general observations

[dchenes]

I only had 128 emails waiting for me, which I call uncommon restraint.

So, yeah. I went to India for ten days, and it was incredible in almost every sense of the word. I saw everything on the roads: cars, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, rickshaws, horse carts, buffalo carts, ox carts, camels, cows, loose buffaloes, elephants, dogs...and only one bad accident.

I was enough of a tourist to take an elephant ride (I had to save the receipt, because it says "Item: Elephant, Quantity: 1"), and buy a sari which I will probably never have occasion to wear, and let people sell me things I wasn't dying to buy. (But it's a genuine ruby...)

These are things I didn't, or couldn't, take pictures of:

Every truck in India has at least two of the following three things painted very decoratively on the tailgate: STOP, HORN PLEASE, and KEEP DISTANCE. "HORN PLEASE" means when you want to pass the truck, blow your horn first so the truck can decide what lane it's going to be in. In India everyone drives on the left, except when they can't (usually for road construction, traffic jams or cows), and then they drive on the right with all the left-driving traffic coming straight at them. The road from Delhi to Agra tried to address this with a road sign that said "Please do not drive in the wrong direction", which struck me as singularly good advice regardless of where you are.

Back to trucks: sometimes, depending on the design of the tailgate, the English gets a little mangled. My two favorite trucks said "HORN KEEP PLEASE DISTANCE" and "STOP HORN PLEASE STOP".

There are about three levels of buses in Delhi; the really nice ones look like MBTA buses, and the next level down is a little less nice (no glass in the windows, so no air conditioning). Those buses say "Stage Carriage" on the side, except for two I saw that said "State Carriage" and one that said "Stag Carriage" and, appropriately, had no women on it.

I did see a lot of women, in saris, riding sidesaddle on the backs of motorcycles. I can't decide whether it's worse to have the drapery on the side of the motorcycle that has the drive chain on it, or whether it's worse to have the drapery on the other side and have it sucked into the chain from the far side. I never saw that actually happen, but it was the first thing I thought of.

An auto rickshaw is a ridiculous thing. It has a front wheel like a Vespa, attached to what looks like the front end of a Volkswagen bus and the back end of a Jeep. It has handlebars like a Vespa, too, instead of a steering wheel. They're the Indian version of a clown car sometimes; I would not have bet you can put six people in one, but I saw that.

There really are cows everywhere, and my favorite one was one I saw walk up and stick its head under the hood of a car being worked on. Otherwise the cows lie in the highway medians, and wander around in the roads, and suffer themselves to be sort of shooed out of the way and honked at by cars.

The other thing that really amazed me is where people will sleep. Most of Delhi is under construction of some kind, between urban expansion and renovations for the Commonwealth Games in October, so there's construction equipment and material everywhere. I saw somebody sleeping in the midddle of a huge cable spool, and two or three people sleeping in each prefab section of a concrete highway overpass waiting on a flatbed truck, and if they can't do that they sleep on the ground at the side of the highway.

There are people who have NOTHING and live in tents made of torn-up plastic tarps, and people who have nothing but livestock and live in tents with their buffalo, or pig, or goat; and people who have four walls and a roof, but Western civilization wouldn't call them fit for human habitation. And everybody is all mixed up together. There can be a slum around the corner from a high-rise apartment building.

An Indian train station is an amazing thing. Everybody takes trains, so you get everybody in train stations. Unfortunately for a white woman it's hard to do much people-watching. Making direct eye contact with passing men invites what they call "Eve teasing", which basically means getting the Indian equivalent of whistled at and ogled and otherwise made to feel uncomfortable. And that is why I waited for the Jaipur train in the upper-class ladies' waiting room.

It was 100 degrees during the day almost every day. I was just getting used to it when I left, meaning I wasn't running around with at least one liter of bottled water at all times. At night it probably got down to 85 or so. Considering it had been snowing in Boston the day I left, I was all for hot weather. Not so much for mosquitoes, though.

Indian mosquitoes have titanium teeth and raise welts that feel like subcutaneous BBs. I learned that the first night I was there, and after that I put on bug spray twice a day. By the end of the trip, the smell of it turned my stomach. Bathing in DEET is infinitely preferable to malaria, but I'm glad I didn't have to keep doing it for longer than I did.

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[dchenes.livejournal.com]

Mostly because I hadn't been there yet; partly because I've read most of Kipling.