day two

It's four fifteen in the afternoon, and so far, it's been a great day. I'm staying at the Sunny guest house, a building that's made up of brick, concrete/rebar and wood, depending on what part of the building you look at. The dorm room is a covered section of the roof, but there were a lot of mosquitos last night. The other travelers there are a riot. I went to a revolving restaurant with a few backpackers last night and spent easily half an hour being grilled and teased about being an American. Today I went to the New Delhi station with Willem, a documentary-maker staying at the Sunny, to observe the train ticket booking process. (Aside: Willem carries with him a folio of pictures of himself with famous people, including Sir Edmund Hilary, Reinhold Messner, Bill Clinton, and Sachin Tendulkar, the most famous Cricketer in India.) It turned out that as a foreigner, you simply walk into a special tourist office, in which there are no lines, and they take care of everything for you. In fact, there is a special 'Tourist Quota' on the trains; a few seats that remain open so that foreigners can avoid the lines and madness of the reservation counter. Strange that the government of India so encourages tourism. Even in non-tourist parts of town, there are still shops with English signs and touts waiting to offer you everything under the sun--it blows my mind that the few tourists who get out there still provide the best odds for making a living.

After my trip to the station, an Australian backpacker named Emily and I went (after a complete autorickshaw debacle) to the house of one of her acquaintances, a guy named Tariq, from Kashmir, who cooked up a fabulous lunch with four of his friends. His family guides tours through Kashmir, and lives in a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinigar. Kashmiris have a strange reputation in town, a reputation for being kind to a fault and then growing angry when you fail to patronize their business. I have yet to see this in action, but one of Tariq's friends did suggest I go immediately to Kashmir and forget about the rest of India, to the point of suggesting I return a train ticket to Calcutta.

Here's a good story: Max, an Australian guy who's been to the subcontinent five times, was hit in the face (on a moving train) by a big human turd. Somebody stuck their ass out the window and let one go, and the train was moving quickly enough to bring it back in. Everybody had a good laugh about that one.

I'm sure I'll have some stories of my own soon enough.