Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

I may (or may not) get flak for this post, but I'm not interested in opposing views on this one.  I know I mentioned it in an earlier post, but I can not stand for the animal cruelty I'm seeing here in India involving dogs.  I sat through a tour today and I listened to a man give me a long speech about how to be hindu is to be caring to all creatures.  Bullshit.  I've watched children run up and hit sleeping dogs, then run after them with the stick, grown men throw rocks at their 'sacred' cows, and today I saw a man swerve intentionally to run over a puppy, as the girl on the back of the bike laughed.  Fuck that, I don't have to accept that.  And I don't buy into this happy 'hindus respecting life' crap, when this is what I see.  I understand that this is not everyone, I have seen one man call over a dog and pet him, and I noticed that our driver stays away from dogs, but I've seen way more incidents of abuse that I'm sickened by. And the condition of the stray dogs in India is appalling. Just because a dog is a stray doesn't mean it has to be skin and bones starving.  For example, Greece or Turkey.  In Greece the people take it upon themselves to take care of stray animals, and in Turkey there are rescues where the dogs are tagged and cared for.

 So, I don't know if it's possible, but for all you people who are thinking about adopting a dog from outside the country, see if you can find one from India, because they are the lowest on the totem pole here.  Even though these abusers are not good hindus, I hope their karma gets them in the end.

Off to Rajasthan

We booked a tour with Shanti Travels.  I'm not sure how much of a tour it will actually be.  It seems like we're booking a driver and hotels.  But, here we go. So, our drive from Delhi to our first stop, Mandawa was supposed to take between five to six hours.  Due to an insane amount of traffic due to incessant swerving and large puddles in the road, a portion that usually takes about 2 hours ended up being a good full 5 hours.  So, it ended up taking us twelve hours to reach our destination.  So, we spent our first day of our tour in the car.  And we thought we would be seeing countryside once we left Delhi.  We were wrong.  We didn't reach anything country until the last 45 minutes.  There are an impressive amount of people in India.

Mandawa was a small town.  It is known for it's Havelis.  A haveli is basically a mansion built for the maharajas and wealthy people about 200-250 years ago.  They are decorated with intricate paintings, designs, and carvings.  They are quite crumbly and unkept, but you could imagine they were quite magical in their time.

We were staying at a haveli.  It was an interesting chambered room.  We had a sleeping room which fit the bed (I use the word bed lightly), a sitting room, a terrace, and a bathroom.  Definitely charming, but definitely not to our level of cleanliness or comfort.  The 'bed' was a wicker frame with a super thin mattress.  It was a painful night of 'sleep'.

We left the next morning for Bikaner.  On the way we stopped at a really magnificent and well restored haveli (restored by the french artist who now owns it). It was really beautiful.

We then made our way to a temple of Seth's choosing.  I was quite surprised to hear Seth's request to visit this temple, because it is a temple that is dedicated to its holy rats.  So, Seth, the man who loathes rodents, requested to enter a place where you have to take off your shoes to walk around a temple infested with rats. Curious.  The smell was abhorrent.  I think Dr. Rock (our travel doctor) would be horrified and was waving her finger back and forth tutting inside my head.  I definitely didn't touch anything.  But, yes, there were rats everywhere.  They had buckets of food for the rats placed everywhere, and even pans of milk for them to enjoy.  Some of them must have indulged too much, because there were many dead rats decaying as well.  It's interesting that even an animal who carries deadly diseases can be considered holy, while the dogs are blatantly abused.

Which brings me to something I realize I haven't mentioned. We've all heard the stereotype that there are cows on the streets in India.  Well, it's not a stereotype.  They are everywhere, and they rule.  If there's a cow in the street the cars will stop or go around it. They will walk into homes, food stalls, etc. And the cows are not your garden variety dairy type cow you find all over the US.  These are what we call Brahma Bulls.  Probably because the Brahamans worship them?  Though they are a bit prettier, they are no more intelligent.

