Ridin' Dirrrty - My trip to India

OK, so you know I have been sort of intrigued but sort of dreading this trip since Tony got back from India and told me that I would hate it...So, I was trying to be brave and expect the absolute worst and hope for the best....It was really unbelievable how these people live and unfortunately I got so wrapped up in the poverty and the filth that it was hard to find any very redeeming qualities about the country, that is, other than the food!
To set the scene, picture the worst slums you can imagine. No running water. No electricity. Garbage filled streets. No toilets, sinks, kitchens. Whole families living in a shack build from sticks and tarps, like a tent. They walk down to a water pipe to get their water to wash with and cook with. And the people in the cars drive by unfazed by what is happening on the streets.


The stores are lined up right next to these slums. A 'store' consists of a similar type shack with a painted cardboard sign identifying what they are selling there. The streets are a combination of mud, garbage, and urine. In fact, I was in one city where there is only 1 toilet to 9000 people. So, if you had to pee, you'd spend a week waiting for the bathroom.


As there is no bathroom, most of the people come up to the street level to relieve themselves. They do this because they live on the side of the street and don't want to get too close to their homes. I cannot tell you how many people I saw publicly urinating, full stream in the streets.

They carry large objects on their heads like this lady and use their hands to keep balance.


The roads are chaos. Cars, and trucks share the lanes with motorcycles, 'auto rickshaws', and animals - camels, cows, elephants, horses and goats. There is no order to the chaos, no lanes, and sometimes to make it even more fun, there are no roads! The roads they do have are filled with potholes and you can't drive much over 40 km / hr because you have no where to go. They also like to shove as many people as possible into their vehicles, and have no regard for safety of families or of children. Here is a picture of an India school bus.
I saw 3 adults on one motorcycle, and on another one and entire family of four. Dad was driving with a child standing on the platform between his legs. Mom was sitting side saddle on the back holding a baby girl in her arms. no seat belts, no helmets. Nothing! Also on my journey, we almost got involved in several 'cow' accidents where we'd be getting up to a steady pace of 60 km / hr and out of nowhere, a giant cow steps in front of the car and we screech to a halt.

The good news is that we had our own professional drivers through most of the time I was in India. One of them when we were in the southern region was very religious and had to stop at the temple before we took off for a prayer and a swipe on his head. He then bought four lemons from this man sat outside the temple (see the trash in the background, lovely?) and promptly places one under each tire so that when we were off on the road again, we rolled over the lemons for luck. Not sure if it was the Hindu gods working or not, but the next day, he did not go to the temple before we set sail and we got a flat tire!
The man with the hairiest ears I have ever seen in my life. That is all ear hair sticking out, no head hair! Double click on the picture for a larger more textured view, if you dare....
The first picture I took didn't come out as well so I had to snap another one. I was pretending to take pictures of a plane in the back ground, but I could not disguise my interest in his furry beast ears. Enjoy!

There is something to be said about being in India though - everyone communicates in english, making the business aspect of traveling a lot easier. There are so many dialects and languanges other than english that people from the north cannot communicate with people in the south, so they all use english as the moderator. So, I understood everything! What a concept!

Here's me eating a delicious dosa (a southern India crepe made from rice and beans) at a road side cafe on a three hour journey to Pondicherry. They let me stop off here to use a real live toilet so I didn't have to squat in front of my coworkers and our driver on the side of the road with the rest of the folk. Big smile here : ) In gerenal the food was great for what I was able to eat of it - lots of veg dishes, curries, and the most delicious breads! Carbs carbs carbs. Love it! But I of course was not able to drink the water or eat any uncooked fruit or veggies. Everything I ate had to be piping hot with steam coming out of it. It was nice to know it isn't just us...I met a guy who grew up in India but for the past 5 years had been living in Singapore. He had to acclimate himself back to the dirrrrty water by taking one sip every day until he stopped getting sick from it, and then slowly adding other items into his new bacteria diet. So gross.
My journey through the week started in Mumbai (the new name for Bombay), then to Pune, Dehli and finally Chennai and Pondicherry. If Pune was a flea on a rat on the Lower East Side, then Dehli is a Park Avenue penthouse. None of the airports were of any particular scale of worst to best, however I did spend the most time in the Chennai airport on my way home. Five hours to be exact waiting for my red eye flight home to Hong Kong through Bangkok. Fun fun fun! At least they had free wireless Internet so I could pass the time doing work and chatting on line to some friends and family.

Here's a shot of Ghandi and I in Pondicherry, a former French settlement. Beaches, Cafe's, French influence architecture, and a statue of Gandhi. Not I get it. Living his principals, the southern region is nearly 100% vegetarian. Gandhi also believed in truth, nonviolence and simplicity. He had cute ears. All of his statues around the country seem to emphasize them.

The people in the south also dressed a lot like him with a wrap around sheet / skirt for men. Women everywhere dressed the same in their traditional saris, draped in various styles and colors - it is definitely one of the most colorful countries I have ever seen and the sari's are the pallet. The women are quite plumper than the men in general and their little chubby tummy's stick out from under their pretty sari.

So, would I ever go back? Maybe. But only if I was guaranteed a trip to the Taj Mahal as part of it. I've gotta see that!

Till next time, I LOVE YOU & MISS YOU!

KL is A-OK

Selamat datang (welcome) Blogger friends! I had a chance to go to spend the week traveling for business in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Malaysia is south of Hong Kong, about 3.5 hour flight and it borders Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. They have two seasons here, HOT and HOTTER, and even now in the middle of 'winter' it is a toasty 85 degrees, with 100% humidity. It is the rainy season right now, so pretty much everyday, it rains for at least part of the afternoon. The country was once British ruled and therefore, they drive on the left hand side of the street like in Hong Kong. Otherwise, it is quite the large melting pot of cultures. The majority of the population are 'Malay' and by nature approximately 60% of the people are Muslim. This is the first predominately Muslim country I have ever been to! The rest of the population is Chinese (mostly Buddhist) and Indian (mostly Hindu) so it is very diverse. Everyone speaks at least four languages including Malay, English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Malay has a different script, but some of the words sound the same. By far, this is the most, best English speaking place I have visited in Asia yet.

