Hometown

I've been back in New York now for about two weeks. Our big news is that we'll be heading back to India in about a month. Until that time you can expect a few posts, but not too many.

After getting back to the United States, I spent a few days with my parents back in Wisconsin. I kept taking lots of pictures of trees and clouds, in part because they both looked so different that what I'd been looking at in India. It also seemed very cold to me -- it was a cold spring, even for Wisconsin, but I might also gotten used to the Indian sun. The above photo was taken from my old bedroom window. My parents are farmers, and you can see where the fields start behind the backyard.

And below is the town square of my hometown of about 2700. It's grown a lot since I've been gone, but most of the newcomers live in developments on the other side of town. Anyway, it looks a lot different from an Indian village of the same size, that's for sure. For instance, no cows, and not too many people just walking down the street.

More Stuff Soon

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

G.K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat", via Terry Teachout

Film City, so far away

We've both been back in the United States for about a week at our respective families. One has no internet, and the other has dial-up only, so expect slim posts for a while at least.

In the meantime, watch the above video for Basement Jaxx's song "Romeo." It might be old hat to some of you, but I was amazed when I saw it for the first time yesterday. I found it when looking up stuff on Ramoji Film City, the film studio/amusement park outside of Hyderabad where the video was shot. Part of the fun is seeing how all the Indian musical number conventions mash up with a very western song. For more on Film City, here's the New York Times's take.

Howdy

A hearty welcome (as they say) to everyone visiting here from Boing-Boing. As the tagline says above, we're a couple of Americans staying for six months a year a while in Bangalore. I'm a travel writer, and Don works in publishing. While we're not working, we're usually traveling, trying to cross the always-busy streets here, inviting stares, breaking things, buying tablecloths, eating dosas, that sort of thing.

Here are a few older posts you might like:

• Chicken à la Kingfisher
  
• As Many Arms as Vishnu
  
• Monsoon Cooking, or My Big Fat Indian Dinner
  
• At the Beach
  
• Some Notes on the Office
  
• Not Cuckoo for Coconuts and Counterpoint: Coconuts Are Great!

(Mango pic from 2006 -- haven't gotten any yet this year.)

Drum Machine

Drum Machine.JPG, originally uploaded by jrambow.

I thought this was really cool. It's a drum and bell machine I saw at Bangalore's Bull Temple. You can see the motor to the left and how it's connected to the drumsticks. It wasn't going, unfortunately -- would be fun to see it at work, and to see how you adjust the speed of the drums and bells.

As you can see, the machine was in a cage to prevent curious people (and monkeys!) from getting a rhythm going at the wrong times.

If some hipster band in Brooklyn or Berlin or Rio knows what's good for them, they'll try to get their hands on one of these ASAP and use it on their next album. Maybe someone already has . . .

Flying Ants on M.G. Road

Here was a sight that made me a little scared. This is a huge billboard in front of the Vijaya Bank building on M.G. Road. All those specks are flying ants! I managed not to run for my life and instead just kept on walking. Maybe I shouldn't have been so scared -- now that the bees are abandoning their hives because of cell phones, we can look to the ants to take up some of the slack and start pollinating.

What We'll Miss

Don and I are both due to fly out of Bangalore and back to the United States next Friday. If this time is anything last the last time, I predict that next week will be light on posts and high on silence. Although I intend to keep posting even when we're out of India, at least for a while, I thought it would be good to start thinking of some things I'll miss when I'm gone.

• fresh lime sodas
  
• people who are friendly and patient even when you don't speak any of India's mother tongues
  
• clothes that are all at least 25% more vivid than anything in New York City. It's going to be hard to go back to black, grey, and black.
  
• A dialect of English that didn't always make sense to me but was always interesting. Here, you always "avail offers" rather than take advantage of them, and have "power cuts" rather than "power outages" (we had about five yesterday, so it's on my mind). And why say just "OK"? Say "OK OK OK" instead. And if something (like power cuts!) is hardly worth mentioning , you can say "power cuts are there."
  
• paan
  
• high purchasing power. Obviously, having dollars and the large amount of rupees that they buy has made for a better time.
  
