ChrisandCin

Dear Australian Citizen,

The Travel Advice for India was updated on 15 August to include the following text:

“Credible reporting suggests that terrorists may be planning attacks in India directed at hotels frequented by foreigners, including perceived western owned hotels.”

The overall level of advice remains at “High degree of caution”.

* India

http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/India

Kind regards
Ryan Tierney
Vice Consul, Australian High Commission

This was in the local paper this morning, how do you park vertically I asked myself? Do you make the car stand on its nose ??

I wondered what it was, this vertical parking… it turns out it can be when you back into a spot and the cars are all with their boots/trunks towards the curb. But then if this is true, isnt this car on the left parked correctly…. I am confused!

What a week, its been a blur thats for sure.

Cindy left last week for Australia to go see her family, its much easier to take a 12hr flight from Kolkata than a 22 hr flight from the USA, so she took the chance and made the journey now. So for a month I am a bachelor….

So this week brought to us ‘the boy’ his name was Deep… I have no idea if that was the correct spelling but that’s how you say it. Now the boy was attained through the houseman who runs one of the company guesthouses . We had met deep when we were living in the guesthouse. His main jobhere …well his only job was the look after the dogs, walk and water them while I was at work. But this was a problem, as he rarely walked them and never watered them! Deep was a simply boy from some village 2 hrs away, deep hadnt been privy to many of the things we take for granted. A microwave was a perfect example of this, I think he thought it was simply a box to store food in as that is what he would do, its  a convection microwave too and he would keep putting the metal plate in it and filling it with food, if he had cooked something he would put it in there, if he saw I had leftovers…which I was going to throw I would find them the next morning in the microwave…. yummy!!

The boy didnt know much english, or hindlish, in fact he only spoke Bengali. The english words he knew were not many, just “sir” and “lunch” . Lunch was used to describe everything, breakfast dinner lunch, garbage, shit on the floor, you name it , it was lunch! Very strange! On the first night it was discovered he couldn’t cook… which is weird how the hell do you get on in life if the only thing you can cook is toast and a omelet. But Deep could only do this….oh and make tea. The tea wasn’t nice at all! So on night one I made dinner, a yellow thai chicken curry. It was funny to watch him eat it, I had for once made a dish too hot for a Indian, he couldn’t eat the curry, I gathered it was too spicy for him, and the rice he didn’t like as it was long grain rice not basmati. So that was the last time he ate my cooking!

Indian tea… I have never watched Salim the company guesthouse man make the tea, but I gather its the same way. I watched the boy here make tea, what they do is put in a saucepan some water, milk, a couple of teaspoons laden with sugar and boil, at the end of the boil the tea bags are thrown in, little string with tag and all. Its stirred and then served. Its not really that nice to drink either, with fresh milk it gets this nasty sticky layer on top of the tea from the milk, and with UHT milk it just dont taste right at all! Maybe its an acquired taste! The boy would watch me make instant coffee in the morning, he couldn’t get it at all, first I had this plastic thing I would fill with water, somehow it would boil the water, then I would put some coffee and sugar in a cup and poor the hot water on it, then drink it….now admittedly its instant coffee and that in itself isn’t great, but its the way you make instant coffee people, read the side of the jar!

Western dinner… on what was to be the boys last night, he cooked me dinner. Now I had been at the airport all afternoon in the heat with the idiot mechanics as they took 6 hrs to do a 1 hr job, and even then it wasnt correct and the plane had more troubles, but we wont go there just yet. So I come home all hot and sweaty, after spending the good part of the afternoon in the planes lav scraping the glue from the seat left there from the plastic protective cover that hadnt been removed when the plane was delivered, so it had really stuck itself to the seat. And the boy is making something, he tries to show me, I can see what I thought was eggplant , a batter and boiling oil….hmmmm its also 6pm and this guy is ready to serve me a western meal….as he thinks we always eat dinner at 6pm for some reason.

So I grab a beer and go sit in front of the puter to read the emails and catch up on what the world has been doing in the last 8 hrs, and the house is filling with this strange smell, and its something being deep fried. So I finish the first beer and return for more, only to find that he is actually deep frying sandwiches… and what they are is 2 slices of bread filled with peanut butter and potato, then they are dipped in beaten eggs with curry powder added and deep fried!! Here is the plate I got for dinner:

[singlepic id=427 w=400 h=300 mode=watermark float=center]

It consisted of the delights of the finest western cuisine, the deep fried sandwiches and those little fried turds are actually little omelets dipped in the same batter and fried…

Here is what it looked like…

[singlepic id=428 w=400 h=300 mode=watermark float=center]

Now I have to tell you this tastes really really gross, really gross. I had a couple of bites of the sandwich pictured and then a couple of bites of the other sandwich, and oh my god it was gross, and take matters worse within 1 hr the stomach was complaining badly about those 2 bites I had!

Luckily at about 9pm my driver bought over some chicken curry his wife had made!

But the boy has been sent back now, no more smelly person living in the house, he really did stink, his BO was so bad even the dogs wouldnt go near him!, and he was dirty. TO make matters worse one morning he got up before 8am and actually cooked me breakfast, the standard Indian/western breakfast of omelet (Indians we dont just eat omelets for breakfast).. but he bought out a knife, and he starts to walk away then realises the knive has some food or some thing on it, as he is doing this he is rubbing something behind his ear, so he returns to the table picks up the knife, I expect him to get a new one, but NO he uses the ear scrubbing fingers to scrape and rub off the food, then wipes it on his shirt and replaces it on the table, I started to gag instantly!

Anyway the moral of the story, test drive all servants you get!

Who thinks of this crap!

This sign is in the foyer in front of the elevators in the office building where I work…..

I always feel bad when I see this, but then again I wonder where their parents are…

This tiny little kid was running around in the peak hour traffic, I am amazed he didnt get run over as he was so little, I spotted his parent too, they were just sitting on the road side. When the kid would get money he would dart across to them thru all the cars and hand them the money and then he would return to the slow moving traffic…nice parents!

When I am at word, some of the locals take me to lunch , sometimes to some places where I do really wonder if its going to cause me to spend the rest of the day on the toilet… but luckily that hasnt happened yet…touch wood!

This week I ate in this little wonder of a place on the way back from the airport to the office…

Now look in the back of the pic, you can see a kinda ladder leading up… well this is the stairs , albeit very steep stairs to the upper level which is airconditioned.

You climbed these steep stairs, entered this tiny door and presto you were in… problem. The ceiling is about 4 feet from the floor! There are beams going everywhere too, but they have thoughtfully covered these beams with cushioning thats covered by vinyl, to make it worse to get under these beams you have to duck way down, so under them you only have 3 ft from the floor to ceiling! And its dark, realy dark, there is just one ….

Oh I have to interrupt this , I have a houseboy at the moment living here minding the dogs, and he is making me breakfast, he just bought out a knife, put it on the table and then realised it was dirty, so what did he do, he used his dirty hand to scrape the food off. ……

Anyway this restuarant had just one lightbulb in it, so it was really really dark and sitting there at a normal sized table your head was just against the ceiling, it was very very strange, to be sitting the crawl space of a ceiling eating lunch. But it was clean, had no strange smells and there was no after effects from the chicken bryani, which had deep fried eggs in it (that was a strange concept, a deep fried egg!)