Double Hamster on The Rocks

August 12, 2007

Keralites Rock

Weekly update (for this week at least):

Let's see: The bulk of the week was pretty slow.

A lawyer called a few days ago and told me to expect a subpoena related to the work that I was doing in 2002/2003/2004 (I can't remember which year). Someone is suing someone else and apparently I was involved in a project that has some bearing on the case and so I may need to fly back to the US to testify. Sometimes work just never leaves you.

I learned to jump on and off of a moving train yesterday morning.

I divide the learning session into three parts, w,t and f.

W: David and I arrive at the train station in Trivandrum. We are planning to catch the 10A M train at Aleppy in order to watch the annual Nehru snakeboat races (pics in flickr after I upload them today). We have tickets out to the races but lack tickets back and are asked to walk over to the reservations office to get tickets. The reservations office looks just like an American Dept. of Motor Vehicles office, which is pretty nostalgic for me.

As expected of the DMV, the ticket purchase takes some time and so we walk back and get to the railroad station tracks just at 10AM. David looks at the ticket and then at the signboard above track number 1: the numbers do not match. Okay, he thinks, this is not our train. He then notices that another train three tracks and an overpass/walkway away is starting to move out of the station.

T: He thinks that this has to be the train to Aleppy and starts running. We dart up the stairs and over the tracks and down the stairs and David, who is leading, keeps running and jumps on to the moving train. I jump on after him but I'm not as graceful so I slam into the doorway wall and lever myself in.

F: David walks through one car and then comes to the mid-car platform where he asks a bystander whether we are on the right train. The bystander says no and I think that we will pick up something else at the next station and then David looks back and then runs forward and jumps back out of the train, landing on the last third of the platform. The train is picking up some speed (the cars at the end of a train are moving pretty quickly by the time a train finishes a station exit) but he makes the jump and lands running. I follow and jump out without looking but spot some cement/ grain bags on the platform mid-leap and so I push myself farther out and let go of the handrail on the outside of the door. I pass over the bags, land harder, stagger for a few steps and then splay myself out over last part of the platform.

Several people jog up to us and ask if they can help. Where is the train? It is the first one that we saw, but we need to hurry since it is leaving the station. We run back to the point where we started and board that train before it starts moving. David thinks that I'm ridiculous for jumping off of the moving train without pausing to check for poles and other hazards. In retrospect, that could have gotten ugly.

Indian trains, at least in the CC class and above, are great. Lots of sleeper bunks. We were moved several times and had to pay another Rs 50 because we had an open instead of reserved ticket. Food vendors spent the entire trip walking back and forth along the compartments, hawking coffee (kopi, just like the kopi in Singapore), chai, briyani, banana chips, etc.

David met two of his friends, Madhu and Chris, after we disembarked in Aleppy. Madhu had waited for us instead of heading out to the race but he still manged to negotiate and secure a spot on one of the hundred or so boats that lined the racecourse on the water side. Thousands of spectators lined the bank and the racing boats were paddled down the middle.

We saw several classes of boats, all with super narrow, pencil thin shells that were barely visible above the water. These boats are called snakeboats because they look snakelike as they glide along, driven by the rowers. The smallest of these boats probably has 20 rowers while the largest class had 135 people, from 120 to 130 rowers to steering people to people to keep time during the race.

Three races stood out: an early men's heat, the final women's race, and the final race of the day, where the winning 135-man boats from the earlier heats raced down the waterway to establish an overall winner. This was the pinnacle race in the pinnacle snakeboat racing event and like many "best of the best" events it was very good. There was also a halftime water show and several of the boats sank during the races after taking on water.

By the last races, the people on two of the boats beside us were pretty drunk and started fighting. Fights are different here. The bottles and sticks and boards and even huge planks (intended for throwing at the crowd on the other boat) and bamboo poles came out early, but the two groups also cooled down pretty quickly. In part, this is because the police boats kept drifting by and here, as elsewhere in India, the police are not so keen on light touch diffusion tactics, preferring instead to use lathis: long, stiff sticks which are terribly effective when beating the hell out of someone (on a side note, I saw this in Gurgaon, when a driver became belligerent with a police officer over a parking matter. He argued, was surrounded, and the pulverized-- the whole thing probably took two minutes)

On the way back from the race, I managed to lose my wallet. I discovered this after Mathu and I ran over to a KRSTC super fast bus to Trivandarum and he helped me press in at the back of the bus.

And this is where I found the Keralites totally rock. I am standing at the very back of the bus and I can't find my wallet and I explain to the collections guy that he needs to come back to me after I find my wallet and then the bus is bouncing own the highway and I'm standing pressed against the emergency exit door and checking my bag and then a young lady asks me if I've lost my wallet and gives me Rs. 100 for the ticket and then a married couple sitting down in a seat near me gives me Rs 100 for the rickshaw trip from the station to my apartment and the, later in the trip, a third guy (an air conditioning repairman who lives in Saudi Arabia and visits his family twice a year in Trivandarum) gives me Rs. 50 for the heck of it. Ach, so kind. This allowed me to pay my ticket and get back and really check my bag and then start calling credit card companies, asking to cancel various cards. I gave each of the donors a business card and told them to contact me. I might take three families out to dinner at some point.

