Nice Work If You Can Get It

Honey, I'm hooooooooome!

Though I'm writing this from my new digs in India, I can't forget to write about my "layover" in Paris. Note to self: 1hour 40minutes is NOT long enough to get through customs and check in to a new flight.

I got off the plane from Chicago and attempted to collect my baggage. Trouble was it was already being moved to my flight to Delhi. This took 10 minutes to figure out. Once I'd learned that little tidbit, I had to find the Air France check in. I'm in Paris, right? This should be easy, right? 20 minutes and several confused looks from non-English speakers later, I found the check in desk for Air France. Interesting, there's no lineup and the flight leaves, oh, very soon.

I go to the lone remaining woman at the check in desk and ask her about my flight. I say I'm lost. She says no, honey, you're late. Luckily she thinks I'm 15 and takes pity on me. She's on the phone finding my baggage, then she grabs my passport and ticket and starts running for security. She talks up the police guards to let me bud the line (in the French I do understand I hear her telling the guy to be nice 'cause this "little girl" needs help - please don't look at my passport and figure out I'm 25, please!), talks up the security scan people to do the same as the police guards, and before you know it I'm yelling Merci! and waving as I run for the plane. Last one on. Sweet.

Mom and Dan picked me up from the airport. I was pretty tired so the details are hazy. Lots of horns honking, people being beligerent on scooters, and the sweet sweet smell of burning dung. Ah, India.

I'm planning on exploring the compound today. Happy hour's at 5:30, so I get to meet some folks from the Embassy. I'm here less than 24 hours and I already know how to find a beer. Awesome.

Somehow I had thought that getting no sleep during my travels would allow me to sleep when I arrived and slide painlessly into this time zone. Wow, was I wrong. Mom and Dan took me around yesterday to introduce me to people and I'll be damned if I can remember any of their names. Thankfully they all remember their own first days here and have forgiven my tunnel vision stares as I desperately tried to assimilate information. Most people had already seen me and were referring to me as the "lost girl who must be a visitor." I'm sensing a pattern here.

Needless to say yesterday was necessarily uneventful. I read and ate the mangoes Satif brought last week (read: man who grocery shops for Mom and Dan). The family cats, Leo and Dudley, have started to warm up to me. Dudley, the Indian cat Mom adopted, was gutsy enough to jump onto the couch at my feet while I was reading. I thought he was being friendly, but it turned out he was more interested in practicing his hunting skills on my toes.

I also attended happy hour and tipped a bottle of Big Rock Warthog ale (there's no place like home, there's no place like home), but was too zombie-like to really participate much in conversation. On the bright side, I was with it enough to learn that, if I wanted to, I could befriend any number of francophones and brush up on my french this summer. Tres bien!

Yesterday was my first venture "off compound." It's easy to forget where I am when I'm within the safe enclosure of the compound walls. 24 hour access to pool and gym and a bar with a tab in my parents' name... this is not India, this is Club Med.

But anyway, Heather took me out into the big city yesterday afternoon to go shopping. Kahn Market is clearly geared toward rich Indians and foreigners, of which there were many. Fabindia, the first store we went into, looked like Ikea on the bottom and the Gap up top. The colours were facinating, as were the sheer number of accents and languages wandering around the store. French, Dutch, Spanish... Again, the early part of the excursion made it easy to forget where I really was... enter Leonard Cohen...

The second boutique we went to had Lenny playing softly in the background. Uh... where am I?

Kahn Market is a series of stores smashed together in a horse shoe shape... it's like a dusty and cramped version of the row buildings in downtown Barrie or Victoria. Alleys filled with scooters and broken bicylcles cut between some of the shops, and there are people milling about everywhere. More shops are piled ramshackle on top of the ground floor shops and you have to climb winding staircases to reach them. Billboards for Coca Cola and The Big Chill restaurant hang from the higher reaches, but even they don't escape being coated in dust.

Very few people beg in Kahn Market. Some crouch in the alley ways selling cherries and mangoes, but fruit's cheaper outside Kahn's upscale walls. "Buy some mangoes, madame. One box, 500 rupees..."

Heather, who took me out, is well known at some of the intersections. We stopped at one light on the way home (stopping is optional, remember), and we were promptly descended upon by a whole family who came straight for her window. Heather's car is a bit like Mary Poppins' bag - she reached behind her and pulled out bottles of water and juice, food, bags of chips, and started handing them to the people at the car. Some of the children weren't even tall enough to see in the window... I think they know her because when she said she'd exhausted her supply, they believed her...

Heather: "You could spend all the money you make here just feeding people."

