wheely bag

Monsoon sky

2009-06-14T05:10:00.000-07:00

A night at the circus

2009-06-08T03:20:00.000-07:00

The evening opened with a limp explosion of cheerleaders shaking their silver pom poms and a pantomime of the Revolution involving unicycles and a disco ball. A lone trapeze artist swung above pretty Lao ladies dancing a traditional dance. A contortionist distorted herself on a platform above pretty Lao ladies dancing a traditional dance. And Lao ladies alone, without any circus-y distractions, danced a traditional dance. Two bands of martial artists sparred; two girls gyrated inside rings of spinning silver. A fat woman and a lady boy argued, seemingly for hours, at the “beauty shop.” The band played out of tune; the audience laughed. And at the end, seven performers dangled off a bicycle pedaled by the hot clown. It was a night at the Lao circus.

Hotpants & sugarcane

2009-06-08T03:15:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, the hot season started abruptly. Its arrival was announced not just by heat and dust and crabbiness in certain expat households, but by the roadside proliferation of sugarcane juice and hotpants for sale.

Hotpants are self-explanatory, or should be. As for the sugarcane, stalks are hauled in from the countryside and delivered to neighborhood micro-businesses and the kind of open-air mom-and-pops that sell sticky rice cakes, candy, and cigarettes. The stalks get stripped of their hard outer layer and pushed repeatedly through slow-moving metal rollers; the greenish juice collects in a pitcher and is served over ice in a plastic bag. Some days I really wish I could be the kind of girl that zips around on a motorbike hung with plastic bags of sugarcane juice and fried noodles and grilled chicken, but it’s just not me. One bag was enough to satisfy my curiosity.

While the soaring temperatures would also seem to promise an end to domestic harmony, such as it is, the heat might actually resolve a long-running dispute concerning our wall decorations. Our Bluetak is melting, and taking our two sets of educational propaganda—twenty-four panels in all—with it.

Isaac quite likes the series that insinuates if you don’t brush your teeth, they will creep out of your mouth, frolic in the sink, and then start their own revolutionary tooth republic. But he is vehemently opposed to the artwork in the piece warning children not to throw their empty cans and plastic bags into the water, lest a cute little fish get stuck and need to be rescued by even cuter little crabs. He’s been campaigning, unsuccessfully, to get someone else to share his antipathy, but he may prevail yet: I’m afraid our fish have only a few weeks left before I tire of readjusting the grid.

The first six

2009-06-08T03:12:00.000-07:00

It’s been almost six months since we arrived, six months that have settled so much into routine that nothing seems extraordinary any more, not the novice monks chatting on cell phones nor the vendors pushing wooden carts laden with coconuts nor the prepubescent motorbike drivers, though a particularly small boy will catch my eye.

So what does stand out? I got mildly electrocuted by a banana muffin toasting in our Pro-Life oven, purchased with much fanfare from a ladyboy in Thailand, who insisted on taking our photos with our new product, then getting her staff to unpack it, break it, and pack it up again. That’s not why it shocked me—any appliance does, since the electricity isn’t grounded—but it does explain the rubbish timer. I rode in a tuk tuk that towed another tuk tuk (the one belonging to my original driver) for ten kilometers down National Highway 13, Laos’ “busiest” road, the two vehicles nominally attached to one another with a bit of blue plastic string that broke more than once. I stole a kitten from the grounds of the Asian Development Bank, and then promptly gave him away as a birthday gift.

And that’s about it. I teach banking, economics, and soil professionals during the week and beer salesmen on Saturdays, right after I visit the organic veggie market; Sunday mornings are dedicated to the herbal steam room at the gym. Every so often consumer needs drive us to visit a Thai mall, and the Thai mall drives us promptly back into Vientiane’ sleepy embrace.

Market Day

2008-09-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

With Isaac recovered from his (possibly airplane-food induced) bout of food poisoning, we decided to explore some of the markets around Mong Kok in Kowloon. First we hit up the Goldfish Market, where we cooed over the baby turtles ("Isaac, I want a baby turtle!") and the pretty fish ("Oooh! So pretty.") .

Then we traipsed past the rows of phony Le Sportsac bags and mounds of real polyester panties at the tail end of the "Ladies' Market," pausing only to provoke the proprietor of a fruit stall for dillydallying in front of plums we didn't intend to buy. Next was the Flower Market, where I took lots of photos and Isaac befriended a cat. And finally, we visited the sad little songbirds in their market, but they were so sad we didn't stay long.

