clothing in india

i almost forgot a really fun event of today. during our adventure near the synagogue, which is the most touristy place on the island, i got a comment on my milo in maine fish t-shirt. in front of every shop (and there are lots of them) there is a man harassing you to come in and take a look; they all have different methods. complimenting is my favorite. one man in front of his shop looked at my fish t-shirt and said: "I like your shirt, fish! you cook (slight pause) and then eat!"

this evening we went to the "teapot," which was a semi-touristy tea shop. we ate samosas with masala chai and i had an additional coffee. the coffee was yet again weak and kinda strange; maybe this is what southern indian coffee is like? anyways the tea makes up for it. then we were on the hunt for some ice cream and found another semi-touristy place. zoe had a deep-fried banana with ice cream and i had a coffee with ice cream. that concluded our bizarre dinner.

afterwards we went to listen to indian classical music. it was northern style, which was a sitar and drums. the music was great and i think the person in front of me fell asleep. i found it great to meditate and let the mind wander. apparently there are over 100 different kinds of drums just with inside kerala.

benson just made the awesome list. benson is the owner of the place we are staying at, which I would recommend to anybody (costa gamma.) i think benson made my night. when we returned from the music he was standing on the fount porch with his buddy who picked us up from the train station two days back. benson complimented zoe's salwar kameez, then looked at me and asked where my indian clothes were. i laughed and then told him i was working on it. i really am interested in indian clothing. benson recommended a local tailor and the amount i should pay ($1.60-$2.00.) he added that he would also show me how to wear my new clothes once i got them, which would be so great because i am clueless.

i mentioned after this exciting news that zoe was really wanting to learn how to wear a sari. he replied: "oh, i'll get my wife to come over here tomorrow to show her how."

tomorrow should be fun.

lunch in kochi

today we went to a local restaurant and had thali. first they laid down a banana leaf and then put a mountain of rice on it. it was followed by five or six different sauces ladled from cans the waiter carried around. two addition small cups were laid on the table for each of us; one of them was curd and the other a dessert. the curd I put on the rice immediately and it was tasty, i then, unknowing poured half the dessert on the rice as well which you are suppose to drink straight from the cup. the surprised waiter said: "no, no, sweets, that is sweets." oh well, i am learning quickly. i suppose that's like putting ice cream on steak. 

then there  was the problem of getting the food to my mouth with just my hands. it was rice and a bunch of runny sauces, so i began mixing them all together. not quite the way to do it, but it was successful. i am not sure if the people were staring at me because i was white or because i was mixing my food. my aim was to mix the main sauce with the rice and one other sauce at a time, but i ended up mixing in more. the real trick is getting the rice and sauce to the right consistency when it does not drip from your hand or fall apart on the way to your mouth. using your fingertips you grab and scoop a little bit at a time.

next time i will definitely make a pool of the main sauce in the middle of my rice and then mix smaller amount at a time rather than my entire dish at once. the walk back to the hotel was really hot. along the way we found a lost baby goat which was heart wrenching, it just kept running and calling out for its mom. we also stopped at a fruit stand and got 4 bananas. the man weighed them and held up two fingers which i interpreted as 20 rupees; only when we were back at our hotel did i realize it was probably 2 rupees. 50 cents for 4 bananas would be a lot in india, but if it was 20 rupees it would probably be the white-guy-charge, a very common charge here.

kochi

we have been doing a good job of exploring indian food, although we have not even started sweets. our method is ordering things that we have never heard of, and for me, cannot pronounce. today for breakfast we went back to the krishna cafe, which is some of the best local food around here, and cheap! i had a donut that was made of potato and herbs. that's my best description.

tea is a lot of fun because it is always served in a steel cup resting in a steel dish. to cool off the tea you pour it back and forth between the two vessels, although you have to be careful because sometimes they are different volumes and the steel dish will spill over. so far the coffee here has been crazy sweet with a lot of milk.

yesterday we went to the touristy area and picked a restaurant out of desperation to get away from the heat. we sat on the roof of the place across the street from a giant catholic church. it was a lot of fun watching all the children in uniform walk out of there, pile 2 or 3 on a bike, and go home. we ordered french fries, vegetable fried rice (chinese), and two curries; it was weird but fine. service was not very good but we tipped because during our wait for our food the waiter/chef/host (only guy there) hopped on his scooter and went to the grocery store. we were one of two customers. at least the food did not make me sick, yet...

later we met up with two travelers who are also staying in the same place as us. they are coming down from nepal and going to thailand, and we are doing the opposite, so we went out to eat and swapped stories. we ate at this awesome vegetarian restaurant (about 50% of restaurants here are vegetarian) called the pumpkin, and it had awesome authentic indian food. it's silly to even mess with non-indian food here.

