April 19, 2007
South of the Border Comes to India
Part of the shocking growth in Gurgaon, India is driven by a 28KM strip of sparkling expressway that starts at Km 14.3 in Delhi near Rao Tularam Marg and ends at Km 42.0 in Gurgaon, bisecting the city in the process. This is the first real expressway in India and it runs through India's only planned city, a bit like the Baltimore-DC highway running through an desi version of Columbia, MD. Real estate investors and local developers have built hotels and malls along this highway and drivers speed past cranes and construction equipment every day.
This is not to say that every developer seeks to build the most modern amenities in the best of taste. In at least one part of Gurgaon-- Sector 32-- some enterprising developers have decided to rebuild a miniature version of "South of the Border" the famously crappy hotel, restaurant and theme park jammed off of I-95 just south of the Border of North Carolina.
The Gurgaon version does not sit south of any particular border. Instead it is called th 32nd Milestone, since it is stationed both in Sector 32 and at mile 32 on the expressway.
Like its American counterpart, the 32nd Milestone has a hotel:
And a bungee jump near some batting cages:
And a restaurant-...with the best restaurant name ever.
Best of all, it has a killer pop art go kart track. If it were bigger, I would convince someone to re-film Talledega Nights here:
No...really. The go kart track- visible from the highway- is great:
Posted by jb at 07:16 AM | Comments (1)
March 13, 2007
General Update
Hmm.
Moving, apparently, to Gurgaon, just south of Delhi, probably in mid April. I’ve seen a bit of the city. It’s the Trenton, NJ of India.
On the plus side, the apartment did not work out so apparently I’m getting a small house with terraces and a big field in the back yard (villa they called it). It is a bit of a fixer-upper (these phrases always give me pause. A fixer-upper in India is not a fixer-upper in the United States) but apparently the house will have a full staff (security guards, cook, etc).
So far, my interactions with drivers, cooks etc have been a bit awkward. Americans are not, as a rule, used to these services. It's bad form to push back on the services themselves though, since you just end up insulting someone else's professionalism. Also, I'm just not qualified to drive in Delhi.
I’m in Singapore now but I’m off to Bangalore on the 19th
My parents are leaving their house in Landenberg forever and moving back to the farm in VA. I wish that I could help out with the move and with cleaning up the farm (cleaning out dead trees and vines and poison ivy and cutting back the boxwoods—the farm is pretty torn up right now). I have promised my parents that I will be at the farm for Christmas but everything will be covered with snow then.
Why does a Flickr group search for ennui return the group “Men who love shoes?”
I went for my vaccinations today. They gave me the first round of standard stuff and I need to come back for the Hep B and Hep A (if the screen suggests that I need it) shots. They gave me two boxes of Mephaquin for malaria but I’d rather figure out a way to immunize myself since I don’t want to take a dose every week for my entire duration in India. Maybe I’ll just take a box if I am running a fever. The CDC recommend typhoid but the doctor here feels that’s overrated. Maybe I will look into it later if I ever get the chance to try a bike ride down the west coast of India.
Y’all are of course welcome to visit once I get set up. There should be several guest rooms, at least for a while, since nobody else from my company will be living in the India office (Hari is down in Kerala, which is not at all close to Delhi).
The house
Across the street (these are not my photos)
Posted by jb at 04:42 AM | Comments (2)
November 30, 2006
Chennai
Arrived in Chennai last night, workshop during the day, now I am at the GRT Grand hotel. So far, India makes me think about the Matthews, an Irish Catholic family that I knew while I was in High School (to this day I'm in their debt because they gave me the groundwork for at least half of my social skills). Here too, I see groups of people who really know how to sit around a table and have a serious conversation. The effect is incredibly appealing.
Posted by jb at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2006
Friday and Saturday
Passover at the Green's house. 11 people. We sat down at 9:45 pm and finished at 1:30 in the morning. The Seder started slow and then we all raced to the finish.
Drove over the Lara’s house the next day- a small blue bungalow in Brentwood. I brought two plants, a grape vine and some other trellis-oriented plant as a housewarming gift. Steven- her husband- and I moved a trunk into the basement and worked at pulling some blue vinyl siding off of the porch eaves. I still need to call Lara’s brother Neil.
Wrote the first two paragraphs at the Freer Gallery of Asian art, sitting on the walkway that surrounds a small boxwood garden in the middle. I meant to drive out to Woodley park, relax at a café, and have some coffee but I decided to keep going by train down to the Smithsonian stop where I could take a gander at the Chinese landscape paintings I’d studied in college. The main landscape exhibit was shut for repairs but I decided to stroll around and see whether they’d kept any of the landscapes by Ni Tsan on the walls.
Ni Tsan’s paintings are unusual because they maintain broad swathes of blank canvas. The ink forms trail off into this space, occasionally forming a transparent bridge in the middle of the canvas that joins forms at the top and bottom. It makes me think of the last note in a recital or of a thought that slowly trails away.
Rachel called as I was leaving the art gallery. Went over to her house and planted some azaleas and spring onions in some raised beds that she was working on. Afterwards, Nathan, Rachel and I went over to a block of warehouses on 4th and Morse in NE where we ate Korean food at a bodega wishboned between the Haw San (sp) import export warehouse and four other warehouses. The food was really cheap and the proprietor sat and talked to us while we ate.
