the monsoon, finally

friday at 5pm we started our office festivities. a few team building games. thankfully i was appointed judge. who says you can't trust the white man? at 7 the engineering group headed for the go-cart track. the drizzle turned into real rain. i put on the provided helmet, worried slightly about picking up head lice. fortunately the stink inside the helmet made me forget all about the lice. i started around the treacherous track, the front tires kicking up dirty road water onto my face (the helmet visor was missing). 6 laps later and back in the pits i was soaked and filthy, though i was sure i had the fastest time of the group. there was little satisfaction in this, however, as my co-workers are so uncompetitive (see the bowling entry some weeks back). i watched the next group as i picked the grit from by teeth and eyes. lots of crashes and spinouts--good stuff. i think some people weren't aware that the go-carts had brakes. the group after us was even more fun to watch, crashing into one another and even destroying a car.

filthy and wet, we headed to a hotel to eat. "hotel" means restaurant in india. no one seems to know why. we ate chinese, which seems to be the most popular non-indian cuisine in the country. i asked for chopsticks which freaked out my co-workers, who hadn't a clue how to operate them.

by now i was late for my meeting with B & V and their pals. i asked the guys to drop me off near the bar, unable to convince them to join me. V had brought his 2 cameroonian friends, N & E, who seemed bored out of their minds. a few glasses of beer and it was already closing time, and time for me to get my second soaking of the night on my walk back to the office where i had stupidly left my keys. a strange man in a car kept trying to pick me up on my way back home.

i woke up this morning with a sore throat and a raspy voice.

my future bride

the guys at work feel bad that i'm single and old (compared to them) so are trying to find someone to marry me. they walked me through a search of bengalimatrimony.com, billed as the worlds largest matrimonial website. too many of the hindu women seemed to have their priorities messed up, including wanting to marry within their caste or their race, etc. when i restricted the search to non-religious women (my officemates thought this was a very weird thing to do) i ended up with only 5 or 6 choices. my top pick is a 28 year old meat-eating school teacher and artist. an excerpt from her bio:

"...Want to share my life with someone who would be my friend and support, open-minded and non-superstitious. I believe in trust and transperency. I hate Hipocracy. I'm very much afraid of cats."

it's eerie. i could have written the very same thing, except that i'm very much afraid of squirrels. cats are pussies.

mad dog

the stray dogs roaming the bangalore streets ignore humans during the day, but become territorial at night. one dog patrols the area around my home, and even sleeps in my driveway. during the day he completely ignores me. after 11pm he treats me as an evil intruder, barking and growling and baring his teeth. i stare him down and make my own threatening noises, which so far keeps him at bay. this happened again last night as usual, only this time the building guard gave the dog a beating for it. i should have tipped him i think.

office rat?

one of my few female co-workers was making a leisurely trip to the bathroom, which happens to be next to my desk. she opened the door, gasped, and lept backwards. she stood still, her mouth wide open in shock. apparently a rat had charged out of the bathroom and under my desk. i asked, "a rat or a mouse?" "a rat!" she insisted. the maintenance guy put a trap under my desk and an hour later a tiny mouse was caged inside. i'm not sure what they did with it...

mysore

i thought i was heading to mysore to take a break from the mayhem of bangalore. i was wrong.

true, mysore is smaller, less crowded (but still crowded), and the air is a bit more breathable. it's possible to cross the street fairly easily. sometimes there's even a traffic cop to help you along. on the other hand, wherever you look you see men urinating on a wall or through a fence or into a gutter. sacred cows are everywhere, and so is their shit. so much of the city reaks of cow shit and man piss. there is a lot of pleasant looking green space, but most of it is fenced off, probably because people would just pee all over it, and of course cows would graze and shit on it. but worse than all of this are the scammers.

mysore gets a bunch of western yoga students and tourists, which in turn has created a massive scamming industry (i suspect yoga students in india for the first time might be particularly easy targets). this being low season, there are few tourists and a ton of out-of-work scammers. so they basically all descended upon me. the scammers range from cute 8 year olds to grizzled 50 year olds. the one thing they have in common is that they are extremely friendly. they're always so interested in you. there seem to be a few different pitches:

1. show you the incense factory
2. take to the one day only music festival (the scammer often posing as a music student)
3. show you a amsterdam style "coffee shop", where pot smoking is legal (mysore, they claim, is one of a handful of indian cities where it is legal)

these offers always come after a lengthy confidence building process during which they express great interest in you and share their love of things from your culture. two separate scammers actually sung the same bob marley song in an effort to prove they were "just like me." never mind that i'm not really a bob marley fan. they drop the names of their fun loving western friends living in mysore (who almost certainly don't exist, or if they do are part of the scam), and ask if you'd like to meet them. and the list goes on and on. in general, they make it difficult to shoo them away because at this point they've only been friendly.

then comes one of the above pitches, of course disguised as a gesture of friendship. i'm not sure what happens with each. i suspect the music festival has "just ended" when you reach it, and you meet the scammer's musician friend who leads you in some other unknown direction. the "coffee shop" scam scares me the most, as from what i've been able to gather, pot smoking is illegal in all of india and this might be a scam designed to get you "arrested" followed by the bribe to get you out of trouble. the incense factory is undoubtedly some sort of redirection scam as well.

one scammer walked with me for a while, chatting me up as usual. a western woman even waved at him from the window of a passing bus and he waved back. maybe i was wrong about him? maybe he's just a nice guy? no, when he waited for me for 45 minutes while i was in a museum, i knew he had to be a scammer. i debated with myself whether to see where the scam leads or to just blow him off. i decided to use him at least to point out a good cheap place to eat. he did. i was careful to make sure that it was a crowded eatery so that i wouldn't be drugged. he told me it was ok to smoke pot here, but i declined. while i was eating, his "friend" came by. this guy spoke perfect english. we talked at length about bangalore. he knew the city well and we talked about many places we'd both been. he lamented the westernization and yuppification of bangalorian culture. he spoke at great length of his interest in yoga and ayurvedic medicine and what it could do. we discussed the tragic london bombings and world politics. he spoke at length about his studies abroad and his return to india to "give something back" by working with local children with cerebral palsy. he shared his email address and gave me the address of the sister orphanage in bangalore in case i wanted to check it out and volunteer or donate. man, what a great, great guy. after lunch, he wanted me to stop by his place with the other scammer. i somehow had the impression this was the orphanage (he said he lived there), and i thought the scam would involve me giving money to either a real or fake orphanage, and/or buying some fake and/or overpriced ayurvedic medicine. i debated whether to follow or take off. what the hell, i went with them. they weren't big guys and all of the confidence building didn't suggest a violent end. plus i could turn around an leave at any time.

instead of an orphanage, we went into a ramshakle storefront. no one else was there, so i felt fairly safe. he had talked about the ayurvedic properties of certain oils in the restaurant and sure enough, he had some of those oils here. he started to bottle some up for me, one he guaranteed would repel mosquitoes and the other would cure any stomach issues (things we talked about over lunch). i told him i didn't really want to buy any oils. he went on about how this wasn't about money and how he wanted to share ayurvedic medicine and why would he go though all of this for a few dollars. he knocked down the price of the two bottles of oil to 250 rupees, which is about $6. he wanted to sell me some expensive and ostensibly highly potent "marijuana oil". when i didn't bite, he offered me a big bag of pot for $9 (the pot was real). yes, this huge investment of time was coming down to whether or not i would by $16 worth of stuff that probably had a value of something closer to $3-5. but this is india and making $10 in a day is a good score. i told them i didn't know anything about these oils and was uncomfortable buying them, and that i didn't want the pot. they feigned insult and prices came down somewhat, but i took off. they weren't happy and our friendship was clearly over.

in addition to the scammers, there were the beggars and the street vendors who would chase me for blocks trying to separate me from my rupees. definitely more agressive than bangalore.

but it wasn't all bad...

sites seen:

maharaja's palace - the highlight of the trip. those maharajas really knew how to live it up. at one point i ended up on the off-limits palace rooftop having taken a stairway i wasn't supposed to take (apparently a door was unlocked that shouldn't have been). i realized immediately i was somewhere i wasn't supposed to be, but i still snuck around for a while and took in the views. no one caught me.

the art museum - not bad. after making the rounds i tried to leave the gallery, but one of the staff stopped me, insisting i must see the musical clock go off on the hour. so for 5 minutes i stood in front of this massive french clock adorned on top with a little regal military scene. the only movement was the drummer boy pounding out each second. a crowd gathered. anticipation grew. the hour struck, and the music box began its song, though nothing moved. was it broken? finally the soldiers and horses and carriages stuttered into action, circling the palace atop the clock. it was easily one of the lamest things i have ever waited for. the museum guy who forced me to stay approached with a smile and said (paraphrasing) "see, wasn't that great?" i wanted to punch him but instead i gave him a thumbs up and a smile.

