The Return from Goa

Wow, that was quite the trip.  I loved goa.  Want to go back.  Like, now.  Although the Bebinca was awful!  And the cashew liquor tasted like moonshine but not as refined.  Yeah, bad.  Otherwise, it was paradise.

Goa makes it very hard to leave India. 

To Goa I Go!!

Packed my bags, have my tickets and passport, my kindle is all charged and stocked up with several books!  My camera is a ruined heap of metal thanks to me dropping it on the ground so I'm hoping my travel partner can send me some of her pics to share.

My co-workers and friends have all been giving me ample ideas for things to do in Goa (I was content with sitting on the beach but there seems to be a lot more things to do).  At least the list contains mostly food to eat.  That I can do no problem.

love and hate

I’ve started eating with my co-workers. I know this sounds a little weird but before I would get my lunch served to me at my desk every day. Now I eat with my co-workers in the lunch room. It’s nice because everyone brings their own food but we have a staff who heats it up for you and serves it to you at your table with fresh bread. A little luxury, indeed. I really like the group eating except everyone takes my popudums. I love popudums and apparently my cook is the only one who makes them or brings them because they are totally gobbled up as soon as they are set on the table.


Eating with everyone has modified our relationships slightly and when I look back on my time here it was a great mistake for me to wait so long to join them. I probably came off as a snobby American elitist. I think more than anything though it’s modified my mind frame. I feel a little more included into the culture as it were and I find I’ve become enamored with Mumbai’s ways.

Mumbai is all about a love hate kind of relationship and I think the more you start to love Mumbai you can’t help but get annoyed at it. The city and it’s people are so friendly and open. Why don’t you JUST BUILD SOME f’ing SIDEWALKS? The smells of food are so amazing. Why can’t you just improve santitation? Would it kill you to clean up the streets of trash? Religions and peoples of all backgrounds seem to live in peace and harmony. Why must there be a symphony of dog howls, honking horns, and firecrackers every single night??  

Mumbai, such a strange beautiful messy city.  Colorful Hijabs, cows and goats meandering down busy streets next to people in bmw's and business suits.  Techno dancing drowning out hindu chanting drowning out the constant noise of traffic.  Sometimes while I'm sitting in a car and watching a new arrival from our boston office staring out the window I realize how amazingly crazy it all is, and then I also realize in that same moment how less crazy and expected it is to me.  I like that feeling.  And I hope that the person staring doesn't get a bad idea of the place by all the filth and disorder on the streets.

But that’s kind of the deal with Mumbai. I love it because it’s vibrant, colorful, and chaotic. And I hate it because it’s smelly, dirty, and chaotic.  But it wouldn't be Mumbai without both elements.

book vs. kindle

My issue with the kindle is not related to the device at all. The light design, the travel friendly size and practicality, instant access to books, and the built in dictionary are all features that after a few uses I find it hard to live without.

My issue with the kindle is kinesthetic. And also the fact that I can’t read maps in the beginning of the book due to small print which as an avid fantasy reader – is a very huge problem. I do love the library itself. In the town I grew up in it was a beautiful building that I still have memorized in my mind. The children’s section was through the back door and down the stairs, the Nancy Drew series was on the second shelf from the bottom in the 4th row (I not only read them all, I was a bit o/c about reading them in order. If the next book was out, I waited til it was back) and the choose your own adventure series books were in turnstyle bookcases. The Adult section (which sounds inappropriate now, I wonder if they renamed?) required a 2 flight walk upstairs. In those days there were “due date” cards pasted into the front of books. You could tell how popular the book was by the amount of stamps it had. In some cases the book required a second stamp slip which covered the original. I’d look at those stamps with the dates and start to think of the time out of the library the book had spent, imagine the book and where it was a few months ago and who had been reading it, or it sitting all by itself on the shelf for 2 years with no one picking it up.

I do this imagination process with coins too, as I wrap them. I love to wrap coins and I think of silly things while I do it – the fact that I might be splitting up two pennies that had travelled all the way from texas together (b/c you always seem to get at least 2 pennies back), if the coin from 1969 had one owner or 10,000. If the dirty coin I was adding to the roll would get washed or trashed, melted down, and remade into a new coin.

Ok, I’ve shown enough crazy for today. I miss you pages, but I love you my lovely white e-reader. You give me no cramps in my wrists and when I slide you off my lap accidently you still hold my page. And even though every book costs me money (except the books no one wants to read, those are free) at least I have instantaneous access to the book (in the USA). And I guess the point is that I know exactly where my e-reader has been. Library books…not so much.  OMG is that what they meant by "Adult Section?"