In India

So it's Saturday evening, my natural instinct is to find a bar. Easier said than done. I went down to E-square, figuring if I was going to get drinks I'd do it at the place I was sure I could stumble home from.

E-square is an oasis, in the middle of dusty Ganeshkind road it's a cinema/mini-mall complex. I found however there was a very nice chinese restaurant above. Really, a very nice restaurant, I was taken aback. I had dinner there and two beers for Rs. 800.
Fantastic. They also have a health club , a hotel , and a bar in the lobby.

I went to the bar after dinner. It was a little dead, but it was 8:30, so I had a drink.
"Jack n'coke"
>>"sorry?""
"Whiskey and cola" (I was presented a menu)
"Jack Daniels and Cola, square bottle, whiskey...' (pointing)

(Note: Years of drinking have taugt me this, A bartender who asks 'single or double?', then uses the little tincup to measure out the booze is either very bad at his craft or you're going to be charged alot)

Dude makes the drink.
>>"Rs. 800 sir"

"Whoa....that's what I just paid for dinner. So...you leave the bottle."

>>"No...I keep bottle, one double Tenessey whiskey drink...Rs 800"

Do the math, that's about $17 for a cocktail !
That's outrageous for Manhattan !

Jack Daniels is beyond top shelf in India, it's an import...on the menu it's listed as 'Teneseey whiskey' , Do not order whiskey in India!

(Anyone who has been to india and ordered whiskey (a rare combination) , please letme know if this is true across the board, or if this place just jacked me.)

I had the bartender walk me through some other drinksAs with any bartender he was happy to engage in coverstaionwith someone who would keep buying drinks.

Bar prices in India (or at least at this scam of a bar, check back for updates)

• Gin and tonic....Rs 300
• Vodka tonic.....Rs 200-250 (depends on the vodka,the local vodka was called 'Flash')
• Kingfisher (Indian beer)...Rs 100
• Bacardi and coke....Rs 300

This is all still an order of magnitude more expensive than everything else, another indication I was being ripped off.

Hotel bars generally suck, and this was no exception...all middle aged dudes in hawiian shirts.

At this point after 3 rum cocktails, something hit my gut ( like a blender had jsut turned on in my stomach). I did'nt get it, I had been fine after dinne, rI had been drinking only bottled water, and then I remembered swirling my coctail listening to the clinking of the
...ice cubes....aarrgh....the damn ice cubes. ( You just know they're not pouring out bottled water into the ice cube trays).

The ice worked it's awful magic amazingly fast, this could'nt have been more than an hour.
We can now add Jack daniels to the list.

The agony

I will not go into details, let me just say this. I have put my body through the proverbial wringer on several drinking occasions (one of which was the week before I left), sometimes taking a full day to recover. This is worse. Let's just say I had planned to leave the house that day, and could'nt.

Another tip...your travel guide/doctor will give you a list of stuff to eat when this happens:

• Bannanas
• apple sauce
• rice
• crackers.

Yeah, you're going to want to buy some of those things before you actually feel the symptoms coming on, because once they do you won't have time. So you don't need Atkins, just come over here and drink from the tap, that'll do it.

While at the temple on the hilltop , I got a pretty good view of the roads. I thought I could walk back to the main part of town. Road there, hang a right, bridge there....okay. So I ventured forth. Then I actually entered the maze of streets surrouding the temple. One road I'm almost sure, looped back onto itself.
I also saw some more of the local wildlife, this does'nt phase me anymore, but it did when I got here. The goats thought it would be a good idea to stop on the traffic meridian. As far asI could tell, no one cared. Goats are not common on the larger roads in Pune, but you do run into them on sidestreets or around dumpsters.

But i knew I had ventured too far when I ran into the cows.

You do not see cows on major streets. There is a mule that lives somewhere around the office. You will see goats sometime. Once I saw an oxcart and last week someone was trying to get their 2 camels through traffic. But not cows.

Never Cows.

(Also check out the 'road', see the children at play sign? that's an electrical wire draped over it, and a gaping ditch next to it, so don't send your kids to play there)

I turned around and hailed one of the rickshaws that was stalking me. They do this now, they take one look at me and think : "That white dude is sooo lost , he's gonna need a rid any minute now, and he probably can't even count ruppees."

It's a line from an old simpsons episode. And it's all about Ganesh. Ganesh is by far the coolest of Hindu deities. There are little shrines for him every 3-4 blocks, with statatues ranging from 6 inches to 6 feet tall.
This is one of the nicer ones, about 4 feet tall, but there are tons of them in the city.

Here's the deal with Ganesh (see disclaimer), he's Shiva and Parvarti's son ( thanks Ajay) , from what I read some other god 'accidentally' chopped off his head, so they went out and got him the head of the first animal they could find...which happened to be an elephant. Apparently Ganesh was just cool with it...like..."Ok,I get an elephant head."

