The only rockstar at the taj mahal

The Agra trip we went on was one of the strangest experiences in my life. Period. We started it off at our infamous raj garden apartment, now free of the polluting influences of Sushil Kumar. We ordered Domino's Pizza and sat down for a good long bollywood film. Once midnight rolled around, we stumbled out of the apartment and into the cars we'd arranged to take us to the Taj. I was more than a bit nervous. Indian roads are notoriously dangerous. The highway to Agra is unlit, cratered and fraught with peril. Unmarked construction sites, livestock and impromptu barricades erected to collect tax from travelers abound. I sort of half jokingly called both of my parents and told them I loved them and hopped into the back of our dingy hired Qualis. The whole point of doing the trip as an overnight was to sleep. Try as I might, there was simply no way that was gonna happen. The road would rocket you out of your seat the moment you'd nod off. I tried some crazy origami sleeping position with the other guy in the back, which looked like a line of tetris that was about to be cleared (except my legs didn't vanish). This didn't work because I almost mashed my neck into the seat more than once. Finally after 6 fitful hours of tossing and jostling, we made it to Agra. When we finally made it up the street full of touts, we entered the Taj and paid the exorbitant 750 rupee entrance fee (slightly less than $20) and went in. Some of the girls paid for a tour, but the guys were largely content to simply wander. We did see the beautiful tombs themselves, and they really are as pretty as the pictures everyone takes, but the place was simply mobbed outside. The weirdest part was there were white people EVERYWHERE. In Jaipur, I end up gawking at every other white person I see, because they're so rare outside of the program. I maybe see 5 white tourists a week poking around our neighborhood, only because the Birla Mandir is so close. In Agra, white people (namely white tourists) were everywhere. You know you've been somewhere for a while when you gawk at other foreigners. Once we'd finished our wanderings and settled down for a rest at the back of the structure, the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me in India slowly began to happen. There were 12 of us, we were all wearing respectable, non-touristy clothes and most of us were wearing salwar kameezes (the girls) and Kurta Pajama (the guys). I was wearing a tee shirt, but with respectable pants. Slowly, some Indians came over and started gawking at us. Eventually, a crowd of about 40 people swarmed and started shooting pictures. They'd bring their kids over and click away. Everyone wanted to have their pictures taken with the weird white people. At some point, an old woman asked Kari, one of the fairest skinned women in our group (blonde haired and blue eyed) to autograph her arm and a 50 rupee note. Then a bunch of Muslim guys came over and saw that one of our group members had a Muslim-looking beard and gave him the traditional muslim greeting and we got mobbed once again. The iconic image from this whole experience was watching this small kid, who was probably no more than 8, just gawping open-mouthed at seeing two pale white women in salwars. We then faced the street of touts again while going to get a bite to eat. We got to the roof-top restaurant we'd been looking for and had just pulled up a table when the heavens opened and we got seriously dumped on. We quickly dashed down to the first floor of the restaurant and passed a very pleasant two hours down there enjoying some nice food and hot coffee. All the while, the storm was dumping torrents of water onto Agra's stinky ass streets, which put a very palpable pong of shit and rotting garbage into the air. Agra is a foul cesspool of a city and I don't think my nose got a break from unsavory smells from the time we crossed in until the time we moved on. The more immediate problem was we had no desire to wade through 1 km of raw sewage to get back to our cars. Cars are not allowed in Taj Ganj, which ruled out having our drivers pick us up. We had to take rickshaws which are like boats in this sort of weather. It didn't help that I was basically in charge of getting my rickshaw to where we needed to be and since it was me and a bunch of people crammed in to such a small space, my retarded caveman Hindi had to suffice. It only worked so well, though. He did understand parking, but he misinterpreted what I said. I said paschimi parking, which means the west lot, but he thought I meant dakshini parking, the south one. Eventually he just gave up, making us fend for ourselves and ripping us off in the bargain. I was so happy to get back to our dingy little Qualis and shut the door to shield us from the stink and touts of the Taj Mahal parking lots. The next 6 or so hours are sort of a delirious haze, where I may or may not have fallen asleep.

