Biscuit: Tasty Doesn't Get You A Date To The Prom

Do you ever have those moments where you overthink a situation, and in the process, totally fuck it up?

You know, like when you think to yourself, "I have this very important thing. It is very important that this very important thing not get lost, so I will be sure to put it in a very safe place, so I will always know where it is."

And then when you go to find it, not only can you not remember the very safe place, you can't even remember having had the conversation with yourself, and it ends up that the very safe place is safe enough to keep the very important object from everybody, including you.

Another example: My roommate and I were having a dinner party a week or two ago, and at one point we needed to clear some serving dishes off of the table so we'd all have room to eat. The salad, all good and mozzarella-y and basil-y and tomato-y, was in the biggest bowl we have, a large shallow metal one. For lack of room anywhere else, I put it on top of the microwave, which lives on top of the fridge. "God, be sure to remember that I put that bowl up there, or else in like a week we're going to be wandering around the kitchen trying to find where that god-awful smell is coming from, and then we'll find the bowl and be like, oh my god, I'm going to barf from the disgusting week-old rotten salad," I said.

Cut to several days down the road. I'm doing dishes because a) the sink is full, but more importantly, b) our kitchen is getting smelly. And it suddenly hits me, and I slowly turn around...and there's the big bowl, still on top of the microwave, and full of the now rather unpleasant remains of the salad. "Found the salad," I texted to my roommate. "HAHAHAHAHA," she replied.

At least we knew it was going to happen.

More immediately, and what brought this whole topic to mind, happened on Saturday night. Shiv and I had just had a wonderful time meeting the lovely Miss Mare in person, eating cheese and drinking martinis and gossiping like mad over at Marion's. (p.s. hey Mare, send me pictures!) I stop off at an ATM to get money for a cab, and as I'm putting my card into the machine, I think to myself, "Man, I really hate these stupid slot-loading ATMs. I'm always worried that I'm going to totally forget and just walk off without my card."

Then, apparently because my brain was satisfied that I had spent the requisite amount of time thinking about the situation, promptly forgot all about it. Which explains why I have no ATM card this morning; the branch just told me that the card has been shredded and I have to order a new one. Damn it damn it damn it DAMN it.

Maybe I should buy a pad of post-its that I can just stick to my arm or something. Of course, I'd probably just forget to bring the pad of post-its with me when I leave the house.

I've had twelve days in a row of going into the office, and I'm currenly putting on shoes and socks to go in for lucky number thirteen.

Note to self: Think about maybe getting a nice mini-fridge to go under your desk -- and as long as you're practically moving in, do something about those bare windows. Yuck.

Also? I was just talking to CanadaKate. (I'd link to her, but there's no point, really, ahem ahem ahem.) I was telling her how excited I am that I had a spare moment to sort and drop off my laundry this morning, and then I realized:

It was, like, a full 50% lions, British flags, white tank tops, and American Apparel briefs...aaaand then some other clothes.

I guess I know what I like, right?

What did I do today, you ask? Oh, nothing special. I just hung around at the Indian Consulate, you know. Getting a visa. For India. So I can, you know. Go to India. Tomorrow.

Yes. Tomorrow. Well, I suppose technically "today." I am going OH MY GOD I AM FUCKING GOING TO INDIA TODAY. I didn't even know if work was actually going to send me until about 5:30 this evening, and let me tell you, sitting there all day wondering if you're going to be going to the other side of the planet the next day is pretty nervewracking.

We have a development team working there, and I'm going to learn what they do and teach them about what I do. I have a plane ticket and a visa to go to India and I'm actually going to India. India is very very far away from New York, in case you were wondering, or did not have a handy map to reference. I have an 8 hour flight to Paris, and then another 8 hour flight to Mumbai, which gets in around 1 am on Friday. Then there's a four-hour drive to the city I'll be staying in. I keep wanting to call it a town, because I can't fly directly there from New York, but this "town" has a population of something like five million people. Five million Indian people. Because, see, they live in India, which is where I am going.

What kills me is I always think that to do something like this, to plan a trip to India, you really have to think ahead and book all your travel months in advance and figure out where you're going to go and where you'll stay and what you'll do. Not so, apparently, in the business world. In the business world, you just buy a last minute ticket for $1700 and tell the people on the other end, "Hey, could you book a hotel please? Ten days. Yeah. Thanks. Oh, and send a car 'round to the airport, too."

I tried to calm down and breathe a little bit on the subway ride home, but it totally didn't work. What I ended up doing instead was frantically scribbling out a very lengthy to-do list, detailing the work I had to get done at home tonight. This includes, among many other things, laying out a playbill for Purchase College, writing all of the captions for the images in my book about the clap, packing, ordering my cap and gown, and looking up stuff about just where the fuck I'm fucking going.

So that's where I'm going to be. India. The battery to my camera is charging right now. I have a feeling I'll need it.

