Bhopal and Sambhavna

So it is Saturday night here, very late, and I'm the only one awake. Don't feel like sleeping quite yet and need to catch up here. I have way too much to say.

I guess I should start by describing in some detail where, exactly, I am. The address here is actually another perfect example of how addresses are in India:

Sambhavna Trust Clinic
Bafna Colony
Berasia Road
Bhopal 462 001
Madhya Pradesh, India

"Bafna Colony" is just the name of this general neighborhood -- it is slightly more descriptive in its precision than it would be to specify the neighborhood "Dumbo" on a letter to Brooklyn. Berasia Road is the nearest big road -- the only thing around here that would even be considered a real street in a place like New York. It is few minutes' walk from here. And Bhopal is the city, of course. So to get here you do as I did -- get to Berasia Road upon arrival in Bhopal and go down it until you are alongside Bafna Colony, and then turn into it. You are now in a dense tangle of dusty, semi-paved "streets" that I would be more inclined to call "footpaths" or something like that. Most of them are wide enough for just one small car (although you will rarely see an actual car here) but many are not. Most people around here are on foot, and the ones who aren't are on motorcycles or vespa-style things. Autorickshaws come in here with a little prodding (one refused the other night and we just had to walk the rest of the way). In this immediate area most of the buildings are actually solid constructions made of brick and concrete. It varies a lot, though -- many of the homes are made of scraps of wood, sheet metal, plastic tarps, and other things. The ones that are really made of brick are often incomplete -- the have no roof, for instance, or are missing a few walls. It's hard to tell whether they were never finished being built or if they used to be complete and fell apart. I will try to get some photos posted here once I get my internet access sorted out.

The clinic building is new -- it opened just this past April. It is a beautiful place -- not just relative to its surroundings, but in its own right. Two floors, all bricks, concrete and wood. All the walls are brick and the ceilings wood. Whether from the architecture, the occupants, or both, the whole place has a very warm and human feel to it -- it feels like a safe place. The only people who actually live here are volunteers like me. Right now there are only two others, Matthias from Zurich, Switzerland, and Maude from Providence, Rhode Island. Matthias is an environmental science student and is one of the sweetest guys I have ever met in my life. Maude chooses the title of "artist" to best describe herself and she is here doing photography and archival work. She, too, is very cool. She used to live in NYC in the 60's, working as a photojournalist.

We all sleep on the second floor. Matthias and I sleep in a room that roughly the size of my old apartment in New York, but which has six beds in it (two bunk beds and two others), each fitted with mosquito nets. Up on the second floor with us is also a kitchen, a laundry area, the library and research rooms, and huge, open-sky terrace areas.

The first floor is a much busier place. Every morning it is filled with people (roughly 100), mostly women and children, who are here for the many services the clinic provides. I am told that these days most of the people coming here are victims of the poisoned drinking water and about a quarter to a third are victims directly of the gas that night 21 years ago. Some people are visibly affected. I don't know enough about the health effects to write intelligently about it right now, but the methyl isocyanate gas did something awful to people's eyes. That is just one of many, many things the gas did, but it's one effect that is very visible. There have also been effects on children born here after 1984. Very heavy, a lot to take in, a lot to feel and think about.

The day before yesterday I went over near the Union Carbide factory for the first time. It's about a five-minute walk from here. The actual MIC tank that leaked and the surrounding equipment is set back a few hundred feet from a concrete wall that runs along what everyone still calls Union Carbide Road. The people that live around there live in much humbler conditions even than those near Sambhavna, only a few blocks away. I passed a water pump on Union Carbide Road that was painted red to warn locals that the water was poison, but it has since been taken out of service, anyway. Now, the local government comes regularly to fill a few large, cylindrical, plastic tanks with better water for people to drink. The tanks are a little taller than I am and about 6 feet wide. The wall of the Union Carbide property is mostly covered with painted political messages against Union Carbide and Dow, in both English and Hindi. Our presence there attracted a huge crowd of children and a few adults, all very friendly. One man came out and waded through the knot of children encircling us and at first it seemed like he might be angry -- his face seemed to ask what we were doing there and he was pointing over to the Union Carbide site -- but I shook his hand and said a few broken words of explanation and he warmed up immediately. I was worried because someone had said something just a few minutes before about some Westerners getting rocks thrown at them on that street. The appearance and conditions over there right by the old pesticide plant are much worse than they are around the clinic. It looks to be something between a permanent neighborhood and a campsite. Much fewer structures are made of things like concrete and brick and many more are made of found materials. Everything is jammed together, dense and thick, very crowded. I will try to post a photo at some point. It looks much like Miami would look if no one got any insurance money for many years after a hurricane destroyed absolutely everything, but with everyone still living there in the same spot. It's hard to describe.

