aww biscuits!

so i'm in this really posh internet cafe with bollywood music and a/c, but there are no functioning cd roms here either, so still no photo upload. which is a shame, because this morning i passed a camel pulling a cart down a busy street. yay! camels!

i'm in ahmedabad, india.
i just got off a 40-hour train ride from kerala.
the five-year-old girl who slept above me didn't believe that i couldn't understand hindi. so she chatted away while i smiled and nodded and snuck her animal crackers when her mom wasn't looking. it was a very fun linguisticky moment for me. i imagine that she has met loads of people who speak hindi and not english, but none the other way around. i don't fit into her venn diagram of language reality. (shout out to the logic peeps, and brendon, who doesn't read this blog, i hope) this little girl has about five languages under her belt. fantastic. still, i couldn't get a word of english out of her, other than goodnight.
general observation about indian kidlets: the attitude towards strangers that indian kids take seems to be different than what i was raised with. they don't seem to feel any "stranger danger." it seems to be normal for kids on the train to go and lay down next to anyone, really, in their car. there's a lot of contact between the kids and other passengers, they eat anything given to them, and parents don't seem to mind other passengers disciplining their kids. this is based on only a few experiences i've had, but that's my impression.
three different indian men tried chivalrously to help me with my rucksack in the past few days, only to find that it was actually too heavy for them to deal with. i asked them to step aside while i hoisted it effortlessly (sort of) up onto my back and went on my way. haha! take that indian men! haHA!
i also find myself a lot better adapted to not taking any hooey from anyone during this solo venture through indian cities. i really like ahmedabad. it's way more chill than mumbai or kerala. the arab architecture is gorgeous, and the food is tasty. i'm catching a bus down to the farm this evening. i hope they have cd roms there.
i've been pretty crap at posting while in india. it's been kind of hard to get any internet time, for one. and also, it's hard to know where to start. everything here is so different. so i'm just going to ramble for a few minutes. first off, lots of stores have hand-painted signs and advertisements. it's very striking. things like detailed pictures of computers and accessories, and even movie posters will be hand painted. cool. everything is more colorful in india i think. the way people dress and decorate things. food isn't all that spicy in the south. korean food is the spiciest of all spicies that i've ever had. i eat a lot of tomato soup and cheese sandwiches on the weekends. very yummy. and lots and lots of coconut. there are lots of mustaches here. men wear button down plaid shirts for the most part. especially in kerala. and skirts called dhoties. but they do wear underpants under said skirts. (i know you were wondering, megs). men in ahmedabad don't wear the skirts so much, and i know nothing of their underpants. i watched napoleon dynamite twice at the yoga centre and all of your moms go to college. i spent three weeks slowly watching the movie gandhi and i've changed my mind about ben kingsly in that movie from when i was little; now i think he's kind of sucky. my blonde room mate from ireland sinead didn't feel that she got much attention from indian men while she was travelling. i thought i got too much, and our friend suki from london whose parents are indian got way way more than either of us. that being said, suki is way way hotter than us, i know sinead will agree. like fire hot. she's b-b-b-beautiful. she also does her makeup and wears pretty clothes, cheater. however, also, suki said that indian men fancy (and molester) western women of indian descent more than those blondie girls from ireland, for example. since people keep assuming that i'm part indian, i think that explains a bit how i find indian men i meet on the street treating me so obnoxiously. my swami thought i was a gujarati, so that's probably bad news for me, being in gujarat now. but i can't lie, i do love it when people (excluding random men on the street) ask me if i'm indian. i mean, i think it's pretty obvious that i'm not a local. then again, with all my awesome malayalam (the language of kerala, the name of which is also a palindrome) it must be hard to pick me out of the indian crowd. but not really. one of the best parts about being in india is that i'll finally be able to go eat at indian restaurants and understand what's on the menu. i know the breads, i know the sauces, i know the names for the veggies and the spices. hooray! no more nan and butter chicken for me, boy howdy! i also sent a huge package home full of indian cooking