Security in Delhi on flights to America is amazingly tight. First I had to get my bag x-rayed and sealed, and get my carry-on tagged. Then I checked in (where I'm sure my bag was x-rayed again), went through immigration, and went through a line to x-ray carry-ons. Then I had to return, stressed, to immigration because the guy who stamped my tickets and forms had forgotten to stamp one particular place. Then, when boarding the plane, all bags were opened and thoroughly searched by another, independent security team. We were required to boot up electronic devices to show they all did what they were supposed to do.
At each of these steps, they checked passports. I must've had mine checked half a dozen times.
Dinner on the flight (American Airlines international) wasn't particularly good, though it's still better than the food one gets on domestic United flights.
Breakfast was good, and sizable. I enjoyed the omelette. The yogurt, though not identical to the one on my flight to India, was similarly bad, tasting sweetened and artificial.
These long flights were marginally easier to cope with than the ones to India. Carrying a six hundred page pulp novel which I bought in Jodhpur, I was a bit more prepared this time. Still, I finished it before the first leg ended. The last few hours, sick of reading, of listening to music or discussion on an iPod, and of watching television, were particularly boring.
In Chicago, I landed, passed quietly through customs, browsed a bookstore briefly, drank water out of a water fountain (quite a change!), and boarded my connection.
Relatively soon I was back in the bay area and safely at home. I was happy to take a long, hot shower.
India: Oct 24: Flying Home
India: Oct 23: Gandhi Smitri, and Chokola (again)
We had a slow morning after a late night. After breakfast at home, we took a rickshaw to the Gandhi Smriti. Or at least we tried to. The rickshaw driver headed, as it turned out, to the Gandhi museum. At one point I noticed him driving through a part of town I didn't expect to be near and discovered his error. He refused to bring us to where we wanted to go and instead dropped us off at random. We refused to pay him. What a waste of time. It must've cost us an hour.
Instead of proceeding directly to the smriti from where we were, we grabbed a rickshaw to Connaught Place so J and N could look into flights for the rest of their trip (after I'd have gone) and so we could all mail postcards.
Finally, we grabbed a rickshaw to the smriti. (I wrote in my notes: "hopefully, smriti next.") I followed our location on the map. Indeed, when we got close to the destination, the driver admitted he also didn't know precisely where it was. He was pretty close--about a block or two away--and we directed him. Oy.
The smriti has a lot about Gandhi, his life, his goals, India's independence, and more. It includes a substantial, enormous museum. I got tired of it before I saw everything. I did see a lot more about British colonization than I expected. I also saw a neat doll exhibit with dioramas of scenes from Gandhi's life. One area of the smriti is obsessed with the last 48 hours of Gandhi's life. It's fairly morbid. All in all, it was definitely a cool place to visit.
After some trouble finding a rickshaw (because the smriti is in a residential neighborhood and they don't really just wander by), we managed to make it to Khan Market for Chokola. We enjoyed our drinks at Chokola so much during our previous visit (old pictures) near the beginning of my trip, we decided to return for a mid-afternoon snack. It didn't disappoint.
In the evening, we joined two of our host's friends and followed their suggestion to go to Drums of Heaven for Chinese food. It wasn't bad, but wasn't particularly good either. Simply fine. The best part of the meal were the starters: fried (unidentifiable) vegetables and a coriander soup (which I'd never seen before). Due to the atmosphere and lighting (very dark) and picture exhaustion, I didn't take any pictures.
Here are the few pictures I did take during the day.
India: Oct 22: Rajpath, and Recovering from an overnight train
Given that it's hard to get a great night's sleep on a overnight train, we had a lazy day as we recovered. Our train arrived in Delhi early in the morning. We headed to our friend's apartment (where we were staying again) to drop our stuff off. We attempted to go to the coffee shop down the street, but it wasn't open! What kind of coffee shop doesn't open until 10am?
