Catching up all over the place

The voice over crew in Bombay.
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Oh my god! Could I possibly be any farther behind on blogging? Why no, I couldn't. But here I am about to make a mad dash towards catching up. It is now March 12th. I am actually in Egypt but I will detail all that stuff in another blog. This brief blog will encompass Calcutta, a quick trip back to Thailand, and Bombay...Calcutta has a reputation as being a city that will try your patience if you are not able to handle starving children and beggars. I was there for 3 days and in that time I had almost no trouble at all. I came in on a holiday (January 27 is the Indian Independence day or something like that) and there was no traffic. Probably the only day of the whole year when this would happen. So it was smooth sailing to the hostel. Once in the hostel I met lots of cool people. All of whose pictures I don't have on this memory card so there will be no photos. Sorry. I saw almost nothing in Calcutta. I was burnt out and just didn't give a shit about touring anymore. So I went to the museum and drew some pictures of old skeletons there. And I am sure that I did some other stuff as well, but to be honest with you I don't for the life of me remember what that was. I seem to get that way intermittently these days. I go go go and then just stop and read a book. So off I went to Bangkok.

Tim and Martin on the way back from the Hanging Gardens in Bombay.
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I spent 3 weeks in Bangkok with Candy May, Jake, Anya, Tom and lots of other cool people at the park by the river (Almost all these pictures are either in the wrong format or on another card so I can't post them now). In the park there are tons of people who do fire spinning, capoara, juggling, play music, do aerobics, and all kinds of other stuff. I started learning how to do poi, which is fire spinning with two chains that burn at the ends. I have only done the fire once, but I practice with some basic ones. Candy and I spent a week in Kanchanaburi checking out the river kwai and the hellfire pass. A place where lots of people died and suffered greatly building a railroad across Thailand for the Japanese during world war 2. What a miserable scene that was. It's in a beautiful setting now, up in the mountains, surrounded by lovely wilderness. But even with that beauty it still holds the haunting feelings of so many dead who suffered all the way to their last breaths. I spent alot of time reading here...Candy had to work every day. She works way too much, 12 hours a day. So I read a bunch of classics. After 3 weeks my visa ran out and I had to go back to India to catch a plane to Cairo.

because he was a "successful business man".

Poin with glow in the dark lights. Long exposure.
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So in Bombay I saw Elephanta island, the Hanging Gardens (with Tim and Martin), the Prince of Wales museum, lots of cool old British style architecture (huge stone buildings with the very colonial feel but with Persian and Indian style influences), and I did voice over work for a Bollywood film. That's right my voice will be famous among millions as the guy who claps (in a crowd) and yells "Hey! What are you blind?" as a driver who almost runs over the main character of a movie. I don't seem to have any pictures of the other places. Don't know what happened to them. Oh well. After a few days I flew to Egypt.

the fort in the park in Bangkok
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My overall feelings for India can be summed up in the simple phrase "love it, hate it". If I never go back again that will be ok. But I am drawn to return. There are so many wondrous things that I haven't seen. And the people are really nice when they're not trying to sell you something (or get you to buy them something, or pay for their beers and hookers...yeah that's another story). I guess as a sign off on India I will tell the story of my mohawk night.

I got my hair cut in a mohawk. I have always wanted to do this and finally decided that I don't care enough about what other people think anymore to do it. So I walked into the night looking for a barber with a shaver. Some young men grabbed me randomly and told me to come with them. I followed them over to where the loud drums where banging and a huge group of only men were dancing. It was a wedding celebration. Like I said only men were dancing...the only women there were the bride and her escort (friend?). I danced with them for a while and then decided to leave, at which time a guy who I thought was associated with them grabbed me and become my impromptu guide. He showed me a place to get my haircut. I am sure it was the barbers first mohawk, cause he didn't have a clue what I wanted. After the cut my guide asked for a beer so I got us both a beer and then he showed me around his slum neighborhood, which was only slightly sketchy, but really interesting to see. Dark alleys filled with families and cooking smells. Very dirty and tons of improvised materials constructed into shacks and multi-story buildings. He drank his beer quick and then asked for mine, which I hadn't drank. I opened mine, decided that the local beer in a can, Kingfisher, is gross and gave him the rest. I realize that this is not good, promoting begging and all that, but I was feeling rebellious...oooooh! I decided I had had enough of his company after he asked my name for the fourth time. To be fair I don't remember his name either, but I did that night. As I was leaving he asked me for money for food. That pissed me off and so I bailed in a rather rude verbal manner...and went to hang out on pier.