this photo was taken from sitting on the doorstep of our hotel; which we love. we find the people working here to be incredibly nice and helpful.

i understand why people worship cows; they are so peaceful. i see cows just standing in the middle of the narrow streets with cars, buses, and scooters zipping by on either side, and they could care less. these cows were just taking advantage of the shade, usually they hang out in groups of 2 or 3 but i see some on their own just wandering. there are also lots of goats which i believe are around simply to keep the grass short.

unfortunately we did not take the ferrari motorized rickshaw; we took the one that was more like a 1993 toyota corolla.

the photos cannot capture the heat of the sun. it is so hot here, and also humid. standing in the sun it feels well over 100 degrees, but in the shade its only mid 80s, i'm guessing. it's the kind of heat where you drink a liter or two of water and don't have to pee.

one of the biggest attractions where we are is this synagogue. the area has served a large jewish population that has been here for thousands of years. it is unbelievable how many religions are present in india.

tonight we are going to listen to some indian classical music at an 8 to 9 show after dinner. i am definitely looking forward to that.

day 1 and 2 in india

i've been very bad about taking photos here, mostly due to laziness. it is also a little bit because there are not as many opportunities, often it is cramped and i am in someones face. but here is some from the motorized rickshaw! more are on the way, i promise.

zoe's in the mirror!

the train ride:

we got on board and discovered that we had our own cabin which is a nice halfway step for our next ride. there were people selling food, but non of them looked really official. later i discovered you buy food when the train stops at a station for about 1 to 2 minutes. you purchase your goods from a sort of-but not at all- official vendor. the vendors yell "coffeeing, coffee, coffeeing!" or just "chai, chai, chia!" i couldn't understand what they were yelling for food, something in tinfoil.

this movie makes me dizzy, but so did the train. after a 12 hour ride i was so hungry, zoe and i had some awesome dosas for breakfast that costed less than 50 cents each.

a few other things from thailand

before we left bangkok we visited this temple, i believe wat pho, which took up an entire city block. this was partly due to a reclining buddha, which was larger than my house.

i'm sure there were well over 2 or 3 thousand buddhas at this temple.

and i almost forgot my "i'm in a dome!" picture, this is from the rainforest part of the botanical garden in chiang mai.

opium and temples

we went to an opium museum that was funded by the queen of thailand (the princess mother); pictures were not allowed unfortunately. it was a really neat museum located on a mountain side as far north as you can go within thailand. the entrance is on one side, then you walk through the mountain through a 180 meter tunnel with scary art carved into the stone (maybe bad hallucinations?). you come out onto the other side in the museum and go through multiple floors explaining the history of opium, how it spread through the world, how the british used it to suppress the chinese, and how it suppressed the thai people. all in all it was a really enlightening experience of something i knew very little about.

what really summed up the experience was going to a temple a short way from the museum that sat on the river. after ogling at the gigantic buddha we noticed a fork in the massive river. from standing on the temple you could see the actual golden triangle. on one side was burma, the other laos, and we stood on thailand.

note the golden temple and the chemical factory on the burmese side of the river.

just outside of chiang mai there is a massive botanical garden we visited, where we picked up food poisoning. the gardens were amazing (not organic i believe), they had gardens from all over the world and from all of the major climates. they also had a 18,000,000 baht temple (or so tang told us).

foxglove!

the desert place was hot. we had enough of that one.

zoe hid in a small hole on the side of a pagoda attempting to scare tang.

we also went to this temple, notice the hands reaching up from hell around zoe on the ground.

this is... the bathroom.

lanterns.

this town clock is by the same artist that did the temple just above.

mmmm....

burma

straight ahead you can see the thailand and burma border.

first i had a coffee. it seems nobody who works at a cafe knows what condensed milk is; you must say carnation. zoe and i have been trying to get a coffee with carnation since our first one towards the beginning of the trip. on the menu after our first espresso we noticed thai coffee and assumed that was coffee with carnation, so we ordered it. when we received the coffee we noticed that it was not it, and tang added: "be careful, may give you heart attack." we looked back up at the server and asked for carnation to be mixed in, and she seemed to understand. she took the coffee, and when we got it back there was definitely coco and a tiny bit of carnation mixed in. close enough. i was about 2 feet off the ground for the rest of the day.

master maxwell lawrence and miss zie woodbury. this part did kind of scare me. at the boarder they took our passports and said we would get them back on our return. we were advised at the thai border to leave before 4 p.m. this was definitely the sketchiest part of our trip so far.

this is on the bridge over the river that separates thailand from burma.

i did not take a whole lot of pictures of burma; the streets were narrow and you were always in someone's face. i did manage to get a few. i tried not to buy anything, but i did end up getting some sunglasses just because i wanted a little money go towards the locals. unfortunately burma is under a dictatorship and the market is heavily regulated by the military.

