Mangoes

(PICTURE: Picking mangoes...before the article we just read.)

As I was typing that last blog, Huyen interrupted me with a look of disgust on her face. She began to read me an article from THE TIMES OF INDIA. Here's what the article says:

SUBJECT: Toxic mangoes: Traders asked to clean up act.

New Delhi: It's a well known fact that mangoes are ripened with calcium carbide by traders and this can prove to be toxic. The chemical is banned in section 44A of the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act but is being used across the capital, a fact that Delhi government has suddenly woken up to. It is now preparing the ground for a crackdown.

That's the opening paragraph. On a nice sidebar it lists some facts including: "Calcium carbide can damage kidney, heart and liver and cause ulcer." I bolded the same words that were bolded in the sidebar.

So here's why Huyen had a look on her face -- we've eaten and drank mangoes every single day that we've bee in India. Furthermore, we're currently in Delhi and ate two mangoes last night! Well, who needs a kidney, heart and liver, right?

Fist Fights

(PICTURE: The animals here imitate the humans.)

Think for a second: When was the last time you saw two grown up men in a fist fight. Okay, now think harder, when was the last time you saw two grown up SOBER men in a fist fight? Personally, I don't think I've ever seen that (I'm assuming at a sporting event the combatants were drunk), or at least not in the last decade.

Well, today I saw my THIRD and FOURTH fist fight between two Indian men. Okay, technically they all weren't fist fights but they did all at least have one person grabbing the other and shoving them with a finger in the face and voices raised to a threatening level. Here's the four situations as best as I could interpret them:

FIGHT 1: This occurred on a bus between two passengers. I believe they were vying for some standing space. They started to yell at each other and grabbed one another on a crowded bus. Finally the bus ticket collector threw them both off...except one then jumped back on and I think said, "I'm cool" in Hindi.

FIGHT 2: This was the scariest one. Huyen and I were at the train station when a huge crowd started to form around two men. One guy was jacked (mom, that's slang for very strong) and had the other guy by the belt buckle and was basically dragging him with his other finger in the guy's face. The other guy looked petrified and was waving his hands as if to say, "Sooo sorry for trying to pick pocket you. I don't know what I was thinking." Well, who knows what he was saying but the imaginary conversation went something like that. Huyen and I jetted before the crowd turned more raucous.

FIGHT 3: This morning two guys on the street were wrestling with each other. They weirdly had both their hands clasped like they were doing a WWF test of strength. I'm pretty sure one of them had bumped his rickshaw into the other.

FIGHT 4: Just now two other guys on the street were in each other's face. One guy was holding the other guy's undershirt and jabbing his finger at him. There were no context clues to this fight so I can only imagine they are ex-lovers who bumped into each other and still aren't over one cheating with Bengali sweet shop owner.

One time on a bus, I saw a guy reading a book called "The Argumentative Indian." I have no idea what that book is about but I plan on checking it out of the library when I get home. Just from the title though, I can only hope it explains why Indian men are so confrontational.

As far as the picture above, one day while we were walking in Agra we had to jump back about twenty feet because two holy bulls started to tussle in the street. At first it was sort of amusing as they locked horns, but it turned pretty ugly when one bull kicked the crap out of the other one. I'm no vet but I'm fairly sure the bull broke the other bull's leg because the other bull limped away, gushing blood. It was pretty nasty. Huyen and I stood sort of in shock as about a dozen Indian guys laughed their asses off next to us.

Oh, India.

Taxi Math

I'm not good at math. In fact, it gives me the sweats. One place that I don't like to do math is in a taxi cab. I like to look at the meter, pay the fare and give the driver a couple bucks tip. In Kolkata though, you need to do some math to figure out the correct cost of your far. There's two types of math problems:

TAXI MATH PROBLEM #1: To get the correct cost of your taxi, you need to DOUBLE the fare on the meter and then add two rubies. Yes, whatever the meter says you should then double it. For example, if you ride to the Memorial Monument and it says 23 Rubies, the correct cost is 46 Rubies plus 2 Rubies extra. I know this sounds like a scam (DRIVER: "Yeah, so, uh, you actually need to pay double what the meter says) but it's truly how it works. My Lonely Planet warned me about this and so did the concierge guy at our hotel.