I had another really weird experience yesterday. The guys in the apartment were hungry and we decided to visit a mall we'd never been to before. It clearly wasn't totally done, many of the shops on the third and fourth floors were blank storefronts being outfitted for tenants. We came to this place called indijoe sizzlers where the ambiance was clearly geared towards a chilis/tgif/applebees sort of place. They'd clearly never had a white patron before, let alone five, so they asked for our input on all sorts of minutiae, like the music, and the amount of M&Ms in the shakes. It was totally strange.

The power's getting cut so I have to run. Pictures tomorrow.

Sweet, Sweet Freedom

My gloom and doom posts of the last week or so have raised some concern among my family. I'd just like to say to them that this trip has many positives and that I'd only focused on the debacle with our housing because it was interesting.

We finally largely resolved our housing issues. Our landlord got us gas, a TV, and a cooker and has left us alone. We're supposed to get a water machine in the very near future. I'm not exactly holding out hope for that, but worst comes to worst, we'll just buy our own. One of the great novelties about having a TV now is the great stuff that's on Indian basic cable. I spent at least 4 hours (half)watching a One Day International Cricket Test Match for the Asia Cricket Cup between India and Pakistan yesterday. Cricket always maintained its novelty for me because I certainly couldn't understand it until my friend Indrani explained it to me in 2006. I still didn't really understand it until I saw it put into practice last summer. This was the first cricket match I've seen where I understood what was going on from the get-go and it was somewhat interesting. India's bowling and defense was pretty bad, so Pakistan managed to score 299 runs in their 50 overs. India then put on a clinic of dominant batting and they scored 301 runs in only 40-ish overs, getting them a bunch of national pride in this ultimately pointless rivalry.

Our classes are rather busy, today we took a test which we will take again at the end of the program. I think it's supposed to test our proficiency with hindi, but what it really does is make everyone despondent for 15 minutes afterward or goofily adopt a "fuck this noise, I'm just going to write C for everything" attitude. While I didn't really do either thing, I did start moving pretty quickly towards the latter option in the last 15 minutes or so of the test. The vocabulary is just so high flung that there's no way in hell that someone like me, who speaks self-proclaimed "retarded caveman hindi," can ever crack it. Making matters worse is that all of the answers, every single sodding one, are in every question. It's hard to know if a passage is about Dalits (untouchables), space travel, witchcraft or world population when you can't understand three-quarters of the words and all four ideas make an appearance. This leads me to believe that the writers of this test were christingly fucking stupid, as the test doesn't test degrees of fluency, but actually only tests if you're fluent or not. As none of the people in the intermediate group are fluent, I don't know what the teachers were thinking.

On a less annoyed and whiny note, I am going to agra to see the Taj Mahal tomorrow. As I hear Agra itself is sort of nasty, we're daytripping it. It should be interesting.

Grabbing life by the earhairs

Well, the spectacle that is living in 601 Raj Garden continues to this day. The coolers our landlord promised finally showed up 3 days late. They don't work. They just make the room much more humid (which is an achievement in Jaipur during monsoons) and raise the temp 15 degrees. We had to turn them off because it was so agonizing having them on. The promised drinking water has been sporadic at best, we've had to go to the market every day to pick up about 15 one liter bottles of water because he brought us 12 (which were finished in a day...I don't think he gets how dehydrated white people get in Jaipur) and keeps trying to slip ones into our fridge that he's refilled at his house. He claims to have an aquagard purifier, which is okay I guess, but our doctor has told us to avoid even aquagard water and just drink bottles or RO water. The cook hasn't been sorted either. His wife has been cooking for us, which has been okay, except that when he brings us the food he snoops around our place and we caught his wife in Ashwin's bedroom poking around a few nights ago. The food as of the last few days has been pretty bad too, alternating from "this is bad because my wife is a bad cook," to "this is bad because I'm a stingy bastard and can't be arsed to get you real food." It hit an all-time low when we were served breakfast today, which was 5 rupee samosas from a street cart and bread and butter that we bought. We're paying this guy 2000 rupees per person per month and he can't even be bothered to not starve us? It's ridiculous. The TV hasn't been sorted, and now I think he wants us to pay for it. That's minor, though, we all have laptops. The धोबी (washerman) that we sorted is ludicrously expensive and he's overcharging us by a factor of 5 compared to the other building residents. We just fired him this morning because he won't change his crazy prices. And the electricity keeps going out in the middle of the night which means that the fans go off and the whole apartment turns into a tandoor. We boil as long as the fans aren't on, because the apartment rests at a toasty 88 degrees at night.