On the pier a young stylishly dressed Indian approached me. He had nice shoes on, jeans (Indian jeans are very stylishly cut, really intersting patterns and such), and a t-shirt that had a riddle on it, the answer to which was "the sea". Don't remember the riddle itself. I knew this guy probably wanted something so I went through all the usual questions with him to try and trap him in his own game. He actually passed all of them. "What do you want? What do you do for a living? What are you selling?" and such. So we went off to a bar to have a drink. After we ordered beer I even asked him, as a prudent precaution, "Do you have money to pay for your beer?". NOw this may seem harsh, but it is standard practice to provide service and then ask for payment for it, without prearranging such, or to order stuff and then declare themselves your guest so you have to pay.He told me that not only did he have money for his beer but he would buy mine as well because he was a "successful business man". He seemed to get really drunk and we left. I went to the bathroom and he followed me out. As we left the waiter came out and chased us down to get payment. He said so I could hear that he had left the payment on table. Then he went back in to pay the bill. I don't know if he actually left it or not, but he took care of it. During our beer he told me that he would pay for me to go to an Indian brothel and have some girls later. I thanked him and told him that I wasn't interested. Then we talked about music and that was what we were searching out once we left the bar. And find music we did. In the second floor of a bar where I was the only non-Indian there was a woman singer who would trade off with a man singer. The were both very good and backed up by a guy playing the appropriate tunes on his keyboard. The music was blaringly painfully loud in the tiny room we occupied. A room about 60 feet by 15 feet. With all the walls lined with mirrors and men sitting on seats all around the outside edge. In the center of the room stood about 10 fully dressed Indian women, who spent most of the time looking at themselves inthe mirror and occasionally gracing one of the older gentlemen with money with a sly smile. Then the guys would give them money. On a regular basis the head waiter would take a huge wad of 10 rupee bills (that's worth about 25 cents) and spray them very smoothly over all the girls. Then a lowly waiter would crawl around on the floor, pick them up and put them on a tray and disappear into the back room with the money (probably to rearrange it into the next pile to be sprayed over the girls). Now this scene was very intersting and sort of sad. My friend, Ahmed, was really into it and seemed to know a lot of people there. People who, as he drank more, slowly disassociated themselves from him. And I could see why. He started getting obnoxious and drunk. So eventually, after he has ordered and drank a bunch of over priced beer (which I was willing to pay for half of because I figured he was full of shit about paying for everything), we got the bill. He looked at it, leaned over to me and said "I need 500 rupees". I said "100 rupees?" in disbelief. And he said 500 again. So I looked at the bill, willing to split the difference with him. The bill was 600 rupees. So this slick character thought that he was to be my guest in an overpriced brothel (yes it was a brothel, the girls were for hire). I got pissed. After a few rough words and a bit of physical contact I decided that my best option was to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I stood up, pulled 200 rupees from my pocket (which I had planned to give to the singers), another 100 from my money belt, gave them to the head waiter, told him that the rest was on the drunk guy and ran out of the bar as fast as my little feet would carry me. End of story. It was an interesting night. And personified pretty much all dealings with Indians that happen by originating on the street. I think that 95 percent of Indian people are probably really nice, but as a tourist I pretty much only get to deal with the 5% that suck.

Then it was off to Egypt. So join me in the next installment....