann makes the point much more eloquently, but Kanye West’s “Bush doesn’t like black people” sums up what everyone is thinking, but not even Keith Olbermann has the balls to come out and say.

http://www.dharmaboost.com/kanye-west-slams-bush-nbc-red-cross-fundraiser.html

http://media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Controversy_over_New_Orleans_photos_captions

Ummmm... Yeah...

2005-09-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

This past saturday one of the apartments here tried to have a mellow wine and cheese party. Needless to say it turned from bad to worse as we went through the wine. Once the wine was gone we went through a bottle of that coconut booze I mentioned before.
The psycho in the first picture is Josh and as you can see he having a punishingly good time. You can't see it in this shot but he has a fifth of coconut booze shoved in his back pocket. He drank more of it than anyone else at the party and drank enough that he should probably be dead.
I have no memory of which song everyone is singing here, but someone said they think it was Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me". It's usualy a good sign that a party is headed south when Def Leppard comes on.

Rock N Fuckin' Roll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please go to Sri Lanka!!!!

2005-08-29T23:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went to Sri Lanka. This place is GORGEOUS! beutiful coconut-palm groves, long stretches of jungle lined beaches, the warm Indian Ocean, and some of the friendliest locals your likely to meet anywhere.
For those of you who don't know (I didn't), Sri Lanka is a teardrop shaped island off the southern tip of India. It made big headlines when it was ,unfortunately, one of the most heavily devestated countries in last years tsunami. It's hard to believe that was just 7 months ago, but it was and the island is recovering slowly but surely, which brings me to my first point...
I strongly urge ANY of you reading this to go there if you can find the means. Sri Lanka is a country that relies very heavily on tourism and after the tsunami, people have been slow to return there and the local economy is hurting. It has everything you could ask for in a tropical resort, but it's very very cheap. Imagine going to Hawaii and not having to worry about getting ripped off at every store you go to. If you can scrounge up the airfare, or get a good deal online, I promise you will not regret it.
We were only in town for 3 nights so we didn't get to see all there is to see. We decided to just take it easy this trip and lie around on the beach or at the pool, but we plan on going back the first chance we get, and then we'll do some more travelling around the country. There are national parks, elephant sactuaries, places for scuba diving, LOTS of shopping, river safaris, and tons of great food. And in the middle of the Island is a place called Kandy where within close proximity of each other are many temple ruins and natural wonders. It's not all that big of an island, but it takes a long time to get around because the roads are barely big enough for 2 way traffic so we couldn't see all of this stuff in just 3 nights, but some of our friends went and it sounds just spectacular.
I ate more seafood this weekend than I have in months. Curried, grilled, steamed, you name it. If it swims, the Sri Lankans know how to cook it. And beef! Heather has missed beef somethin' awful. Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhists so unlike the Hindus here in India, they can eat beef. I ate a little, but I think Heather had enough for the both of us.
The water was warm and the surf was not too dangerous so we swam in the ocen for hours our first day. Then we were too sunburned the next day so we swam at night.
I brought back 3 bottles of the local booze called Arrack. It's made from coconuts. I love coconuts! Candy, suntan lotion, curry, and now booze! Is there anything the coconut can't do?
I got to ride on an elephant as you can see from the pictures. He was pretty small so I thought he was a baby, but the guy said he was 23 years old. I forgot his name, but I fed him some pinaples ad went for a short ride. I would have loved to go longer, but there was no saddle. For anyone who has never riden an elephant bareback, it HURTS. There are more comfortable places to sit than along an elephant's spine. But as our friend Matt pointed out, the elephant probably didn't like it much either. One picture shows the elephant trying to help a guy get his truck out of the sand, the keeper made the elephant push a couple of times but then stopped him. I couldn't understand what was said but I think the truck was just stuck too far into the sand and the guy didn't want the elephant to hurt himself.
I loved being at the ocean again, but I think the thing I loved most about Sri Lanka, was that people don't stare at you like slack- jawed idiots the way they do here. People in Hyderabad stare at you with their mouth open and a scowl on their face and nothing you can do will discourage them. We've tried waving, smiling at them, saying hello, and even scowling back. The yokels here just keep staring. But in Sri Lanka if someone's staring, you just give them a smile and they smile right back.
Anyway, we were very sorry to have to leave to come back to Hyderabad, but we will most definitely be going back.