chamundi hill - i took a public bus to the top of chamundi hill. i left my shoes in the shoe repository, bought a ticket, and joined the queue to enter the hilltop temple. somebody shoved flowers and a religious idol into my hands. i said i didn't want this, but they said it's not for you, it's an offering. they didn't ask me for any money. i was waiting in line and someone scolded me becase my flip flops were poking out of my backpack. the complainer thought i had merely shoved the shoes i was wearing into my bag. i explained i hadn't, and that this was my luggage, but he was unsatisfied. i was now trapped in the disneyland style circuitous queue and there was no way out. finally he agreed i could hide them in my backpack at least. i did. so there you have it, my first trip to an indian temple and i'd offended the gods, or at least their worshippers.

i felt bad about my faux pas at first. but then i entered the push to get a blessing and offer my flowers and icons. people pushed and shoved as a security guy enforced a rapid offering rule. i gave my offerings and my cash and was shoved away. it's difficult to imagine a less holy experience. how is this less offensive than flip-flops protruding from a backpack? to exit the temple, i navigated the gauntlet of holy men seeking money for blessings. one caught me and i ended up lighter by 10 rupees with a dot of paint between the eyes.

finally i emerged from the temple and the guys who "gave" me the offerings hit me up and ended up with way too much of my money. i went to pick up my shoes, pushing through the children selling postcards. the shoe attendant motioned me aside, pointing to the wall. painted on the wall was the number 100, nothing else. the shoe guy said this meant that shoe storage was 100 rupees and i roared with laughter. i took my shoes and gave him 1.5 rupees.

so there you have it. this holy place was largely about getting me to part with my money. 20 years from now i'll enjoy stepping on the cockroaches these karma-poor scammers become in the next life.

i walked the 1000 steps down chamundi hill and after the usual negotiations caught an auto-rickshaw to the train station. i was really looking forward to getting home.

fat, snotty, pale & lazy

a few weeks ago i was bronzed and trim and healthy.

but sitting in front of a computer all day changes all of that--fast. my tan is gone. almost no exercise and too many carbs are causing an alarming gut expansion. and i've been suffering with allergies that are making me sneezey and sluggish. turns out bangalore is the allergy capital of india.

i need to find some way to reverse all of this. wooing the indian ladies is difficult enough as an outsider without adding the gut and the snot. though maybe being pale is an advantage.

solutions? low carb eating isn't feasible. the gym is too far away. plus my ankle still isn't really exercise ready.

i figured constant bouts of food poisoning and other gut related maladies would keep me trim, but so far i've had it easy. in fact, except for one ultra-spicy food related incident, my bowels have been better behaved here than at home. go figure.

ugh. i think i've said too much.

the indian movie experience

i survived my first indian movie theater experience, barely.

plenty of people talked over the movie. cell phones rang. the dramatic tension was largely undone by a poorly placed intermission. the aspect ratio seemed wrong.

fortunately i had a buffer between me and the masses. if the theater were full it would have been a complete disaster.

at least i only paid about $2.40.

happy independence day

i'm pretty sure i'm not supposed to be working today as it is independence day in the US, but here i am anyway. frankly, i'm not sure the whole independence thing is working out, so it's difficult to get excited about the holiday. after 230 years of it we end up with our worst government ever.

still, i will celebrate. i'm taking the afternoon off to see "war of the worlds" with scientologist superstar tom cruise. i hope i don't end up rooting for the aliens.

police inaction

apparently our intended destination was shut down by the cops, and the evening degenerated into a few guys drinking in my apartment. B and V left at about 1am. i walked out on my balcony at 1:15 and saw them in the streets talking to a group of about 5 cops. probably nothing. i checked again half an hour later and they were still there. this generated a little concern. i walked out to see what was going on, not that i really had much of a strategy for getting them out of the clutches of the police. fortunately i didn't have to. B speaks some kannada (the local language) which delighted the bored police and they were just chatting. finally the conversation broke up, but at this point B and V were worried about finding an auto-rickshaw that wouldn't charge them 4 times the going rate. so they came back to my place and fell asleep on my couches. B was a little concerned that the bored cops would follow us home in search of some booze and something more entertaining than hanging around in the streets with the stray dogs, but they didn't. but this got me thinking... maybe i should befriend the notoriously corrupt cops. once i have them on my side i could get away with anything. not that i have a lot of underworld ambitions here. not yet at least.

disco is dead

friday night i hooked up again with B and V and over a beer a plan emerged to head to the disco. do i like discos? no, but i thought i should at least experience an indian one. B and V, being european, adore discos the world over.

there is a rule in bangalore that you cannot get into a disco unless you bring (or are) a woman. there is a reason for this. first i should explain that indian males often remain entirely "wholesome" until they get married. this is often not by choice. or at least not by their choice--it's usually that women won't allow anything to happen until marriage. this makes the typical indian male obsessed with finding someone to marry as quickly as possible. it also leaves him in a perpetually hot and bothered state. now the disco tends to attract the few not-so-conservative indian girls out there. we're talking tight sleeveless shirts and skimpy skirts. while this is the way everyone under 20 dresses at home, you just don't see it here, and it suggests, at least in the minds of some males, that these girls might not insist upon waiting until marriage. once the guys realized where these, um, more liberal minded girls were congregating, they arrived in droves. cover charges skyrocketed, but not enough to trump the mating drive. fights fueled by certain pent up energies broke out as several guys would compete for the attentions of one girl. hence the rule and the high cover charge we would surely be asked to pay.

we had no women in tow, but well-connected B knows the doorman, who probably also realizes that the white man isn't gonna go nuts when confronted by a woman in a skirt, though i wasn't so sure about V and his one track italian mind. we were offered entry for 600 each (about $14), which includes 2 free drinks. i applied the best of my formidable negotiating skills, but could only get the price down to 400 each. we then learned that the dance floor was closed until further notice, so we'd essentially just be sitting around drinking like anywhere else, though the doorman tried hard to sell us on the atmosphere inside. turns out that there'd been a crackdown on clubs, the new police commissioner enforcing a disco license law that was previously ignored. every dance floor in the city, if not the state, was shut down until various fees and fines were paid and paperwork processed. this was a bit of a relief for me and a crushing blow to B and V. we sure as hell weren't gonna pay the big bucks to sit on our asses, so we left and instead paid the small bucks to sit on our asses and drink at the nightwatchman, a nearby bar. B's indian friend N joined us and we (well, they really) came up with a drunken strategy for the next night (i.e. tonight) involving a secret late night club and go-go dancers.

i'm giving this evening a 20% chance of success, and a 10% chance of something terrible happening. still, i dare not miss it.

pigeon love

everyday i have to watch two amorous pigeons go at it on the air-con unit outside my office window. they do some sort of spastic kissing thing for a while, followed by "the act", which is mercifully brief. it was sort of interesting the first few times, but now i'm kinda hoping they smash into a window and die.

indian english

i love indian english, which is a lot like old british english, i suppose. a typical newspaper article, for example, might lament the increasing number of rowdies, rascals, miscreants, or other similarly named perpetrators of hooliganism or bamboozlement. i think i will subscribe to the paper for this reason alone.

i do however, wish i could better understand spoken indian english. it varies widely by speaker--some people make perfect sense to me...others might as well be speaking chinese. yet indians seem to understand each other when speaking english even when i can't. the whole back-and-forth communication rhythm is a bit different as well. you could almost say there is a certain impatience to indian english. most of my phone calls with indians result in complete confusion as my pauses and verbal cues differ from theirs.

one correction: the KFC is not new, it was only remodelled. my co-workers were aghast (see, i'm talking like this now) that i thought bangalore might have ever been KFC-less.

goat pizza

they've just opened up a shiny new KFC near my place. i wonder when i'll finally break down and eat there. mercifully, the only other american fast food chains nearby are pizza hut and dominos. i try to stick with indian chains when possible. for example, i usually get my pizza from U.S. Pizza, an indian pizza chain posing as an american pizza chain (much in the same way that outback steakhouse is an american steakhouse chain posing as an australian steakhouse chain). sunday night i enjoyed a tasty tandoori paneer and onion pizza. for some reason, they always give me a load of ketchup packets with my pizza. i think they think americans douse everything in ketchup and adore tandoori paneer.

last week i had pepperoni pizza at "pizza corner" (another local chain) but it was goat pepperoni. i'd kill for real pepperoni, but you won't even find that at pizza hut or dominos.

the audition

i was placed in a sound studio and read 2 pages of an instructional chemistry script. i haven't had chemistry since high school and wasn't sure how a few of the terms should be pronounced. why couldn't it have been phyiscs or math? the sound engineer played it back to me and pointed out a few areas for improvement. not sure if i'll get the gig. actually, i'm not sure if i even want the gig. do i even have the stamina to read like that for 2 hours?

met the expats for drinks and dinner later. i met a young swede, B, who has been here for 2 years and therefore has the scoop on everything. B and V got into a battle and i mostly just let them go at it. several times V, in a loud voice, declared his disdain for and mistrust of all indians. this would have been simply lame and small minded at low volumes, but was highly inappropriate at high volumes while surrounded by indians. if anyone overheard, they didn't let on.