Man, this is going to be AWESOME once it actually sinks in.

I swear, that's who the guy who drove me the four hours from the airport to my hotel looked like.

Well, if Danny Pintauro were Indian, anyway.

SO. I'm here. 26 and a half hours of travel, door-to-door. It's four something in the morning here, not that my hotel room has a clock for me to be sure. Consider it a reasonably informed guess. I think I'm due in the office here later this morning, but I'm not totally sure. Hopefully I'll get that figured out shortly.

Other than the bare fact of having made it to India, there's not a lot to report. The CDG airport in Paris is utterly dreadful; I had to take three different shuttlebuses to get to my conecting gate. And here I thought a two-hour layover was plenty. Besides that, I have been in planes and cars, driving through the dark. I think every corner we passed had the same tan-colored, flop-eared dog. I could be mistaken.

More to follow later, after I've had a bit of rest and a day in the office. Wish me luck! This is still irretrievably strange.

It's 10:30 am, and I'm sitting in the lobby of my hotel, waiting for the car that's supposed to take me to the office. In New York it's like 1 am; I'm still kind of weirded out that it's, what, nine and a HALF hours ahead here. Who jumps ahead by the HALF HOUR?

I had my complimentary breakfast buffet, which was hard boiled eggs and then a whole bunch of different Indian food things. There was something with chick peas in it, and something else that didn't have chick peas. And coffee, and watermelon juice. I'm beginning to suspect that I'm the only person staying here; I haven't seen anyone but the staff, I was the only person in the restaurant, and the waitress called me this morning to make sure I was showing up. Now that's service!

Outside, it's crazy; everyone and their mother is driving by on a motorcycle or scooter of some kind. There's no such thing as a "lane," -- even when we were on the highway last night, the lane markers seemed more of a casual suggestion, if anything. We kept passing people in the same lane that we were in, just sort of muscling them over to the side and, I guess, hoping for the best. Still, the driver was really nice in that "I don't speak your language" kind of way, and there's nothing like a little bit of fearing for your life to wake you up after a long plane ride.

Okay. I'm going to make sure I have everything I need for the office this morning. It sure is a good thing I'm good at improvising; I have no idea what I'm supposed to do when I get there, so we're going to see what "winging it" does for me.

I'm back in my hotel now. For some reason they decided to move me from the first floor to the fifth floor; the only difference in rooms is that this one takes longer to get to in the elevator, and had a bathtub instead of just a shower. It also came with a plate of cookies, with compliments from the manager. I don't have any idea what that's about.

However, I called the president of my company this afternoon to give him an update, and then he casually asked how my five-star hotel, Le Meridien, was treating me. "They have me at a Comfort Inn, actually," I told him, and when I convinced him that I wasn't kidding, he got all righteously angry and told me to go out and demand I be moved to the better hotel, because he "won't have [me] staying in that Comfort Inn shithole," end quote. (In its defense, it's really a perfectly nice hotel. Just less nice when you have some Le meridien something something dangled in front of you instead.) Happily, right as I was walking out of my office from the call, a guy THERE was like, so how's the Meridien? and I told him I was at the Comfort Inn, and incidentally could they please look into getting me moved. Yes, I know that makes me the high-maintenance snobby American, but if I can get my work to pay fr a five star hotel, then I want my extra two stars, damn it.

I haven't even had a chance to look around or go anywhere yet; I was at work all day and I'm too exhausted to do anything but type and eat room service tonight. However, two of the extraordinarily nice people from the office are going to take me shopping and stuff tomorrow evening. It's fantastically nice of them, but the place they had in mind is called The Bombay Store, which if I'm not mistaken, has a branch in your local mall. I think they don't think I can handle anything else. I told them I could totally deal, so hopefully they can just show me around the city so I can figure places I want to go on Sunday and after work the rest of the week. Not that I have any idea what I'll be doing; in addition to the getting-lost thing, there's the trying-to-not-be-killed-by-crazy-drivers thing. So we'll see how that goes.

FuN FaCt! Pune apparently has the highest number of two-wheeled vehicles (i.e., scooters/motorcycles/bicycles) per capita of all of Asia. Which would explain why I have seen, to date, approximately nine billion of them.

I also found out they ordered me Pizza Hut for lunch because they didn't think I could handle eating Indian food. So Monday I'm going to their corporate cafeteria with them. Again, we'll see how that goes. Wish me luck!

Additionally, I have an unshakeable mission to take lots and lots of pictures over the weekend. At present, I have a total of six photographs in my camera. One is of my office, one is the view from my office, three are arms-length shots of myself taken against the wall in various airports around the world to show how my cute hair can stand up to the intense rigors of travel, and one is of my traveling companion, Blue Bear. Not exactly slide show material, here, people. It's okay, though. I have a week. And it will be awesome.

