India #2

India, Journal 2: This city is trying to kill me. I’m not sure, but it could be because I have red hair. On the other hand, the fear of death seems primary motivating factor out here sometimes. So far, I’ve had three different sicknesses, multiple near death experiences, and I’ve breathed a poisonous fume that would rival the darkest lands of Mordor. Never before have I seen so many awesome things and so many insane things all at once.

The first day was a bit of a stress test. I have become accustomed to the toilet with two buttons to flush it and the combination garden/kitchen hose in the bathroom. I’ve gotten used to housekeeping coming in at all hours with my underpants. Freshly ironed underpants.

So that’s all good. What I haven’t been prepared for is all the different ways India tries to KILL you. The first day was really a test of death by traffic. Nothing about the traffic makes any sense. People drive the wrong way ON THE FREEWAY. I hope you fully understand the gravity of what I’m staying. People hurtle at oncoming traffic AT googledyplex infinity kilometers per hour. I have no idea how fast a kilometer is. But we lots of them per hour. Cars there are nice, except I think they were all created before the invention of modern vehicle suspension. My head now tilts about twenty degrees to the right from frequent collisions with the roof of the car. Meridian in the way of an easy turn to your exit? SMASH IT TO THE GROUND AND DRIVE OVER THE CRATER. That’s right. If you can’t turn somewhere because of something, you destroy the something.

The other problem is the noxious gas. At five o’clock in the morning, all of the smog from the sky sinks to the ground. It really smells as if a collection of rabid, infected dogs died in the drain of a sewage treatment plant. On a good day, that’s what it smells like. This might have something to do with the fact we drive past a river that also serves as a toilet, bathtub, and day spa. What blows me away is how happy these people are. Never before have I seen people who have so little who are so happy. Even our drivers are thrilled, and they work six days a week. Plus I’m pretty sure they pick us up at 5 AM and drop one of the crews off at 11:30 PM. I have no idea when those guys sleep, but I have never seen them unalert on the freeway. The drivers communicate with car horns. Every major vehicle has fancy calligraphy on the back that says exactly these words – over and over again: “Horn Okay Please.” Over and over again on the freeway – big trucks, usually filled to overcapacity, with five guys sitting in the back and the words “Horn Okay Please.” Occasionally, we’ll see an Elephant with facepaint, and sometimes we’ll see a family of four on a motorcycle. My favorite so far was a guy riding a motorcycle wearing an 1850’s style Samurai Helmet, complete with awesome dragon facemask and golden crescent moon shaped horn-ornament on top. He’s probably the coolest guy in India. That said, with characters like this, it’s amazing we survive. Truly.

That brings me to the second day. I learned very quickly that the head of Reliance’s Media Division is a passionate vegetarian. So passionate is he, in fact, that he serves everyone at the building ONLY vegetarian foods. Imagine my joy at learning that meat would not be served during at least two of my three meals per day. On the second day of work, I had for breakfast several pieces of banana bread. I actually asked for toast, but got none. I have asked for toast every morning. I have asked for toast each DAY I have been in India. My waiter clearly understands. He always asks if I want white bread. Then he asks if I want butter. But no toast ever arrives. I don’t know what happens to my toast. I assume it vanished to the mysteriously absent 4^th or 5^th floors of the building, but one can never be too sure of toast.

Having eaten my banana bread and muffin flavored with double bland, I headed to the office, where I was treated to four different kinds of rice for lunch. To be fair, the rice was actually pretty good.

Now, I’m not sure if it was the banana bread from the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet no toast guy or the rice, but I began to feel a little ill. Slightly queasy, as it were – as if my stomach were punching me in the ribs begging me for something simple and easy to digest – something mild – something like toast, I guess. But since it was lunchtime, and toast was not available, I had to make do. I immediately took one of my pills. This particular one was called cipromaximus stomachus deathus. Or something. This gave whatever virulent, evil, son-of-a-bitch strain of viral death something to laugh at. Upon returning home, I drank water. Upon arriving in my bathroom, I un-drank water. To put it as mildly as possible, I decided to carefully review the lunch menu.

I must have thrown up for a solid six hours. After this point, there couldn’t possibly have been food in my stomach, but I threw up anyway. If I had to guess, my bowels somehow moved into the future during the time-zone change and I was actually vomiting food I hadn’t even eaten yet. I may have been delirious, but I’m pretty sure at one point my feet were coming out of my mouth.

