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?"

lights! Firecrackers! heartattack!

I am slightly conflicted about Mumbai. I like the city the best, especially visually, when it's a festival time: there are amazing lights all over the place, the energy in the city picks up but somehow radiates more ease making it less rat racy and more vibrant. However, the noises...oh gawd the noises! They will drive me batty.

Yesterday was Eid and there were no firecrackers at all. I don't want to get into a religious argument but as of now, Islam is winning over Hinduism in the celebration festival column.

I realized this week that I haven't left Mumbai since I've arrived here August 13th (which I believe would skew any reasonable person to irrate ideas). So in order to combat that issue I just booked a trip to Goa. I'm quite excited to get away for a few days.

November Reading (a little early)

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The best written descriptions of traveling the European countryside – ever -- her writing is exquisite. This book made me want to hop on a train and backpack. Unfortunately the mystery regarding Dracula and his heirs, while compelling in the beginning, dragged on and on and on and on and on. I’d like to tell you that it has a worthy ending….nope, can’t do it. I’ll be picking up Kostova’s next book cause she is such an awesome wordsmith albeit with major plot issues. Maybe she got a new editor for her new book.

Julia’s Chocolates by Cathy Lamb
Hands down the biggest piece of shit I’ve read in awhile. I’d like to give this a redeeming sort of footnote but I can’t find a way to do it.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
My first Jane Austen book! And it was free on Kindle! Free Kindle gets me to read all sorts of stuff. Now I'll know what people are talking about when they talk of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley and Mr. Collins and that tramp Lydia. This is a rather fun book. I don’t really know if Jane Austen deserves quite the rep she has but I found reading the novel enjoyable, if a little hard to piece together the exact sentence structure Austen utilized. Whatever it was I’m pretty sure I was not taught that form in 3rd grade.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Such a cool book. This thing grabs you on page one and doesn’t let you go. I loved the characters, found the writing magical (in part 1) and precise (in part 2), was entranced by the storyline, and found the entire package a satisfying way to spend a rainy weekend. Good read for any booklover.

Boneshaker by Charlie Priest
Go GRRLLL sci-fi writers! Seattle! Steampunk! Zombies! Need I say more? Okay, I’ll say a little more. I wasn’t very involved with the characters until the second half. In fact, I probably would have put the thing down if I got it from the library. Fortunately for me, I paid for it and I’m a sucker for committing to my mistakes once I pay for them. But I’m glad I stuck it through, this was one hell of a ride. Priest is a good writer but she could work on her pacing a little; otherwise I enjoyed this after getting through the beginning. There is also, at my age, something endearing about a 35 year old female protagonist in steampunk gear.

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
Here is my favorite quote from the book: "So it was that the former Secretary of War decided to kill the former Secretary of the Treasury." If that doesn’t get you to read it, then nothing will.

“Delhi Guys are Aggressive”

Says a guy from Delhi to me.

“Yeah, no shit.” I think. This thought came after having several opportunities to meet guys from Delhi. The word ‘opportunity’ is a misnomer - I should replace that with the word ‘experience,’ as in what you go through to learn from and become adept at either confronting head on or avoiding completely at a later time.

And while my experiences have manifest into a strangely coincidental occurrence of all culprits being from Delhi, (I’m just repeating what people in India say to me!) I would encourage these practices regardless of where people originate from.
Here are my pieces of advice for fellow single women travelers:

Do not sit alone by yourself

There is a reason my male friends in Mumbai (in retrospect I had no idea how lucky I was to meet right on the onset) informed me women in Mumbai do not go out without a guy friend with them. Because men are all OVER YOU. “What’s your number? What are you doing? Let’s get a drink! Let’s go right now. Let’s go back to my place.” Um, usually in america we exchange greetings and sometimes even a few words before we go there, buddy.

Do not carry any interesting paraphernalia which could be a potential icebreaker

Do you own a kindle or a blackberry? For the love of god leave that stuff at home.

Do not feign interest in their existence whatsoever

Trying to be nice? Trying to let them down easy? Trying to act civil while discouraging their lead? Stupid you (err stupid me). You gotta just shut that shit down pronto.

If you are from a bitchy country like the UK, France, or the USA use that to your advantage

Are your people known for their rudeness, distance, or lack of humanity? I’d suggest putting that cultural smugness into full affect if you are trying to rid yourself of unwanted attention. Condescension is always a romance killer.

If you sense someone staring at you, do NOT look up or stare them down, just ignore it.

I’ve learned by unfortunate circumstances that the stare down is apparently a female breeding call – where American men would be admonished, it appears to be an invitation for conversation and paying for dinner. Do your best to avoid.

I guess traveling without your boyfriend nets you on the “available” chart for most men. I’ve actually never been very good at telling guys to go away, mostly because I’ve rarely – if ever -- had a guy approach me out of the blue. I’m not good at being rude, nor do I want to be rude, but how can you politely ask guys to just stop bothering you?