Golconda Fort

2005-08-14T03:28:00.000-07:00

Today we went to Golconda Fort. It is about 30 minutes from Hyderabad. "Golla" means "shepherd" and "Konda" means "hill". The guide book says "There is no recorded history of Golconda previous to 1364A.D." so I guess they think it's older than that, but no one wrote about it until 1634. As with most histories and descriptions here, there are a great many vagueries involved. It was capital of something (more vaguery) begining in 1512A.D. But it doesn't seem like it was much good because the first three rulers who used it as there home met with bad endings. One of them was "put to death while he was engaged in prayer in assembly mosque of Golconda Fort."
The fort is HUGE. it's easily one or two miles across in either direction, and it rises high onto the tallest hill in the area. As you can see from the pictures the area is pretty flat so from the top of the fort you can see way off into the grey horizon.
We had our pictures taken a lot as we hiked up the endless stairs. Lots of people approached us and asked if they could get a picture with us. Heather managed to get a shot of a couple of them. That is one mighty orange shirt that happy bastard is wearing.
That reminds me, men here hold hands with each other MUCH more openly than they do back home. Homosexuality is very closeted here, but straight men just walk down the street holding hands. But they get VERY uncomfortable when they see a man holding hads with a woman. Some of the crazy younger guy-girl couples will hold hands or wlk close together, but for the most part etiquette calls for the man to walk a step or two in front and the woman better keep up because there is no such thing as holding a door for her. I'm trying to get Heather to walk behind me, but she won't do it for some reason.

Dogs

2005-07-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

There are stray dogs EVERYWHERE here. They seem to get along fine just living on garbage and rodents. Here in India they don't say "vegetarian" or "meat" when referring to dishes or even people. They say "Veg" or "Non Veg". Our friend Lauren has classified the dogs here into two categories: Veg and Non Veg. The Veg dogs are just your run of the mill cute stray dogs. They trot from road to road looking for scraps and barking at the water buffalo. The Non Veg dogs, on the other hand are a bit more sketchy. They don't trot but either run or slink. Some even swerve from side to side as the rabies or whatever takes hold. They bark at anything that moves, they don't have much hair and some even foam at the mouth. They are altogether bad news.
This dog here seems to be Veg. I wouldn't pet him, but he didn't seem too diseased. He was digging for scraps until he saw that we had ice cream.