There are, also, a surprising amount of camels.  I didn't expect to see camels in India, but they're everywhere.  They are used like donkeys, but for heavier loads, I guess.  So there are cows, camels, donkeys, and then there are the street dogs.  I feel so bad for these dogs.  Many of them run on three legs, because one of them is too hurt to run on. Our first night we were walking and one of the street dogs  decided to follow us.  We weren't doing anything special other than not being mean to it.  It wandered around a parked car near a security guard and apparently the guy kicked the dog hard because he ran away limping and squealing/crying.  It hurt my heart.  The books, and many people, will tell you that you have to be accepting of other cultures and that it's just different, but there are some things I refuse to accept.  Cruelty of canines is one of them.

We arrived in Bikaner and visited the Junagarh Fort.  It was pretty, but stark.  It was really big, though.  Most of the fort was stripped of it's contents, leaving most to the imagination.  Once again, it must have been magical in its time.

For dinner we found a place in our Lonely Planet guidebook, named Gallops.  Their logo was horses running through a horseshoe, and they served really cold beer.  Perfect.  Dinner was very good.  We started off with paneer pakora, which is basically spiced battered and fried cheese.  We dipped them in ketchup and a chili sauce.  That was quite good.  For dinner we ordered paneer butter masala, which is similar to tikka masala in the US, but with spicier black roasted chills. We, also, ordered shubnam curry which had mushrooms, fresh green peas and a cream gravy.  To round it out an order of plain naan was our choice.  It was a very good meal.

Back on American Soil

Sorry to tell you guys this after the fact, but we made an unexpected trip back to the US.  We strolled along American soil where most everybody spoke english and things were clean and well kept. Um, well, here's the thing, at our food tour we were part of a group where four out of the seven of us worked for the US Embassy.  We became friendly with a couple, and they invited us to see the Embassy.  The US embassy in Delhi takes up 3 large blocks.  It's quite impressive.  There are offices, living quarters, a 'country club', an acclaimed international school, and so much more.  It was a really neat experience.  Neither Seth nor I had ever been to a US embassy, so it was a first!  It was, also, really interesting to get the perspective of living in India with a family and hearing about little things that you wouldn't think of otherwise.  Of course, the school and her kids were really intriguing to me. Hearing about their experience was important for me.

You'll notice that there are no photos of the embassy.  That's because you can't take photos of an embassy, duh.

Because they are just lovely people, they invited us to have dinner with them at their home, which happened to be right around the corner from the place we were staying.  It was a bit of a shock to catch a glimpse into their fridge and their kitchen, because it was packed with products that I haven't seen since early June.  Working at the embassy they have access to American goods.  We had a delicious meal of a cobb salad (planned?) and baked potatoes, with rice crispy treats for dessert.  Yum! It was so welcome.  It was really nice to swap travel stories and hear about their experiences.

Kwa Heri Africa, Namaste India

Good bye Africa, hello India! 

It took us 24 hours of travel to get here, but we're in New Delhi, India.  We left our beach bungalow at 10am to get to the Zanzibar airport.  We took a short flight, about a half hour or less, to Dar es Salaam, then we had to wait for our next flight, which was 5 hours away.  This might be ok if we were in an airport like DIA (Denver Airport) where we could wander through the stores aimlessly, have a decent bite to eat, or even post up at the New Belgium Brewery in the airport.  But, Dar es Salaam is a tiny airport. There's 3 to 4 tiny shops that have the exact same items, and a restaurant that looked questionable and was severely overpriced, like the stores.  It was actually kinda funny.  We found little Kirkland packets of nuts for sale, but they were like $5, and not worth it.  A small pack of gum was $3.  So we sat and listened to our audio book.