I'm looking up things to do this morning, and possibly advice on how to get around without getting hopelessly lost, and decided, hey, let's see what comes up when I search for "Fulminous" on google.co.in. Unsurprisingly, given the rarity of the word, this page was the first result.

The surprising part is that it was described, on the google page itself, as "Tales of a man in Manhattan."

I really

REALLY

want to know who came up with that and how they got it to show up on the google pages.

I've just gotten back from my first official wander. Basically I strapped on my satchel, put my camera in my pocket, and headed out the door. The strangest feeling about walking around here is that of utter illiteracy; all of the street signs are in a language so foreign to my brain that I obviously can't understand anything. I'm used to at LEAST being able to sound out words, but with an entirely different character set, it's completely and totally impenetrable.

All this by way of saying that even if I *had* a map, it would do me no good at all. So I started out by walking out of the hotel and turning right at every corner. With luck, I'd just come back to the hotel again, and otherwise I could turn around and retrace my steps. Plus that meant I wouldn't have to try crossing any streets, which is a major plus.

Sure enough, after a few minutes got back to my hotel, so I decided I was tough enough to cross over and do the same to the block across the street. Not that anything here can really be called a "block," exactly, but you get the point. It took me about two or three minutes to get to the other side, waiting for the mobs and mobs of motorcycles to break long enough for me to run. It's really weird getting such a sense of accoplishment for just crossing the street, but I really felt proud of myself. (laugh)

This time as I walked, I passed a herd of tiny little black and white goats, and a pack of chickens. (What do you call a group of chickens, anyway? A cluck of chickens? A nugget of chickens? I have no idea.) I took a few pictures of some insanely gorgeous buildings, one of which apparently used to be the residence of a Major of some kind, and is now a branch of the India Life Insurance company.

When I got back to the hotel this time, I decided to try walking in a straight line as far as I could go, so off I went down the street. I'm not usually this careful about directions when I wander around a new place, but it's harder for me when I have to rely solely on landmarks, which are strange enough, than when I can use street signs. I got to the end and noted down a yellow sign in English, for a business conference center, for where I'd have to turn to get back home, and then I found myself on a huge busy street that would be, if there were actually lanes, at least 6 lanes wide. There were shops and businesses and restaurants all up and down it, so I went that way for about a mile, stopping at a coffee shop for a nice big iced mocha (yes I know, whatever), and drank it while the power went out. Nobody but me even looked up when the lights went out; even the guy watching sports on the TV in the corner just went back to reading his paper. Further down the street, I poked my nose into a local college campus until a guard told me I had to leave.

On the way back down, two tiny toothless old ladies in saris...well, they cornered me against a ston fence and kept trying to put a red thumbprint on my forehead and sprinkle me with some kind of yellow powder. I feel bad that I have no idea what it was, but regardless, I didn't want it on my face, so I kept saying No! and waving them off and trying to get away without actually knocking them over. Then a very helpful man ran over from a bus stop and started yelling at the old ladies, who yelled right back and ignored me long enough for me to get away.

Somewhere along here I found a bridge across one of the three rivers in Pune (again, no map so I don't know which one), so I went to the other side and started wandering there, with the end of the bridge as my new "home" point. Eventually I got to a place where to go around the corner I'd have to walk through a narrow, crowded market of people selling all kinds of fruits that I don't know what they are. At first I'd decided that I'd reached the limit of my comfort zone and should turn around, and then I said to myself that I'm in INDIA for pete's sake, and if I couldn't squeeze my way through a little market on a corner, I have no business thinking of myself as an adventurer. So off I went, and I got through without being forced to buy anything, and found a whole bunch more streets to walk around. I looked in a few little malls (like three or four shops in a plaza), saw a big silver dome in the distance, and decided I wanted to go to where it was, so I crossed some more streets to get there.

In case you're ever in India and you want a quick tip on how to cros the streets here, even the six-lane ones (which I did, several times!! Woo hoo Boy Scout Badge in Urban Exploring for me!), the trick is this: just go for it. Get rid of that pesky sense of "self-preservation" that's holding you back. The cars and motorcycles and auto-rickshaws do their thing, and you have to do your thing. Just try to move quickly and avoid being hit by one of them, and you'll be fine.

It had been about two hours by now, and even though I love the sunshine and the heat, a little dose of A/C sounded pretty good, so I started back to the hotel. On the way, there was a kid's clothing store with pictures of little Indian girls wearing fancy saris...and anyone who knows about my relationship with my little spoiled niece won't be surprised to learn that I popped right in.

