In India

So hot in here....

The heat in mid May is just cruel, it's been 100 degrees for about two weeks striaght now. The locals thought it was 'chilly' back in February when things were topping out at 80. It's ridiculously hot, which is bad for the gora, but great for mangos (and other fruits).

So I went to buy some mangos, there are about 100 different shapes and sizes. The most well regarded is the Alpohonso Mango. I may have gotten one....who knows, I didn't try very hard.
That is I set out and tried to try, but as the white dude, every mango you point at and say 'Alphonso?'
will be answered with an enthusiastic 'Ha! (Yes!)".

So...Here are some mangos and my recomendations
(the battery is there for scale, my recomendatioin is thatyou should NEVER eat batteries, unless you are a robot)



The green one on the left is smaller and has white flesh, it is good for 3 things:

• Jamming full of chilis and submerging in vinegar for some number of months (indian pickle).
• Dissapointing your guests after you so jubilantly promised
  'Fresh mangos for desert!'
• Pitching some distance from yourself to distract stray dogs.
  

I dub it the 'Grenade mango', because it is best some distance from you. It is the most bitter thing ever. Even the stray dogs, creatures who have been raised on scraps of coconut husks and leftover rice cakes, passed on eating it.

The one on the right however may in fact be an Alphonso. The flesh is a bright orange and is extremely sweet, it's also mushy,unlike the mangos in the stores back home, which are yellow and more solid inside. It cancelled out the disapointment of the grenade mango, so this afternoon is a wash.

The bee situation finally got resolved, of course it got worse before it got better....here's the height of it, large enough to engulf a basketball.

Manoj the building manager told me

'Oh very lucky....In India we consider bees good luck!'

I asked my man Friday at work

>>'Dude are bees good luck?'

'Bees? Why would they be good luck , they sting?'

Manoj.....why you gotta lie? How bout when the water went out, was that the lucky busted pipe?

But Manoj I gotta give you props, you fixed this before mein malik ( my boss) showed up.
So I returned home to find my apartment smelling of insecticide , like a curious mix of turpentine and grape juice.

Oh and exterminator guy, you might want to find a better strategy than "spray and let them fall where they may"...The balcony looks like the killing fields out here.

I saw a bird swoop down to eat the dead bees but it seemed to sniff ( as much as you can say a creature with a beak 'seemed to sniff') and didn't eat them. Thank god, or else I'd have dead birds, and then lord konws what comes next on the food chain. Anyway the bees are gone and that's good.

5/20/06
Some more from my last trip to Mumbai, this is Victoria Terminus (VT). It's like Grand Central Station.

Actually now it's been renamed to Chitapati Shivagi (CS) Station. Shivagi if I have't mentioned it yet is a cross between George Washington and Superman in Maharastra. But there are maps and train schedules with either name on them, just to add to the overall confusion of it. It's still got all this ornate Victorian architecture ( incuduing those British lions out front) so the renaming isn't fooling anyone.

Also This building is not St Thomas' ...I thought it was because one of the guides on the street pointed in this direction and said 'Saint Thomas!'

This is actually the american Express building on MG road, this ( a few block off) is St Thomas' a small church with a bunch of dead english sailors and generals immortalized in marble insdie is a more humble white steple.