Current mood:

insomniac

India Journal, part 1 -- 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a cow
[I've sent bits of this in mail to various people, which may or may not have gone through. Photos to follow as I can.]

8:32 AM 7/29/2008

The obvious big changes are important, but there are little ones, too: What look like crows with gray necks or tails.

I only saw 4 cows on the road on my way to the hotel from the airport...

8:18 AM 7/30/2008

So yesterday I went out for a walk after getting settled, towards M.G. Road [Mahatma Gandhi Road, part of the commercial downtown core]. (Actually I just walked in a striaght line towards the center of the city, to make it trivial to get back.)

The mix of the old and the new is a bit startling -- cracked stone slab sidewalks under shiny modern buildings; the proliferation of private security guards at the gates of modern buildings; etc. However, where I was walking doesn't compare to the shantiness of some of the things I saw from the car coming from the airport.

A few blocks along I saw a very pretty litle girl, maybe 7 or 8, with a bright scarf around her waist. I took a picture of her (OK, my first mistake), at which point she smiles and started doing backflips, which really looked very cute until she stuck out her hand with a few coins in it and pantomimed being hungry. She only followed me for a block (unlike the assertive auto-rickshaw [yellow golf cart] driver who was sure that I was only walking because nobody had invited me into a cab.) The next cute little girl who did backflips for the obvious foreigner didn't seem so innocent... [And yes, I do intend to get some coins that I can give to beggars. I'm a sucker...]

Further on I saw a fragile-looking woman sweeping dirt out of the gutters with two hand-brooms. I took a few pictures from half a block away, but decided not to take any from closer, even though the tradiitonally-dressed woman sweeping dirt against a backdrop of traffic would have made a great shot. *sigh*

I did take a picture of the construction workers who had crawled up a structure and were welding on it, in hard-hats and flip-flops.

This morning I'm contemplating a walk in the other direction -- out of the back of the hotel, where from my roon I can see 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a moderately busy road with a steady stream of autos, buses, motor scooters, and oh yes a cow lying in a presumably cool and comfortable mud puddle in the construction area for Bangalore's new mass-transit line.

It's odd -- the most popular means of personal transit seems to be the motor scooter, and not the bicycle. Maybe that's a function of how spread-out this city is. There were traffic cops at most of the bigger intersections on my rush-hour walk yesterday; still, I felt nervous about crossing a number of the streets. The cynical solution to that, of course, is to find someone else about to cross the same street, and stay downstream of them ;-)

4:22 AM 7/31/2008

Insomnia is not your friend. I'm also told that some of the emails I've sent haven't gone through...

A few snippets:

Globalization means that the safe in my hotel room was made in Israel, and the light bulb in the bedside lamp in Indonesia. Oh, and Tuesday night I was drinking beer from Ireland with the manager of the group I'm working with. :-)

From the morning of the 29th: [blockquote]
As Bilbo said, adventures make one late for dinner. (Did I mention that I'm hungry?)


I have an... interesting view out my hotel room window. It occasionally features a circling raptor with angled tan striped on the backs of its wings; I'll try to get a photo and work on identifying it.

All:

We only passed 4 cows on the road getting here from the airport. Toto, I don't think I'm in Kansas any more...

I think my first task here in India will be to buy appropriate clothes to wear to work tomorrow. ;-) [Cue flashback to previous note about adventures.]
[/blockquote]

(that view features 5 temples (one Sikh and 4 Hindu, I think) and 2 mosques, laundry and solar water heaters on the roofs of some flats, a semi-busy road jammed with cars, buses, scooters, a few bikes, and the ubiquitous yellow "auto-rickshaws", which are three-wheeled taxis that sem to be slightly overgrown golf carts. You know the traffic is bad when people stop their engines when the car starts, and the "autos", as they are called, need to be restarted with a pull of a cord.) There's also a construction area for Bangalore's future mass-transit line, which features a cool comfortable patch of dirt that generally hosts one or two cows.

A few more notes:


By the way, one amazing thing is that even fairly grubby autos and trucks often have some decorative touches, whether it's a line of hand-painted flowers where a car would have a racing stripe, a garland on the front of a truck, multi- colored filigree work fringing a truck bed...

Beggars showing off sickly babies whenever the car stops in traffic are a bit disturbing. The people hawking towels, newspapers, toy motorcycles, and rubik's cubes are a lot easier to ignore. (Yes, I've been stopped in traffic and had someone walk around between the cars trying to interest people in Rubik's cubes. It didn't even seem surreal in context.)

We only passed one ox-driven cart, and I saw a few cows and one long-horned ox by the side of the road, as well as what might have been a camel market. Hopefully today it won't be raining and I can take bad photos from the car. ;-)

As we got further out of the city towards my office there were more men in traditional waist-wraps instead of Western trousers, usually topped with a Western button-down shirt. I'm told that the men are from Kerala State, and that their native language is Malayalam (the world's longest language-name palindrome ;-) ) like some of my colleagues. Most of the women I see are wearing traditional clothing, though of course India has a huge diversity of cultures and traditions -- saris, tunics (kurtas) with flowing pants or rarely jeans, a scattering of hijabs. Only one of me female co-workers wears Westernized clothing, though it still slants towards a kurta influense. She's also the only one of the women who speaks up and asks questions during meetings. Hm, perhaps there's a correlation ;-)