The store wasn't exactly the kind of place where you can browse; the merchandise is all behind counters, and a guy brings stuff out of boxes and lays it out. I think in ten minutes, with four guys pulling boxes off the shelves, I saw about twenty dresses and saris and little school outfits; this one in silk and that one in cotton and this one with more beading and that one with less. I told them she was almost 8 years old, and they pulled out something in a size 28, which looked a tiny bit small, not that I'm really any kind of judge of these things, so I asked for one size bigger. "Oh, she's a *fat* one, is she?" the guy asked me, and winked and brought out a size 30. I ended up buying this remarkable gold-and-pink silk outfit with a full, twirly skirt, and absolutely coated with beads and sequins, and she is absolutely going to *FLIP.* It's good to be the cool uncle.

Later this evening I'll go out with the two guys from my office, and hopefully I can get them to pick a good place where I can take them to dinner for their trouble.

In other good news, I'm being moved to the other hotel in the morning! I'm really looking forward to being in a place where I have full-time internet access, and don't have to buy vouchers with access codes an hour at a time from the front desk. Plus it'll be in a different part of the city, so I can have a whole new place to wander in, and they have a concierge who I'm sure will be able to help me figure out this whole taxi/auto-rickshaw thing.

So this afternoon, while I recovered from the Big Wander, I spent a few hours in the hotel catching up on emails and doing a bit of work. I had a ton of stuff to deal with from my office, and by then it was almost 6 and the guys were going to pick me up at 7. So I got ready and then I couldn't help myself so I took a quick half hour nap, and went down to meet them.

Only one guy could make it, because the other had a family emergency, so he wasn't there, but my guy seemed excited to take me around. It's remarkable how accomodating they've been; I'm sure part of it is because my company is employing them, but part of it is that they're just genuinely really nice. He offered to drive me around on his motorcycle, but I seriously don't think I could have handled that -- not having been on a motorcycle, like, EVER, I really didn't want to start here. I'd be terribly liable to shriek in his ear and throw him off his stride, and then we'd all be dead. So he got us into an autorickshaw, which is basically like a car with three wheels, one in the front and two in the back. There aren't any doors, either, so most of the time I could have reached out and touched any of the millions of people we were zooming past.

The ride lasted about 20 minutes, and I think came to about 6 rupees, if I was reading the meter properly, which is maybe fifteen cents. New York taxis could learn a thing or two. At the end, we were at a long street that gets closed off to car traffic on the weekends, so it's more of a pedestrian mall. We popped in and out of a few places, I bought a couple things (heh heh heh), and I learned that "pedestrian traffic" also can include "people on camels."

Yes. Camels. A family got together, took their camel out of the garage, and rode it. To the mall.

A block away from the camels? A herd of cows. Just trotting along.

After an hour or so of this, we decided to get some dinner, so my coworker called around to his friends for suggestions while I had a coffee. I had to keep saying that yes, I could handle spicy food, and eventually we took another autorickshaw to a restaurant that actually I had walked past earlier in the day, so I totally knew where I was and everything. Across the street from the college! Where the old ladies tried to paint me!

The restaurant is called HORN OK PLEASE, which is also a big logo painted on the back of all of the buses and trucks, which apparently is a reminder to smaller cars to honk when they pass. Not that any of them need a reminder; people are VERY liberal with the horn-honking here. Inside it's decorated with a lot of truck tires and stuff, -- I think it's really funny that I ended up at the Indian equivalent of a theme restaurant.

The cuisine was, I'm told, Punjabi, from the north of India, which I was also informed means it's heavy with lots of gravies and sauces. TOTALLY my kind of meal! We had a spicy green pea soup, and a plate of spicy vegetable appetizers, basically cooked up and rolled in some spicy sauce, with an herb-yogurt sauce to dip in. Then we had two main dishes, one of which was a curry with cashews, and the other a mix of vegetables like peppers and peas in some spicy red sauce, and a big pile of buttered naan. I think he was impressed that I know what naan is. (laugh) He did all the ordering, as the menu didn't come with descriptions, and I kept encouraging him to get whatever he thought would be good. I went through two liters of bottled water, but MAN it was good. I hope I proved I can handle having lunch with them for the rest of the week. He was really glad to eat there too; he considers himself a foodie. We also found out that he started on this project in India on the exact same day that I started working on it in New York! We're totes twinsies.

After that we walked back to the hotel (I knew how to get here!!!), purchases in tow, and shortly I will be packing up my stuff in preparation for the big move to the new hotel in the morning.

WOO!

Also? MAN I AM SO FULL.

Please forgive the heretical title; if I had any idea where this hotel is in relation to the other parts of the city, I'd be able to tell you if I was movin' on up to the East Side or not; as it is, suffice to say I've definitely moved up.

A driver for the five-star place came to pick me up this morning, and none too soon. Seriously, while I am, of course, totally fine staying wherever, if I'd had to listen to "Unchained Melody" in the elevator one more time, I might have had a severe mental breakdown. I checked out of the Comfort Inn, wrote "Very comfortable, thank you!" in the guestbook they offered me, and headed out the door. A tasteful array of magazines and newspapers were available in the backseat of the car, but I had my face pressed against the window instead, watching people drive by. At one point there was an entire family on one motorcycle; mom, dad, and two tiny girls in front between the dad's arms. No camels today, I'm afraid.