Instead, we returned home. I ate some guavas. We'd been carrying these around for days (since Udaipur, I think), waiting for them to ripen. We also ate some very good potato parantha made by our friend's maid/cook/help. It mostly consisted of the filling, with enough dough to keep it together: that's how it should be. And it had just the right amount of salt.
After breakfast, full and bored, I decided to take a nap as my friends planned where to go after I left town.
After I woke, I ate a sweet or two from one of the boxes we'd been carrying for ages, then the three of us took a rickshaw to the Rajpath.
Rajpath
Rajpath is analogous to Washington D.C.'s lawn (a.k.a. National Mall). It runs from a famous monument, India Gate, past many open lawns, past the parliament buildings, to the president's residence.
Walking the Rajpath was quite soothing compared with walking almost any other place in any other city we visited in India: no smells, no honking, and people obeyed the lights. How weird!
Elsewhere in New Delhi
After the Rajpath, we took the metro to Connaught Place (CP). The metro was as efficient and clean as I remembered. It uses what appears to be cheap plastic tokens but are actually RFID chips. The government still searched bags at the entrance, though they waved me right by. I guess I don't look like a terrorist in the eyes of Indian police.
As the metro was new, although the Indian government built a good quality system, the riders still need to get used to it. People need to learn to let others get off before attempting to get on.
In CP, we stopped by a Costa Coffee. There, we met a friendly Pakistani man who quickly told us his life story (he lived in Las Vegas once) and gave us good wishes.
Later
Taking a rickshaw back to our friend's place, I observed rickshaw drivers have no patience at roundabouts. If they enter at one side and want to leave at the exact opposite, they'll usually drive a straight line across the multiple lanes of traffic, pass adjacent to the island, then cut across more lanes of traffic to leave. No one bothers merging and driving the circumference until needing to exit!
In the evening, our friend drove us to Buzz, a hip restaurant known more for its scene and its alcohol license than its food. We met some of his friends there.
After dinner, some people from our group started dancing on the tiny dance floor. Others joined them. The place became hopping. I chilled.
For a few more details on the day, especially sightseeing and dinner, look at these pictures.
India: Oct 21: Slow-Speed Wandering Through Jodhpur
Because the overnight train we were to take from Jodhpur back to Delhi was to leave in the early evening, and because we didn't have any other major sites we wanted to see Jodhpur, we spent the day lackadaisically browsing the city and eating. During the day, I took a handful of pictures. It was even hotter than usual and we spent as much time as possible sitting indoors or in the shade.
For lunch, we had a traditional thali (large Indian meal made from many small dishes) at the road-side restaurant attached to a cheap hotel (Hotel Priya). It was a fine but not notable meal. Happily, it was reasonably-sized--we didn't have to overeat. We followed up lunch with a trip to a Cafe Coffee Day.
Once downtown, at the clock tower, we headed to a bookstore (Krishna Book Depot) with a surprisingly good selection of English books. I bought one for the plane ride home. We never would have found this shop without a reference in our guide book. It was one of very few bookstores we saw outside Delhi, and certainly the only one that carried English books. Then, in the same vicinity, we went to an internet cafe, an art shop selling paintings and sketches, a juice stand, and a road-side samosa stand. The last looked fresh enough that this was one of the few times I disregarded the World Health Organization's advice to avoid eating street food. The samosa was good.
By this time, it was mid-afternoon. We walked to our hotel, relaxed for a bit, then rickshawed with our bags to a restaurant across the street from the train station. We had a decent, early dinner at Midtown Vegetarian Restaurant, then boarded our overnight train to Delhi.
This train trip was a bit more pleasant than other ones. Because we were in an AC car, they gave us blankets, sheets, and a pillow. :) Unlike our other overnight trip, the blankets turned out to be unnecessary--our AC car was sealed well (i.e., had no drafts), so everything stayed fairly comfortable.
Before going to bed, I had more sweets from the box we were carrying around since Jaipur.
