Procrastiblog

You should never buy a guidebook that doesn’t provide place names in the local script. Both the Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide books on India get this wrong*. While it is true that you can generally make yourself understood in English**, it is nice to be able to find your own way some of the time (and it is sometimes necessary to spot-check an auto driver’s route planning). An English-language map does not help if most of the street signs, bus stops, and train timetables are in Kannada script.

I don’t remember having as much of a problem with this in other non-Roman-script countries I’ve been to, although that’s probably because I didn’t know where I was supposed to be half the time anyway. We had a difficult time in Japan, but Japan is notoriously tricky to navigate (kanji would have helped, though). I remember having some trouble in Russia, which I guess I dealt with by being very conservative about cabs, buses, and trains. When you’re staying someplace for several months, it is pretty depressing to feel like any given cab ride could end in Tamil Nadu.

* As does the Time Out Tokyo guide. Lonely Planet Japan gets this partly right, so it’s not uniform across their titles.
** Oddly, this is least true inside Bangalore, which is fairly cosmopolitan, but has a rather small tourist trade and a rather large pro-Kannada chip on its shoulder.

Remember the elevator console Chris was so impressed by?

With a sense of perspective, it’s interesting to even non-computer geeks.

(Sadly, I do not see much of the World’s Largest Calculator. Because after having worked in this apartment for a week or so I feel that I have a good estimate of the probability of the power going out at any given moment, and feel that the elevator is not the safest bet, unless you want to spend some quality time with the calculator.)

Had a Fourth of July party last night, attended by a majority of the American ex-pats in the office. In the run-up, I think I convinced my Indian co-workers I’m a John Bircher, which is pretty funny considering how much time I’ve spent thinking about what country I will move to in 2008* if George Allen becomes president**.

We did all the things Americans like to do: drinking beer, eating hot dogs (thanks Jonathan!), talking about television, confusing the German, and teasing the Canadians. In a show of progressive internationalism, we sat through 119 scoreless minutes of soccer*** with only moderate whining. (Granted, that last minute was pretty damn exciting. And I jumped out of my chair as the only other foreign country I’ve been in for more than 2 weeks earned its spot in the finals.)

God Bless America. Especially the Supreme Court. Happy belated Fourth!

* Not that I didn’t spend plenty of time on similar themes in 2004/2005, but other factors intervened. I might actually be finished with my degree by 2008, knock on wood.

** I pose George Allen as a most-likely/least-acceptable exemplar—he is a deeply odd and odious character. Bill Frist and Sam Brownback would be similarly unacceptable. I’d probably stick around to see how John McCain turns out…

*** For a while, I tried to be “culturally sensitive” and call it football, but you know what? “Soccer” is semantically unambiguous. You know what I’m talking about. Get over it.

Apparently, the Internet is “not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.” Also, apparently, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AL) is a gibbering moron. If you’ve got two and a half minutes to spare, listen to the audio. It is appalling, even if you don’t understand the technical issues and even if you agree with his underlying point—a person has to work very hard to make this little sense.

Ha!
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Kochi: not my thing. Reminded me a lot of Charleston, SC, in a weird way: both are old shipping centers with nothing much going on that attract tourists and antiquers. The synagogue was pretty nice (the city has a historic Jewish community—Jew Town (no kidding)—that now consists of 14 people from 3 families).

Something which turned out to be really worthwhile that you would think was a suckers’ game is the “you buy we cook” fish stands down by the waterfront. Maybe we got ripped off in relative terms (we paid around Rs 600 for a 3 crabs and 2 lobsters, and another Rs 150 to get them cooked), but the food was really yummy. A tip: curry crab should be cracked away from the diner and should not be eaten in a rush.

P.S. Lots of goats and cats, not so many cows and dogs. Why is that?

P.P.S. Deb asked pretty much every local he met for the first two days where he could get some crab and the answer was invariably “no chance” since it was out of season. Every fish guy on the waterfront was selling crab, and most of it was alive (and therefore fresh). WTF?!

P.P.P.S. We showed up on the one day of every month when alchohol is not permitted to be sold anywhere in the city. We happened across a place that was selling beer out of a hole in the wall—seriously—but we didn’t have the good sense to purchase it or the guts to photograph the hole.

Happy
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Went to Kerala for the weekend and spent Friday and Saturday morning on a houseboat in the backwaters of Kumarakom (photo set here). This was an incredibly nice experience. The boat, which had two bedrooms sleeping four people, cost Rs 4750 (that’s almost exactly USD 100) for about 24 hours of floating, drifting, idling, and relaxing (incl. a crew of three men, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a basket of bananas). You would think this sort of arrangement would involve docking at various villages where people would be lined up to sell us useless knick-knacks and handicrafts. Nope. The docking was entirely non-commercial in nature. The only up-selling attempted was: Rs 800 for a kilogram of prawns with dinner (not worth it), Rs 100 for 2 liters of toddy (kind of disgusting), and Rs 800 for a massage (we said no). Everybody, everywhere: go do this! It’s fun! (Caveat emptor: these are off-season rates. Prices include a fair chance of monsoons.)

POSTSCRIPT: Shout out to the nice people at the Tharavadu Heritage Home who kindly helped us arrange for the boat in exchange for, at best, a kickback from the boat’s proprietor (we didn’t give them any money, anyway).

If your houseboy should spend the weekend watching your TV with his friends, or if he should take naps in your bed when you are not around, it is not worth your effort to complain about it. It is not worth it to explain the subtleties of your unease to the accomodations manager, who will ignore them anyway and scold the boy for some vaguely related misdeed. It is not worth it when the boy will act abashed for about five minutes and then continue to do exactly the same things over and over again. Not. Worth. It. At all.

With all due respect to my blogging/life partner, this explanation is no more credible than if she claimed to be establishing a model democracy in the middle of my face. Whatever after-the-fact justifications H might provide in order to maintain public support for her bellicose position, it is clear to me—and, I think, to any reasonable observer—that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing my beard.

Extrapolating from my first 24 hours in the presence of the beard, I calculate that some variant of the phrase “You have some Indian food in your beard” would be repeated approximately 125 times over the next six weeks. Which would be clearly unreasonable.

As some of you (if not most of you) (if not all of you) know, I have recently been joined in India by my wife, Hilleary. I’ve asked her to start blogging with me, adding another ignorant American’s perspective to the picture. My suggestion for her first post: “Why the Beard Had to Go”.