The funniest part about the whole situation is that he flees every time we try to sit him down. We've decided that we're blocking the door tonight and if he tries to run out when we talk to him, we'll wrestle him down by his earhairs, which are at least 3 inches long. We're sick of the bullshit from his end and we're probably moving again next week. Watch this space.

Teacher's and Club Soda

From the last post, you all may have assumed that things were going swimmingly because I was letting things come and go as they pleased. I was at least partially wrong there. You kind of have to put up a little resistance when your landlord tries to put it in you on the price/amenities/everything. First off, our landlord is batshit bonkers. No, you say...Jake, be charitable...Jake, he's just an old codger. NO. He is nuts. He demanded that we pay all of the rent up front, without seeing the state of the place. We may have done this in a better situation, but he'd made us wait for 10 hours for him, while constantly delaying and ignoring the phone calls of the program directors. This would've been fine if he'd been working or fixing the apartment, but he'd been writing a hilarious contract which had no legal grounds. We basically turned down the deal at this point at the recommendation of the program heads, but then we came to some sort of consensus. We're there for 15 days and if it's good, we'll stay. If not, we're out of there in a week and a half's time. We have a whole list of grievances that needed to be addressed, which are starting to come together. We got drinking water, our cook is supposed to start tonight, we have a dhobi (washerman) and a cleaner which were organized for us, and he is apparently getting us a table, some chairs, a TV and a couple of coolers by today. He's been hemming and hawing a bit, but we're going to leverage this 15 days period for all it's worth. It's required a lot of teacher's and club soda to deal with, but hopefully it all works out.

Moving day

We got our stuff out of the hotel today and we were supposed to move it to the flat now, but the guy who owns it has a function until 1. It's really funny how much people just do their own thing here. Even though the guy was likely alerted a while ago that there would be people moving in today at 11, he sort of brushed it off and just continued with his schedule. You see this sort of thing in transport a lot too. You have five guys that are sitting on a bench seat in a car made for three and another one just comes along and jams himself in and everyone else just has to adjust. There's a quote from a bollywood movie that's eerily appropriate for this Indianism. The actor is railing against defeatism in India and says, "What's the most common phrase in this country? 'Adjust kar na, boss.' (Won't you adjust, boss). Ten men in a rickshaw meant for 3? Adjust kar na, boss. Train bench made for one, but holding 8? Adjust kar na, boss..." Adopting a stressed out attitude doesn't help anything. When we were looking at the host families a couple of days ago, I was really tense, because it wasn't certain that there'd be enough rooms for the guys. It seemed like the program directors hadn't sorted their shit out and we were gonna get it. I was so tweaked up that apparently I shouted "Jesus fucking Christ!" in my sleep. But once it became apparent that everything was gonna work out okay, I managed to settle down and everything fell into place just as it should have. You just have to adjust, boss.

Jaipur Afternoons

This is my first post on this blog. I'm hoping to help keep everyone up to date with my life here in monsoon country. First off, since it's monsoons now, it's incredibly humid. We're getting sporadic downpours when the clouds just can't hold it in anymore, but it's like moving through a really hot cloud the rest of the time. The program is just getting started, we've just made our living arrangements for the next few months. I'm in a lovely sixth floor (7th by American Reckoning) flat overlooking Rajasthan University. We've got five guys in it, and it's a big one. We'll see how everything works out there. Aside from that, we have our first big tour around Jaipur tomorrow and we move in as well. I'll keep posting as more happens and will throw in some pics when I feel like emptying my memory card.