I have a hard time taking photos of a lot of things here -- often the snapshots that would be of greatest interest to you all back home. I don't feel comfortable with going to places like Union Carbide road, for instance, and displaying my shock at the appearance of someone's home by walking up and snapping photos. This has been a problem for me all over India. Everything around me the whole time I've been here has been incredible in a wide variety of ways. I've only felt comfortable with taking photos of a few things, though.

In general, foreigners attract a lot of attention here, even just walking outside. Except for my companions here at Sambhavna, I have not seen a single Westerner here in Bhopal or in Madhya Pradesh. I don't really expect to see any, either. I don't think anyone comes here to visit. So people really look at us. Adults just look, but the children speak right up as soon as they see me. Most commonly they say "hello!" or "hello! how are you?!" very enthusiastically and in an almost inquiring way, and they are very pleased if I bounce back with a "hello, I'm fine, thank you!" It's pretty much the only English they know and I think they just get a big kick out of using it and getting a response. The way children, and even some adults here in India look at me has been very intense. Not in a bad way. Very refreshing, actually, after so many years in 'let's-all-pretend-we-we're-not-standing-here-together-in-this-subway/elevator/cafe' New York. People here really look at you, right into your eyes. That morning I had breakfast with the hotel owner in Jaipur I kept looking down at my plate and to the side and every time I'd glance back up his eyes were locked into mine, gazing right to the very back of them. Looking at him felt like looking into the sun. I found that a lot here. It is a good thing.

At night it's just the three of us here along with a couple of guards that watch the entrance to the clinic. We sit outside on the terrace to eat or drink tea. There are many moments when I feel like we are on a space station together. Or maybe like we are at one of those Antarctic laboratory stations. Of course we are surrounded by people here, but it's quite an alien panorama, especially if you've just arrived. Also, there only a couple of people here who speak fluent English -- Sathyu and Rachna. There are then a few others who speak some English. And that's it. My Hindi is still way too limited to really talk with people. I'm working on it, though. Very soon I might be the only foreigner here, at least for a while. Matthias is leaving in two weeks and Maude might leave even before then. Sathyu and Rachna are great company, too, but they are extremely busy and don't do much hanging out upstairs. This very charismatic 13-year-old boy named Zuber who lives nearby has latched onto me and comes everyday and stands on the other side of the clinic's fence and calls out my name. He really wants to hang out and be friends, but I badly need to learn more Hindi.

I took this week's dose of mefloquine this morning and I'm feeling a little nauseated from it. I'm really glad, though, that I came here already on it instead of assuming there wouldn't be enough mosquitos in January to justify the side effects. There actually aren't that many mosquitos most of the time, but in the evening they are everywhere and very aggressive. Matthias got sick again last night with malarial symptoms and he is worried that the chloroquine & primaquine combo isn't working, but it is still too early to tell. I'm the only one around here taking mefloquine because people want to avoid the side effects. The malaria treatment involves taking up to six times the normal dosage of chloroquine, though, and the side effects from that aren't pleasant, either. And neither is the malaria, of course.

I did end up bringing my ipod to India, with the excuse that it contained three volumes of Hindi lessons on it. Hanna had told me last year that when she came to Bhopal she couldn't listen to any of the music she brought because it just made no sense over there. This hasn't been exactly the case for me. Hipsters and irony don't make any sense here. That makes dead weight out of roughly half my ipod. The album I've been listening to most is U2's *All That You Can't Leave Behind*. It's funny because I never listened to any U2 at all back in NYC -- it was always a little too wholesome for me back there. Here I like it a lot. The music is earnest and unpretentious to my ears, and throws frequent bones to the more serious problems of the world. Maybe I just don't know anything about Bono and that's fine, really. I don't want to know. It's a little life raft for me right now. I badly need some rock and roll, and with as little b.s. as possible.