One neat observation about train travel: Even if your eyes are closed, you know when you stop by a train station because suddenly things smell. (Stations tend to smell more than the countryside, and stopping allows the smell time to intensify.)
India: Oct 20: Jodhpur
This day we made the untraditional decision to see Jodhpur's sites efficiently and implemented it, seeing everything we wanted to see in the city before dinnertime. In fact, we were so efficient we actually had to kill time in the later afternoon before dinner.
The day's rapid adventures are primarily portrayed in these pictures and movies. As you can tell from the pictures, there's a reason Jodhpur's known as the blue city.
Jodhpur, at least the Old Town, has crooked streets like Udaipur. We thought at first that it also had Jaipur's negative of aggressive salesmen and touts, but eventually realized that these were found only in the center plaza where tourists tend to be; in much of the rest of the city we were hassled less than in Jaipur.
We started the day with a walk through Jodhpur's slightly smelly streets to an omelette shop, which turned out to be closed. Instead, we ended up at the Shri Mishrilal Hotel for makhani lassis. They were sweet, like pudding, but more tart.
We grabbed a rickshaw up to Mehrangarh Fort. For efficiency, we arranged to have our driver for the whole day. During the course of the day, we learned a lot about him such as his age (24) and that he worked in stone mines for five years. (I believed him; I don't think it was a story for sympathy.) He also told us about being mailed fifty thousand rupees (about a thousand US dollars) by an American tourist he drove around for a couple of days. (I think it was pretty clear he was hoping we'd be as preposterously generous.) In addition, he told us an Israeli group he drove around mailed him a thank you gift of chocolates and pictures they took of him with his son. Throughout the day, we kept trying to pay him more because we kept him longer than we'd originally agreed. He kept refusing. Yet, at the end of the day, when we paid him what we agreed (plus a small tip roughly corresponding to the bonuses he kept refusing), he asked for more. I think this reflects some interesting cultural/conversational expectations.
At the fort, I paid extra for the audio tour. It was a good investment. Not only was the tour paced well, it was lively and educational. Since my friends didn't pay for the audio tour, we split up, which led to great difficulty meeting up later. Running up and down the fort looking for each other is a lot of work!
On the way down from the fort, we stopped by Jaswant Thada, which is a cenotaph (a tomb built for ceremonial purposes, not to house a body) for a ruler of Jodhpur.
We then had our driver take us to Mandore, a town a bit north of Jodhpur with many temple-like cenotaphs. Interestingly, all these shrines--and there were many--were built and carved by workers paid only with food.
After Mandore, we were off to another palace, Umaid Bhawan, and its attached museum. Then we went to the train station to book tickets. Given our experience in Jaipur, we knew trains filled up. We waited in five lines as we were referred from bureaucrat to bureaucrat. At one point we were told there were seats in the tourist quota on the train we wanted. Near the end of the adventure, when we were in the back office finally getting things settled, I got the impression that it turned out they didn't have seats in the tourist quota and had to and did bump other people to seat us (because they told us they could seat us). Also, given how protective we were of our passports during the trip, it was nice N managed to negotiate it so we just showed them our U.S. drivers licenses and orally told them our passport numbers to prove we were not Indians. (I think she did it by bluffing that'd we have to go to our hotel to get our passports, and they frankly didn't want to have to deal with us again.)
To relax from our busy day, we had our driver take us to one of the few restaurant/bars in Jodhpur, On The Rocks. It wasn't yet open--we were too efficient visiting sights! Instead, our driver took us to a sweet shop he recommended, Sbree Kanji Sweets. We bought and ate some snacks, then returned to On The Rocks, which still wasn't open. We thanked and dismissed our driver and browsed nearby stores: clothing, alcohol, antiques/jewelry/trinkets.
Finally, when On The Rocks opened (7pm?), except for shoddy service, we had a pretty pleasing Chinese-Indian meal. It was hard to get the waiter's attention. He got one order wrong. The bill was incorrect. We had to ask twice for water, and never got refills despite asking. I guess I can add to this list that the service was slow, but that's pretty typical for India.