• cable TV and the amazing channels inside. One favorite right now is the Udaya channel, which broadcasts in Kannada. They have a great cooking show, in which housewives come on and make a dish and are then given a sari for their trouble. We would love it more if we knew better what they were saying/making, but it's already fun the way it is. There was a guy on it once, too.
  

Next time, some of the things we won't miss so very much.

Don't Trip

Over the weekend we went to the wonderful Jain basti (temple) in the town of Sravanbelagola. More about that later, but first here's a shot of the enclosures that covered some ancient inscriptions on the hill. We thought it all looked like some sort of Dutch or German art installation -- the red and blue parts sticking up hold summaries of the inscriptions. And those are German tourists in the background, so it all fits.

The Mysterious Pre-Monsoon

In my year in India, the monsoon remains just about as confusing as it was to start with. We've had a couple rains since we got back to Bangalore at the start of the month, and one of our acquaintances said the unusual rains were something called the pre-monsoon. They would have to be very "pre", since the monsoon won't arrive in Bangalore until June.

The storm today was impressive. All the afternoon was hot, and the skies kept getting darker and darker. Finally by about 8 o'clock lightning began to spike down. We were up in a restaurant on the 10th floor, so it was fun to watch the lightning appear to the west. And finally the rain came. Standing water appeared in the roads almost immediately, and the temperature dropped way down.

The rickshaw driver who took us home from the restaurant said that all this rain was because of the tsunami. Wha? There is a tsunami in the South Pacific at the moment, but that doesn't make any sense. He must have meant the deadly and terrible tsunami of 2004. What could that have to do with it? I have no idea.

And that's why I keep asking people about monsoons and the weather. Just about every answer is interesting.

Gaur!

We just got back from a big road trip that included several days at the Jungle Lodge's K Gudi camp, south of Mysore. We didn't see any tigers, but we did see a leopard, lots of deer, and many gaur, the world's largest bovine. The bulls are hilariously big -- the cows are the size of blown-up brahmin dairy cows. My favorite sighting were five wild elephants swimming in a small lake. Here there are exiting the lake after deciding they had had enough of all our photography.



And here is a gaur, looking shy but muscley.

Hyderabad Hot Spot

Now's the part where the blogger apologizes for light posting, except I'll just skip that and say that I'm in Hyderabad at the moment, working on a travel guide. I'm dusty and sleepy and a little bitter that my hotel isn't as nice as either of the two Taj's I toured this afternoon. Of course, I'm not exactly paying Taj prices, either. (Note for rich people out there: the presidential suite in the Taj Krishna is really amazing [your own pool!], but only you can decide if it's worth $1200 a night.)

I love exploring cities, but sometimes I really wish I could skip that part of the learning curve where I flounder around trying to figure out how to get from point A to . . . just about anywhere. Hyderabad has what might be a unique water feature -- an enormous tank (water reservoir/lake) separating Hyderabad itself from its suburbanized twin, Secunderbad. from the newer suburban town of Secunderabad. I spent lots of time today walking along the eastern edge of the lake, Hussain Sagar, thinking I'd reached the southernmost point, but actually nowhere near. Luckily there's a big 50-foot Buddha near the south, so in the future I'll be desperately keeping Buddha's head in sight if ever try to walk anywhere in this very hot city again. Walking is NOT very popular in the parts of town I've been in so far -- it was basically just me, the beggars, and a few random students. Undoubtedly the old city part will be a little different.

Tomorrow will be devoted to sight-seeing. I'll be the one taking pictures of the admission windows and their ticket prices, asking people questions about opening hours, and rushing through the things on view.

China Leaves the Simpsons Full of Holes

While we've been in Delhi, we've started making it a habit to start the
morning out right, not with the tedious Anderson Cooper or the slightly
less boring BBC News, but instead with the Simpsons, which appears on the
wonderful Star World at 8:30 AM. Star World is the expat American's
friend -- it's got the OC, American Idol (current season), and a slew
of other prime export-quality shows.

Anyway, yesterday's episode was titled Simple Simpson.
In it Homer becomes a kind of pastry vigilante/superhero, getting back
at bad people by throwing big fat pies in their face. It's all going
wonderfully until he's caught by his boss Mr. Boss, who discovers his
secret identity and threatens to reveal it unless he only pies people
Mr. Burns is against. Girl scouts, that sort of thing.

But the episode's ending was confusing -- Lisa was introducing someone
on stage, Homer was getting ready to pie whoever it was, and then
suddenly Homer had a change of heart and gave up. At first I thought it
was because there had been sloppy cuts because of ads or something, but
then Don remembered that it's the Dalai Lama who's about to get a pie.

And that's when it made sense -- Star World broadcasts in China too,
and the cuts were probably made to get past the censor there (See the
above link for more). Sad that it also means a censored episode here in
India as well.

[Update: the linked-to article claims without a citation that the Dalai Lama cut was done "to appease the predominantly Buddhist viewers of East, South, and Southeast Asia with regards to any view of mocking the Dalai Lama." Not sure which theory's right.]

Monkey Washing in Assam

Despite the important-sounding name, the Asian Age is a low-rent newspaper, as you can see by what they chose to include on the top half of their "Newsmakers" page (19 March edition). The caption reads: "GOOD DEAL: A monkey cleans the utensils of a shopkeeper in exchange for two bananas at Tezpur in Assam on Sunday. This monkey comes frequently to the shop and helps the shopkeeper by cleaning the utensils."

The hell? How is this at all likely? What do they mean "frequently"? And what do they mean by "clean"? Most monkeys I've seen make things dirtier than before. On the other hand, this monkey looks especially obese, so maybe it's remotely possible that he's given up his happy wild life of terrorizing anything he thinks is weaker than him and instead decided to work for bananas rather than steal them. But I just don't think so.

What gets me is that surely almost everyone reading this Indian paper has had at least some interaction with monkeys -- enough to know that they're cute at a distance and evil up close, with large teeth and an inclination to steal anything that looks interesting (just like this blog?). It's no more likely that monkeys would start cleaning things than that people would spend their days walking along each other's balconies, stealing water bottles, and mating on roofs.

For a more realistic approach to monkeyshines, I think you only have to look at the inside of the door leading to our balcony at the cheapo hotel we stayed at:

The Mughal Gardens

And the day after the Haus Khaz rose gardens, we remained on a flower rampage. We headed to the Mughal Gardens, part of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the President of India's house).

This was an amazing place -- a complex of about five gardens laid out in the late 1920s by Edwin Lutyens, who designed most of the "New" infrastructure in New Delhi. The best and biggest garden was like a typical Mughal-style garden, with small streams of water forming a rectangular pattern and meeting near the center. The garden is only open for about 5 weeks of the year, and I was glad we had a chance to go.

Given its location more or less in the center of India's government, it's wasn't too surprising that security was so tight. And the sign above explains why I don't have any pix of the amazing, huge zinnias, or anything else. The government had put thought into more than just security. There was bottled water available, as well as a handy supply of bathrooms and even "lounges" (covered tents) for getting out of the heat.

The lines moved fairly fast when we arrived in mid-morning, but when we left around noon they were much longer. Clearly, visiting the gardens is something that lots of families do as a tradition. But what people evidently don't do is stop and smell the roses -- we got lots of funny looks when we did so. And with rosewater such a common ingredient in desserts as well as perfumes, this seemed especially surprising.

Wi-Fi: A Highly Selective Delhi Guide

In the Greater Kailash area, the only public place I've found that has Wi-Fi is the Cafe Coffee Day in GK-2 market (that's the M block). If you ask your server, he might say it doesn't work, but look for the Airlink signal. You'll have to pay via credit card, not by buying one of those cards. Also, it's expensive at 45 rupees an hour or so, but since it evidently has a monopoly for a large portion of South Delhi, I can't argue.

If I've missed any Wi-Fi spots somewhat near GK, please let me know.

Springtime in Delhi

Summer is about to take over and make everything dry up in Delhi, but for the moment the city's parks are full of flowers. Zinnias, roses, marigolds, salvia, poppies, huge dahlias, and a million others kinds I don't know. The weekend before last we went to Hauz Khas ("Royal Tank"), a large park surrounded by a schmanzy neighborhood in South Delhi. This tank (water reservoir) was built around 1300 for Siri, the second city to exist within what is now New Delhi.