There is almost constant music coming from the area surrounding the clinic. I arrived here halfway through a nearby wedding celebration that lasted for three days. They had a very loud sound system and played a loop of mostly Hindi songs until past midnight and starting back up at around sunrise. Non-stop. And a live hand drummer, too. Some of the music they played was Western and was quite surreally ill-fitted to our surroundings. When we walked over there, for instance, they cranked up this house beat song "Shake Your Booty." All the kids went wild jumping up and down ecstatically and freeze dancing into these fantastic poses. This in a place where there are almost as many goats and cows walking around as there are people. And I am 100% sure that no one around here knows what "shake your booty" means.

Then there is the Muslim prayer cantor, too. The one closest to here is a little off key, I think. I liked the one by my hotel in Jaipur, better, actually. I didn't hear any in Udaipur. There are also explosions all the time, sometimes one every 30 seconds, like right now as I type this. They are the same "fireworks" I heard in Udaipur. I have to put "fireworks" in quotes because they are just so totally bombs. They sound the way it sounds when a transformer on an electrical pole blows up. It's a deep, full-bodied boom that I can feel in my chest if it's not too far away.

Ok, I should stop now and try to get some sleep. Lots to do tomorrow. There is so much more to write about, but I'll have to save it for later. For now, though, I should say that I feel very good. It has been two weeks since I arrived in India. In those two weeks I have learned that I am not nearly as tough as I thought I was in a lot of ways, but I have also amazed myself -- watched myself, really, almost from above, with compassionate fascination. Coming to India and to Bhopal, especially, has been a very good thing for me. I haven't been so happy in a very long time. More later,

MM

more coming soon

I know I haven't posted anything in a couple of days -- it is because I don't have internet access yet. I am writing some stuff, though, that I will probably be able to post in a few hours, mid-afternoon in NYC. I'm ok, though. Ciao for now.

Last night was incredibly bad. Today's lesson - never expect an 11-hour bus ride to be okay when you are paying only $5. The bus ride from Udaipur to Indore was so bad I'd say it was on par with the 24 hours I spent in jail in NYC during the Republican National Convention. The only place for my bag was in the aisle and I had to stay up all night to hold it upright so it wouldn't fall on top of the several adults and children curled up on the floor beneath it. I was in the seat section, which was nestled under a series of cages in which the better classes slept. Across were more cages. It looked almost exactly like a rusty old NYC Dept. of Corrections bus. The ride felt like we were off-roading with no suspension on rocky riverbeds for at least 8 of the 11 hours. It is a miracle that both axles didn't shatter. The stench inside was so awful I could barely think. Unfriendly fellow passengers. The ride got so bad, though, that by the time it was over I felt a certain affection for them or us as a group. It's ok, it's over now. Indore was weird. I arrived there long before sunset. Still totally black out. Dim lights, few people up, bad air. I told a group of autorickshaw guys I needed to go to Bhopal right then, no hotel, and one frenzied guy took me to the bus station not too far away. Within half an hour I was on a Rs 116 bus to Bhopal. The sun rose about an hour and a half later. The landscape of this part of Madhya Pradesh is mostly flat, with some rolling hills. Everything is green and lush, even though a lot of the riverbeds were completely dry. There are lots of deciduous trees, but also lots of palm trees.

BHOPAL

I was very exciting to approach Bhopal and finally see it in person after hearing about it so much. The city is pretty huge. 1.5 million people, fairly large area. Low buildings. I called Sambhavna clinic from a phone place near the bus station, got directions, and took an autorickshaw. The clinic is beautiful, and much bigger and busier than I imagined. Bustling with people. This morning there were huge crowds of people coming for treatment. Right now there are a few other volunteers here, mostly from the U.S. and mostly on their way out starting tomorrow.

You can see the abandoned Union Carbide factory from the terrace here. The flare tower and MIC (methyl isocyanate) tank rise above the area not far from here at all. The neighborhood around the clinic is extremely poor. People have been very sweet to me and very helpful. I'm figuring out now what I'll be working on this week and beyond, but it looks like there is plenty to do. I have only just arrived, so I don't have so much to say yet about Sambhavna and the continuing disaster aftermath situation here in Bhopal, but I'm sure I will have tons to say as time goes on. If you are just coming upon this and don't know anything about Bhopal or what happened here, here are some links:

Where I am: www.bhopal.org (website of Sambhavna Clinic)
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal: www.bhopal.net
A simple history on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
(There are also detailed histories on the first two websites.)

********************
Some other observations:

There are tons of mosquitos here already and it's only January. By comparison, there were almost none at all in Rajasthan. It's not any hotter here, so it must have something to do with there being more water here. Apparently malaria is a huge problem here. I'm sticking to the mefloquine. Right now here in this room there are dozens of mosquitos and some people brought in a bowl with some leaves and twigs (a particular kind?) to burn to drive them away. So now I'm in a cloud of relatively pleasant-smelling smoke. Two of the volunteers were diagnosed with malaria this morning. Two other staff have it right now, too. They are starting on a complicated course of treatment with chloroquine and primaquine. I went with one of them down to the "chemist" this afternoon to try to find the drugs he needed. They are basically open street shops with tons of bottles and they have almost every kind of pharmaceutical you could want, no prescription necessary. It's wild. I decided to look for more mefloquine because I only have enough for another couple of months. The first place had none, but the second had plenty and I bought six pills for Rs 312, roughly $1.25 each, one tenth of what they cost back in the United States. I examined them very carefully and it is as legit as I could wish for -- good exp. date, right dosage, right name, size, opaque encapsulation, etc. I'll know if it's the real thing within an hour or two of taking one. So that's good -- problem solved.

Muslim prayer time right now - the Allah Akbar prayer song is playing now. Bhopal has a long and robust Islamic history and there is a much greater Muslim presence here than in the average city in India.

I just went into town to buy a few supplies like a towel to shower and a new pen and a better English-Hindi dictionary. (Much, much less English in Madhya Pradesh than Rajasthan). Bhopal is so much better than the other places I've been so far. No tourists at all, no hassle. I can walk down the street and no one bothers me. The economy here isn't totally based around squeezing foreigners. I feel almost as if I have finally arrived in India for real. The traffic here is the worst and wildest I've seen anywhere. Worse than Mumbai and Jaipur combined, something I never could have imagined that first night in Mumbai. The pollution, too, is suffocating. My nostrils blacken tissue paper. I can feel it in my eyes, too. It's so bad you that when someone smokes cigarette next to you you can't even tell, by sight or smell.

I'm very happy to have arrived at last and to be here. I can't believe I'm here. I will write more when I can. M.

I could watch monkeys all day. The ones I've seen here in Udaipur are a light gray with dark black faces. It's hard to say how big their bodies are or what their height is because they are always in different positions. When they are squatting down and sitting upright, though, it's about 2.5 feet from the ground to the top of their heads. There are babies, too, of course. I watched them as I ate my breakfast from a place across from Jagdish temple, where there is a huge tree full of monkeys. They leap from branch to branch and run around on the surrounding rooftops, too.

I am loving the animals here. There aren't enough animals walking around New York. This morning when I walked out the door I was face to face with a huge elephant. Here in India they paint the elephants' heads and trunks with beautiful multicolored designs.

Breakfast was spinach and paneer with rice at at Sunrise Restaurant, 18 Gangaur Ghat Rd. Go there if you come here. It's a sweet middle-aged couple that runs the place and I love it. You go up this tiny little stairwell that winds up past the kitchen, just a hole in the wall with a grilling surface, and up to the roof, where they have a few tables. They were talking about Lonely Planet and how they never got any business before they were mentioned in Lonely Planet's 2005 edition of *India*. Lonely Planet is a minor god in India. For traveller's, it's absolutely essential. You'd be dead coming here without it. Every foreigner you see at a train, restaurant, or on the street, has a copy and uses it constantly. Businesses will include "LONELY PLANET RECOMMENDED" on their hand-painted signs. Lonely Planet is something analogous to Alan Greenspan here. I took a risk here and stayed in a hotel not mentioned in Lonely Planet and it turned out great, but in general I think the book basically makes or breaks a business here.

Roy, the guy from Scotland I was hanging out with, has been all over and it was his opinion that no place could top India when it comes to the pure randomness. I will give this week's award for randomness to the fabulous LOVE NEST RESTAURANT, which sports several flashy signs to catch your attention as you pass by on the dusty road between Udaipur and Ranakpur. This place would have turned heads in Brooklyn, irony capital of the the world, but it was out here in the middle of... you'd just have to see it.