By 9:30pm, when we finished dinner, the atmosphere at the restaurant was festive. We moved to the restaurant's attached bar. It was hopping. The music, however, was pretty bad. The bar remixed songs to have a stronger bass line. Yet, it didn't use good songs to start with and the remixing simply made them worse. At the bar I had a glass of Royal Challenge Indian whiskey, which was not bad at all.
And that's how to do Jodhpur in a day. Obviously, refer to the pictures for details/color commentary.
India: Oct 19: Ranakpur and Kumbhalgarh
We chartered a car to drive us from Udaipur to our next destination, Jodhpur. On the way, we stopped by Ranakpur, an intricately carved Jain temple and one of the highlights of my trip to India, and Kumbhalgarh Fort, an enormous mountain fortress that's also pretty extraordinary. I took many pictures. They illustrate the day much more then the following words ever could.
For breakfast, we quickly tried eating the leftover pakoras we made at our cooking class the previous night. They were sad, soft, and soggy; we threw them away.
Kumbhalgarh was our first destination. En route, J observed that Rajasthan has many buildings perched on hilltops. I imagine it's because of all the wars that occurred in the state.
At Kumbhalgarh, we stopped outside, looked around, headed inside, looked around more, and climbed to the palace-stronghold at the top of the mountain, all the while taking pictures. Some pictures came out great because of the beautiful azure sky. Kumbhalgarh is impressive, not simply because of the mountaintop citadel but because of the size of the fortress itself: the outside wall stretches 22 miles, encompassing 36 square miles of land within the fort's boundary. I thought the palace at the top of the fort was anti-climatic, but N liked its simple design; unlike many other historic complexes we visited, it lacked bright colors, shops, etc. Also, ignoring the few colorful flowerbeds and some spotlights embedded in the ground, one could easily imagine it was, say, the seventeenth century. The fort hasn't changed in ages.
After the fort, our driver had us stop by a mediocre and overpriced roadside buffet. At 200 rupees per person, it was more expensive than most meals we had in India. N and J weren't as down on it as I was: N liked the yogurt and J liked the dal.
In the afternoon we explored the main temple at Ranakpur. I'd read a lot of effusive material about it beforehand. Nevertheless, it met my high expectations -- it was as impressive as I imagined. The combination of the exceptional detail with the size of the temple was nearly inconceivable. Each pillar was unique, and there were many of them. I wonder how long it took how many people to carve everything.
There are many alcoves within the temple, each with a statue of a deity. We weren't supposed to take pictures of the deities; everything else was fair game. I hate to say it, but some statues looked funny because they had glue-on eyeballs. Meanwhile, the doors to some alcoves were closed. I wonder why.
While exploring the temple, a security guard pointed out an interesting sight (see the pictures) and expected me to be amazed (I was not), then asked me for money. Similarly, I received a (sweet) blessing from a priest, complete with colored paint on the forehand, then asked for money. Not too tasteful. And he didn't want a small donation; he asked for a few hundred or a thousand rupees.
After the main temple at Ranakpur, we stuck our head in another temple, then found our driver and continued our journey to Jodhpur.
It was nice to travel in a car for a change. We were traveling in style compared to our past train and bus trips. Nevertheless, the trip wasn't all lollipops and roses. There was a truck traffic accident along what would best be called a one-and-a-half lane road that backed up the road for multiple kilometers. (Yes, multiple kilometers: I looked at the odometer.) We passed two or three hundred trucks! (Yes, I counted.) The accident took up enough of the road that another truck couldn't pass. We could pass, though with dramatic tipping as one pair of wheels drove where the shoulder fell off, because we were in a smaller vehicle. The accident must've happened hours ago to have such a lengthy backup. Or perhaps the road is simply well traveled -- it's the major Bombay-Delhi highway. (Yes, a road that could barely be said to have two lanes is the highway connecting two major cities.) In any case, we were very happy we weren't on a bus.