One item in re eating at small shops in industrial warehouse clusters. There are forklifts everywhere.
Sat around on the front porch with Dave last night. Dave hand cut some hickory and used to cook a big steak on the portico outside his kitchen.
Happy Easter to the upstairs housemates. Good luck to T Montgomery during her trip to Calif.
Posted by jb at 08:19 AM | Comments (4)
March 07, 2006
Rt 235, Southern MD
It is spring at Saint Mary's but early spring; January. Andy has started a jug band and he's looking for a washboard which means that he needs to drive up Rt. 235 from Saint Mary's city to Waldorf, MD 1.5 hours away. I'm in the car with him and the radio is playing Sonny Rollin's Saxophone Colossus. The last time we played this song was on a fateful drive to Fredericksburg, VA to eat waffles at the Fredericksburg Waffle House while watching a sudden torrential rain and hail mix beat Andy’s no-start car security system to death. Anyway, we are driving and because it is January on the Chesapeake it is snowing and cars are plowing ahead at a conservative 25 miles per hour which is not at all acceptable when you are planning a jug band and need to get a washboard.
Continue reading "Rt 235, Southern MD"
Posted by jb at 10:19 PM | Comments (1)
February 24, 2006
A Short Poem As A Placeholder
A short poem, as a placeholder. I'll switch it out if I get time to submit an entry tonight.
Continue reading "A Short Poem As A Placeholder"
Posted by jb at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2006
Cabdrivers
(6:50PM) I’m on the Acela from Philly to Boston and there is no internet access on the train. The conductor has just walked by collecting tickets and the transportation safety administration has required conductors to do random identification checks and since:
- I no longer have a photo id
- and the woman at reservations refused to sell me a pre-reserved ticket without id
- and the quickticket machine that I resorted to had all sorts of dire warnings about the TSA now requiring id placarded on it
- and I'd already evaded one id check when I took advantage of some confusion in the station to walk past the pre-boarding gateway id checker
I’m hoping that I don’t get checked.
I left the meeting in Fort Washington early in order to take a cab from the boonies of Pennsylvania to the 30th street train station in Philadelphia and the cabdriver, after assessing traffic along the toll highway, decided that it would be better to travel back to center city without using any highways at all. He drove getaway car-style, hurtling through red lights ‘cross the back alleys of north Philadelphia [Juniata Park, Hunting Park, Nicetown, Fair Hill] while telling me about his year in Boston (back Bay, with his parents) and six years first in Brooklyn (near the GW Bridge) and then in Manhattan (in St Marks—8th street and 2nd Ave— which was not as clean as it is today). He went back to find his landlord in St. Marks, asked about the rent for his fifth floor walkup and was told to add 2 grand to the monthly rent that he was paying in the 1980’s.
...
Some of the neighborhoods in North Philadelphia have not changed since the 1950s. All the details are complete, down to the old cadillacs and the thin, neon woolworth signs.
...
This has been a great evening for cabdrivers. The cabdriver from the Train station back to Logan airport has just recommended his cousin’s Italian deli, down the road from Russo’s. He has also given me a recipe for braised rabbit.
Posted by jb at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
License
This is supposed to be an entry at 10:00 pm but there is some trouble with my username and password so it is getting stored in email. I'll post it when the account resolves itself.
I'm supposed to be writing an article on some medical diagnostics but right now I'm in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel in fort Washington PA and I'm distracted. There are three Guido's at the desk next to me, trying to work out something on the hotel computer. Directions to New Jersey or the secret of fire. I can't figure out which. They all have moustaches and leather jackets and heavy Philly accents and I wouldn't be out in the lobby but the Marriott seems to have no wireless service.
But that's really beside the point. The real point is that I managed to lose my license at Logan airport and this means that I'll be taking the train back north to Boston tomorrow night unless the train requires id, in which case I'll be taking the bus, hitchhiking, stealing a motorcycle, stealing a bicycle and walking in that order. It's one of those not-nightmare-but-heavy-on-the-annoyance scenarios. The average American has his picture taken 2,000 times per day but license and passport are arguably the only two pictures that contain a slice of your soul.
Fort Washington, Pennsylvania is about the most convenient place to lose a license but then I'm not sure about getting a new one since my passport, which expires in 2007, is my only viable form of id. As far as other forms of id are concerned, I need to get a new copy of my social security card and to do that I need a copy of my birth certificate. I lost the only copy of my birth certificate six or seven years ago (this is what I get for keeping it in a FedEx envelope in a pile of discardable papers near the bookshelf) and the original is in a filing cabinet in the middle of small windowless (I imagine) office in Westfalen Germany. Now I think to myself that I can't get on the plane to Germany without a license and so no license no birth certificate no social security card no license and that completes the cycle (or it will, once my passport expires-- I'm glad that this is happening in 2006 and not 2007) but a more reasonable scenario could go: need more than passport to get new license. No other id. No license. Passport expires in 2007. No trip to Germany no birth certificate. At that point I disappear entirely from the face of the earth and spend the rest of my life eating Gila monsters out of a gutter in Escondido, California.
But that's just me obsessing. I'll bet Gila monsters don't even taste so bad and cooking...that totally denatures the poison sacs along their jaw lines.
Posted by jb at 05:26 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack