Well, tomorrow will be our last day in India, and my last day for quite some time. We'll be leaving the apartment at 1:00 AM that night (I can't rightly call it "morning") to head out to the airport, where the plane will board at 4:00 AM.
Why the airport said we should be there three hours before they start boarding, I'm not entirely sure I want to know. Apparently, the checking process takes an eternity.
We just bought an idly steamer so we can eat at least two Indian recipes back in the states. Unfortunately, we don't know the recipe for the special sambar it goes with, and trying to look for a recipe online is utter insanity due to the standard Indian naming system, wherein the principal law is "No more than one name or word per hundred instances".
India has been fun. Most certainly not what I was expecting, but then again I was kinda expecting the river + cow + mud hut + holy man + dancing milkmaids scene. I'm actually slightly relieved it didn't live up to my expectations.
It feels like I've barely been here a couple weeks, and also like I've spent a good deal of my life here. It's going to be strange coming back to Vegas and the house we've got there... I hope I can kick some of the unusual habits I've picked up here, the ones that are almost essential to dealing with Indians but would seem slightly insane to Westerners.
But of course, I cannot try to generalize India. India is a massively huge fabric woven with thousands of threads made from wildly different materials and colors, and the image it presents can be rather confusing at times. Simply going from Hyderabad to Goa -a relatively short trip when the rest of India is taken into consideration- you see cultures that are almost completely alien to one another.
If any of you decide to visit India, I recommend you take these points into consideration:
1. South India has some of the best food (in my most humble of opinions), and is far less strict on the manners practiced while eating it than the Northern parts.
2. If you ever get a chance to eat Rajasthani food, pass. Same goes for paan.
3. Sellers of a particular good will tend to cluster around each other, for some reason. If you don't like the products or the prices of a place, go next door. This also applies to restaurants.
4. Indian pidgin pronounciation guide: "Z" is pronounced "J". This leads to people talking about going to the jew, and also talking about the number jeero. "S" is sometimes pronounced "Sh" or "Ch". This leads to people talking about getting someone to fix a leaky chink.
Also be on the lookout for people testing their geography by talking about the tiny island nation of faggy.
5. Everybody has a different way of spelling English words, most of them phonetically. Train your deciphering and pattern-recognition skills by looking at signs and billboards.
6. Being in close quarters with Indians is actually less of a bother than being in close quarters with Westerners. I assume this is due to a combination of their not being self-conscious about it, and the fact that Indian sweat smells like the spices they eat (check your armpits after a few days of eating the local food. You may be surprised).
7. Don't tip too much. If you do, you will never be able to get rid of the waiter you tipped.
8. If one person knows where/who you are, everybody knows where/who you are. My name has spread around, since it's the easiest to pronounce, and I often run into strange kids that I've never seen before who greet me by name.
9. Don't drive. Leave it to the locals. I don't care how much you don't like taking rickshaws or taxis everywhere, you're going to like driving in this madhouse even less.
10. Eat. Everything. There is so much good food here, it is almost sinful to leave even some of it untasted. Stuff yourself full to the brim with curries and dals and tiffins and enjoy every damn bite of it. If it doesn;t taste right, go next door and try it there.
Luckily, I've got a few things to entertain myself with when I get back to Vegas. We've got the tenth season of South Park waiting on DVD at the library, and we're lining up a few of the movies that have been released since we left for India.
Did you know that on average, there are about three movies released per day here in India? Did you also know that the quality-quantity balance is heavily lopsided?
My time is going to be heavily eaten up when I return to Vegas, so I most likely won't be able to keep up such speedy updates on my various projects (...), and in general I won't be spending as much time on the boards. I might have some time when I get to the school, since they promise to only fill half the day with various projects and 'lessons'.
Well lads, it's been great. Be seein' y'all when I get the chance.
-Kagus
P.S.
This isn't the last post, I've still got a day's worth of time left. I just figured I should get around to writing this thing some time before I left for the states.