As in many other parts of Delhi, Moghul monuments and tombs are scattered here and there, in various states of repair. In fact, Delhi has so many that I wish they could lend a few to Bangalore -- they'd really perk things up.





The rose garden in the park was huge. And very well kept up. I suspect that there's a lot of non-city money going into keeping it like this.

After the rose garden, we headed to the Deer Park, which actually does have very obese deer behind cyclone fencing. Even better, there was a peacock. I wanted to taunt him into displaying his feathers, but I didn't know how to do that. I suppose you need a peahen.




The lake itself was a lot prettier than I thought it would be. I thought it would just be a big puddle, but there's a lot of water here. It might have been helped by the relatively large and unseasonable rains we got a few days earlier. Isn't it eerie?

Smiling the Smile

Smiling the Smile, originally uploaded by jrambow.

And here's a slideshow of photos from our second day at Angkor Wat. That was when we covered the Ta Phrom (overgrown with jungle) and Bayon (full of creepy smiling guy) Temples. They were both splendid. Do you think the Smile wore off on Don?

Maggi Ketchup Horror

It's on the shelves of supermarkets and little neighborhood stores alike. It's on the table at lots of restaurants, especially the mediocre and the mid-range. It comes with your fish and chips, it might come with your pizza, it will probably even come with your samosa or pakoras as a kind of chutney. Worst of all, it's usually thrown into Chinese food and tomato soup as a main ingredient, giving a simple, sickly sweet taste to everything it touches. I'm talking about Maggi (and to a lesser degree Kissan) ketchup. The two of them sometimes seem to have all of India in their sticky paws.

Between the milk-sweets and all that tea, it's no secret that most Indians have a sweet tooth. But it's still surprising that a majority evidently wants their ketchup to be even sweeter than the corn-syruped-up American classic. Where American Heinz has a pleasing vinegar/tomato bite to counteract all its sugar, Maggi just has more cloying sweetness. The stuff even looks gooier and shinier from all that cane sugar.

But there are signs of a little change. We were excited a few months ago to discover that Heinz is available here. I've tried Indian Heinz a couple times so far, mostly at fast-food joints, and to be honest couldn't tell if it was A) Just as Bad as Maggi, or B) Slightly Better. It still didn't seem as tangy as the ketchup back home, but it's a step in the right direction.

Related: a Stylestation post about a Malcolm Gladwell article about what people want in ketchup, and why there aren't a million different kinds on store shelves. I'm still amazed that Heinz hasn't made more inroads in India -- according to the blog post, it's been here since 2000. I guess sweet ketchup is a winner.

Causeway

Causeway, originally uploaded by jrambow.

Here are a bunch of photos from our first day in Siem Reap. These are all from Angkor Wat, the major temple there.

Phnom Penh Take 1

When we arrived in Cambodia, we ended up having to spend a while getting our visas. A big German tour group was in front of us, and that held up things a bit. We'd known about the eVisa, but hadn't gotten our act together and applied for them. I'm not certain that they would have saved much time -- the single line for them was kind of slow-moving too.

We stayed at the Foreign Correspondents Club, a slick bar and restaurant that also has a few very nice rooms. Their marketing is so clever that the New York Times' infamous article on Phnom Penh bought into its roving-reporter shtick. For the record, there are no feverish writers working on their next Pulitzer there, or at least no more than anywhere else. We liked the place a lot, but we thought the game was given a way a bit by their cool t-shirts, which cost $15. That's about five times more than I'd expect anything like that to cost in Cambodia. (I still want on, though.)

Here's a picture from our room window. The beat-down mansion in the foreground will probably be fixed up soon -- one exactly like it a couple doors down is now owned by the United Nations, if I recall correctly, and they have clearly sunk a lot of money into it. In the background is the National Museum.



After this quick visit to Phnom Penh, it was on to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. After we checked into our hotel, rented bikes, got our $40 passes for Angkor Wat, and actually arrived, it was lunchtime. This turned out to be a blessing, since we missed a quick but powerful downpour.