That was more like the Delhi I imagined.

So, the most exciting thing I did yesterday, and tangentially the most life-threatening, was cross the street. Yes, folks, say goodbye to drivers deferentially slowing down to let you get from point A to point B. Here, they just drive.

Mom, Dan, and I went to the American Embassy for dinner and a pina colada. I actually experienced more culture shock going through the airport style security check to enter the Embassy than I had encountered anywhere else off compound! After dinner Mom and I decided to take a tuk tuk home, but had to cross the street to catch one going in the proper direction. Tuk tuks are economy taxis, kind of like tricyles equipped with an engine and a tiny covered backseat. All I could remember was Mom's story about how Bernie had seen a guy get hit crossing the street last week, and how the police just dragged him by the ankles to the side of the road. You know how there aren't any crosswalks here? No such thing as 911, either. So we braced ourselves, waited for a break in traffic, and booked it for the median. The raised median provided a haven of sorts, but I could still feel the cars rushing by 2 feet away. Once the second lane cleared, we headed for the sidewalk. I never thought crossing the street could be so exhilerating.

We also had the most intense storm Mom's seen since she arrived here last July. Bear in mind, I haven't seen lightning in roughly 4 years, so my perspective was a little off, but after hail, thunder, and wind strong enough to blow the barbeque across the back balcony I was convinced of the storm's magnitude. Admittedly the lightning was beautiful, but the brief storm was pretty brutal. Several trees came down, including one housing endangered owls on the compound, and I can only imagine how the city's homeless population is dealing with the aftermath.

Interestingly enough, Delhi isn't supposed to get any rain outside the rainy season between July and October. Since I arrived 3 days ago, we've had two rain storms. Thunder and lightning are extraordinarily rare this time of year. But that climate change bullshit? Yeah, it's a myth.

Okay, I've procrastinated enough. This, too, must go into the blog.

It was culture shock weekend.

Mom and I went to Sarojini yesterday. Sarojini is the craziest market within this vicinity. I was mostly prepared for the mania because everyone we talked to said "oh, well, that'll be an experience" - or something to that effect - once they found out I'd never been before. And mania it was. Bizarrely, the two of us went during the quietest part of the day...

First off, people hound you. I know sales people in stores in Canada ask you how your day is going and all that fake crap, but here they follow you, they holler, they grab your hands... sales people - or peddlers between shops - don't understand "no" unless it's yelled in their faces and they certainly don't understand giving up and moving on. I've never been so rude so consistently, but practicing this will likely teach me the flaws in my "can't say no to people" logic.

Secondly, the colours are mezmerizing. I know Kahn market seemed colourful, but Sarojini is insane. Row upon row of "suit shops" sell ready made tunics, pants, and scarves in every shade and level of detail, western clothing hangs from racks inside what look more like cement bunkers than stores, and people sell snacks and juices in neon bottles and packages from carts and out of baskets they're carrying.

Third, unless they know you, and even sometimes when they do know you, they'll try to rip you off. White skin = money = gimme. The mentality back home, everyone assumes that everyone else has taken responsibility for not screwing others. Here, the mentality assumes that you take responsibility for having been screwed by someone else because it's your fault for letting them do it. Sarojini translation: when you ask "how much," which you inevitably do because there's almost no such thing as a price tag, you usually get quoted double the price than the sales person would quote to an Indian. Don't buy on the first quote, bargain down, and say no and start to leave the shop if you want a fairer deal.

Some things no one can prepare you for, though, like the incessant children who sell beads off their arms or the fingerless blind woman begging from a cart being pushed by someone who I can only assume is her husband. If you buy beads or give money, you're instantly swamped by other children or similar begging people. Or, the passing thought "are my feet sweaty? no that's just road goo in my sandals..." Most men just whip it out and pee wherever, so one can only imagine what road goo contains.

Today Mom and Dan took me to... a market... Vassant Nagar? Anyway, we went to an Italian restaurant for lunch. The restaurant, if you didn't look out the back window, made it easy to take a break from "I'm in India" culture shock. The decor was really cute and clean, the servers were really friendly (not unusual, by the way, in case you were wondering), and the food was definitely Italian. But then I noticed the dust on the lampshades, and the upholstery on the bench seats was worn thin...

The market today was much more western and didn't cause the same shock and awe Sarojini inspired. Wide, car free lanes curved through stores that sold Sony, Von Dutch, and Reebok stuff, to name a few. It also contains the creators of the BEST ICECREAM I HAVE EVER HAD. If you're ever in Delhi, go to this market and visit Choko La. Order the chocolate decadence. Don't expect to ever be able to eat it again, because doing so just might kill you it's so good.