TAXI MATH PROBLEM #2: This is the math that really pisses me off. Here's the problem: If you take a taxi from A to B and it costs 70 Rubies, then how much should a taxi from B to A cost? If you're like me, you're thinking 70 Rubies, duh! Well, not so much in a country where everyone is trying to rip you off. Huyen and I took a taxi to a part of town where there was no subway (we took the subway everywhere else which was actually pretty great, albeit crowded). The fare there cost 70 Rubies. After dinner, we approached a cab and asked him to take us back to our hotel. The cab driver wanted 300 Rubies. In fact, every driver we asked wanted something ludicrous and refused to turn on the meter. Finally, we found a guy who would drive us for 100 Rubies. We found him about 1/4 of the way back to our hotel since we had started to walk. In my math world it should have cost us ____ (whatever 1/4 of 70 is).

Besides math problems, there's also sometimes geography problems. Luckily, I was always good at geography...although that doesn't apply in India I guess.

Here's the geography problem: we had to take another taxi one afternoon and the driver dropped us off at the WRONG part of town. We knew it was the wrong part of town but the guy wouldn't stop arguing with us that it was exactly where our hotel's business card said it was. He kept pointing at the card and then pointing to where we were. Well, the guy was clearly illiterate (an English problem) because he had dropped us as some point in town FURTHER away from where we had started. In his defense, both parts of town started with the letter "R". Luckily there was a subway nearby so we jumped on it and got back to our place thirty minutes later.

Oh, India.

Beggars

(PICTURE: A pretty common scene in India.)

I hope I don't come off as completely insensitive and as a total a-hole by writing this blog because well, that's how I feel a lot out here. As most people know, poverty is a huge issue in India. Like in most Indian movies you've seen, there are street beggars everywhere. It seems that you can't go more than ten feet on a sidewalk without someone asking you for money or rattling their can at you.

My heart goes out for the kids who are on the street because god knows how the hell they ended up in their situation. The thing is, there's millions of kids begging in this country and after a while you start to almost become desensitized to them -- and well, that's terrible and makes you feel rotten.

More than a few times, I've had kids and other beggars latch onto my arm. Coming from the states (or I would think almost any developed country), having homeless people grab you is something that is way beyond our code or acceptable conduct. Frankly, you feel violated. But worse than that is when you end up feeling like the bad guy because you have to yell at a homeless ten year old to get off your arm.

But then, the cynic is me starts to think: Are these kids trying to scam me like half the people in the country (another blog coming up)? For example, the other day Huyen and I were walking down the street and some kid (probably around ten) starts asking us for money. The kid was filthy, very skinny and walking with a limp. After I told him no about six times, he grabbed me by the bicep and basically had me drag him along with me for ten feet. I finally stopped, gave him an evil look and said, "No!". I clearly scared the kid and he let go. I then watched him walk away WITH NO LIMP.

The point is, the begging here is a double whammy. First you feel horrible that so many people have to beg. Second you feel like a jerk for getting mad at people for the way they beg.

Oh, and then there are stories like this (where I got the picture from)...

First Impressions

(PICTURE: At night, men just gather on the street and play chess.)

Crazy. That's the world I would use to describe my first impressions of Kolkata. I would say "overwhelmed" but really I found myself laughing and staring in the relative safety of our Ambassador taxi. Huyen and I kept on pointing at things and saying, "Whoah, did you see that?" or simply, "Oh my god."

There doesn't seem to be an inch of space wasted in Kolkata. There's something going on seemingly everywhere. There were tons of people standing/squatting/sitting on the sides of roads or hanging out of cars/rickshaws/bicycles/buses. There were animals which seemed to be out on joy walks, enjoying the garbage buffet that lined the streets. There were posters and advertisements that covered every wall from the airport to our hotel.

There was the nonsensical. Coming from Hanoi, I thought driving couldn't be worse. I was wrong. Nearly dead wrong. We'll get into this in a later blog but people had barely any grasp/care for safe driving. Either that, or as I suspect, people just can't afford new brakes.

And then there was the poverty. As we drove in, you could see the squalor everywhere. There were cardboard and scarp metal homes anywhere there wasn't a concrete and brick one. On the streets, there were people begging on nearly every corner. At one point, we stopped at a red light (yes, we actually stopped) and a kid (probably 8) came up to my window holding his sibling (probably two) begging for money. The kid reached in and grabbed my arm. This would be the first of many times this would happen.