I'm in a different part of the city now, very nearby the main train station. As such, it's usually even more crowded in the streets than in the Deccan Gymkhana area I was in before. Traffic was fairly light today; the driver told me that pretty much everything is closed on Sundays, so he could drive around with a minimum of swerving, honking, and almost running people over. I'll have to see what it's like in the morning when they pick me up to go to work.

Unsurprisingly, as hotels go, this one is a world apart from the Comfort Inn. Everything is carved and marble and luxurious and expansive; basically a Plaza-esque kind of place that I'd never be able to afford in New York. On check in, I was greeted by half a dozen people, rushing my paperwork through as fast as possible, and a porter with a glass of fresh juice (I'm thinking white grape, but it may well have been something indigenous that I don't recognize) on a silver tray. One of the clerks walked me down the marble colonnade to the elevators, up to my room, and explained all of the amenities, like where the Do Not Disturb and Clean My Room buttons may be found. Another porter showed up with my luggage, and I tipped him 100 rupees, which is around $2. According to what I've found on line, tipping isn't strictly necessary here; that is, a tip is usually considered payment for services rendered. What they have instead is a system called baksheesh, or payment in advance for services to be rendered in the future. Basically if you give a good tip to start with, you'll get good service from then on. I don't know how true that is, but it feels really weird to me to have a meal or let someone carry my bags (I can certainly tote my own luggage around!) without a tip. So a tip, baksheesh, whatever, it still seems like a good idea and I still feel like the luxurious American throwing his money around.

I cleaned up and had a shower of the high-water-pressure and very-high-temperature that it's just impossible to achieve with a home shower, and found a note attached to the bathrobe on the back of the door that I think is indicative of the kind of hotel I'm in:

"This bathrobe has enjoyed considerable success among our guests, to the extent that particularly enthusiastic customers have become "collectors of Le Meridien bathrobes." While we recognize that this initiative helps spread the reputation of our establishment, we nevertheless urge our most fervent supporters to make an effort to separate themselves from this admittedly endearing garment when they leave. (Althernately, a bathrobe may be obtained in exchange for a few rupees.)"

The most remarkable area I found was the rooftop swimming pool. I'm going to do some work up there later this afternoon when it isn't *quite* so hot, and hopefully do a bit of swimming too. There's also a restaurant up there, in case I get, I guess, peckish or something from my exertions.

When I went downstairs for lunch, I made two very important discoveries: One, today is Easter, a fact that completely escaped my notice what with everything else going on. Two, and please please don't hate me for this, the hotel has an absolutely marvelous Easter champagne brunch for 750 rupees, or about sixteen bucks. Not to go into great detail about everything I ate (hello, nine desserts) but boeuf tenderloin en croute and Waldorf salad isn't a bad way to start one's week. Western dishes aside, I had a spoonful of just about everything they had, from beetroot and papaya salad to a curried lamb to things with yogurt sauces and things with mint leaves and rice with cardamom and pistachios. Plus they just kept refilling my glass with champagne, so I'm a tiny bit tipsy and totally full.

Other observations--
One: Coffee here is even worse than coffee in England, and coffee in England is dreadful and weak and watered down and all tastes like Nescafe. I know this is true, but I can't stop ordering coffee anyway.
Two: Public bathrooms in general are pretty funny: most public restrooms I've been in have been a row of urinals against the wall. The main difference is that instead of flushing each one down a separate pipe, the urinals just have a hole that drain everything down the wall to a trough cut into the floor. There's really no reason to have the urinal at all, except it provides a thin veneer of civility; it's a thing made specially for peeing into, so we're not just peeing on the wall like savages.
Three: The handles to flush regular toilets are near the floor, so you flush by stepping on the handle. This seems like a remarkably sanitary way to go about things, instead of having to touch some old handle with your fingers.
Four: I think I just saw a hawk fly by outside my window. I may go up to the roof now to investigate.

I'm afraid this is going to take on a little less of a "travelogue-y" feel, as now the work week has kicked in, and I'm going to be spending most of my time in the office. Still, hell, I'm in India. What *isn't* a good story when you tell it from India??

I'm pleased to report that I did get to have lunch in the company cafeteria today. No less than eight people popped in on me during the course of the morning to ask if I was *sure* that I wanted to eat with them; I almost started to think they just didn't want me around. Man, I sure hope that wasn't the case, now that I look back. At the time, though, they all were expressing concern that I wouldn't be able to handle the food. Just to save you the worry until the end of the story, I managed just fine, ate everything, liked all of it, and haven't had any kind of ill reaction whatsoever.