Field Trip To See Local Hospital

2005-07-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm astounded by the conditions of this hospital. It is the biggest and the best in the city (actually in the entire state) and the conditions are less than desirable. Heather's boss's wife was going there to assess their needs and see if she could find them some corporate sponsors and she asked if I'd like to go. It is a state-run facility and there just isn't much money to be had. But they definitely make do with what they have.
The doctors were amazing. Because it is a government hospital treatment is given free of charge to whoever shows up. The doctors are very proud that they provide such excellent care in spite of the staggering workload. They specialize in birthin' babies and all things considered, they do a damn good job. Safe sex is not really taught or practiced like in the U.S. so there are a LOT of babies and a LOT of STDs. One of the things the doctors are most proud of is that they give mandatory AIDS tests to all expectant mothers being admitted. This allows them to take steps immediately if the results are positive to help lessen the chances of transmission from mother to child.
The building itself reminded me of a rundown public school. Faded teal and grey interior and rain washed and chipping paint on the outside. It wasn't clean in the sense that we think of "clean" in the U.S. Most of the floors were just unpainted concrete and every door in the place seemed to be wide open which invited in a multitude of flying insects. Mostly flies. Each ward we saw was packed with old rusty cots barely supporting a saggy flattened old mattress which was covered in soiled linens.
We saw one set of twins, born the day before, that had presented the doctors with a bit of a challenge. They were "interlocking" twins which means the were hooked onto eachother by the chin. The first twin was born breached and the second was born head first, but they were in the womb facing eachother in a way so one chin was caught under the others chin. Not like conjoined twins, but rather just sort of fitted together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In a well equipped hospital this wouldn't be a problem because the doctors would have seen this on a sonogram. But here the doctors didn't know until the first twin was stuck on his way out. I didn't hear the details of how the birth was finished successfully, but both of the babies were sleeping peacefully when we saw them and the doctor said the one that had the harder time of it had started feeding that morning which is a very good sign.
Throughout the day I was struck by how the doctors never ever complained about their conditions. We practically had to drag it out of them that their autoclave was being held together with putty. All things considered it was a good day. I didn't have the heart to take a lot of photos in the wards. One thing I found interesting that I did snap a couple shots of was the patients sitting outside. The hospital has a beautiful garden in its center and the doctors said many of the patients were used to living outdoors so they hated being in the beds. So they would just sit or lie around in the garden under trees or out on the grass. The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the hospitals in America might want to think about something like that. I know I'd rather convalesce under a tree than in a white room that stinks of lysol.

2005-07-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you send a box to India. This is no accident... I think you'd have to try hard to get a full box this flat.
And this was sent FedEx 2 day. Can you imagine what they would have done to it if they'd had it for more than 48 hours?

2005-07-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is an area of town called Secret Lake. It's beautiful, but the water seems to be mostly sewage and when it's hot (which is every day) the water buffalo spend all day wallowing in the shallows. So it don't smell too great. There is a lot of construction around the lake because it is in High Tech City which is sort of a suburb of Hyderabad. Google and Microsoft and all the other IT companies have their offices in High Tech City. It's actually not as much a suburb anymore as it is a neighborhood in Hyderabad. I've been told that over the past five years the city has grown so much that it has swallowed up all the surrounding areas that used to be separate communities. I read that by 2012 Hyderabad is expected to have a population of 7 million. I think it is at 1 or 2 million right now. And as you can see from the one picture, a good number of these million or so people live in shanty towns made up of tarps and whatever scraps of cardboard and tin can be scrounged together. Most construction workers live in these shanty towns. It's strange to see these high rises being built by people who can't afford a house of their own. A small army of workers along with their wives and kids will construct a shanty town just a few hundred yards from whatever project they're working on. When the building is done and the upper class is ready to move in, the shanty town is quickly broken down and the workers are off to the next jobsite. It's a tent-city one day, and a parking lot the next.

2005-07-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

Montana aint got shit on the Indian sky.

2005-07-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is Ismail. He's the head driver here for Cozy Cabs, the company Google pays to shuttle us around. He's great. He coordinates all the ten or so drivers and helps organize all the little field trips we want to go on.

2005-07-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

This is how you build a building, large or small in India. You build all the floors suspended on layers of thousands of sticks and the fill in the walls later. Thank god there are no earthquakes in this area or we'd be in deep shit. Although a few people died two days ago in another part of town when a wall of their house collapsed because it got too wet in the rain. I guess any way you look at it, the construction methods leave something to be desired. Oh well.

2005-07-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Happy Bastile Day!!!
I hate the Fench.... OK I don't know any French, but I'm sure I'd hate them if given the chance.

So, sorry it has taken me so long to post this blog, but we have no internet access at our house so I have had a hard time getting online.
As you'll read later, things here take a LONG time to get done so it'll probably be a while before I get to get to make another entry. This entry will be short, but I'll write more detailed crap later. Fotr now I'll just post some pictures and be on my way.

The picture of me was my first night here right after I got off of the plane. I was EX-fucking-shausted!!!