Why does everyone love Ganesh so much:

1) Excellent Titles:

• "god of new beginings" (the head thing, and the new head thing) "
• "remover of obstacles" (that's what elephants do...I guess)
• "bringer of wealth" (because elephants....um...wait...er.. oh, who cares ,he brings wealth!).

All the other major deities are about this whole cosmic triumverate of creation, maintaince, destruction...Ganesh, he's just chill.

2) Have I mentioned, he's got an elephant head! The pink elephant thing also makes me associates him with Delerium Tremens which is a great beer ( and a great name for a beer).

And the imagry is just plain fun. I mean in catholic school growing up we got the "Friendly Jesus" picture, (not to be confused with the "Buddy Christ" picutred below, there now I've offended everyone)

but this was always followed up by "On the cross , nails through hands, died for your sins Jesus", a little grim. (Especially when you were seven, and your biggest 'sin' was not sharing the nintendo with your brother.)...I digress , back to Ganesh.

3) Technicolor temples!

Subtlety not required : pink, yellow blue....gold, any more colors letf?

This is the Ganesh Shrine in the Pravati temple. Ba-dow!

I put some ruppess in the Ganesh coffer, he's my favorite. This will probably piss off Jesus as I have'nt put anyting in the church collection plate in years. Sorry Jesus, but it was only rupees ;)

Mein Parvati Templev jarunga! ( I Parvarti Temple went)

Looking for places to go in Pune I read about the Parvarti Temple. It is at least 300 years old and is on a really big hill in Pune. It is located on the extreme south of the map I gave in the earlier post ( across the river in the south).
As the driver took me there I saw we headed right through central Pune, the temple seems to be located in a more underdevloped part of town (you'd think it would bethe other way around). It's 108 Steps up to the temple, and people advised me not to do it mid-day.
But:

• I refuse to wake up at 7 in the morning on a weekend.
• I'm not so clear on where I am once it gets dark (and I'm even worse if the streetlights are out).
• It's not that much cooler in the morning, it's a 'mild' 75-80 degrees (F) by 9 A.M. anyway....I'm already sweating.

So I went at noon. 108 steps....at noon...

It heightens the religiosity of if if you feel like you're about to drop anyway.

they're actullay more like long platforms than stairs...

When you get to the enterance you have to take off your shoes and leave themat the shoe check. Some of the locals brought sandals with them...wish I'd thought of that. Why do the gods require no shoes but flip-flops are okay?

I alternated between burning my feet on the stones and destroying my socks.

The Entrance:

However outside the Parvati shrine there is a man constantly hosing down the steps. I don't know if it's a purificaton thing or just so you don't burn your feet.

You go inside and there's a building in the middle surrounded by 4 small towers.The central shrine is where Parvarti is. There is a 3 foot statue behind some gate in the middle.

People come up and ring the bell ( to announce theier presense , curiously there is a similar bell in the local PizzaHut that people ring if the service was good), then bow and say prayers, put money in the coffer, sprinkle flower petals about... I didn't take a picute of the actual statues, because there were always people in front of them praying and such. Essentially the statues are 3-4 feet tall, Parvarti is depicted as a beutiful woman.

At the Parvati one were two women who were offering all kinds of things to the goddess ( flowers, fruits...etc), and they were'nt going anywhere anytime soon. Plus I don't think people would like it if you went into church and took picutes of them praying, so I stuck to the architecture, which is still pretty fantastic.
I paid a ruppee to go up on the balcony, which has a sign that says "Use balcony at your own risk". This is kind of another feature of the temple, every little room/shrine/balcony you want to go on has a price. There are coffers everywhere ( which is fine because the stuff is really nice and someone's got to preserve it)

The 'Sorry if I dishonor your culture' disclaimer:

I have no knowledge of Indian history,religion, or culture. I pick up things from tourbooks or signs, or what the guy at the temple manages to get out inEnglish. Heck, if it was printed on a placemat in English, I'd probably take that as fact too (Ganesh loves IHOP!). Also i seem to remember the odd details the most. Eventually I'll get a history book and looks this stuff up, for now it's fun for me to guess. Plus it's not like these folks don't take liberties...I made copies at the "Ganesh copy store" this morning, that's like having a "Jesus-FedEx-Kinkos" or something...

Peshwar muesem- There is a small museum on the temple grounds (you're not allowed to take pictures in there). And I learned some stuff today. Actually most of the plaques and captions were in hindi, so I didn't learn much at all. But here's what I surmised:

Local History (see disclaimer above): Pune was the capital of the Maharastrian state from sometime in the 16th-17thcentury, to the early 19th century. They had kings called 'peshwars'. The peshwars were apparently involved in alot of wars. Fighting with Portugese, Muslims...pretty much everyone who was'nt actually from india. I gathered that the paintings were mostly kings and generals, as many of them are displayed in battle. There was one picture of an elephant with a cannon on it's back, that's fairly terrifying. ( Or maybe they didn't have lots of wars, most of the stuff that gets preserved in most museums is from wars anyway...and no one writes books on the history of peacetime...boring).