My first Lao hippy

2008-05-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

I want to be a hippy. Isaac does not. So he didn’t much care for Pi Mai Lao (Lao New Year’s),
when the Lao wish each other well by dousing one another with buckets of water and handfuls of flour for five or six days in a row; for him, that was five or six days he had to use his sun umbrella as a shield and carefully seal his daily essentials—wallet, passport, cell phone—in multiple plastic bags.

Eventually, I also tired of the hourly soaking. But on the first official day of Pi Mai, when we crossed the Mekong to watch the people building sand stupas and I found myself soggy and barefoot, my feet sinking into thick mud, teenagers smearing the soot scraped off the bottom of cooking pots onto my cheeks, I had a revelation. “I can’t go to Korea and earn money!” I thought to myself. “I need to stay here and be the hippy I’ve always wanted to be.”

Perhaps my vision was encouraged by the fact that the day before, I had met my first Lao hippy. Like many hippies, he comes from a family with a good deal of money, and is slowly transforming one of their properties into a gallery/performance space; Isaac and I were walking past on our way to our guesthouse when he stopped and invited us up to the rooftop, where, on a couple of different occasions, we met a Welsh painter and a Chinese yoga instructor and an experienced French expat who explained how easy it will be for us to buy fake work visas and live in Laos forever.

Not surprisingly, our hippy has long hair and a green thumb and self-proclaimed aversion to materialism and bathing, which has provoked some of his neighbors to nickname him “smells-like-turtle-shit-armpits”. The fact that he slathers himself in self-tanning cream in a land of whitening beauty products also prompts them to snicker that he looks older than his seventy-year old father.

But less predictably, he speaks Lao, Vietnamese, Thai, French and English fluently; can credibly impersonate Naomi Campbell and a ladyboy in his one-man walk-off; and has at various points in his life taught Braille, been stalked by the paparazzi while dating a Vietnamese pop singer, and broken off his arranged marriage a week before it was to be consummated. As Isaac put it, “That man has a lot of flavor.”

He always apologizes before mentioning something crude, and professes to hate talking about sex. But he does both readily, and to our delight, he revealed how filthy Lao people can be in their own language. That afternoon I’d seen him gambling with the owner of my guesthouse, and so I asked them if they’d grown up together. “Oh yeah. I joke with her that I knew her when her feet were as big as a snail, and now her snail is as big as her feet” which makes sense after he explained that 1) Lao snails are relatively big and 2) snail is slang for “pussy, and I don’t mean Mt. Phousi, but the real punani.”

We asked for more examples, and he told us that that morning when someone was tailgating him, he turned around and shouted “Why is this great big truck trying to crawl into my little tiny asshole?!" Lest we thought only hippies spoke thus, he had plenty of evidence about what people had to say about parts of his body other than his armpits and what the women he spies on have to say about their husbands after a few Beer Laos.

Ah, Laos. The more we learn about it, the more we love it.

We tried

2008-05-11T00:18:00.000-07:00

As we all know, Isaac and I are terrible tourists, good at cramming ourselves full of food and befriending cats and waiters, but not much else. This problem is clearly not just Isaac’s—I was quite on my own when I went to Cusco, Peru, and failed to see Machu Pichu. So upon our return to Luang Phabang, we determined to do some of the touristy things we had neglected on our previous stay.

First we took a trip up the Mekong to the Pak Ou caves, repositories for damaged and defunct Buddha images from the surrounding towns. On the way to the caves, we were deposited at the “Whisky Village,” famed for its lao lao production but now peddling Beer Lao T-shirts and “silk” scarves from China passed off as local products. On the boat ride back, Isaac and I stopped talking because I called him a baby for wanting to sit on the shady side of the boat. In the half hour in-between, the caves themselves revealed some lovely cracked, flaking Buddhas, beautiful in their decrepitude.

Next, I signed up for a cooking class at our favorite LP restaurant, Tum Tum Cheng. We started out with a tour of the local wet market. Most of the produce heaped up on tarps and tables—the multicolored collections of chillies, mushrooms, eggplants; the knobs of ginger and galangal and stalks of lemongrass; the pyramids of silver fish and buckets of snails—were familiar from trips to other markets in other countries, but some things seemed new and distinctly Lao: the spicy bark of a tree used in a traditional stew; the bags of mak toum fruits for tea; the packets of dried brown things with untranslatable names and purposes.