After collecting my shoes from the toilet, I proceeded to get two painful, short hours of rest, give or take. Despite this unfortunate near death experience, I STILL woke up at five AM and I STILL went to work. It was the hardest day of work I’ve ever put in during my lifetime. Imagine throwing up so much your entire body structure aches. Now imagine your stomach is at it’s weakest point in ten years. Now imagine taking that broken body and weak stomach inside of an SUV death box barreling down the freeway with literally no suspension over destroyed freeway medians. There was a bright side though – the frequent collisions between my head and the top of the SUV made it so I didn’t even have to turn my head – if I needed to puke, I could just roll down the window and easily unleash a rainbow yawn all over the samurai warrior motorcycle rider next to us.

That didn’t happen. And thankfully, my life was saved by the most unlikely of characters. Not a man, not a doctor, not an angel, but something far more amazing – a true miracle of our world. A McNugget. Bless McDonalds – they do have some crap food out here – I don’t think I have to mention the Maharaja Mac or the Veg McPuff (oh yes – both very real) but damned if they didn’t have Chicken McNuggets and French fries. And they were delicious. I will admit that in America, nuggets and fries both have a mild taste of beef, which these McNuggets lacked, but they were still so good, the non-beefiness was easily forgiven. Though eating McNuggets can sometimes be like swallowing a handful of full sized razorblades (the McNugget is a harsh Mistress) these were like eating the first Snickers bar of Easter – only good things could happen from here. Religious connotations aside, the McNugget was my intestinal messiah.

I was proven correct. So far, the food quality has maintained a reasonable amount of safety and were palatable, as well. Breakfast was also a fine meal. However, the worst vomiting I have ever had was replaced with the worst COLD I ever had. I can only guess that no-toast guy is gathering up some of the sick guys from the street, checking their symptoms, and having each of them lick my banana bread before it has been served to me. There really is no other explanation. I swear to you, he hates me because I have red hair. It’s because I am a wealthy, red haired American giant. I have a fairly large class in India – in fact, I had the opportunity to present to a class of around one hundred people, and I’m pretty sure I was a head above all of them.

India #1

Somehow, somewhere in the Universe, several planets aligned. I don’t know why, I’m not entirely sure HOW, but someone somewhere decided, “Hey – lets send Chris Scott to India.” This will chronicle my descent into what I have discovered may be a sauna somewhere in hell. I don’t mean to imply that India is an unpleasant place, only that the devil probably visits here when he needs a spa day. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself – lets start from the beginning.

It started with a delightful limo ride to the airport. Everything was packed – toothbrushes, socks, passport, and a large bag of hot Cheetos. This was great. I shared the vehicle with my housemate and coworker Ellen Cuny. That was a lot of fun. The car ride was quick and there was almost no fear of death. The things I take for granted…

So, we hopped out of our vehicle and into the Tom Bradley International Terminal, where in lies the Emirates (that’s our plane) lounge. Which was great. The business lounge was a nice, comfy huge room with internet access, delicious sandwiches of every kind (I ate as many of the roast beef ones as they put out, as I anticipated there would be no roast beef for me for quite some time after this) plenty of free alcohol, cookies (Brussels, I think they’re called – I grabbed several small packs of these for emergency India Dining purposes) and tested out a beer – I think it was called OB and was Korean. I imagine this was because Emirates shares a lounge with Korean Air. In any case, its flavor was not bad for a beer named for a feminine product. There must be some marketing brilliance behind the name.

In any case, they loaded us aboard a brand new Boeing 777-200ER – one of the newest planes in the Boeing catalog, and took off.

This airplane could have been the coolest thing I’ve been in since the invention of the pantsuit. The seats recline… and by recline I mean TURN INTO A BED. So I sat down, turned on the front facing airplane webcam, leaned back, and relaxed.

I found the safety video highly entertaining. Apparently, the safest place for your young child is a body bag. I’m not kidding. In the event of a water landing, throw your kid in a body bag and ship him out to the proper authorities. The bright side? There’s a small, clear plastic window so you can watch your baby in the body bag.

It wasn’t long before they started throwing all manner of food at me. Champagne came before takeoff. I drank about a have flute – no need to get overly belligerent on the airplane. Then, there was a tea. Then a salmon with a dinner roll and some kind of lemon mayo. Then my food came out – I have pictures of all these meals. They were great!