Being a big blond American gal, I was at little nervous about going to a Muslim country at first...On the flight over, there were only a few alarming things....the first was when the flight attendants announced they would be coming through the cabin spraying us for diseases and if we wanted to, we could cover our noses and mouths! Yup, that is what they did, with Lysol size canisters. No one else seemed phased by this, so I played it cool. Second, was the announcement as we were about to land, kindly letting the passengers know that they have strict rules and practice corporal punishment in the country where we were about to enter. Niiiiiice. Back to the whole Muslim thing, I have made some very cool discoveries which I am proud to report.

First off, on the ceiling of my hotel room, spacing out before going to bed, I noticed this black and gold triangle thing. No clue what it was, I thought maybe someone put a sticker up there or something. I had to change rooms mid week because Tony joined me (also traveling on business, but we got to spend the weekend, how convenient...) and I was in a single bed at first and needed to upgrade to a king, so in my new room, I again looked up and there it was on the ceiling, but now it was pointing in another direction. The sleuth in me finally figured it out....It is an arrow, pointing toward "Kaaba" (which is conveniently written on the arrow but I had no clue what it meant) the city where Mecca is, the direction they must face for their five daily prayers. Also, I had a product launch in a brand new hotel just outside of the city and amongst all the typical 'ballrooms' and conference rooms, there were prayer rooms with slippers outside for you to change shoes and easily go in for your Allah fix. The men and women are not allowed to pray together, so there are rooms for each gender. Non-Muslims aren't allowed inside and I didn't want to disrespect them by snapping a wild photo, so you will just have to take my word for it...Pretty cool huh?

My first day out visiting customers we stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe for some Indian grub. We sat outside at a picnic table and a dude came over and plopped a banana leaf in front of me. I figured it was to act as a 'place mat' which would soon be followed by napkins, silverware, etc. Nope. Out of no where, other guys kept coming by, plopping different types of curries, rice, veggies and sauces onto my banana leaf....all of which I was meant to eat with my hands. Out comes the Purell hand sanitizer! It was very delicious, and very messy : )

Oh, and I discovered a new delicious fruit called 'jackfruit'. It is apparently this huge green prickly thing but once you peel it and take out the many pits, it looks like a shriveled up apricot and tastes mighty fine. Mine was from a buffet so they had already done most of the work.

Tony arrived on Thursday evening and we went out for some delicious malay food with a coworker of ours who is a native. My favorite thing was the fish head curry - here is a picture of the deliciousness.

Friday was a tough day for me. I had to travel to see a customer for five hours in the car all the way down to the southern most city in Malaysia, bordering Singapore. The drive was very pretty, there were acres and acres of palm trees lining the highway. My poor sales guy was falling asleep at the wheel (and I was freaking out because he was driving at 150 KM / hr = 100 miles / hr!!!) so we had to stop at a rest stop where he downed two red bulls....Then the fun came...We put in his Real McCoy CD. Don't laugh! It was so much fun, I secretly downloaded it off of ITunes when I got back into town. Highly recommend it. O La O La Aaaaayyyy.

Other than that, the trip kinda sucked. The air conditioner died half way through and due to flight scheduling, I wound up not being able to get back into KL until after midnight. Tony and I pretended that we were going out on the town when I got back, but he was sleeping and I was exhausted, plus we are old you know, so we just crashed.

On Saturday, we had the whole day free to see some sights. We headed over to the Batu Caves, a famous Hindi temple which is a top of almost 300 steps and surrounded by these terrible naughty monkeys! They come right up to you and steal things out of your hands. You can buy fruit to feed to them, but we were too phobic of their nasty diseases to get too close. I got some beautiful monkey footage which I would love to share with you one day.

After then monkeys we headed over to the Central market where Tony and I picked up various silk malay shirts and dresses (for me). We then walked all the way across town to the 'Rodeo Drive' of KL, the Bintang strip. There are ten malls all along the same block right near the monorail. Tony picked up a shirt for that evening because he forgot his cuff links for the one he brought with him. After our long walk, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for dinner. We headed out to a place called Top Hat. We shared their famous appetizers, little 'top hats' filled with veggies, almost like an open face spring roll. Tony had a malay fab sampler and I had a mixed seafood and noodle soup. We shared a bottle of Tyrrells Shiraz (our obsession since our trip to Australia!) and ate with a view of the famous Petronas twin towers, now the second tallest twin towers in the world. They are quite magnificent.
After dinner and since we were so lame the night before, we headed down to P Ramlee street to check out the action. It is a whole strip two blocks long of all types of bars and clubs. We settled on a place called Rum Jungle because they had a great band and were singing everything from hip hop to rock music. We made friends with some malay boys who were sitting near us at the bar and they made Tony snort a shot of sambuca up his nose! Ouch! He said it didn't burn too badly, it was really funny to watch, I guess that is just how they roll. The bartenders did all these flaming bar fire eating tricks, it was a very fun night and we rolled home well after 2.


The next day we walked down to this beautiful park filled with all different sections. They had waterfalls, turtles and amazing flowers. There were all these nice families who came to hang out there and spend their Sunday in the outdoors with the kids. We took lots of great pictures here, but here's one for your viewing enjoyment.


After the park we headed back to our hotel for a quick bite before Tony had to leave to fly out to Hong Kong while I split for India! More on that soon....Till next time, I MISS YOU & LOVE YOU!