Hey Mister thali man, thali me banana

In an internet cafe a storey above a street in Mumbai, above sidealks crowded with sellers and buyers and the legless and skinny and fat and sequined and torn, cluttered with sleeping nursing-nippled bitches and sugar-filled silver leaf pan sellers and all the same Indian (tm) pretty things you can find pretty much everywhere else in the world, including some of the wall hangings I bought in Cappadocia a few years back. It smells like old cooking oil, pee, fused and smoking electrical outlets, and exhaust. It sounds like car horns. All different pitches and timbres and personal rhythms of honking.

The roads and sidewalks have sudden craters- much like Turkey. Crosswalks flash the green walking man just as it becomes most unsafe for one to walk. Skinny men in cotton ring huge bells in a sidewalk side temple as another man drums and another man waves a chunk of burning something around and shoeless crowds gather and recite whatever it is that one must recite in such situation. The buildings are crumbly old colonial, with brilliant windows and balconies and maybe 10% of the original paint job. The air is warm and thick and heavy but nowt compared to Ghana. It is, after all, winter. Maybe 30 degrees, nothing oppressive. Overall, nowhere near as scary, overwhelming, difficult, or frantic as I had been warned. It's actually quite...easy. (wood being knocked on as we speak)

On Elephanta Island today, an hour away by open sided, life jacketless, little ferry boat, a macaque with good aim tried to tackle me and steal my water bottle. Luckily I was 700% bigger than he was and so emerged with water intact. I saw Siva's linga(m), in an abandoned temple room in a cave on the island. It was about a metre tall and half a metre in diameter and crowned with a garland of flowers. Flowers for the phallii. Very romantic. I dared not sit near it lest I become inadvertantly fertile.

The food is lovely and I walk around in a constant state of stuffedness. All veggie, all the time, with forty million course thalis with endless roti and a mountain of rice and a big tall glass of fresh lime juice and sugarcane juice mixed with fizzy water for about two bucks. Breakfast at the hotel consisting of homemade yogurt, aloo parathas, potato bhajees, many random dhal'y goops and spuddy concoctions full of turmeric and popped black mustard seeds, and instant coffee that's as cloyingly sweet as those annoying 3 in 1 packets in Istanbul (but free!), and dainty little white crustless sandwiches filled with spicy, yellow mashed potato and a few stray leaves of an unidentified green leaf. Finger bowls full of lemon wedges and warm water to wash the roti dust from your finger tips. Pistachio kulfi to ensure the immediate weight gain that even 5 hours of walking doesn't seem to be able to keep at bay. Chai so spiced as to be brown and sturdy even with condensed milk.

Tomorrow we do more things. I believe one of the things involves and aircraft carrier and the other the Prince of Wales. Monday morning at 6am we board a train to Aurangabad. We bought our tickets today, even though they were sold out. The ticket man at the absurdly beautiful train station ended up selling us Emergency Tickets, which are for, well, emergencies. On every train, they set aside a few seats for people who must go to see dying family members or who must go to a hospital far away or any other occasion which may be classified as Emergency. Our desire to go to Aurangabad on Monday morning has officially been declared an Emergency.

Wifi friendly balconies in the desert

The skies are blue again after most of a week of Krikkit-esque white beige hues blending sand with sky with buildings and creating some sort of atmospheric quirk that has left me with a temple-to-temple brain ache all week. I was beginning to think that I was being slowly prepped for an aneurism, with little men digging away at the synapses behind my eyeballs and near my ear drums. Since we will be in Mumbai come 3am this forthcoming morning, I figure an aneurism would not be most beneficial to the situation.

However, the brand new blue skies and bright sunlight are slowly salvaging my sanity, and am now able to sip on my horrific milky nescafe (o, how I miss my coffee maker! my espresso whoosher!) as I wait for all parts of my body to wake up and perk up enough to venture out for some form of walk. I had planned to venture out to yoga, but the 10am class meant I had to be out the door by 9am for the long, scary, depressing walk through sandy lots and mindless drivers and honking horns and absentee sidewalks. I couldn't even bear contemplating that thought and so decided I'd do a few sun salutations at home and go scout out a latte in a cafe later instead. I am terribly undisciplined. Somebody must spank me, or at the least give me a stern talking-to.

The trip looms near, and I have finally managed to convince Shazbat that I really really really don't want to hear more about how dirty, noisy, crowded, maddening, tummy-bugging, impossible, wobble-headed, overwhelming India will be and how I will undoubtedly be floored by the lunacy of it all. And maybe I will. My latent autism may well just kick in and I'll curl up into a little ball somewhere in the arrivals hall and refuse to uncurl until placed safely into a cave pansyon in Cappadocia. Or, whatever it was that carried me through Egypt, Ghana, Bulgaria, Romania, South Africa, etc, will carry me through the teeming humid masses of Hindustan. I'm not that easily daunted, in spite of my meek, mild, shy, introverted exterior. I just don't want to be told in advance everything I will feel. I will decide that later for myself. He said that he was just doing it so that we can be prepared for any situation, like Boy Scouts. I was never a Boy Scout. I wasn't even a Girl Guide. I barely prepare for my lessons, let alone trips. I went to Bulgaria with just a printout of the cyrillic alphabet, the name of a pansyon written in non-cyrillic letters, and a vague idea of where I was heading (er, Sofia, Plovdiv). I went to Ghana knowing that I was heading to Accra, and little more. In South Africa, Pieter and I just drove. And drove. And it's all worked out fine so far. If I dwell on all possibilities and what must be done if they happen, my brain will just stew in them and I will spend the whole trip in a tizzy. I am the Anti Boy Scout, apparently.