The coolest part to me was the plane lighting. In addition to free razors, shaving cream, socks, eyepads, and perfume, the lighting was the best part. The cabin lighting at first reflected our departure colors, but after several hours, was set to match the lighting conditions of our destination. It was amazing. The hue changed, the lights dimmed and went from white to golden to a dusky orange to purple. Once the purple started to fade, the ceiling lit up… with STARS! Not just little holes with lights, there were CONSTELLATIONS on my ROOF! I clearly found Orion’s belt and the big dipper. This, to me, was badass. But not badass enough to keep me awake. Then, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was feeding time again. They made me a great French toast, tea, and a bunch of other stuff I ate but was far, far too groggy to remember. This is the part where things started to get weird on me.

The windows in the cabin are all operated by button. That by itself was pretty cool, but they were actually two layers to these blinds – one that merely blocked the view but allowed light in and one that blocked out the sun. For some reason, my window only closed about 95% percent of the way, which allowed a bit of light from the outside to reach me. It turns out that flying over the polar icecaps removes your nighttime. There was no night. So we left in the afternoon or late evening, flew INTO the day. However, when we began to land, it became apparent that it was actually nearly late afternoon/early evening.

Swell. So we left at dusk, fell asleep for a couple hours during lunch, and woke up AT DUSK AGAIN. On paper, that sounds simple. While in an airplane hurtling across the planet, it messes with your mind. Solution: watch bad movies. I think I watched as much of G.I. Joe as I could before I became mindlessly bored.

Thankfully, the flight was over much sooner than I anticipated. We offloaded into the Dubai International Terminal.

For those of you who don’t know, Terminal 3 in Dubai is amazing. It’s huge. It’s comfortable. There are showers. There are beers. There are eighteen different places to eat. I ate at least one of everything (and there was a lot) and went on a bit of exploring. I noticed every clock was from ROLEX, which seemed to have sponsored the wing of the airport. I must say, that airport was nice. I’m pretty sure it was created with bricks of 100$ bills.

So, after freshening up with a brisk morning/afternoon/evening/outer space shower, I once again rejoined my cronies for a little exploration. We then heard an announcement over the P.A. that our flight, EK500, had been delayed from 10:30 to 11:00. This was excellent (though most of my coworkers disagreed). So we went over to the big digital LCD boards that told us our departure times. These had not been updated at all. No big deal, I thought. I’ll just hang out for a while. Then we heard a P.A. announcement saying our flight was BOARDING. So we ran back to all of the coworkers and rustled them up. Needless to say they were not happy about being hustled along so early in the morning/late in the evening/years in the future. We left the opulent, comfortable Middle Eastern style couch-bench-seats and went to the terminal. Which wasn’t boarding. This may have caused some employee disgruntling. In these situations, I simply pull my fedora over my face and take a quick morning/afternoon/Christmas nap.

Boarding actually didn’t begin until just after 11:00. This worried me, but not enough to roust me from my evening/leap year nap.

My worries were unfounded, as we again found ourselves in a nearly identical plane, complete with the automatically folding robot chair/bed. The only differences I could see were a lack of starlight built into the roof (which makes sense, in retrospect, as I don’t think stars exist in Mumbai) and a manual, classic style pull down window shutter. I was really disappointed in that shutter. I much preferred the glowing up/down button shutter to classic style version, and besides, I was far to busy having food, goodie bags, and hand creams thrown at my face to worry about such things for too long.

Landing in Mumbai wasn’t nearly as horrible as I’d imagined it would be. From the stories I heard, I imagined that you walked out into a mosquito breading zone so thick with the bugs they would become stuck in your teeth with every breath. It turns out it wasn’t even remotely that bad. It was more like being stuck in the everglades whilst coated with a thick layer of bee honey. I was more of an aperitif to them, I think, and less of a feedbag. That was good.

Another expectation I had shattered was the general number of people in the airport. I had envisioned men stacked upon men – hundreds at a time, all attempting to stand in each other’s space. This is not the case. No one wants to be where you are, and there was plenty of space for everyone.

Instead, I discovered everyone wants to be ahead of you. Small moving electric vehicles. Juice vendors. Sandwich wielding Frenchmen. Pilots. They all want the space DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF WHERE YOU ARE. These leads to an important cultural difference: In America, we call this a line. In the UK, India, Honduras, South Africa, and other civilized parts of the world, they call this a Que.