Here's what happens at lunch: There are several tables in the middle of the room. Piled on one end are small metal trays, and baskets of spoons. Then there are big pots, each filled with a different kind of something. I'm really going to have to start looking up what it is that I'm eating; as it is, I can say that there was rice, there was something with what looked like black-eyed peas in a sauce, there was some vegetables in a different sauce, there was just a sauce, there was flatbread, and there were slices of cucumber. I piled a bit of each into each little divot in my tray, sat down with everyone, and ate it all, mostly by scooping up stuff with bits of the flatbread and my fingers. At the far ends of the room, there were great big mirrors, which suddenly made it very apparent that I was by far the tallest person around.

After the meal, we all put our trays into big baskets, and then everybody filed into a washroom with rows of sinks, where we rinsed off the bits of lunch left on our hands. It felt very civilized. At the door, there were little baskets filled with different kinds of seeds that you're supposed to take a handful of and eat as a breath freshener. I suppose, since it tasted remarkably like licorice, that one of them must have been aniseed, but I don't know quite what that looks like so I don't know for sure.

The whole process repeated itself a few hours later, when it was time for afternoon snack.

We need to institute a policy of afternoon snack. Seriously, now.

I got back to the hotel around 8 pm, caught up on my email, all that jazz, and went down for dinner. There's a Thai/Chinese place here, "Spice Island," that I went to tonight. There was a little band playing, so while I ate, I listened to the lovely strains of "Englishman in New York" and "Sweet Home Alabama." And then they played "Musta Been Love (But It's Over Now)" and I have to admit that I kind of hate myself a little bit for knowing all the words.

Spice Island also has the distinction of employing a rather cute waiter, who just so happened to have my table. Now, I honestly promise that I didn't *intend* to flirt with him. Really. It just kind of HAPPENED. I mean, I really *did* like his bracelet, and only meant to point at it and say, "I like your bracelet," instead of saying "I like your bracelet" while I touched his wrist. And when he asked me if the food was too spicy, I really didn't *intend* any double entendre when I said "It's no good unless it makes you sweat," but then I said it and made myself blush.

I don't know if HE meant any double entendre when he suggested the toffee bananas for dessert. But I like to think he did.

At the moment, I'm looking through the Shopping Guide I just found in my room, and planning out where I can go after work tomorrow. Hopefully I can manage to squeeze out of there while there's still daylight, so I can do a bit of walking around near the new digs.

Things I have seen today:

The first cat I've seen so far in India. I've seen goats, camels, cows, and a million yellow dogs, one for every corner, but only one cat. Maybe the cats have enough sense to stay inside.

Three kids playing cricket on the roof across the street from my office.

A very old, very tiny Indian couple on a Vespa, woman riding sidesaddle, sari flying in the wind.

A man taking a shower in front of his tiny tin-roofed house by ladling water out of a bucket.

Women working on the construction of the companion tower to the building I'm in -- their job was to move a pile of gravel from one place to another, which they did one round, wide, flat trayful at a time. They carried the trays around on their heads, which were also wearing special hard hats with little platforms for balancing the trays. The women were also all wearing saris in every color you can think of; it's so odd to me that someone would say to themselves, "Hmm, what should I wear to my construction job today? Oh, I know. My hot pink sari."

I also decided to leave work at 6 today instead of 7:30, so I would have some time to walk around the new area. I tried to map a route in my head when I was being driven around this morning. Basically my route went like this: Walk out of the hotel, and turn left.

Pretty easy. I that way for a few miles, wandering in and out of shops and maybe buying some stuff for folks. It's a whole different experience walking around here, especially the difference between walking around in the daytime, and at night. To start, the hotel is across the street from the main train station, so the street is kind of a main drag. There are huge mobs of bikes and rickshaws and motorcycles and cars, and very little sidewalk. You just have to sort of rush along the shoulder. The only reason it didn't totally weird me out is that traffic is so heavy, nobody can go more than a few miles an hour. It's just loud, and congested, and smoggy.

Still, it was really facinating; the people here just congregate on corners and outside storefronts, buying cigarettes one at a time or eating something they've gotten from street vendors. I went up to one of the booths to buy a pack of Camels -- I asked how much they were and the guy said it was, are you ready for this, 25 rupees. Twenty five. For the record, that's like fifty cents. For a pack. I gave the guy a 100 rupee note...and he gave me back 21. I didn't even have the heart to argue about it, so I just smiled real big and waved instead. Stupid American; can't even count.

Further down the road was the Pune Central mall; I had to check my bag at the door with these guys behind a counter wearing crazy ornamental uniforms. I hung out outside for a minute first to make sure the locals were also checking their bags, just to be on the safe side, though.