Because it's cleaner than a bus or train, I might normally have appreciated traveling in a car with the windows rolled up. However, we already got dirty enough from hiking around Kumbhalgarh that this bonus from our method of transportation didn't matter to me.
Sitting in the front seat, I got to watch as the driver signaled to other cars. He honked if he was going to pass someone and wanted them to move over. He honked when going around a blind turn. (Recall that most roads are effectively a single lane.) He flashed his headlights or brights multiple times to indicate here I am; I'm going through. Other cars flashed their lights once to acknowledge the signal. When other cars flashed him multiple times, he also responded and acknowledged. He generally used his turn signal to indicate to oncoming traffic where to go--i.e., get over there. Obviously, he didn't use these signals consistently, and many other drivers had other variations, but the general principles were relatively widely applied.
Once in Jodhpur, we walked around hunting for a hotel. As in Udaipur, per my request we leaned toward heritage hotels. The first we stopped by had strange architecture, including beds in nooks, a green color theme, and a feel that was just plain odd. We didn't take it because the room the proprietress wanted to give us had no air flow. Instead, we ended up at the Shahi Guest House, a different 350-year-old haveli. As you'll see from the next day's pictures, the roof had a good view of the town and especially Jodhpur's fortress.
Incidentally, our driver couldn't bring us from hotel to hotel because the car wouldn't fit down the streets in that (older) part of the city.
While hotel hunting, we saw someone block printing, in effect stamping a pattern on fabric. Neat!
For dinner, we dined outside at Bollygood. It was quite good overall; I liked every dish.
India: Oct 18: Even More Udaipur
Even though we'd exhausted the few major sights in Udaipur, we decided to spend a goodly amount of time there simply because we liked the feel of the place. Thus, this day we didn't do much except run errands, see some minor sights, and take a cooking class! The few pictures I took this day are mainly from the cooking class.
First, we got up. J negotiated to get a suit tailor-made. We had breakfast, then stopped by a travel agency to price various possibilities for how to continue our trip. We then retreated to the hotel for a time, walked across a bridge we'd been eyeing, and caught a rickshaw to some gardens (Saheliyon-ki-Bari).
The gardens were okay. Within them was a science museum with a random assortment of exhibits such as minerals, tangrams, sand, and the atomic structure of hydrogen.
We left the garden and began walking the perimeter, intending to make our way to a lake. It was unpleasantly hot, however, and we were getting hungry, so instead we got someone to point us to a place to eat. (It wasn't a very commercial neighborhood, so eateries were hard to come by.) The place, Chetan, in the back of a small open-air market/convenience store, turned out to be South Indian. Yet, despite us being in North India, my masala dosa was the best I've ever had.
After lunch, we took a rickshaw to the lake (Fateh Sagar) and strolled along it for ten minutes, then continued with the rickshaw back to our hotel. Interestingly, the rickshaw's motor was so weak that it had trouble going up hills--going up to the dam required tacking. Also about the rickshaw ride: this rickshaw driver didn't use his horn. It was awesome! He had as much opportunity as most drivers to use it, yet did not.
We thought we were returning to the hotel to take a cooking class. The instructor (the wife of the owner of the hotel), however, wasn't feeling well. We had also tried to take the class the previous day, but there was a power outage so it was canceled. I guess we were fated not to take her class. Instead, we returned to the woman we'd met two days earlier and convinced her to offer a cooking class for us at the last minute. (We didn't want to leave Udaipur, a town with so many Indian cooking classes, without managing to take one.) She agreed! We were to return in the evening.
We returned to what we now thought of as our cafe (simply because we visited it many times) to kill some time before class. We ordered a fresh lime soda and it was done right, coming with one vial of lime, one vial of sugar-water, and one empty glass. In contrast, many other times we ordered lime soda, we got only two glasses, and the larger one wouldn't fit all the liquid. If we wanted to make a balanced drink, we'd have to pour out some of the liquids before mixing them. (If we mixed them directly, we'd end up with a full glass but not enough of one ingredient in it to balance the flavors. I suppose we could mix everything by pouring back and forth between the glasses, but that does bad things to the carbonation.)
Anyway, while in the coffeeshop, we met again the couple we saw a different evening coming out of the cooking class we were now signed up for. (Yes, they raved about the class.) Or, well, we ran into the wife. The husband was off taking pictures of policemen who were supposed to be on alert but were actually sitting on a bridge, playing cards, and watching the sunset. She said he'll sell the pictures to a newspaper.
We also ran into Raf again.
After sitting in the cafe, we killed some time by chatting again with the tailor. He works in five shops. He said he used to work in a coffeeshop, but that required talking too much and he got tired of it.
Then it was finally time for the cooking class! The class was great: hanging out in a charming Indian's house and learning about her life and food. It was a modest house, consisting of a kitchen and a room that doubled as a living room and bedroom. The latter is where we ate, sitting on the couch after finishing cooking. The house has a small, cunning, almost-pet mouse. It skittered across the kitchen twice while we cooked.
As she taught, our instructor elaborated more on her life than we learned earlier. She's approximately 38. Why approximately? Because she doesn't know when she was born, not even the season. Also, she acts as a second/first mother to the kid who lives next door; his mother died of yellow fever.
Being Brahmin, she is vegetarian (almost vegan), so we only learned to cook vegetarian food. But, as she has a restaurant, she told us stories about having to learn how to cook non-vegetarian food. For instance, the first time she tried to cook an omelet, she dropped the eggs, partially because she was surprised by and disliked the smell. She had trouble flipping omelettes, breaking many in the process.
She also mentioned a neat tidbit: people get flour (atta) in India by buying grain, taking it to a grinder, and paying two rupees per kilogram. No one buys flour directly.
We learned how to make a lot of dishes: masala chai tea, coriander chutney, potato & onion pakora, aubergine (eggplant) and tomato masala curry, vegetable palau (a.k.a. vegetable biryani), naan with cheese and tomato, chapati, parantha, potato parantha, and sweet parantha. As you can tell, we spent quite a while learning how to deal with dough. She give us a detailed printed sheet of recipes on which I took many additional notes. This sheet had recipes for a few more dishes that we didn't learn how to cook.
Given the length of the list of items we learned to cook, it's no surprise we made too much food. Although she kept asking us to eat, and joking with N in Hindi, we left with many leftovers. When we got back to our hotel, it turned out the owner stayed up late to wait for us.
Later addendum: Even though we spent three days in Udaipur, there are other sights that might be worth seeing should I ever return: Lake Palace (hotel/restaurants) (they don't allow non-guests to visit the island), the crystal gallery, and the sound and light show. Also, in the general vicinity of Udaipur: Mount Abu (only hill station in Rajasthan), Chittorgarh Fort, the temple in Nagda, and the Jagat temple.
India: Oct 17: Assorted Udaipur Sights
I took a smattering of pictures at every site we visited this day.
Because we liked Udaipur and decided to remain here several days, we knew we could explore at a lackadaisical pace and still see everything we wanted. We started the day on yet another rooftop terrace eating an okay breakfast at Mewar Haveli. After breakfast, we wandered into Art'o'craft, a good painting/art shop with pieces in a variety of creative styles.
We then took a rickshaw to the Vintage Car Museum. The maharaja has a fondness for classic cars and opened his collection to the public. The curator of the collection opened each garage in turn for us and accompanied us as we explored, telling stories about the cars along the way. Apparently, on a trip to England, an old maharaja was insulted by a salesman who looked at him and thought he couldn't afford a Rolls Royce. The maharaja bought the store's inventory and used all the cars as garbage trucks. Rolls Royce, thinking this use of their vehicles would tarnish the brand, offered to buy them back. The maharaja refused.