At the end of our one and a half hour trip to our hotel (which if the roads were empty would probably have taken fifteen minutes max) our taxi pulled up to a street which was totally under construction. The driver signaled that he couldn't go down the street and told us to walk. Frankly, we had no clue if this was where our hotel was (it turned out to be about a five minute walk down the alley) or if he was just tired of driving us. After grabbing our bags we gave him a little tip. He then started to complain that we should give him a lot more. Really? A lot more of a tip for you not dropping us off not at our hotel (he clearly could have gone one block up and circled around to our hotel)?

In the end, we got to our hotel which was a sanctuary of peacefulness compared to the rest of the city. These first impressions though would last and only become cemented over the coming weeks. We'll delve into lots of these things in upcoming blogs.

Kolkata: Airport Pick-Up

(PICTURE: An Ambassador cab.)

My friend Kevin scared the crap out of me when I told him that I was going to Kolkata. You see, he and his wife Beth went to India for their honeymoon and spent their first couple of days in Kolkata. When I asked Kevin for some advice, he told me to fly in and get the heck out. This scared me because I consider Kevin to be one of the best travelers I know. If this warning wasn't enough, he and Beth insisted that we allow them to treat us to a night at a 5 star hotel when we arrived. It took a lot of arguing but finally I convinced Kevin that it wasn't necessary. Kevin relented and said that he at least wanted to get us a driver to pick us up at the airport because we shouldn't be winging it when we first arrive since he was sure Kolkata would be unlike anything we'd ever experienced. I agreed and Kevin attempted to arrange a driver. After a few days, Kevin told me that he was having trouble getting us a ride because "things are never easy in India." Wiser words were never spoken.

I told Kevin not to worry and arrainged a pick-up with the hotel I booked (for the record, we stayed at a really awesome boutique hotel/art gallery). The hotel sent me a confirmation email and told me that a driver would be waiting at the exit gate with a placard. Naturally, nobody was there when we came. Huyen and I waited for about twenty minutes before we decided to give up on the pick-up. The problem was though that we didn't have a phone to call the hotel and the pre-paid taxi booth was inside the airport. This was a problem because we were now outside the airport and you needed a ticket to get back in. Luckily, the pretty-face-rule works in India too and Huyen sweet talked an army guy with a machine gun to let her into the airport. Huyen paid for a taxi and came back outside.

We took our prepaid taxi receipt to the taxi line and told a circle of drivers where we wanted to go. Not one driver actually knew the spot and they debated on it for about 10 minutes. Finally one guy said to follow him and led us to his taxi which was not in the taxi line. Two other guys grabbed our bags and escorted us to the taxi. The two other guys apparently were homeless men who took our bags to get a tip. Heck, I respect that since they're not just sitting on the street begging for money (I don't mean to sound heartless but when you can't go twenty feet without someone asking for money you don't mind giving something to someone whose going that extra mile) . The problem is we didn't have any small denominations so we ended up giving them our leftover Thai Baht...which they seemed happy to get. Our taxi driver got into the car and shewd off the beggars. He then turned on the Ambassador cab, which rattled to life, rolled down the windows and we sped off into Kolkata...

Flight to Kolkata

Our first real taste of India came on the flight to Kolkata. The plane was filled with probably 95% Indians which made for an interesting couple of hours. One of the things I had heard about Indian culture is that personal space isn't something they're really into. This became quickly apparent as the lady next to Huyen more or less cuddle up next to her and went to sleep. No kidding, she ended up taking up about 25% of Huyen's chair. Behind us, about four Indian guys crammed into the three seats once the plane took off (although I don't think before the unfasten seat belt sign went off). The guys played cards behind us and weren't exactly not kicking my chair every thirty seconds.

However, the most telling example of how Indians aren't into following rules (blogs on littering, driving, etc. coming soon) came when the plane landed. Seemingly as soon as the plane touched down, nearly every Indian person jumped to their feet and began grabbing their bags from the overhead compartments. The Air Asia flight attendants got on the loud speakers and told everyone to sit down until we got to the gate. However, nobody listened. The flight attendants than basically went through the aisle and pushed people back into their seats. I really felt for this one flight attendant who looked completely dumbfounded and frustrated as she tried to get people to sit down; clearly this was a daily experience for her.

And with that, we begin the blogs on India...