Inside was a lot like being in Macy's, except the staff is actually attentive and will help you. In some cases they're a little overly helpful -- they tend to follow one around from rack to rack as one browses, and at one point when I picked up a jacket, one guy actually ran across from another area to breathlessly ask if I was interested in a blazer. Three guys tried to help me find a pair of sunglasses, and four guys, FOUR, were spraying cologne onto strips for me to smell.

After I left the mall, I kept weaving my way down the street, between clumps of people and speeding motorbikes, and found my way across a bridge, the "sidewalk" of which consisted of a single row of cobblestones beside the roaring traffic. Everyone else seemed fine with this arrangement, so I soldiered on and tried not to jump every time a motorcycle got too close. The other side was getting more and more urban; the side of the road was entirely populated with these little stalls selling cigarettes and snacks and roasted nuts and fruit and food that I have no idea what it was, but that smelled really fucking good and reminded me I'd forgotten to eat lunch and had yet to eat dinner. I'd probably walked a good couple miles by this point, so I crossed the street and found an autorickshaw to take me home. Autorickshaws are totally fun, in the "taking your own life in your hands" kind of way.

When we got back to the hotel, the difference between all the marble and doormen and buffets and decadence, and the rest of the city, was astounding. My fare was 3 rupees, but I gave the guy a 100 ($2!) and told him to kep the change. Stupid American. Can't even count.

Side note: If you ever. EVER. have a chance to try Indian mango in April when they're in season, do it. I have never in my life had fruit as brain-meltingly good. It tasted like peach and lime and mango and tiny perfumed white flowers, and it felt like velvet. I may not ever need another kind of fruit ever again.

On the way to work this morning, we passed a little cafe with a big sign out front advertising it as the "Mountain Dew Manmeet Chat Joint!"

I really think something is getting lost in translation, there.

Similar topic: we were listening to the radio (92.9 FM is HOT HOT HOT, sings the jingle) and this song comes on with this crazy techno beat and this guy singing something, and the first thing that popped into my head was, "God DAMN but this song would be AWESOME to have sex to." I could actually feel my eyes dilating.

I really need to find a music store.

I just stuffed three mangos into my face. One of the guys at work brought me a whole bagful just because he thought I might like them; it was close, but I managed to refrain from squealing. So when I got back to the hotel tonight, I called down for a plate and knife and they kind of confusedly brought them up. And then I just peeled 'em and ate them straight off of the pit, with much juicing and squishing. My fingers and lips are both stained a bright pumpkin-y yellow and I'm afraid I also engaged in a fair amount of loud, vocal appreciation. You know. Like in When Harry Met Sally. I'll have what he's having.

Other than that, the only other interesting thing that's happened to me today is that I had like 8 hours worth of meetings. That, and I went back to the hotel restaurant wthat has that waiter. I don't know what happens when I talk to him, but seriously tonight when he asked if I wanted anything else after my meal, I actually said, "No thanks, I'm full...you know it's been a good evening if you get filled up."

I horribly embarrass myself sometimes.

Honestly, I'm really, really sad to be going home tomorrow. There's a lot more I want to see and do here, and I could really use at least another weekend to get to some of the sightseeing stuff just outside town. Like the Snake Farm! Or the Lion Fort! LION FORT. Hello!! On the car ride home, I was trying so hard to memorize everything we drove past; all the signs and people and stands and models of cars I've never seen before like the Toyota Qualis and Hyundai Getz and that corner that's always filled with the lazy white cows with huge curved horns painted red. I think the red washes off, and stains their foreheads a sort of pale pink. I wish that I had more of that visual-art gene, because I have to tell you, I suck at taking photographs. I always realize something would have made a really awesome picture after it's already long gone.

Tonight I got home just at dark, so I walked down the street to where a coworker told me there was a bookstore that also sold music. I realized that I've neglected to buy anything here for myself, so I picked up a great big stack of CDs at the low, low price of about $3 each. I have no idea if they'll play in my home machine, because I have no idea if CDs are regionally coded like DVDs tend to be. Anyone know?

I walked down a few side streets on the way home, and came across a whole row of stores selling meat, with their wares (read: whole carcasses) just hanging up from the eaves of the building. I admit I didn't explore down that way more than a second or two, because I don't really have much interest in seeing meat before it's been nicely packaged and put into styrofoam trays, and even then it's kind of icky. There was a group of kids hunched down on the sidewalk playing something that looked pretty intricate, with a bunch of different rocks, so I hopped over the railing of the sidewalk with everyone else and went around them on the shoulder of the road.

And now I'm back in my hotel, freshly showered and waiting for the bathroom to de-steam so I can shave my scruffy face and go down to dinner. For dessert, I have a pile of my last five (oh the weeping, only five left!!) fresh Indian mangos. Thank you thank you thank you for the link to order them! I'll be arranging a tasting when I get home.