appliances, mostly to make all the yummy breads. according to the wood carving teacher at the centre, 60% of indian men cheat on their wives. however, if a woman is raped, she becomes a disgrace to her family and is thrown onto the street. the inequality of the sexes seems to be pretty rampant still in india and it makes me really sad. there is no way i could ever live here for that reason. i read a condensed version of the ramayana, the indian cultural epic story. in the story the main character's wife is kidnapped and held by another man/god and he almost doesn't take her back into his home after he rescues her because she may have been too friendly with her kidnapper. one cool thing about the ramayana was learning the 5 deadly sins of indian folk-lore: lust, anger, miserliness, egoism, and envy. hmm . . . interesting. there's also a lot of lore about jesus having spent time in india during his life. my swami believes that jesus was a yogi. i read the davinci code while in india, or thailand or something, and i read a book explaining the davinci code and i'm on jesus-theory overload these days. the indian newspapers are in a tiff over banning or not banning the davinci code movie. the indian prime minister only allowed the opinions of the christian camps before deciding to ban the movie or not. it wasn't banned in the country, but several states have banned the movie. notably, not the christian states, but the muslim ones. hmm . . . i don't know. and the movie comes with a disclaimer reminding everyone that it's fiction. duh. and the government is pushing right now to allow for quotas for students from OBC (standing for "other of the backward class") communities entering medical school. doctors all over the country are on strike against the quotas. so other doctors have gone on strike against those who are on strike against the quotas. i just can't believe what OBC stands for.
read more here: OBC craziness
i get lied to a lot in india. i don't know if it's just the way business is done or if it's because i'm a tourist, but i get blatantly lied to all the bloody time. a rickshaw driver will tell you that the ferry is closed and ask you to pay ten times as much for him to drive you around the island, for example. and then there's the triple pricing of everything for foreigners. the travel agent man in kerala told me that my plane ticket was arriving the next day for about a week, and it never arrived. the tailor told me my things would arrive the next day for about three days. rickshaw drivers say that they know the restaurant or store or street you're talking about, when they don't and they just drive you around and try to drop you off in the middle of nowhere. hotel staff will tell me that all the cheap rooms are full and if i want to stay i have to take the way expensive room, until i start to leave and then one mysteriously becomes available. and today a woman in an internet cafe told me that hers was the only internet cafe in the whole city of ahmedabad when i decided not to buy the $20 internet pass required to use the computers at her cafe. there was another cafe right down the street. before i left the yoga centre one of the students did a tarot reading for all the students in the yoga course. i chose the fool card, which made my swami giggle. a 30-year-old indian yogi man, giggling. one of my best memories. but it turns out the fool card is actually quite a nice card to get, so says jose-louis from chile. the tarot book said something about that card meaning something about continuing to trust people over and over and over again and how that's good because you don't live in the past or the future but now in the present. that's kind of a nice idea, but i think i'm becoming a bit embittered. and all information says that things will only get worse when i get into delhi. i'm afraid of returning to iowa city and going to target to get some shampoo and going to check out and being like, "yeah? who says i have to pay $2.75 for this shampoo? i'll give you $1.75 for it maybe. don't you know, in my country i specialize in selling shampoo and i know that this is way overpriced." or the woman at the olive garden will tell me there are no tables available and i'll kick up a fuss and storm away in a big scene meant to leave her chasing me out onto the street and offering me the table that's actually available. or i'll give a cab driver only half of what he's asking for because i know that he got lost on purpose to hike up the price of the ride and he'll chase me down and give me a good smack. so anyway. i recognize that that's the way things work here and i'm making the best of it. but i'm just tired of always having to be on my toes. then again, if my rickshaw driver hadn't stuck it to me today by taking the seriously way way far out of the way way to town i wouldn't have passed by the camel in the crowded street. yay camels!