The taxi ride home brought the culture shock crashing back. We stopped at a light, and this young girl, maybe 9, came up to the window and tried to sell us a newspaper. She just stared blankly into the car and held the paper up to her chin. It was clear that she was dehydrated and probably wasn't fed properly, but we didn't have anything left in the car to give her but a banana forgot about until we reached the compound. I would have bought a paper, but the money would have gone to the equivalent of her pimp who was undoubtedly nearby. I spend $100 a month to keep a storage locker in Victoria that contains the material evidence left behind by my life. When I get back, I want to give it all away. What the hell is it for?

Tonight, I'm exhausted. Tomorrow, I start work. Heather said that on her day 5 she was bawling. I can say that on my day 5 I was awfully close to that myself.

Just a quick update today...

It's hot.... sooooo hot.... 36 degrees even well after the sun has gone down. Might get down to 25 by morning, but the sun comes up at 5 so it'll be hot again soon after that.

Finished my second day at work. I forgot how nice it is to have a job where somebody else gives you stuff to do. It's like a silver platter of tasks and things to accomplish and someone to say "thanks, I really needed that done!"

I took lots of photos today, but I haven't figured out how to liberate them from my camera yet. I, being the tragedy I am, packed the usb cord in my storage locker in Victoria. I'm going to have to go to a computer shop and pick one up for, oh, $3 or something equally ridiculous.

I can't get over the birds here. Birds of all colours and sounds, owlettes, bats... They hang out on the trees outside the windows of our apartment. They're beautiful! Tough to photograph because they move around a lot, but I'll try.

I'm also going to try to take a photo of the sunrise tomorrow. It's incredible. You can stare straight at the sun which, in the moring, looks like a giant glowing peach. All the stuff in the air pretty much eliminates that nasty burn-your-retinas crap we suffer from in less particulate parts of the world.

Three days "on compound" and I'm going a bit squirrely... heading into town tonight!

Here a week and we have another dynamite light show. The storm, that was aMAZingly out of season, started at 6pm... the clouds came in (they're kind of a goldy yellow colour thanks to all the smog), the rain started, and then the lightning came in... What a spectacular show! Bolt lightning that just crackled, lit up the whole sky. I went to sleep around 10 o'clock and it was still going! The patch of sky I can see from my bedroom window is fairly small, but it still provided a view to some of the most incredible lightning I've ever seen. It was like something you see in those "lightning hits the Toronto skyline" photos that were really popular a few years ago. So much detail! I'm a little obsessed, can you tell?

Anyway, work's going well. Heading to the Turtle Cafe again tonight to meet mom's filmmaker friend. Oh yeah, and I'm making plans to go visit Dharamsala in a few weeks with Norflox (read: Alex).

I have been tardy in my posting... the weekend's activities will have to come in installments.

Part 1) Thursday night

So Thursday I met up with Mom's filmmaker friend Varun. We were due to meet at the Turtle Cafe in Khan Market at 7:30, a cafe I've been to a few times and figured I could find pretty easily. The trouble was, I forgot that 1) it gets dark here at 7pm, and 2) Turtle Cafe closes at 7pm. So Mr. Verma the taxi driver drops me off at Khan Market and I proceed to wander around looking for the cafe. After walking the circumference of the (quite large) complex, I started worry. Being a random white girl all alone after dark, even in a populated market, is not such a good thing. I knew that once people had seen me walk by a particular spot more than once, they would know I was lost. Then I heard someone call my name.

This usually means I've misheard someone speaking in Hindi, so I've stopped responding. But then this guy reaches out and grabs my arm and says "Penny?" It turns out it was Varun. It took me a second to figure out how he had guessed who I was considering neither of us knew what the other looked like. Oh yeah, I'm random white girl walking all alone in the market after dark.

Varun, his friend Siddat (sic?), his other friend Lavanya, and I went off to the Big Chill diner for something eat. The Big Chill is kind of like a 50s diner and has old movie posters all over the walls. I figured we were just going to hang out and have coffee/dinner or something, but then Varun suggested heading to a club to go dancing.