After the market, we returned to the open-air kitchen to find all the ingredients perfectly prepped for us and a Taiwanese television crew ready to film an episode of “blah blah China”—I can’t remember the name, though I had to toast it twice for the camera, once with real lao lao, and once with water in my shot glass. And so our token shallot chopping and sips of mango wine and turns timidly pushing vegetables around a wok were narrated in Mandarin by hip hop dancer Locking Elmo. If you get a chance to see it, I am the frizzy-haired white girl instructing a cute Asian boy in “Sexxy Tigger” T-shirt how to stuff a spring roll.

Our third foray into organized tourist activities involved a morning of elephant riding. At first, as we ambled along through the teak forest on our little wooden platform, Isaac’s sun parasol shielding our fair skin, the mahout singing to his beast, I felt like we were shooting a sequel to Indochine. But when the mahout jumped off the elephant’s neck, ordered me to take his place, and turned his attention to photographing the two Scandinavian girls in tank tops riding behind us, only occasionally reprimanding our elephant when it wandered off into the bushes for a snack, I was once again another tourist clutching her Stay Another Day propaganda.

Our fourth excursion, a trip to the Kuang Si waterfalls, never happened, our burst of activity at the beginning being more than enough for one month. Instead, we went back to our old ways, drinking coffee all day at Joma and retiring at night to play Uno with the boys at our guesthouse.

Vang Viang, Part Two

2008-02-05T02:23:00.001-08:00

I couldn't let my yesterday self get the last word in on Vang Viang. Bob Marley is still wearing out the stereosystems around town, but this morning we woke up to sunshine and fluffy white clouds decorating the karst formations across the river from our bungalow.

Although the surrounding area has scores of caves to be explored and roads to be bicycled, we, quite predictably, have done nothing. After breakfast, the owner, who speaks Lao, French, Thai, English, Russian, Hebrew (from his days as an agriculture student in Israel), and Hungarian (from his further studies in Budapest) serenaded us with Beatles covers on his acoustic guitar; this impromptu concert segued directly into lunch, during which we watched groups of naked little boys splash around the opposite bank.

After lunch we hailed a songthaew headed for the post office so we could mail some fair trade stuffed giraffes to Isaac's new niece and my nephew-to-be. School kids pedaling earnestly home streamed behind our truck, the girls shaded by frilly sun parasols, the boys shouldering floppy satchels, the novice monks in bright orange. As Isaac has been fond of repeating since we arrived in Laos, I love this country.

Vang Viang, Part One

2008-02-04T02:53:00.000-08:00

The other day I allowed myself the pleasure of eavesdropping on a threesome of expats at a slick Vientiane cafe. A member of the trio, an American-sounding woman doubtlessly working for one of the diplomatic or NGO outfits whose money ensures stores are well stocked with wine, pate, and imported cheese, made a disparaging remark about Vang Viang. Apparently, she had heard such horrid things about the place--like girls walking through town in their bikinis, just the sort of behavior Isaac and I also like to allot self-righteous Good Tourist/Bad Tourist labels to--that she had stayed away her first four years working in Laos. When she finally did go, some of her worst fears were confirmed: the town was itchy with backpackers eating banana pancakes and abusing Skype.

At the time, I dismissed her comments as the snotty insecurity of long-term expat. Why so much hatin'? But the moment we stepped onto our cramped, rundown Korean "VIP" bus stuffed with tourists clad in T-shirts advertising Beer Chang or proclaiming that they were "same, same--but different" all my old horror of South East Asian backpackers returned. Isaac told me, in more refined language, to stop being such an intolerant bitch, but I had flashbacks of sweating it out in the back of songthaew in Koh Chang while a cheap Londoner, balking over her $2 share of the fare, asserted her right to save her money over the vocal protests of a white-haired, white-skinned lothario anxious to get his two young brown honeys back to his love shack.

This time, our fellow passengers turned out to be perfectly quiet and innocuous. Still, as we were walking through town today in search of some chocolate, something the snotty but strangely wise expat said came back to me. Friends. Oh yes, Friends. At each of the neighboring three cafes with benches-instead-of-tables we passed, curly haired twenty-somethings were leaning back on their pillows watching old episodes of Friends. Yikes.

A Seedier Singapore

2008-01-20T20:50:00.001-08:00

Fellow travelers have all sorts of snippy things to say about Singapore, its love of social engineering, its smoothly functioning modernity--as if, being in Asia, Singapore has a duty to be exotic. But as a tourist, I love it. I love its cleanliness, its excellent public transportation, its punitive measures to discourage driving. I love its hawker centers, its tropical fruits, its beautifully landscaped parks. I wouldn't want to live in a paternalistic one party democracy, but I'm glad Tiger Air will give me an excuse to return again and again.