The curator also told us a story about the front axle of a Rolls Royce getting broken. It was brought to Rolls Royce for repair and maintenance. Rolls Royce returned the car, fixed, without a bill, instead saying, "our axles don't break."
The curator also told us some interesting facts:
- The Rolls Royce logo changed from red to black when Charles Rolls died.
- Old steering wheels/steering columns previously impaled drivers. This was one of the first impetuses for seat belts.
- Some old cars were built with wooden frames!
After lunch and a brief a detour through Sajjan Niwas Gardens / Gulab Park, we walked to the south entrance of City Palace. We wanted to visit Jag Mandir, an old island-palace (not to be confused with the luxurious, relatively recent construction of the gleaming white Lake Palace).
Visiting Jag Mandir made us angry. First, the price listed at the booth was twice the price printed in the pamphlet (250 rupees), which was supposed to be valid throughout the whole month. Nevertheless, we paid and rode to the island. But, the only accessible part of the island was a large and overpriced restaurant and an absurdly, almost mockingly small museum. The rest of the island, which held some ruins, was under repair/restoration and off-limits. Although the ride across the lake was nice (see the pictures), we felt seriously ripped off. Had we known what it was like, we might not have even bothered going if it was free. When back on the mainland, we complained and were directed to the corporate office.
The corporate office was no good at customer service. They kept trying to explain to us how we were wrong. They told us repeatedly that many people go to the island for (a four thousand rupee) dinner; none of those customers had ever complained about the price of the ride to the island or the lack of things to do there. We didn't think this was relevant. They insisted the trip to the island is worth as much as they charged, and we were wrong in thinking it wasn't worth that much. And, as for the inaccessibility of many places on the island, we should've known. Who cares if we were mislead by their own literature? Furthermore, they have a corporate policy of no refunds.
After venting, we returned to our hotel to pick up the sweets we bought in Jaipur. We ran into the hotel owner and mentioned our negative experience (unexpectedly high price, nothing to see) to him. He commiserated, and explained that in Udaipur and India in general prices have been going up: real estate, stock market, etc. He also took this time to show us some of his paintings. They're very exact. He paints them by copying pictures. In addition to painting, he binds books.
We brought our snacks to a cafe and ate. The tout from yesterday came by and we talked with him for a while. Then we talked to an interesting, entertaining Swiss guy, Raf, who's on his twenty-somethingth trip to India, and his friend Dushan. We'd actually run into them at this cafe multiple times while in Udaipur.
Raf gave lots to advice and told many stories:
- He told us a story about a massive Indian holiday/festival (Kumbh Mela) that he, and 11 million Indians (!), attended. It apparently was visible from space. He bathed in the Ganges, supposedly washing his sins away. Now, he claimed, he could go back to being a "fresh bastard."
- He said if people do their secret things with you, you'll become friends. That's why he said you've got to drink with Muslims and eat meat with Hindus.
- He said that if Indians were trying to be too friendly, simply tell them friendlily to f--- off. It'll be okay.
- He told us stories about traveling in Hungary and meeting gypsies and pickpockets.
- He told many offensive jokes about India, including one about Gandhi and apples, another about Muhammads (yes, plural), and a third about Pakistan ("fill it with water").
- He espoused the virtues of saffron alcohol ("kesan" ?).
We ate a good overall, solid dinner at The Whistling Teal, located in a hotel, Jhadol Haveli. When deciding what to order, someone said (I forget who), "we should try to avoid the familiar culprits." I was amused by this (unintentionally) different way of saying usual suspects.
We chatted with our waiter. It started with talking about the types of flour used in halvas and rice puddings, then spread to the variety of styles/customs in India, and then to how movies affect the way holidays/festivals are observed. We also talked about the difference in food between urban and rural areas. For instance, halva is urban; it's only eaten in rural areas on special occasions. Finally, we got tips from the waiter on what's worth seeing in and near Udaipur.
On the way to our hotel, we saw a party in the streets. Many people, density packed, hit sticks together in time to music. Apparently it was part of a festival called navratri.
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