We Americans, with our sense of social propriety, decide who goes next by standing in a single file line. In India, there is no single file line. There are 3,117 lines that all end in front of a single place.

This is where Indian Martial Arts come into play. You must learn to vanish between people, squeeze around them, and politely avoid them while smiling but not making eye contact. This ‘Que-Fu’ as I call it is probably the martial art most used by five year old children attempting to escape the clutches of their evil parents, overprivelaged supermodels, and trash collectors. More on the latter of the group later.

There are two reasons you want to be in and out of these lines quickly. The first is because if you aren’t careful, the entire population of Indiawill jump in front of you. The second is the smell. The reason trash collectors and Indians appear to be so good at Que-Fu is the odor. You don’t want to be around this many smelly people all the time. The odor, as I discovered upon stepping outside, isn’t really the fault of the Indians. It’s more the fault of the weather. The moment I stepped outside, my glasses turned completely foggy. We’re talking 100%. I was without the ability to see. I also noticed that my pants, which I thought were a fine khaki material, were actually a lovely beige form of moist spandex clinging to my body with reckless abandon. Never before would I have suspected that one day I would look up to God longingly and ask him to bestow upon me a squeegee for my ass.

The next fun step was the car ride. Thankfully, Emirates provided us with lovely luxury cars. However, the driver is on the opposite side of the vehicle, which screwed with me. Once every five minutes I’d look up and to the left and a little voice in my head would scream “BUT WHO’S DRIVING THE CAR?!?!”

This leads me to another aspect of Indian Que-Fu – traffic. Firstly, it drives on the other side of the road. Having been awake for some number of hours I can’t fully articulate due to the effects of time travel, every time I looked out the window, I panicked a little. OH MY GOD WE’RE GOING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE…oh. Repeat that in your head about 500 times and you’ll have some idea of what it was like. Then came the cows. Big ass cows. Male cows. Female cows. Lots of cows. At the airport. Hanging out. No people leading them, just generally having a blast in the foggy/smoggy weather. We dodged those. Then came the dogs. If you are a dog lover, there about 5,234,523,211 dogs per.square.foot.of.space.in.India. And they don’t really care about cars. At all. In some cases, they were just hanging out in the street. Some sat down right in front of us. God knows how they survive the way cars barrel around each other. Cars in Mumbai compete for position on the road. It’s unbelievable. To top that off, there were cabs everywhere, plus HUGE trucks. Guys were awake on top of the trucks… having tea or some such. Cab drivers were asleep hanging out the door. These things boggle my mind.

In any case, watching hundreds of other cars hurtle at me at these insane speeds was enough to throw me for a loop. Once we arrived through the hotel and completed the Security Masterpiece Theater, I road the McDeath elevator up to my room. I have dubbed it this because power to the elevator drops—apparently randomly—and the elevator drops about 2 feet quite suddenly before the breaks kick in. This is something I really, really don’t want to experience first hand, thanks.

I’m on the 12^th floor of I don’t know how man floors. There is 1,2,3, 10,12,14,15, and 16. I assume someone broke through the crack squad of savy, motivated personel working security and stole all the missing floors. Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the other floors are vacationing in America or visiting the Eiffel Tower.

A security guard greeted me at the elevator. He looked like he wanted to break me in twain, but instead grabbed my bags, showed me to my room, opened it and powered it up for me. Very kind of him. I stepped into the room to discover something else odd. There is a window into my shower from my bedroom. A HUGE window. I assume that there are circumstances in which this would could be awesome. However, the shower door is glass and looks into the bathroom as well. I effectively have a view from my bedroom clear into my toilet. I can think of a lot of circumstances in which this could be terrifying, and so have decided to dub this toilet-window the ‘Smell-O-Vision’ viewspace.

I decided to take a look out the window. The sun was coming up. This bothered me because in my mind, the sun should be going down at this hour, but instead seemed to have had one too many drinks, forgotten where his apartment was, and stumbled out into the street in the middle of the night to give it another go.

I shut the curtains and passed out for just about the best three odd hours of rest I’ve ever had. Am I still tired? Oh my god yes. But I have things to do tomorrow, so I’m going to try to stick it out until about 10:00 tonight. If I can manage that, then dose myself with some Tylenol PM, I should be okay.

I will send pictures along as soon as I can get my Mac and Camera back on speaking terms.