That said, we were still excited when our friend Sherry and her police detective boyfriend Steven promised to show us the seedier side of Singapore in the red light district of Geylang.Because Geylang is almost as much about food as it is about sex, we started out the evening with some excellent dim sum. Isaac claims it was the best cha shu bao he's ever eaten, but he tends to lavish superlatives on whatever is currently making his stomach happy.

Next, we made the rounds of the groups of street girls, who each staked out a different block: the beautiful and expensive young women from mainland China in their tiny, tiny shorts, glittering belly rings, and push-up bras; the more casual Filippino women; the handful of Indian women dressed modestly in saris; the transvestites and lady-boys; and saddest of all, the China mothers, women who have been allowed to accompany their school-age children but denied working visas and so prostitute themselves in order to maintain their family.

We finished our tour next to the carefully numbered bungalows serving as legal brothels with "fishbowls" of Thai women lounging around in lacy underwear: apparently, the Singaporean government has decreed that only the Thai shall be prostitutes. Isaac and Steven were given two minutes to go inside.

As we threaded our way through some back alleys, we also spied on card tables layered with pornographic DVDs or serving as platforms for rolling the dice. The more serious gambling is tucked away inside, only accessible to those who know somebody, as is the limited amount of drug dealing which still goes on, despite the mandatory death sentence for drug trafficking.

We finished off the evening with more food, heading for a string of roadside fruit stalls piled with mangosteens, rose apples, star fruits, lychees, dragon fruit. After warning us not to over-indulge in rambutans or dukus, which are considered "heaty," the proprietor filled up small pink plastic sacks with fruit. But this was just a diversion: we had been brought here for the high-grade, D-24 durians selling for 10 Sing dollars a kilogram at a stall on the corner. All over SE Asia hotels and other public spaces guard against this fruit's offensive smell by posting "no durian" signs. But to anyone who has encountered the Bangkok-sewer smell of stinky tofu, the durian's odour isn't so off-putting.

Optimistically, we bought a beautiful 2.5 kg specimen and some cooling fresh young coconuts, durian also being notoriously "heaty". We each took a chunk and Isaac, being the type to scald his tongue on chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven, stuffed his mouth with the creamy flesh, which he immediately spit out. After he had swished out the taste with enough coconut water, he passed his judgment: rotten onions. Sherry and Steven were incredulous, defending, as many people from the region do, the "king of fruits."

Isaac, with his prodigious sense of smell and imagination, is also the type to declare perfectly good food "soapy" or "moldy" or "footy," but this time he was dead-on. The durian tasted like rotting onions. Still, I ate my share, one nibble at a time, hoping this was an acquired taste I could achieve. I was punished for this adventurousness with durian burps all night long.

Blind Man Drives Autorickshaw; No One Hurt

2008-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

New Year’s morning found Isaac inordinately crabby and complainy, even for him: I slept for hours as he warned of mounting hunger pangs, and when we finally made it out of our guesthouse I deemed Kashi, our favorite café in Fort Cohin, too crowded with tourists for my taste, dragging him to a malarial “eco” garden restaurant where he waited yet another forty minutes for stale toast. A subsequent cold coffee at Kashi restored his spirits somewhat, but what really turned his frown upside down was seeing the flag drop for The Rickshaw Run, in which over sixty autorickshaw teams from countries with traffic laws attempt to race each other over the potholed, cow-infested streets between Fort Cochin and Katmandu, a distance of over 2,000 miles, in two weeks. He rhapsodized about the race all day, until our new expat friend Mathew, who keeps an autorickshaw handy for dissertation breaks during the monsoon season, offered to let him drive his.

Several days later Isaac and I met Mathew in front of the Santa Cruz Basilica and drove south to the Veli field, a dusty parade ground adjacent to the municipal crematorium and the Little Flower Church Cemetery. Isaac wasn’t the only student that day: we saw ladies being tutored by the St. Jude’s School of Motor Driving and Mathew’s wife Susana, who never learned to ride a bike growing up in Cairo, was practicing independently on a rusty three speed without working brakes.

Isaac had some trouble starting the autorickshaw, but once Mathew got it going, he took right off. Of course, if you give a license-less man a taste of motorized power, he is loath to give it up, and Isaac made three or four long passes before he stopped to take us on as passengers. We bumped around the Veli field with Isaac changing gears, dodging novice scooter riders, honking the horn; Mathew proclaimed him a natural. But perhaps it’s for the best Mathew remembered he had laundry to drop off at the dhobi khana next door and interrupted our jaunt: Isaac, grown bold, was anxious to try some “maneuvers”—perhaps reversing at full-speed, as Mathew had rehearsed in his former capacity as an Iraq-bound Australian diplomat?

