Observations on India 2

• Yes, my knee is looking (and feeling) better. Thank you for your concern.
  
  
• You know that saying about “People often mistake kindness for flirtation because it's so rare these days”? There's truth in it. I may need to stop being so nice.

• Prices for goods (and services) easily reach into the multiple 100s in India; you will find yourself tempted to haggle the prices down. Keep in perspective just how much 100 rupees actually amounts to, though: about $1.65. If someone quotes you 600 rupees and your reaction is “My god, that's so expensive!” keep in mind that it's actually only about 10 bucks. If you manage to talk them down 50 rupees congratulations, you've saved almost a whole dollar. Sometimes it's less stressful for you (and better for the local economy) to just accept that the original price is still pretty damn low and cough it up.

• Restaurants advertise when they have ice cubes available, because this is a fairly rare commodity here.

• Restaurants also advertise when they take care to wash their veggies in something better than tap water (I believe most of them specify potassium permanganate.. I'm not a chemist, though, so I may have gotten that wrong) because

• You do not want to consume the water unless it's been boiled first, and for this reason

• “hot water” is the beverage you order here. It's the free, default beverage you get, like you can always get ice water in the States.

• Unless the restaurant you are ordering from has one of the above disclaimers, you probably do not want to order any sort of raw veggie. Sadly, this means salad is very hard to come by, and it's almost impossible to maintain a raw diet (if you're going for that sort of thing).

• Standards of cleanliness, professionalism, and time management are very different in India than they are in the US.

• If you do decide to scrub the walls in your new Indian place of residence, be forewarned that a fair amount of that dirt may be load bearing. Don't be surprised if you get just as much paint off the walls in the process... not that I know from experience or anything.

• Incense is your friend. So is hand sanitizer. This is coming from someone who uses neither at home in the US.
  
  

Observations on India 1

I present to you a random collection of some observations I've made while in India:

* Generally speaking, it smells a bit.

* The roads are wide enough for (usually) two cars and a pedestrian, but only barely, and if you're a little bit creative. Traffic passes much more closely than anywhere else I've ever been, but nobody seems to mind.

* You can drive the wrong way on the road as long as you stick to the outside and put your hazard lights on. Everybody does it; it's just how you get around here.

* There are an awful lot of animals in the roads, mostly dogs and cows. They seem to have an understanding with the drivers that they will move reasonably out of the way as long as the cars make an effort to go around them.

* There are cool birds here I've never seen before.

I'm not sure what these are, but there are a lot of them in New Delhi.

* In New Delhi the streets are filthy, but the subway is pristine.

* There are very few trash cans in public places. Most people throw their garbage on the ground. You can imagine how much I'm loving this.

* Almost all prices are negotiable.

* All the signs are in English but everyone seems to make up their own spellings.

* All the signs are in English, but most people speak Hindi unless you start speaking to them in English (or unless they are trying to get you, an obvious Westerner, to buy something).

* "Fog" is the default weather condition on the mountain in monsoon season. When it really rolls in, you can't see anything in the valley or more than a few dozen feet in front of you.

* Due to the fog, nothing ever really dries here. This means if you leave the windows open your blankets (and your clothing, and your towels...) will be damp.

* There's no air conditioning. Instead there are "coolers," fans with water dripping down. They actually work pretty well to cool the area, but not so much to take out the humidity.

* The menus include "buff," which at first I took to be a misspelling of "beef." You can't kill cows in India, though, and I was later informed that "buff" is in fact buffalo.

* Most menus don't have an explanation of what the items on them are, even when they have vague names like "special dumpling" or whatever #2 is on this one:

Is it made with real goblins?

* Coca-cola is huge in India.

* The vast majority of Indian women wear beautiful traditional clothing, even when doing hard labor like construction.

* Everybody wears flipflops, all the time.

* The power goes out at least once a day.

* Most bathrooms have a shower. It's one room, all tile, with a shower head, a sink, a toilet, a bucket, a squeegee, and a water heater with a switch. No shower curtain. You just take your shower and then squeegee the water on the floor into the drain when you're done.

* If you want toilet paper in a public bathroom, you better bring it yourself. If you want a seat, you might need to shop around.

A traditional/standard Indian toilet.

 
* Many of the floors are made of marble, even in otherwise modest buildings.

We went to a restaurant last night where, in order to get to the bathroom, you had to go outside and walk through some hallways and down a few flights of beautiful marble steps. I seriously felt like I had entered some dungeon or temple in a video game. Obviously this was the highlight of the evening. :)