The cards will arrive in Signapore by the time that I arrive in Wednesday. I still have no idea what I did with my wallet. Also, standing up and slamming against the emergency exit door of a superfast bus for 2 hrs (I got a seat after hr two) is really tiring.

Midnight when I got back to the apartment. The gate was closed and locked and so I jumped it. The guard was asleep on a mat in the foyer of the apartment building and I woke him when I walked by.

| By jb | 12:19 PM | Comments (1)

July 15, 2007

Mumbai on the water

In Mumbai/ Bombay today, with the two other company people (two of us are permanently in India, the third runs the Innosight Asia and divides his time between India, Singapore, And the United States).

Expedia apparently had some ridiculous offer on a hotel on Mumbai's west side, so we are at a Hilton on Marine Drive, overlooking the water. This is pretty much the central park west of Mumbai. I spent part of the afternoon sitting out on the granite balustrade along the ocean, ten feet above the waterline maybe. The city had placed some cement water breaks between the waterline and the promenade and the breaks looked just like oversized cement jacks. At night, giants come down with little bouncy balls and scoop up the jacks out of the water. I'm sure of it. It was great to sit down over the water and listen to music and take a break.

Anyway, I love this city. It reminds me of New York. I went to dinner at Indigo, a restaurant in Bombay's equivalent of the village.

Curiously, I got to stay inside Delhi this week as well, at a little, shabby chic hotel in Karol Bagh, which made it easier to get to the Vietnam embassy. I spent the evening and then dawn wandering around in the city. This is very unusual since most of my travel is airport-to-hotel business style travel which really isn't interesting at all.

So, a lucky week. I fly back to Trivandarum on Wednesday morning and then I might take the scooter up to Ponmudi and wander around the tea plantations this coming weekend.
* * *

| By jb | 12:12 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2007

Shnakes

Saw my first snake today, about 3.5 feet long, moving slowly along the cement trellis in the upper berm of the backyard. It had the gold/brown coloring that matched some cobra photographs I'd found but it was too far away to identify properly and I did not spot, at distance, any ridges along the neck that might indicate a hood so it was probably not a cobra.

But let's say it was a cobra. They are common enough here. Kerala is home to all four of the "big four" venomous snakes: the cobra, russel's viper, the krait and the hump-nosed pit viper. If I were a hump nosed pit viper I'd bite people just because of my name. I saw a mongoose walking through the side yard five days ago so it's as if a personal Rikki Tikki Tavi cycle has been completed.

So I realize that this was probably not a cobra but I've started looking in the corners of the rooms anyway. Cobras, like many other snakes, feed on lizards and my house is a bit lizard ridden. I spot at least one a day on my walls, and I like them because they eat the insects which I continually vote offstage in favor of the lizards. I'm not going to vote for snakes though. I'll stay with Lizards... little moving Geico commercials hanging to the ceiling above the churning fan blades... I wonder what they are thinking. Probably "no #&$^ cobra is going to get me up here, this is my own personal fiftieth floor on the skyscraper, one of them tries and I'll go all "Die Hard with a Vengeance" on it" Actually, those are my thoughts. The lizards are thinking "Insects, insects, insects, insects."

Anyway, I check the house (no window screens, only grates, and holes cut through the wall right at the ceiling, along with what I am sure is a miniature periscope so something poisonous can check out the room and wait until I am sleeping before climbing through the hole and dropping down on me) and then I notice that, while the neighbors had hired someone to cut back the brush in the yard, there is still all sorts of brush along the road leading from the house and then the grass along the roadside had not been cut and I think to myself that I will just keep an eye out for snakes when I am walking.

So I go to the store about 1/2 mile from the house and as I am walking back, a man about 10 feet in front of me suddenly shifts to the left away from the grass and begins saying "snake..snake..snake" I of course don't see anything.

"Where?"

"Back there.. you can see the mockingbird going after it"

I look back, and fifteen feet behind me (we were both still walking) a bird is pouncing on the grass and fighting with something that is thrashing around. I still can't make out the snake.

So much for spotting these things.

| By jb | 10:42 AM | Comments (3)

May 07, 2007

5 great things

1. Leaning over the sink to eat a mango ten minutes after I wake

2. Opening the doors and pulling the curtains aside instead of turning on the lights

3. The luffing sound of the ceiling fan, as opposed to the buzz of the AC

3. Hearing birds, insects and peepers when I go to sleep

4. Using power outages as an excuse for a walk

5. Afternoon break: lunch, shower, nap

| By jb | 10:40 PM | Comments (3)

An entry about cockroaches

I slept in the tent last night, on my bed. Well, on three bed frames that I pulled together from two rooms. I set the tent up after switching on the light in one of the house bathrooms and catching several cockroaches re-enacting what I can only guess was a scene from Die Hard II. I killed two of them (one with the base of a steel cup as it tried to scurry up the wall) and then walked out of the bathroom and saw two long antenna poking out of the sink overflow mouth in the living room basin. Between this, the mosquitoes (not very many, but they carry filarisis), and the biting ants (flesh eating might be a better term... Hari told me about them. He had an infestation in his house and woke up with tracks of blood down his legs) I chose to sleep in the tent. I may do this for a while. I have considered purchasing some fake grass mats for the bed.

So it looks like I will get my grass bed. But the grass will be plastic. And there will be a tent in the middle.

Jibber Jabberin | By jb | 10:38 PM | Comments (0)