B left to meet his girlfriend and V and i went to dinner at "the only place", which is the only place i know of to get delicious and copious amounts of that most sacred of animals, the cow. i just had a tasty cheeseburger, because i wasn't that hungry, but i tried a bit of V's steak and it was very good. i think i'll be a regular there.

raided!

i had lunch with co-workers at a new (to me) kind of hole-in-the-wall specializing in some sort of ultra fatty sikh food (the correct name escapes me). most daunting was the quart of buttermilk i was supposed to drink. i managed to down half of it. yuck. at least i saw my first sacred street cows on the motorbike ride out there. they were dining on piles of garbage.

after work, i ended up at purple haze again with the same guys i went with the last time. amongst the frenetic crowd were the same overly affectionate locals i had met the week before, who this time assaulted me with even more touching and hugging. this time they tried to feed me french fries by hand.

after being booted out of PH, we grabbed some food at 11:40, at the only place around that bribes the cops to stay open that late. apparently the bribes weren't enough, as the cops burst in and shut off the lights and threatened the proprietors. according to my co-worker buddies, the cops said something along the lines of "if you serve another dish we'll mess you up but good." it was time to go.

[note: cops here wear silly austrialian style cowboy hats and carry sticks (which they wield almost constantly) rather than guns. i think to make up for this, they put on the tough guy act.]

class dismissed

guitar class went alright. only about 5 people had guitars, and were enthusiastic pupils. most of the guitarless attendees left once we started working on chord shapes.

class was followed by a design meeting from 9:30-11pm with the california office. the phone line went dead about 4 times. a little frustrating.

walking home at midnight is nice in that you can cross the streets without fear, but not so nice in that most of the people still out are a bit sketchy. until now, i was beginning to wonder if anyone here would ever offer me drugs and women.

moonlighting

my coworkers heard i play guitar, and cajoled me into giving lessons once a week, starting tomorrow night. every night this week i've gone with a student-to-be to a nearby shop to buy a guitar. i figured i'd be informally teaching 2 or 3 maybe, but the list of people interested is now up to 16, or about half the company. i think the low price of the course (free) and the novelty of it has contributed to the high level of interest. no doubt there will be a lot of drop outs early on. still, now i'm feeling the pressure to actually plan something. simply getting everyone in tune could take an hour.

i was originally planning on finding a guitar teacher here, rather than becoming one.

as if that wasn't enough...

the english woman through whom i found my apartment gave me the number of a guy who's looking for an american voice for some educational cd-roms. it actually pays quite well for 2 hours of work. but more importantly, i am attracted by the novelty of it. i go in for an audition on saturday. i have inteviewed before, but i have certainly never "auditioned" for anything.

the services of one's maid

my maid does fairly shoddy work. she just sort of splashes around a lot of water without doing any real cleaning. each day she asks me to check her work before she leaves. some days i point out something i'd like her to actually clean the next day. this doesn't necessarily mean that it will be cleaned.

i've been sort of curious how she's managed to stay a maid given her lackluster skills.

that is, until now. this morning, she stroked my arm and said "massage?" i don't think this is a normal service provided by indian maids, but it may be where her true skills lie. rather than test those skills, i listened to my internal alarm bells and declined the offer.

work: week 2

by now i am eating with my hands every day at lunch, skillfully scooping up curry covered rice clumps. i still use my hand sanitizer beforehand though.

my co-workers belch a lot during lunch. i'm don't think i'm ready to emulate that.

screw tang

i meet a few of my new expat pals at pecos. pecos is a great place until about 7pm when they jack up the music, making conversation much too difficult. V has obligations and departs early, but M and i move over to nasa for some outer spaced themed drinking. we are greeted by uniformed waiters that look more like they belong on a cruise ship than a star ship, but the effort put into the theme is nonetheless impressive. i see a manhattan listed on the menu, so i take a chance and order it. what i get is a sugary girlie beverage. oh well.