Alas, no stunts for Isaac. When Mathew tried to re-start his vehicle, it simply shuddered with the same painful metal-scraping-metal noise we had briefly heard and ignored earlier, on our ride to the field. This time, though, the noise persisted. The left axle turned out to be broken, and divine intervention must have kept it functioning long enough for the blind man to have his ride. Eight hundred rupees and one enterprising mechanic eventually fixed the problem, but that afternoon, Isaac’s driving lesson ended with the boys pushing the vehicle into the shade while we sat and waited for help. But I don't think this is the end of the story...

Mathew has plans to cover his autorickshaw with chrome paint (the black-and-yellow is reserved for taxis); unbeknownst to him, Isaac has plans to adds plans to add airplane wings and film a music video. And I have a sure-fire way to lure Isaac back to India.

Two Touts in a Tuk-Tuk

2007-12-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily, we know to ignore any tuk-tuk drivers tendering a "friendship" price--they're inevitably touts that will drag you to a rug shop, a jewelry store, and a handicraft emporium before you're allowed to reach your destination. But in Mysore, city of silk, palaces, and con men intensely interested in where you are from and how long you've been in their city, we succumbed.

Our tricksters caught us off guard--they introduced themselves in a vegetarian restaurant, not by soliciting from the street; they were middle-school teachers (probably true, knowing how much teachers are valued financially around the world); they spoke casually of an incense-making competition we might want to take a look at.

Actually, they really only caught me off guard. Isaac was astute enough to notice they had entered the restaurant only after we did and hadn't ordered anything to eat. But I protested: why was he always so suspicious?

As soon as we got in the autorickshaw, I knew why. First our driver asked us where we were staying, then he inquired after the price, and finally, after shaking his head in disgust at the way some hotels were willing to fleece their customers, he proposed to show us some more affordable options. We demurred, but still let him drive us several kilometers outside of the city center to an incense "competition". Sometimes, protecting yourself too strenuously against any tricks and traps means shutting out the world beyond your hotel room, the world you've given up your paradisical Inner Sunset apartment and boarded a series of expensive and uncomfotable flights to see. We decide we'd let ourselves be lightly scammed.

The competition turned out to be a factory, the factory turned out to have one employee actively making incense. What follows is the basic script of a drama that unfolds hourly in the back alleys and markets of Mysore(we went through it twice more, cursorily, without buying anything, in Devaraja market).

First, the salesman will show his prospective customers how a stick of incense is made, using an older woman or, if he's lucky, his brother's cute twelve-year old kid to demonstrate. He'll explain how to mix sandalwood, gum powder, and water into a thick dough--"like a chapati." This makes the tourists laugh, at least the first time they hear it. He'll then quickly summarize the rest of the process and finish off with a few fascinating facts. Did we know one woman can make 10,000 sticks in a day?

After this introduction, the salesman will move onto the real money-maker: adulterated versions of essential oils. Among the oils he'll paint onto your inner arms with are white, black, and green jasmine; sandalwood; lotus. Do we know Calvin Klein Eternity? This is just nine flower oil. Do we know Kenzo? This is just watermelon seed oil. They're such shysters, Calvin and Kenzo, overcharging us for these natural products, but we can outwit them by buying a ten mm bottle for 100 rupees (about $2.50) from our new friends.

And our salesman has many friends among our people. At this point, he'll bring out a few cloth-bound composition books filled with references from other tourists foolish enough to squander their money and admit it in writing. See? Here is someone from Germany...and Holland...and France...and USA.

You're meant to admire these testimonials and then become an official paying friend yourself. If you resist, at this point the farce turns into a morality play: the salesman ends with a warning against all those other unscrupulous dealers out there.

Our visit proceeded according to the manual with one slight variation: at the conclusion of our sandalwood business, one of our salesmen, a Bob Marley aficionado named Max,informed us of his personal motto: "drink and die, smoke and fly." Then he offered to sell us marijuana oil and hash while his sidekick, a dark skinny kid in bell bottom jeans, sang to us of "boomshaka." I thought he had been watching pirated Ali G videos, but he assured us this was a traditional Indian way to refer to the act of getting stoned.

I was ready to move on, but Isaac agreed to have a look at this second set of wares. Max led us to a small back room decorated with a glossy 4 x 6 foot poster of the Saudi skyline, called for one of his minions to bring us chai in thimble-sized plastic cups, and brought out a small vial of the pot oil. We expressed our admiration for his clever product, which could easily be shipped or sprinkled onto a cigarette and smoked on a train, but we declined to sample or to buy. Isaac, in fact, refused to drink the chai, fearing it be drugged.

