 |
| Trip |
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
It's good Picture Monkey!
In India, you can tell exactly how much someone or something is valued by how much space it is allowed to take up by what surrounds it. While this may be true everywhere, there is no place I have ever seen it manifester so clearly as Mumbai and Delhi. The wealthy cruise in SUV and live in luxury apartments, the middle class sits crammed in endless piled traffic jams in small cars and rickshaws and the poor squeeze their way through cracks living among goats and dogs and sleeping along sidewalks and sewers. Cows of course get to do whatever the fuck they want- this includes taking naps in the middle of an eight lane highway.
The skyline of Mumbai is everything you would expect from a major city. From a distance it is as impressive as New York and London from a distance, with skyscrapers stretching in every direction. On the ground, things are different though. In every space between skyscrapers are slums where 70% of Mumbai lives. The air is a soup that leaves everyone coughing, and the crowding is unexplainable.
Our time here has brought a lot of mixed emotions. From what we have seen it is an amazing country. The people are generally friendly but there is also a rudeness and pushiness that I think comes with surviving in a country of a billion. Everywhere we go people beg and demand money. From the way people gawk and talk about Meg and I, we have gotten the impression that people think she is my captured Asian concubine. While at the Taj a group of boys literally stopped about 5 ft away from us to take pictures of us.
I have not had a chance to type in a few days and I think I am getting a little ahead of myself. For the quick run down, we've been to Mumbai, Delhi, Agra and yesterday we arrived in Goa. The monsoon has been on and off. Delhi saw no rain, but the day after we left Mumbai it flooded, which was visible from the air on our flight to Goa. We went and saw the Taj Mahal and the various other obligatory forts and ruins, but the heat was pretty brutal- 100-108 degrees. We've done some shopping, and managed only to get marginally screwed over in haggling.
I think we're both pretty worn out from being on the road. It is raining hard on and off in Goa, but the hotel we got is quiet nice and Goa is pretty free of the crowds and traffic that were exhausting.
As for the title of the post, Meg took a picture of a man with a monkey who then charged the car like a rhino demanding money and extolling the photogenic virtues of his sad dingy monkey.
s
*meg-added random observations
As much as we love Indian food, I'm not sure that we could eat it every day...it all starts to kind of taste the same after awhile. The tandoor is only open for certain eating hours, so our hunt for naan was usually in vain. Stephan also suffered from severe food poisioning, so we kicked it in the hotel for a day- we think the culprit was the Paneer (chunks of cottage cheese) in his curry.
Also the sign of male friendship here is expressed by publicly holding hands or putting one's arm around the other's shoulder...it's pretty adorable actually.
Another amazing observation is the amount of people they can fit onto one rickshaw or one scooter. A rickshaw is about the size of a go-cart, but we have seen up to 12 people in/hanging from it. We also saw a family of five on one scooter on the highway- the father held one baby in the front, with his toddler behind him, wedged between the mother, who was holding the second baby. Although this doesn't exactly seem safe, traffic usually only goes about 30 mph max and its likely you'll be in grid lock traffic half the time. People also use their horns A LOT to let you know if they're within a 100 ft of you, so during most of our taxi rides the driver usually honked well over 100 times.
It's pretty normal to see a starved-looking boy that weighs about 80 pounds carrying 6- 8 potato sacks full of "whatever" ontop of his back and head.
The tv commercials here are..interesting. The i-pill is their emergency contraceptive pill which they have been heavily advertising (gee i wonder why...there might be a bit of a struggle with population control perhaps?) with a b&w commercial of a girl who says its better than getting an abortion and being disowned by your family. The other one is for a product called the Sauna Belt, a belt you wear around fatty areas that literally seems to boil off your fat...Stephan thinks it was banned in the US at one point. And there are endless commercials for skin lightening creams, as being fair is desirable here...maybe MJ had it right.
The skyline of Mumbai is everything you would expect from a major city. From a distance it is as impressive as New York and London from a distance, with skyscrapers stretching in every direction. On the ground, things are different though. In every space between skyscrapers are slums where 70% of Mumbai lives. The air is a soup that leaves everyone coughing, and the crowding is unexplainable.