So.

I did plan some things, though: I booked us a room at the Railway Hotel in the Fort area of Mumbai, which is just on top of the neighbourhood we had originally wanted. I couldn't reach any of the listed hotels there, except the ones who told me they were very full or very expensive. Thus did I solve my first bout of Indian Challenge. If you can't get exactly what you want, find something else that could also be pleasing- this hotel is an easy block from the railway station where we must go after arriving to book our train to Aurangabad. And they serve free tea and coffee in the rooms in the mornings, upon waking. I like that aspect.

We will be in Mumbai for about four nights before we head out to Aurangabad and the caves. A few days roaming around the caves. Apparently they have Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temple carvings spread throughout the many many caves, like an ADHD Goreme Open Air Museum. And then either heading back to Mumbai to catch a train to catch a plane to Goa, or bypassing plane and Mumbai train altogether and catching a train from near Aurangabad directly to Goa.
And most of a week either being lazy in Goa or not being lazy in Goa. It could go either way. We are considering a few days in a yoga-doing place, but have yet to decide.

Here's hoping my sanity is as sturdy and intact as I think it is.

Breakfast at places other than Tiffany's

For the record, Barakat mint-lemon juice is lovely. And it is really really lovely to be back in a place where I can grab a chicken tikka wrap for breakfast from the grocery store down the street. It's a fine break from simit.
Other than that, I have another headache and a day of planning India ahead of me. I can't seem to find any reasonable accomodation in Mumbai, nearish to the Gateway to India (look right). We want to be there so we don't have to run around too much. I guess everyone else thought that too.

When one is a Lady Who Lunches on vegetarian thali at the mall food court

The last time I was in town, it was in the throes of ramadan and everything was closed, everyone was sleepy with fasting, and nothing happened until after the sunset ezzan. This time, the city is quite mad, with glitzy abaya'd Emirati mall rats filling the boutiques and cafes, tinted-window'd fast cars honking their way at full tilt into traffic jams, and construction crews tearing down and rebuilding larger versions of what they tore down and rebuilt a few months ago. Everything exists within private cars and shopping malls. Everything else is peripheral and irrelevant. I tend to dwell in that realm, much to the horror of my sense of self preservation.

Yesterday I decided to walk to yoga, to get a dose of hot, wet air flavoured with lung clearing oils, and to ensure the flexibility and strength of my body in a city where no one actually moves. The walk is a simple one, following the curves of a few main roads for about 45 minutes- still less than half of my daily commute in Istanbul and 98% flatter. However, unlike Istanbul, one is never guaranteed a sidewalk in Dubai. They just disappear into huge walls of construction sites, or into cordoned off holes that force you out into the 6 lanes of traffic, or into sand dune empty lots where shards of glass and stones work their way into your shoes. Sometimes there are traffic lights when you want to cross; more often than not, there aren't. And when there are, there is no guarantee that the tinted late-model car driven by the woman clad head to toe (including eyes and nose) in black will actually slow down or stop or not put palm to horn in a non-stop warning to you to get out of their way. Apparently it isn't actually illegal for the locals to mow down foreigners.

I made it intact to the yoga, did my poses, cleared my lungs, and made the return trip back. At many points, I was progressing faster than those in cars.

I really really really don't know how people can bear it.

A white skied desert day, smelling of hay

With my second nasty Nescafe interpretation of the morning cooling before me, limply drying wet hair, Jack Johnson doing his thing pertaining to banana pancakes, and a stark view of a sand hued apartment block directly opposite me, out through the sliding balcony doors, I thus begin my nth blog.

This installment of the Gringo Educatrix's Travels in the World finds she in the desert- or at least in the Dubai version of the desert, which exists mainly in parking lots around shopping malls, in vacant lots half built with something big, shiny and new, and in sifting-sands mantle decorations emblazoned with pictures with camels. For the past days I have been bombarded with atmospheric deja vu- this whole winter/desert/white skies/bright air thing is ringing plenty of bells that I just can't place. And it smells like hay. There is no hay in the Emirates so maybe it's just another neurological quirk, like burnt toast and grand mal seizures.

We are setting out for Mumbai come thursday night, in my grand plan to visit all places ending in bai/bay before I hit middle age. A complete list of such suffixed environs would be appreciated. Surabaya doesn't count.