So even though it's a Parvati temple all the other gods get in on the game as well. There is a large Vishnu shrine right next to the Parvarti one.
Vishnu (see disclaimer above): Vishnu is the preserver, he takes care of the universe before Shiva wipes it out. Once that's all done with Bhrama creates the universe again. I know he has incarnations:

• Rama (there's a whole saga and part of it involves an army of monkeys, I'll probably check that out)
• Buddha (they kinda did this to assimilate the buddhist population).
• Krishna ( I think, but I don't know much about him)
  

And a Ganesh one, but we'll get to that in a bit.

I was very careful to ask if I could take pictures and go in certain places.Offending the locals and/or bringing down the rath of their 800 gods was somethingI wanted to avoid .

Mail question: Are you alive? you have'nt posted anything in 4 days?
Yes I'm alive, aftert the first week I got used to sending away the laundry people from my door. Not everyday is that interesting, plus it takes time to polish all these little tidbits into cohesive little posts. But it's monday so I'm catching up.

Mail question: What do you eat over there?
Basically I've been living at the company during the week. The cafeteria is just fine. And they even have a guy making specialplates for me ( tell our accountant not to worrry this costs about a dollar a day). I order a day ahead and they make a little plate. Outside work there isn't a heck of alot, there is a fruit cart where a guy chops up fruit with a machete...I passed.
The HR guy, god bless his heart, tried to take me to a Domino's pizza for breakfast the first morning here. They were'nt open at ten in the morning.
I eat out quite a bit. I've been sticking to things I know about. As for choosing a restauant I really don't know how to evaluate them, I usually go for the one with the most structural integrity. This is a good indication that they wash dishes, filter water....etc. Restaurants based in hotels are also a good bet.
Restaurants and menus come in two varieties

• Veg (nothing on the menu bleeds...about 3/4 of the places)
• Veg AND non-Veg ( we have some stuff with chicken in it)
  

And let me tell you after a few weeks of cheerful "Veg or non-Veg sir?" you'll want to scream "STEAK!!...I want a steak!"

Here are some typical things you will find:

• Dhosa - This is ~3 tablespoons of potatoes,peppers & onions...(think high quality hash browns). It's served in a piece of flat bread the size of your head. Ususally served with some tomato-soupy dipping sauce.
• Channa - this is indian for chick peas, again in a tomato-peperry sauce. Daal - this is indian for lentils (everyone here calls them 'pulses') sometime served as a fried cake.
• Panner - cheese, like cottage cheeze but more solid, in various sauces( butter, tomato...etc), usually coated in tumeric.
• 900 kinds of bread - Ranked in order of thickness
• Naan - puffy
• Roti (a.k.a. Chipati) - flatter, like pita only flatter than that
• Poori - think crackers (although crakers means fireworks and biscuits means crackers in brit-speak)

So I though I could shed the gut on the six month vegetarian diet, but you don't loose weight eating cottage cheese in a butter-cream sauce served over rice with bread.

And, as of this week I'm officially a vegetarian. (Yeah, it's asian bird flu ,remember)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4732098.stm

Food that's different here
To give you some idea what's considerd spicy here:

I saw a guy wandering among traffic selling chili peppers , my riskshaw driver bought a handful and started using them like chewing tobbacco.

The indian food you get in the states is very toned down. Assume everything has spices, tons of spices, and peppers, and somethingcalled capsicum...I think it's like black pepper.
There are other things that just don't translate well:

• Coffee: Coffee exists only as Nescafe with milk and sugar,this simply does'nt fly. I found a coffee shop downtown ("Barista") that has real coffee, but that required some negotiating as well.

"Just black coffee"

>>"Cappucino or Latte?"

"just coffee, Americano...but without the water"

And

"Do you have a six pack of beer?"(Guy pulls out two 40's of something with scimitars on the label)

>>"Strong!, you want 6?"

"No weak, six bottles, smaller, in a box....Kinigfisher?"(Starts trying to arange 6 40's in a box)

"Nevermind..."

And the one thing we export culturally to the world Mcdonald's. (Don't mock it! This is how we won the Cold War, McDonald's in red square was the end of it.)

(FYI Gaurav: The bigMac here is made with chicken, not lamb.)

And although I kind of knew that no McDonalds on earth was actually getting chicken and preparing it, (and that these sandwhiches were probably pre-fabricated in Ohio)...I'm still avoiding chicken.

So I got the Mc-Veg sandwhich...mmm...veg patty fried, Mcfamous day old mayo and peas. But the fries are exactly the same ;)