Cowed

2007-12-25T02:30:00.000-08:00

Isaac and I don't exactly go in for outdoor adventure. Nonetheless we went up into the hills, to a guest house acclaimed for its trekking opportunities, as a way to escape the heat and the honking of urban India.

Our first morning we followed the dirt road into the woods above the coffee bushes and pepper trees that have been Honey Valley's cash crop since the bee's mite-driven demise. We were drawn to a path described as "flat" and "easy" but which turned out to be "prickly" and "pointless" since it was overgrown with sharp grasses and never led us to the expected waterfall. We're natural quitters, though, so we had no problem turning around early and heading back home for our midday meal.

Something, however, stood in the way of lunch: a mother cow feeding with her calf, companioned by an enormous white bull. They were grazing from the middle of the trail, at a narrow spot hemmed in by bushes and trees. We would have to wait for them to move their meal somewhere less cramped.

Eventually the trio progressed to a section of the trail that seemed wide enough to accommodate us all. We stepped forward cautiously. The bull glanced at us; the she-cow glowered. She kept her protective maternal eyes fixed on us as we edged closer and closer, until we got too close. She tossed her head, snorted, pawed the ground; we ran. We'd grown accustomed to the daily business of street cows, beach cows, front-yard cows, but this was a cow of a different magnitude. We retreated, defeated, prepared to sit still until the sun went down--that, or to call the guest house and request a rescue.

As it turned out, we didn't need to miss lunch or disgrace ourselves. We waited for the soft thud of the cow's wooden bell to grow fainter and fainter,until it disappeared altogether; when there were several hundred feet of safety between us and the cows, we scrambled up the hill and back to start of the trail. Soon we were eating dal and okra curry and laughing over our misadventures.

***

After lunch we started to walk jauntily down the hill from the main house toward our bungalow. Halfway there, our merriment fled: in the middle of the road was another mother and her calf, different from the first pair, but to our overactive imaginations, just as big and horned and potentially lethal. We couldn't go forward.

But we couldn't go back, either, for unlike our previous confrontation, this time we had spectators: Israelis. Israelis who had just yesterday hiked miles through swamps and up mountains, nonchalantly scraped leeches from their skin, laughingly watched a dog rip the head off a chicken. We couldn't let them see us defeated by a cow. We hesitated, and then brought out the cell phone.

For the next few minutes, we purported to look for an Airtel signal up by the main house, hoping our latest bovine adversaries would get bored and go away. They didn't. Our pretence wore thin; we couldn't just keep pacing the same fifty feet looking for a signal. Finally, after whispered strategizing and furtive glances at the Israelis above and the cows below, we decided to act.

We walked steadily towards the mother cow. I looked her right in the eye. I told her: no, don't you snort at me. I raised the index finger of my right hand to emphasize this point. I'm not sure if I charmed the cow into submission, or if she wasn't the deadly beast we imagined her to be, but we walked by her without incident, if not without drama.

2nd Class Passenger

2007-12-24T04:01:00.000-08:00

I had promised Isaac strictly first-class train travel. Unfortunately, there are times when there is no fast, air-conditioned, reserved-seating way to get from where you are to where you’d like to be. There is only second class passenger.

Our first such train ride, we embarked with a minimum of pushing, serendipitously landing in the reserved car, where we were able to buy preferential seats from the conductor. Our two hours on board passed uneventfully, the stubby ceiling fans twirling in their iron cages, the green fields flashing by the window. Still, we appreciated the commotion that the loading and unloading of passengers inevitably entailed, so ten minutes before our stop, we gathered our belongings and stood by the middle exit.

As the train halted, we realized that this exit led not out to the station platform, but down six feet into the next track. The next logical option, the door opposite, was locked. And so we rushed towards a door at the far end of the car, but not before a group of old men and women had wedged themselves between us and the outside. They stood, immovable, intractable, as first we, then the conductor, then the other passengers reasoned, pleaded, demanded that we be let through. But the old ones had made it on board and so fulfilled their duty: how, or if, Isaac, Ben, and I were to get off the train was irrelevant.

They were armed with obstinacy; we had luggage. At first our bags were a liability; already my arms had grown shaky from holding my wheely bag overhead and it had bounced down onto a few bald heads, as well as my own. But once we were properly panicked, we lost our timidity. Isaac went first, holding his green Eagle Creek backpack in front of his chest and bulldozing a temporary clearing. Ben and I shoved our way through in his wake, striking out with our Cordura Nylon ammunition, jumping off as the train started to pull away from the station. So much for respecting the elderly, but I felt no remorse: I took home some bruises of my own.