so far in both thailand and burma i have noticed a disney obsession.

we went back to thailand after only a few hours away and got a cool stamp in our passport.

my turn being sick

about 1 in the morning last night i got so sick, though it was still a fraction of what zoe went through. we have been taking our time to get our health back and make a plan for the rest of our time in thailand. on a brighter note, check out zoe's blog; this post takes place at the "fish spa."

a rough night

around 7 last night we went to a movie, on the way there zoe suddenly became really ill. her symptoms rapidly progressed pointing towards something wrong with her stomach, tang really pushed the idea of going to a hospital. we got a cab and were then in under 5 minutes.

i was actually really impressed with the hospital, i think i would rather go there than the maine medical center, but the hospital was also nearly empty. zoe was immediately put in a wheel chair and rolled off to the doctor, she was seen with in 10 minutes.

we got a good doctor who said it was a fairly serious case of food-poisoning which later on was confirmed by the blood test. tang also developed food poisoning a few hours later, but not to the same extent. i however am fine, and i ate the same food, even some food off of zoe's plate, i am really lucky.

talking with the nurses was interesting. the nurses told zoe: "your skin is so white, it is so beautiful." zoe replied that she liked their hats, which were the traditional nurse hats from about 25 years ago. zoe laid on a stretcher for the rest of the night and slept.

when midnight came around they closed the treatment center and moved us to the emergency room for monitoring. they would not let zoe leaving until she could give them a urine sample, or become capable of doing so. zoe was so dehydrated there was no chance of it until the next morning. we were cleared to go home around 2 a.m. but zoe was not strong enough to leave until 6. it was strange staying there over night, i think the worst part about it was someone vomiting blood across the room (we really were in the emergency room).

i was really tempted to take a picture of zoe resting, but reframed from being so rude. if i had taken the picture you would have seen zoe on a stretcher in a hall with a dog lying on the floor behind her and some nurses having dinner. i also saw a cat, and later on heard it screaming somewhere behind the emergency room.

zoe is sleeping now in our upgraded (from $15 to $21) hotel room, now we have AC which is great. we went out for breakfast and zoe has successfully consumed a piece of toast and some a mango smoothie.

the really interesting thing about this whole experience is we did not need identification or insurance at the hospital. I had a hard time understanding the paper work and found myself being addressed as mr. zoe high. the entire bill including medication, seeing the doctor, and staying there over night was as much as our hotel room.

tang quotes

zoe and i have been hanging out with a local girl named tang. zoe met tang during her year in germany; they were both exchange students in the same district. now i have had the pleasure of meeting tang, who finds me quite eccentric. here are some tang quotes about me.

"he's not normal."

"i expected he would be better."

"his face always looks confused."

"the insects must always come in; his mouth is open all the time."

"he is only 25%."

here are images from in chiang rai at an ice cream parlor. i was really tired for the record.

a 5 minute update

so the internet was out in our hut, no big surprise. we got some internet here, but very little time to do much. flickr is taking its sweet time. i am beginning to feel the air of asia in my lungs, and it is dirty.

what else can i update you on in 5 minutes?

i will try to write much more tonight.

zoe, tang, and i went to a national park day before yesterday, known as the old city. it is a place packed with ruins and it's famous for the king who laid down the thai alphabet. for the record it has 44 letters and a third of them are vowels.

right now we are packing up to go out for the day. it is 6:49 and zoe is asking me if i can cut her bangs with my knife, i reply no, tang can.

oh yeah. we have hot water! the heater was definitely broken at the hut. finally we were able to wash off the city grit.

all the food is fried here!

our third morning in thailand

just hanging out on the porch...

there seem to be fish heads in every dish, and it's not so bad

hello everybody, zoe and i are alive and well. the 15 hour flight was not at bad as i thought it was going to be. luckily a woman sang behind me for about an hour which helped pass the time. hong kong was full of "hong kong wonder" -it was great. then it was back on that damn airplane to bangkok. 

in bangkok we managed to find the lovely tang (below), and her family waiting for us. 

we went to a shrine that celebrates all forms of buddhism. the place is on the river and has a big dock where it holds a massive market on the weekends.

we went to check out the docks where i noticed massive fish, 2-3 feet long.

feeding the fish was my favorite part of the day.

this was also my favorite shrine. inside the building behind it is a huge buddha at least 10 feet tall in the sitting pose.

later we got some thai "sweets." this stuff is like green cotton candy, but i think it is made from rice. you then roll up the green cotton candy in a thin sweet pancake, and eat it like a burrito.

elephants! i refuse to ride an animal that i cannot give a ride, but i really like to watch them.

tang's dad has a good friend that has a "hut" at a hotel, or that's how i understand the story. so, zoe and i have our very own "hut" which is so lovely. we also get to stay here for free!

zoe's in the window!