I enjoyed uninterrupted sleep last night. That is good.

My bus leaves at 7 p.m. this evening and will arrive in Indore at 6 a.m. The only bed option I had was to share a bed with some other totally random passenger, which I decided might make for the wrong kind of interesting night. I got a plain old chair seat instead, so I might be tired tomorrow. I'm looking forward to moving on, though, and very anxious to finally get to Bhopal tomorrow afternoon. I am going to Indore only to find a way to get to Bhopal, which is anywhere from 3 to 6 hours from there, depending on who you're asking.

Ranakpur, mefloquine nightmares, explosions in the night

Things have been strange as usual. Two nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night because of what I remember as bone-shaking explosions within a few hundred feet of my windows. They were big enough that I felt the need to move away from the windows and shield myself with the bedding, waiting for some kind of confirmation of what I had heard in people running around and chattering outside. Nothing came. Somehow I fell back asleep quickly. At about 5 a.m. I woke myself screaming expletives at the top of my lungs because of some nightmare. That was really embarrassing, because where I am sleeping you can hear someone's fork hit their plate in their kitchen three floors below. I yelled so loud that I heard some people open their doors in the long moments that followed.

In the morning I remembered the explosions and tried to figure out what had happened. By late last night I had decided it was just another vivid nightmare caused by the mefloquine, when suddenly I heard some more loud explosions outside. Not as bad as the ones in my still mysterious dream/reality episode, these were part of a wedding.

The weddings here are wild. There were at least two moving through the streets last night, dancing, playing music, and blowing up "firecrackers" that anyone back home would call bombs. At every procession, a large entourage walks holding these candelabra-style lamps, each connected by long electrical cord to a primitive looking gas-powered generator mounted something like a donkey cart. Indian culture places a lot of weight on weddings and marriage. Almost every local I talk to asks me within a minute whether or not I am shadi shuda -- married. Then they ask me if I want to marry an Indian girl. I always shrug, of course, which prompts another round of probing and prodding.

Yesterday I went to Ranakpur. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. I got an autorickshaw to the bus station and after asking around found the bus that passed Ranakpur, a very small town 90 km northwest of here. The ticket was Rs. 45 ($1) and the bus left whenever it left, which here in India is known as "NOW". I got on the bus to wait and the only other person waiting with me was a young man with gratituitous medical bandaging covering his whole face and neck except for his ears and eyes. He looked terrible. I hoped that it wasn't from riding buses in Rajasthan. As it turned out, I did have to exercise some caution not to sit near any sharp edges. The combination of bus and road quality routinely sent me flying almost to the ceiling of the bus. My photos came out blurry.

I was the only outsider on the bus. A lot of people stared at me. When it was time to leave everyone started laughing at me because I was sitting in the conductor's seat, which was placed very arbitrarily several rows back in a place I never could have known. Like with the trains in India, when it's time to go, they just start going, and everyone who is still on the train or bus that is not actually making the journey jumps off while it's moving. Likewise, everyone still on the ground starts running and jumps in through the moving door.

The countryside was way out there. Very primitive. People sitting in circles in the sand, talking around little fires. Herds of animals being prodded along by wiry old men in bright-colored turbans. Irrigation systems consisting of big wheels with little tin buckets tied around the circumference, dipping down into a well or stream and pulling water up, all powered by cows walking in circles, yoked to bars of wood. Camels. I began to wonder if the conductor would alert me when my stop came. If I were to miss it I'd be in a seriously confusing bind. I made sure I didn't miss my stop. Ranakpur was at the bottom of a long and treacherous stretch of gravel road full of hairpin turns. When I got off I literally had to jump over several bags of grains (wheat, probably?) to get to the door.

In Mumbai I had felt like I had gone down the rabbit hole. Jaipur felt like one of the less desirable suburbs of Wonderland. Udaipur was just yet another twist on this road, and then jumping off this bus in this valley was something very distant from that. I maintain a reality check in two ways -- mentally retracing my steps and obsessively patting myself down for the few items essential for making my way back -- passport, tickets, money. The bus could barely make it up hills. Must have been an engine built for a small car. We made a bunch of stops on the way. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was a real stop or just somewhere the driver wanted to hang out for a few minutes and talk to friends. Or both. At one village I was spotted in the window as the bus rolled to a stop and about five children rushed on and ran to me in the back of the bus to try to sell me fruit and ask me for my pen, rupee coins, or anything else I could give them. Half the people on the rest of the bus turned around in their seats just to watch me get devoured and see how I would react, I guess.