By our second train ride, leaving Gokarna, we thought we knew the system: find out where the reserved car will stop, get on, buy yourself a seat,and claim a functional exit well in advance. Smugly (those naive Westerners waiting at the opposite end of the platform!), we staked out our position for the reserved car, and when the train pulled into the station, confidently stepped aboard. Into an unreserved car. There was no space to sit; there was no space to stand. There was no space anywhere except up.

Luckily we were invited onto the luggage rack. We spent the next five hours nestled in other people's belongings, first with our knees hugged to our chest and then, as the bags of sweets and boxes of electronics dwindled, with our legs stretched out over the passengers below. Zameer, our saviour, was a university student travelling back from his sister's house in Goa. He rode with us most of the way, during which time Isaac explained why we were childless, why Americans stick their mother and fathers in nursing homes, why we live in a holographic universe--the usual thing. This time, we detrained without a hitch.

By our third train ride, we were able to do it all--get on, sit down, and get off--but of course by the third train ride, Isaac wouldn't accept anything less than sleeper class AC.

Miss Manners

2007-12-11T07:25:00.000-08:00

The morning began, as so many do, with a naïve faith in the “getting there & away” section of the Lonely Planet. It also began with a hot sun, a long walk, and three travelers each crabby for their own reasons: Ben hadn't slept well, Isaac was getting sunburned, and I was still pouting from the night before, when my bargaining abilities had been called into question. I had, in fact, been provoked into one of the big Asian no-no's: causing everyone to lose face by demanding that Isaac fuck off.

And so now I was on strike: I wasn't going to lend the boys my superior eyesight or map reading skills until they, hopelessly disoriented, broke down and begged for some help. My protest was a secret one, though, and Ben gamely navigated us over a footbridge and across the shimmering expanse of parking lot without realizing he was being punished.

He almost got us to the central bus terminal when a travel agency promoting its ticket-booking abilities distracted us. We followed the sign towrds a dank staircase, up two, three, four flights of stairs, and the higher we climbed, the clearer my view of the rag picker in the next street, her dingy sari, her bare feet sinking into a mound of plastic bottles and rotting fruit. I hated India. I hated Ben and Isaac. I proclaimed my intention to go back downstairs and wait in the alley while they chased after the mythical travel agency.

In the alley I sat down on crumbling ledge of concrete, and the owner of nearby business lit four sticks of incense and wedged them into cracks in the wall. He offered me a chair, and my stony little heart relented a little: I didn't hate India quite so much. The incense curled into the damp air. A woman with a pail of murky water walked by once, twice. People stared at me. The midday heat accumulated.

After a while, Isaac joined me, assuring me that Ben was just them in the process of buying us tickets for an afternoon train. I was torn: they had somehow succeeded without me, but I was also ready to have tickets. We sat. People continued to stare. Minutes continued to add up. I decided tickets were sweeter than I-told-you-so's.And then Ben joined us, announcing that the online ticketing system was down. I could still win this one, but my spirit just wasn't in it anymore. I decided to cooperate.

The Lonely Planet came out again. It directed us to the entrance of the central bus terminal, from which point a man possessing neither uniform nor reliable information took over, insisting there was no train on Mondays but nevertheless prodding us upstairs, past a freshly painted train timetable and into hot, lightless room ringed by the shadows of crouching men: the train reservation office. A cryptic sign on the ticket window admonished “no Q’s.” No questions? The steamy, seedy darkness, the paint fumes, the rules against asking questions were too much. Isaac announced we were leaving.

We took our strategizing out into the street, out into the sun. An older man, no doubt intent on selling us some good or service, chose the wrong moment to interrupt, asking where we good sirs were from. Ben answered no, no, no, NO NO! NO!! The man insisted: where were we going? what did we need? Ben told him to fuck off. The man told Ben he was a very naughty boy. Once more, but rather half-heartedly, Ben muttered fuck you. And here Isaac and I,having dutifully read our copy of Culture Shock:India, had been worried about offending people by eating with our left hand or pointing our feet at them.

We decided to split up, Isaac and I inquiring futilely into a few more private bus lines and Ben venturing back into the train office, solving the mystery of why this government-run enterprise was so dark and useless: the power was out. And so we came to terms with our only option: a second-class passenger train leaving from Margao, a transport hub one hour to the south of Panjim. Encrusted with sweat and street dust, anxious about the time, we decided to take a taxi to Margao.