Our time here has brought a lot of mixed emotions. From what we have seen it is an amazing country. The people are generally friendly but there is also a rudeness and pushiness that I think comes with surviving in a country of a billion. Everywhere we go people beg and demand money. From the way people gawk and talk about Meg and I, we have gotten the impression that people think she is my captured Asian concubine. While at the Taj a group of boys literally stopped about 5 ft away from us to take pictures of us.
I have not had a chance to type in a few days and I think I am getting a little ahead of myself. For the quick run down, we've been to Mumbai, Delhi, Agra and yesterday we arrived in Goa. The monsoon has been on and off. Delhi saw no rain, but the day after we left Mumbai it flooded, which was visible from the air on our flight to Goa. We went and saw the Taj Mahal and the various other obligatory forts and ruins, but the heat was pretty brutal- 100-108 degrees. We've done some shopping, and managed only to get marginally screwed over in haggling.
I think we're both pretty worn out from being on the road. It is raining hard on and off in Goa, but the hotel we got is quiet nice and Goa is pretty free of the crowds and traffic that were exhausting.
As for the title of the post, Meg took a picture of a man with a monkey who then charged the car like a rhino demanding money and extolling the photogenic virtues of his sad dingy monkey.
s
*meg-added random observations
As much as we love Indian food, I'm not sure that we could eat it every day...it all starts to kind of taste the same after awhile. The tandoor is only open for certain eating hours, so our hunt for naan was usually in vain. Stephan also suffered from severe food poisioning, so we kicked it in the hotel for a day- we think the culprit was the Paneer (chunks of cottage cheese) in his curry.
Also the sign of male friendship here is expressed by publicly holding hands or putting one's arm around the other's shoulder...it's pretty adorable actually.
Another amazing observation is the amount of people they can fit onto one rickshaw or one scooter. A rickshaw is about the size of a go-cart, but we have seen up to 12 people in/hanging from it. We also saw a family of five on one scooter on the highway- the father held one baby in the front, with his toddler behind him, wedged between the mother, who was holding the second baby. Although this doesn't exactly seem safe, traffic usually only goes about 30 mph max and its likely you'll be in grid lock traffic half the time. People also use their horns A LOT to let you know if they're within a 100 ft of you, so during most of our taxi rides the driver usually honked well over 100 times.
It's pretty normal to see a starved-looking boy that weighs about 80 pounds carrying 6- 8 potato sacks full of "whatever" ontop of his back and head.
The tv commercials here are..interesting. The i-pill is their emergency contraceptive pill which they have been heavily advertising (gee i wonder why...there might be a bit of a struggle with population control perhaps?) with a b&w commercial of a girl who says its better than getting an abortion and being disowned by your family. The other one is for a product called the Sauna Belt, a belt you wear around fatty areas that literally seems to boil off your fat...Stephan thinks it was banned in the US at one point. And there are endless commercials for skin lightening creams, as being fair is desirable here...maybe MJ had it right.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
honk ok please
after a never ending travel day we have safely arrived at a hotel in the scenic metal smelting district of mumbai. it is 95 and raining outside. for now we are holed up recovering and watching mindless movies.
we wanted to reach outside our comfortzone a little and we are there. the people are friendly and the food is good, but the pollution is choking, the streets are packed and have running sewage and the airport was surrounded by dogs and soldiers with kalishnakovs.
oh... and there is an endless flow of elaborate dance and catchy songs on evey channel. from condoms to cars every ad tv show and psa seems to involve half the country dancing in fields or on trains.
lasty, we have noticed huge sweeping creatures overhead. at first we though they were ravens but they are bats with 40 inch wing spans searching for dogs to eat.
we wanted to reach outside our comfortzone a little and we are there. the people are friendly and the food is good, but the pollution is choking, the streets are packed and have running sewage and the airport was surrounded by dogs and soldiers with kalishnakovs.
oh... and there is an endless flow of elaborate dance and catchy songs on evey channel. from condoms to cars every ad tv show and psa seems to involve half the country dancing in fields or on trains.
lasty, we have noticed huge sweeping creatures overhead. at first we though they were ravens but they are bats with 40 inch wing spans searching for dogs to eat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)