Ranakpur ended up being a big tourist scene. Hordes of visitors somehow got dropped there by big white buses with tinted windows and guides. I must have been the only one who wasn't told by someone not to take the public mountain transportation. Money in my pocket.

The Jain temple was beautiful. I won't get into it too much because you can see tons of photos of it on the web and in books. Very famous. Hundreds of marble columns, each completely unique in intricate carvings from base to crown. It felt good on bare feet. No shoes allowed. A guard came over and whispered to me that he'd show me the "kama sutra" carving and led me over to a very small section on the back side of only one column, where there were three little interconnected sex scenes in a row -- man with woman, man with cow, and man with man. His eyebrows rose proudly as his finger moved across each pair and he meticulously pronounced in practiced English - "man with woman..." etc. Then he turned back toward me and said, "now you give me money." Ha ha. The temple was too holy for shoes or leather but it seems that nowhere in India is too holy for the popular sport of squeezing rupees out of visitors.

Jainism is interesting. Wikipedia provides a good little overview if you are interested. One part of Jainism is a belief in the sanctity of all life and obsessive avoidance of harming any animal, to the point where some Jains even where masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling any insects. The temple at Ranakpur was covered with birds and I spotted several of the hugest beehives I had ever seen hanging from parts of its intricately carved exterior.

When I got back to the road, the bus stop was being guarded by a band of a dozen gray monkeys eating carrots. The terrain here doesn't seem like monkey material, but they are here. Actually, the terrain here looks a lot like California in summertime. Dry, sandy dirt, scrubby plants and trees covering yellow-brown hills and mountains with the occasional stand of palm trees.

I got back to Udaipur not long after sunset, feeling a little lost and lonely. It is very strange to be here completely alone. I haven't run into anybody else visiting India totally alone like this. Some people are very sweet, welcoming, and helpful, others just stare, and many others are outright mean. I've had some good times with a few other visitors, mostly from the UK. Spent most of today with a really cool guy from Scotland met a couple of nights ago.

Last night I woke myself up yelling two different times. Not quite as bad as the first night, but still not something I want to be doing every night, especially not once I stop moving around and sleeping different places all the time. I never did that back in NY, so I'm sure it's the mefloquine. Vivid dreams, some bad, some ok. It should fade. For now it makes India and being alone here a little stranger.

I will be staying in Udaipur tonight and then catching an overnight, 11-hour bus to Indore tomorrow evening. Today's bus to Indore was full. Indore is in Madhya Pradesh, a half-day away from Bhopal. As soon as I get to Indore I will begin looking for transportation to Bhopal and hope to be in Bhopal by the end of the 25th.

No, I'm not dead yet

Internet access was down for the whole town last night and electricity was out this morning as usual. I've got lots to say, but no time right now, so I'll save it for later. Just saw an elephant walk down the street, though. First one. I'm still in Udaipur and trying to get out, which I might not be able to do until tomorrow night. So, I should have plenty of time to write later on, as long as the electricity stays on and the Internet stays connected. : ) Bye for now.

more on Udaipur

Every time I write from here there are a bunch of things I forget.

Apparently a lot of the James Bond movie *Octopussy* was filmed here. I've never seen it, but the locals are mildly obsessed with it. Roughly half the hotels and guest houses here offer nightly screenings of it on their rooftops. It just makes this strange place even stranger.

Indian addresses hilarious and reveal a lot about the way things work here. This is something I actually ran into back in NY, mailing stuff to Mumbai, but today Mohan gave me his postal address and it is a real classic:

MOHAN K
OUTSIDE CHAND POLE
NEAR RAJAWAT GUEST HOUSE
UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN
INDIA 313001

Finding good water here has been a problem. I got one bottle this morning that was good, at a place that caters almost exclusively to foreigners. The second one looked great at first, when I bought it just to get change for a Rs. 50 bill (because of course the autorickshaw guy "didn't have change"). I stuck it away in my bag and looked at it more closely later. Seal intact. Some sand abrasion up and down the sides but nothing unusual for a typical bottle here. A few more dents than I felt comfortable with... but then there was a strange spot on the bottom (another place I'd been told to look), where it like a hole might have been poked with an awl and used to empty and refill the water and then glued back or something. I don't know, it just didn't look good. The third bottle I got was definitely no good. Filled to within 2 millimeters of the top. Over-eager re-marketeers. When you open a bottle of water it shouldn't come splashing out as soon as you take the cap off. The seal was kind of broken, too. So for now I'm left with the dwindling supply in my gallon canteen of self-treated bath water from Jaipur, which tastes awful both from the crap it already had in it and the huge amounts of nasty chemicals I had to put it in before the test strips came back looking good. I'll treat some more tap water tonight. I bet Udaipur's public supply tastes better than Jaipur's.

Rupees are roughly 44 to the USD, so Rs 100 is about $2.33, Rs. 500 is $11.77, Rs. 1000 $23.33, etc.

I took my first, very short bike ride in India after being begged and tugged by a bunch of kids who had started talking to me way up in this hilltop section of town and for some reason thought it would just be the funniest thing ever to see a foreigner ride this bike down their street.

The Hindi word for 'tomorrow' also means 'yesterday.' "Kal." Hey, what's the difference, anyway.

Tomorrow I plan on going to Ranakpur to see the Jain temple complex. Bye for now.

Michael

Udaipur

Now writing from Udaipur, Rajasthan, pop. ~250,000.

The train here was nasty. Couldn't go hang out and relax because of some menacing guys who were way too fascinated with me -- kept coming over and staring and then running away. Grown men. It was really weird. Being here completely alone is really weird. And the staff on these trains is very strange, too. They hand out blankets and pillows for people to use to keep warm but then they are absolutely obsessed with tracking the location of every piece of it, to the point where they will be groping around in people's beds and turning the lights on while they're sleeping to try to find out if they are hiding an extra pillow or sheet. On my first ride, from Mumbai to Jaipur, I opted not to use their sheets and took out my sleeping bag. A woman from the UK was on the shelf below me and she had told me about being cold on these trains so I told her to use my sheets and blanket. About an hour after the lights had gone out and we were in bed, the staff guy came around and realized that if I wasn't using the blankets, someone else must be because there were no extras. He went wild, asking who had them in Hindi, which the British girl couldn't understand, of course. I pretended to be asleep. He was reaching under people's comforters and feeling around and finally he busted her, yanking away half her bedding and taking it away somewhere.

The train stations here are madness, like a lot of other things. The weight checker stations continue to appear everywhere, like on my platform at the Jaipur train station last night. This is just in case, as you haul your stuff down the dusty walkway between the sleeping families and stray dogs, you just have a burning desire to know your weight at that very moment. There are little rainbow-colored light displays that respond in some way, rewarding your leanness with a little Las Vegas -style flourish. It's bizarre how popular these things are here, especially since almost no one is the slightest bit overweight.

I arrived in Udaipur at sunrise. There were only two other Westerners getting off the train with me and we were besieged by a bunch of autorickshaw drivers, but nothing like in Jaipur. I left Jaipur for Udaipur without knowing where I would stay, figuring that I would have all day to find a place. When I got to the train station, the sun was still rising, I was tired, and I didn't want to deal with the autorickshaw game, so I decided to just walk a hundred feet, set my bag down and just sit there for a while. When I did finally get to the center of town, I took the first room I looked at because it was so clean and interestingly decorated -- painted designs on the ceiling, all stained glass windows, cool bedding, marble floors, and windows that open up over the intricately carved and pointed top of Jagdish Temple. It's high up -- have to climb a bunch of narrow little stairwells. The room is costing the equivalent of only a few bucks a night. Electricity was out this morning so I had to take an ice cold shower (the weather is very cool here right now) but it was the first shower in a few days, so it felt good. The toilet is funny, too. When you flush it, half the water in the tank goes into the bowl, and the other half ejects out the back of the toilet onto the floor. Like most Indian bathrooms I've seen, this one has at least one drain in the floor, so it works out okay. There's also no toilet paper, but I got a couple of rolls from Atithi House in Jaipur as a going away present. Towel = my old t-shirt. Should I continue? It's a lot like camping, but camping in a beautiful old palace on a lake.