Note: drinking in India is EXPENSIVE! We're talking 300 rupees a drink. As a point of comparison, I can buy two dresses and a shirt in Sarojini for 300 rupees. But it was still a hilarious time. Urban Pind had a drink special on, 750 rupees for all the highballs you could handle, so we purchased our ugly orange wrist bands and got down to business.
Within half an hour we were joined by a few more "loyals," most of whom are now just faces... names have completely disappeared. 10 minutes after that and Varun and I were on the dance floor. By the way, we were the first ones on it. Neither of us could believe that no one else would dance. "What the fuck else do you come to a bar to do? Fuck." - Varun

Note: dancing in India is hilarious. Everyone dances equidistant apart from each other. No one comes near you, it's just not done. Staring, however, is absolutely acceptable. Especially when you're the only white girl dancing in a group of Indians. I wasn't with the other Expats, most of whom were European and totally snobby, so I was a spectacle. More on spectacles later.

After a bit, Siddat and Lavanya came down to dance. We drank and danced until the bar shut down at 12:30. Lots of North American pop music, lots of salsa, lots of Hindi pop, and then lots of BAD country to drive people out. Hilarious.

Some bars, including Bocci, pay off the cops to let them stay open later. After too much bad country, we let Siddat go home to bed and continued on to the next bar. We were pretty wiped and mostly broke by that point, so we spent most of the time sitting in the restaurant section upstairs. Lavanya filled me in on the male/female ratio here, how women are really unsafe by themselves out at night, and how to protect yourself as best you can.

Note: there are twice as many men in bars as women. Men happily dance with each other because there's no one else to dance with. Men are also routinely refused at bars if they don't have any women with them. No one talks to each other if they are strangers.

The night ended around 2am. I had to be at work at 8:30. I can't wait to do it again.

Last weekend's activities were many, but the event that stuck out the most was definitely the tuk tuk ride Gowry and I got stuck on.

We were on our way to Sarojini for our first shopping trip sans either experienced shoppers or locals. Because we like tuk tuk rides, and because we wanted to save as much fundage as possible for the shopping trip, we took a tuk tuk. The ride itself shouldn't have been long, and the guy quoted us a reasonable price for the trip... except about half way there dude decides he needs gas...

So we pull into the gas station and Gowry and I are like "whaaaaat the hell..." We asked the driver if he needed gas and he just kind of nodded at us and grinned. A quick scan of the 15 other tuk tuks in line for gas at the pump indicated that we were in fact the only tuk tuk that still contained passengers. The driver got out of the tuk tuk and went off to joke with his fellow tuk tuk buddies, who all kept looking back at us and laughing. I figure this guy wanted to show off to his buddies just who he had in his tuk tuk... And because neither of us speak any Hindi, we were hooped. So we sat in the back of the tuk tuk for 15 minutes in the blazing heat until dude could gas up, and then we proceeded on to Sarojini. We were such a spectacle.

Anyway, the parties last weekend, aside from the aforementioned Thursday with the locals, were pretty strange. The toga party was populated by punch swilling American marines (I'm the guy in charge of getting people killed, I don't get killed myself), and Saturday at wherever we went was hosted by a dj who was mostly terrible.

I guess the most exciting thing that's happened since then is my first round of Delhi Belly. I knew it would happen eventually. I didn't know where my small bowel was until it started to hurt. I know very well where it's located now! Hopefully after some heavy duty antibiotics I'll be back on my feet, though. On the bright side, Indian pop music channels have been keeping me great company during my sick days off work! I now know about all the blockbuster movies coming out and can even fake the words to a few of the current songs! Can't wait to go dancing again!

Indecency 1 - Tabula Rasa:

Thursday night Gowry and I went out with Varun, Lavanya, and Saddat (sic? I can't believe I don't know how to spell that yet) to this really cool rooftop bar called Tabula Rasa. Both Gowry and I were convinced that, had it not been for the gawdy yellow billboard jutting out from just above us, we would have been fooled into thinking we were in Toronto. The music was great, the atmosphere was awesome, the company was wonderful as usual. At one point I borrowed a fellow dancer's hat and got my groove on for a while. He wasn't using it, I considered the hat a waste unless it was used as a prop as it should be.

Anyway, the indecency comes in when Vera, the Austrian woman we met, and Nevin, her very large Tibetan boyfriend, started making out on the dancefloor. At first I was excited - this doesn't happen here! I'm accustomed to seeing people kissing in bars at home, so this kind of action further added to the "this could be Toronto" vibe. Until things went to far. It truly was like get a fucking room now people. And then they started basically having phone sex while standing in the bar right in front of us. The five of us (photo to come) just stood there and stared at them. And then stared at each other. And then we stared at them some more.