We found a taxi, negotiated a price--I made a vocal point of not participating in this pointless ritual--and climbed in the car. We were on our way! And then...a protest march rounded the corner. For fifteen minutes we watched workers—mostly men but also a few women; mostly miners, but also clerks and dental technicians—stream chanting past us with their orange union banners. By the time the last raised fist had past us by, India's ridiculousness had brought us together again. There would be no more fuck you's directed either at the citizens of this fine country nor at each other.

An hour later, we were at the Margao train station. Isaac walked right up to the ticket counter, handed over seventy rupees, and within a minute was holding three tickets and some change. It was that easy.

Bolly-would-be's

2007-12-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, when we were still living in Japan, Isaac sold a computer to an Indian man whose brother had just won a national contest for new Bollywood talent: I don't remember the specifics, but there was talk of a film deal for him. So the plan (meaning Isaac's plan) was to leverage this connection into renown and riches for ourselves. The substance of this plan relied on two key actions. First we had to remember our friend the computer-buyer's name, which took a few days, and then we had to gather the energy to send him an email, which promptly bounced back. That was the end of the plan, and with Mumbai looking increasingly like an overwhelming, expensive city, we had to scrap our dreams.

Fortunately, Bollywood came to us. After my yoga retreat was over, we inadvertently found ourselves in the lovely city of Panjim, capital of Goa, for IFFI, the International Film Festival of India. Unfortunately, we were able to neither attract the attention of a Bollywood director in search of pale, approaching middle-age talent nor get tickets to any of the movies. But one evening we did head off to a nearby beach for a free mass screening.

The film in question, Dhoom 2, was entirely in Hindi and, as one of the project managers of the event told us, not very good. Nonetheless, he directed us to the VVIP area in consideration of our thwarted IFFI dreams (of being able to buy tickets to a good movie) and the absence of any other very, very important people in the rows of plastic seats reserved for them.

The opening action sequence involves a heavily jewelled crown, owned by a kindly, queenly looking white woman with two rambunctious grandsons, being transported across the Nairobi desert in a posh private train.

Suddenly, the movie's villain parachutes onto the train, tricks the guards with his kindly, queenly looking white woman disguise and, when discovered, deflects the ensuing bullets with a mysterious red square. Moments later, he unfolds this red sqaure into a snowboard with which he sets off into the sands, only to reappear moments later in a full-scale dance number. (Though on second thought, the detectives who chase to this "perfect thief" might actually be the stars of that number.)

We stayed until several more jewels get burgled, the mosquitoes had chewed up our ankles, and the non-VVIP screening area filled up with thousands of people. No movie deals out of our brush with Bollywood, but we can now identify and sing along to the theme song "Dhoom Again." It's a start.

A breath of fresh air

2007-12-03T05:53:00.000-08:00

I originally wrote this in an email several days ago, but in the interests of making good on some of my oft-repeated blog promises, I've decided some cutting and pasting is in order. So, here goes:

Moments ago I was sitting in a dark Internet cafe, but the electricity in town just went back on, so now we have a fan and fluorescent lights and blaring devotional music in addtition to an ancient computer (which itslef runs off a generator).

This is perhaps one of Isaac's worst days, as his phone, his electronic lifeline, has broken down and it's possible that nothing can be done about it until Singapore. Also, we've been fumigated for the second day in a row by a man pumping a toxic mosquito supressant through the streets of Gokarna. Last night Isaac spotted him and his billowing fumes from at least 100 feet away, and so we had time to run down a side alley and in the opposite direction, towards the beach.

Unfortunately, the boats we had planned on taking home had stopped for the evening, and so we climbed into an autorickshaw which, predictably enough (at least in hindsight), soon drove straight into the cloud of pesticide. Of course visibility was near zero, and you can't run over cows or pilgrims (we're in one of South India's holiest towns), so our driver had to display uncharacteristic caution as he navigated the noxious mess. Tonight we returned to town to email and just as we were ordering our masala dosas, the fumigation man walked right by our window-side booth. Isaac pulled his entire shirt over his face and didn't emerge for several minutes.

Unfortunately, this is but a fraction of the crap we've inhaled into our delicate first-world lungs in the last two weeks. The day we arrived at our bungalow in Om Beach they were burning plastic ten feet from our bed; they've been burning plastic, at greater or lesser distances, for all of our stay. We havn't been witness to too much grinding poverty, but we have seen countless acts of environmental sabotage.

PS: The Nokia Customer Care Center in Mangalore fixed Isaac's cell up right. He also got his pants hemmed for 50 cents, so he's much happier than when we last heard from him.