Udaipur is exactly what I needed right now. One of the most beautiful places I've ever been, right up there next to Sevilla. In the very center of town there are a lot of people trying to sell stuff to foreigners -- always annoying -- but a short walk out of there and there is peace. Tiny streets (only a few feet wide), friendly people. It took some coaxing for me to drop my Jaipur armor, but I'm glad I did because I ended up spending the morning with this super nice man named Mohan who I just ran into on a back street. He took me to his studio where he paints little pictures of animals. In Jaipur it would have been a bad idea, but it turned out that this guy really just did want to hang out and tell me about Udaipur and hear about New York and the rest of the United States. After he finished his work we went on a walk through some wheat fields and met some beautiful children. I wish I could upload some photos here. I love Udaipur. I find myself walking slowly (impossible!), slow as a fat cow. After our walk Mohan had to go and pointed me towards this park I wanted to go to. This other man nearby overheard and told me to hop on his motorcycle because he was on his way there. I surprised myself by agreeing and was rewarded with a long cruise all over and a valuable Hindi lesson on wheels. Udaipur is very hilly. All tiny little streets wrapped around steep hills surrounding a network of small lakes. The buildings come right up to the lakes' edges, where people swim and wash clothes. Udaipur's official color for women's saris is a bright, glowing sun-yellow, so you can see that all over, too. I wish I could stay here indefinitely.

I have to do laundry today and I'm not sure exactly how it works. I think you take it to someone who dunks your clothes in water and then whacks them against rocks a bunch of times until they are clean. I will find out soon. I hope my H&M underwear can withstand the beating. : )

Today is mefloquine day (once per week anti-malarial prophylaxis) so I'm feeling a little strange right now. Not bad, but not conducive to writing much more. More later.

Goodbye Jaipur

So, I am leaving Jaipur tonight. I just got a ticket for a train leaving at 9:30 p.m and arriving in Udaipur at about 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. Bikaner and the Karni Mata temple will have to wait until the next time I am in Rajasthan. From Udaipur I will visit Ranakpur, where India's largest Jain temple is, out in the middle of the woods. I need some woods right now. After a few days I will need to figure out how to get to Bhopal from there, which will probably be difficult and complicated.

I'm looking forward to getting back on the tracks, but I am leaving at peace with Jaipur. It would be a lot better if I could pass as Indian. Being a Westerner here is awful. Walking down the road means having rickshaws pull up to you literally every 15 seconds and say "Hello friend! Hello!" Some give up after I say 'no' a couple of times, but some follow you for a whole block. I prefer to walk. If you get in rickshaw, they will often try to take you somewhere other than where you are trying to go. They get paid commissions by business to bring clueless people to them. If the driver does go where you want, he will almost certainly "have no change" when it's time to pay. If he does have change, it is because it consists at least partly of tattered old bills that no one in India will accept as payment (you have to take them to the government). People try to pass these off on outsiders. There are no taxi cars, here, by the way -- just motorized rickshaws and unmotorized rickshaws. Both kinds heckle and harrass me as soon as I step outside. A lot of this whole hassle is because Rajasthan is one of the most touristy states in India. "Most touristy" means there are a tiny handful that you spot now and then, but it's enough to sustain a feeding frenzy among the locals. The forms the hunt takes range from the overt, constant, and extremely annoying (like the rickshaw drivers) to very subtle schemes that develop slowly. There'll be a guy that you just happened to be sitting next to and a casual conversation will begin (maybe even one you started) and on and on until whatever the scheme is. It's awful because after a while you just don't even want to talk to anyone anymore.

The power just went out but this place must have a back-up because the computer is still on. I should probably post soon, though. The power goes on and off all day, at both scheduled and unscheduled times. Every section of the city has scheduled, two-hour black outs because of energy shortages. The rest of the time it's on and off, but mostly on.

I have to say that Atithi Guesthouse has been such a cool place. Very good to me. I had breakfast with the owner this morning and we had a good talk about lots of things, like the way cars are killing Jaipur. ; ) Atithi has been a much-needed haven and extremely helpful in every way. Very clean, too, with safe food.

Ok, better go. I have to find food for the train ride and stuff like that. I will post again from Udaipur.

You can follow me on a map if you want. Here is a link to a little map:

http://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/countries_map/map-picture/india_pol96.jpg