Finally we took the 3 hour flight to Ethiopia.  We had another 5 hours to kill in that airport.  We had originally thought we were going to be there during the day, and that we would check in, leave our bags, and venture out into Ethiopia for lunch or dinner.  But, it was from 7pm to midnight, so we skipped that idea.  This airport was weird.  The shops were filled with random designer labels, but it all seemed fishy, like they were counterfeit, or they had "fallen off a truck".  Also, the shelves were fairly empty, there'd be a huge shelf with two or three items on it.  And there were TONS of cigarettes.  Apparently cigarettes from China are a hot commodity, because they were expensive, $50 a carton, while Marlboro were $16.

It was finally time to head to our gate.  When the man called for passengers with children, needing special assistance, and business class members, the entire group of people in the waiting area bum rushed the entrance.  And they began to enter without being let in.  Eventually we made our way up, but the people were so pushy and then so close behind us that I kind of wish we had waited for everyone else to board first.  But we needed to assure that we had overhead luggage space. They would push up against you, and when you turned your head they would apologize, but do it again and again.  Just before the plane there was a guy trying to check everyone's ticket, and we watched him turn away a passenger and realize that he might have been letting people on the plane who shouldn't have been let on.  Hmm.  I'm pretty sure there were some stow aways on that flight.

The flight was about 6 hours, after the delay, but it was not a bad flight.  We dosed ourselves with our respective knock out drugs and were able to sleep a bit.  Aside from the fact that I was awoken by people walking by and bumping into me with elbows and carts, we were awoken in the middle of the night for a meal.  I think we were in a daze because we sleepily ate a meal at about 2:30 in the morning.  Totally unnecessary, but we were zoned out.  Seth barely remembered anything the next day.

The plane landed and the airport in India was much more vigilant about the passengers on the plane.  They cattle blocked the exit and checked everyone's ticket stub, and if they couldn't find it, they had to wait.  I thought that was awesome.

We were picked up by someone from our hotel and we made our way into Delhi.  We landed on a Sunday morning, so traffic wasn't like it normally is.  We've heard a lot about Delhi traffic.  And, maybe it's because we just spent a few weeks in Africa, but so far New Delhi is not like we expected.  It is much 'nicer' than we expected.  But, I'm also going to assume that we are in the nicer part of the city.  When I looked up our area it seems to be the Silverlake of New Delhi.  But, when I say this, don't picture a street lined with pretty store fronts and welcoming restaurants.  I said it is the Silverlake of New Delhi.  We've already encountered areas that require ten gallon lungs to hold your breath.

Our hotel, aside from our romantic anniversary night, is the nicest hotel we've been in.  Amarya Haveli is a cute boutique B&B where we were offered their delicious homemade iced tea upon arrival.  Our room is the Jaipur room, so it is themed pink, with a pink temple painted on the wall.  And the bathroom is glorious.  Aside from the fact that you have to keep your mouth glued shut in the shower (we're in India) it is amazing, with water pressure and extremely hot water.  And we had the best night sleep, probably since we moved out of our apartment in May.  AC, hot water, clean, and a comfy bed.  Awesome.

We ventured out for a walk to a park nearby.  We ended up finding Deer Park, where they actually have deer in an enclosure.  There was a lady there who was feeding them yellow rice and naan.  I have a feeling that she wasn't supposed to be doing that.

Eventually we made our way to a recommended restaurant called Park Baluchi (which I bet means deer park), where we would have our first Indian meal.  We ordered two beers, two vegetarian dishes, and two types of bread. The beer was Kingfisher and the waiter presented them to each of us like one would a bottle of wine.  It was interesting.  Then there was a well packed ball of ricotta like cheese in something similar to a vodka sauce (i.e. tomato and cream).  That was really good.  It had lots of spices and a bit of a kick. Yum! Then there was a spinach based dish with string beans, corn and potatoes.  That was, also, very good.  We accompanied those with regular naan and kolcha, which is what I believe to be India's version of pizza.  It was a flat bread with some chopped tomatoes, spices and cheese.  All very good.

We made our way back to our hotel and ordered some masala chai tea to keep ourselves awake so that we wouldn't fall asleep too early.  The tea was delicious. And so was our night's sleep. Aahhh...