I still have a bunch of work left to do (seriously I could be here another month and not finish everything I need to get done), I'm avoiding checking my work email, and I have to figure out how I'm going to pack all my stuff. Have I mentioned before just how thrilled I am that my mom bought me an amazing big sturdy suitcase for Christmas?!? She had NO IDEA how handy it would be -- she was just embarrassed to see my walking around with my grandpa's old wheel-less Samsonite.

Okay, I still want more time to spend here, but now that the clock is ticking down to when I start the four hour drive to the airport, I'm incredibly antsy and just want to go go go go go already! Everything is packed, including the four kilos of candy I bought at lunchtime. It's all these milk-based candies covered in silver leaf -- very marzipan-ish, except for the whole silver leaf thing -- in mango and cashew and fig and something that tastes like candied pineapple except it isn't, and a bag of little spicy things that look like rugelach except they aren't.

Because a coworker took me shopping during lunch, I missed out on the last lunch in the company cafeteria, and had to order a Pizza Hut after all. I know it sounds stupid to say given a) the hotel I've been in and b) the fact that I've only been away for a week, but seriously? Drinking a Pepsi felt So. Decadent. Mmmmmmmmm suuuugar!

It's probably no surprise to anyone, but the thing I'm most excited about doing when I get home is calling people and actually TALKING to them on the TELEPHONE. I'm on the phone all the time -- and not having my cellphone (which also serves as my watch) in my pocket at all times has been weird.

Also, did I mention that one of the CDs I bought, I have no idea what kind of music is contained inside, but I chose solely based on the name on the front of the CD? I honestly think this is another one of those lost in translation moments, and if you know any better, please feel free to correct me, but honestly. How could I resist a CD called "Jism" ?

Hee hee hee hee yes. I am twelve.

In other news? NEW YORK HOME WOOOO!

Okay, so the dopey thing here is that I got myself on an awesome run of posting, and then as soon as I get back to the country, totally drop the ball.

The not-dopey thing is that I did, in fact, make it back to my home, safe and sound, after approximately 32 hours of travel. Which, just let me tell you something, is a lot of travel. Highlights included watching a Hindi movie, the yogurt on the Air France flight, chatting with the nice high school girl next to me between Paris and New York, flying over the Alps at sunrise, and looking out my window and seeing London Bridge. Lowlights included the food on the flight fron Mumbai (boo, Delta, boo I say), the Mumbai airport which I know you might be shocked to hear but I guarantee is approximately nine thousand batrillion times worse than CDG airport, the guy who kept standing up with his squalling baby and blocking my view of the subtitles on the Hindi movie, and carrying a 50 pound satchel across the continents.

I got in on Saturday night; Sunday was cause for great celebration because it was my first day off since mid-March.

I'm real glad it was a nice day, because I'm apparently not getting another day off any time soon. I'll be working this weekend, again. And for those of you playing at home, would you like to take a guess as to where I am right now?

Go on. Look at the time stamp on this entry. It hasn't been delayed or altered in any way. 2:30-something am and where am I?

Yes. Work. That's where. I'm at work at 2:30 in the morning.

At least in India I had time to sleep. Sheesh.

Just how lazy, as a people, are we?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you...The Eggjector™, the complete kitchen set for egg extraction!

You heard me. The Egg. Jector™. It's a fucking ejector for eggs and they called it an Eggjector™. Why do we need the Eggjector™? Because apparently it's too hard to peel-n-eat your own god damned hard-boiled eggs. All that, you know, effort to get to your lunchtime snack is just too much. In fact, you'd better get an Eggjector™ for home and office, so you can be prepared for extracting an egg no matter where you are.

Besides the fact that it is hygienical [sic], here's what I don't get. To properly 'ject an egg from the Eggjector™:

* Punch on the small end of an egg several times using the piercer located on the Eggjector™ base.
* And then crack the larger end by tapping on table. Make sure it is fully cracked. Don't be timid!
* Place the egg on the rimmed base of Eggjector™ with punched small end pointing up and the cracked larger end down.
* Place the push barrel of Eggjector™ on top of its rimmed base. Criss cross hands over the top of the barrel and give one good fast push to pop a perfect hard-boiled egg from its shell.

In other words, puncture your egg HERE, and then crack it open HERE, and then put it in here not this way but rather that way, pray to god you weren't too timid in your cracking procedure because who the fuck knows what happens if you try to eject an agg from an improperly cracked shell, double-fist slam it over THERE, pop it out over THERE and then CHASE YOUR GOD DAMNED SLIPPERY FUCKING EGG AS IT ROLLS AWAY DOWN THE COUNTERTOP.

Seriously. I want to find someone who has one of these things, just so I can cook up a batch of soft-boiled two-minute eggs and have them try to peel that bitch. "Mmm, I can't wait for a good ol' hard-boiled egg," I will say. And then I will laugh when they give it a good swift push and it BLATS all over their countertop. Serves 'em right.

Biscuit: Delivering Egg-Based Justice Since 1977.