Indeceny 2 - Indian Wedding

Friday morning I got an email from Varun - "yall better get some shopping done, that is if you want to come to the wedding tonight." Gowry and I proceeded to get very, very excited - we needed outfits and we needed them pronto. Like the shopping machines we've become, we overtook Latchpat Nagar and came out, after 2 hours off us scandalizing shop keepers by changing in the same change room, warding off marriage proposals, and haggling like crazy with two amazingly glittery outfits suitable, we thought, for an Indian wedding. In the words of the brother of the bride, "you girls went all out."

What Varun failed to mention, though, was that this was a conservative Muslim wedding. This was not the dance party Hindu extravaganza we had expected. Subsequently, the sparkle I had succumbed to was way over the top (read: we were the indecency). The dynamic duo - Random White Girl and the Only Brown Girl Who Doesn't Speak Hindi - were even more of a spectacle than we had been all afternoon. Side note - Gowry and I are getting used to being the entertainment wherever we go.

However, we made the best of the situation. We took photos, ate fabulous food, and even met Sakeena, Lavanya's friend, who we might go camping with some time this summer. The wedding was beautiful and very, very large, so there were at least lots of distractions to keep people from staring at us too much.

Upon leaving the wedding, we decided we all needed a drink. Gowry and I got together with Lavanya, who at this point was wearing a white sari, and we took our fine selves to Aura, a local night club. We danced Bollywood style for a solid hour or 2 and were once again an absolute spectacle. But hell, we're on the other side of the world, right? It's like being given a license to be ridiculous.

Saturday was girl day. Lavanya, Gowry, and I went to Sarojini to buy more random shit, and then Lavanya took us to Paraganj. Paraganj is tourist central - lots of packed in shops and super cool souveniers and people who would happily sell rocks of hash to your grandma if she was willing. There were flags flying everywhere, hostels, carving, scarves, and more white folks with bad dreadlocks than I've seen since the last time I wandered down Commercial Drive. I think the highlight was the rickshaw ride from one end of the market to the other on our way back to the car - now that was insane! The three of us managed to squeeze one bum cheek each on the rickshaw and the guy hit the pedals and we flew. I was sure we were going to take someone out there were so many pedestrians, but the bike just wove through the throngs and the dogs and the bags of street food and potholes and all of a sudden we were right back where we had started. Incredible. Photos pending.

That evening we did a little wine and girl time at Lavanya's house, got ourselves ready, and then hit up Baci for Indecency 3 - This Ain't No Canadian Dancefloor

I've never gotten free drinks at a bar. I've learned, though, that when three attractive but not hoochy women park themselves infront of the dj booth and proceed to dance like tomorrow's not coming, all kinds of people suddenly want to buy you drinks. I guess three women grinding on a dancefloor isn't exactly a common sight in Delhi. We got lots of compliments from the dj, though, when he finally stopped spinning and we stopped dancing at 4am. Again, photos pending.

Today's evens were far less indecent but were equally random. Gowry and I did India Gate and the parliament buildings this afternoon to inaugurate our official sight seeing outings. We wandered through lush parks past people cuddling on the grass (apparently all the action happens in parks here), took random photos of trees, and marvelled at all the space we had.

There was a Bollywood movie shoot happening outside the Defense building at parliament, so we stopped and gawked for a while. Gowry is most certainly more of a Bollywood expert than I am, but after watching a week straight of Indian pop music stations I'm beginning to become quite learned myself. Security guards kept telling us not to take photos, but we just pretended not to understand what they were asking. Star struck, we pushed through the crowds that had gathered to watch the shoot and headed for some shade to sit in.

We ended up sitting under a tree next to the PMO and External Affairs building and were shortly joined by this lovely woman who's name I can't remember. Her husband was inside getting some documents from his office, so she'd just come by to sit and make friends, I guess. As it turns out, she and her family are from Varanasi and the surrounding area. She gave us her telephone number - we're to call her before we visit Varanasi so she can set us up with her family members and they can show us "more than we would ever want to know about Varanasi." Her and her husband pointed out all the major buildings and gave us a bit of the history behind them before inviting us for dinner some time and sending us on our way.

Before heading back to the compound we wandered back through the park to India Gate itself. The arched monument was constructed as a memorial for the Indian soldiers who died during WWI. We must have chosen the right day or something, because when we got there it was like a carnival was going on - there were people everywhere picnicking and selling food and mendi and bracelets... and there was this concert band dressed in colonial gear playing music in the square on the far side of the monument. It was incredible. Good thing Gowry was there, because I was totally dumbstruck and staring and totally not paying attention to anything other than how lively and colourful everything was. I think we're going to have to pack up the gang and come for a picnic and beers some time soon.

This post is so long but it feels like I only touched on things... photos pending. I have to go wash the afternoon's goo off my feet before going to bed.