[travel] India dreams

My four-day rush through a narrow slice of India was like a really good party... the most amazing and intense experiences just couldn't be photographed.

Despite having spent five days in India, it's never felt entirely real.

Every now and then I stop and experience the fact that I am a conscious being and that I am experiencing what I am experiencing right now right now. It's a reality check on the nature of my own existence. I do these at least once a day without explicitly planning to do so. The funny thing is that they don't work here. Something feels different, as if I'm not really experiencing it and I'm more living in a dream. Many of my visits to exotic places feel like dreams after I have left, but this feels like a dream right now.

I can't chalk it all up to sleep deprivation. I think it's more the intense sensory experience of being here and the first genuine culture shock I've felt in a while.

One image that comes to mind: while traveling on a train, I caught a brief glimpse of a group of squatters living inside a power substation. Yes, inside the thing with 250,000 volt wires near the ground, supported by giant bellows-shaped insulators. Apparently you can live there without getting fried as long as you don't get near certain areas, and even the small children know where those areas are. In India even the poorest women still wear brightly colored saris, so this image came as a flash of bright colorful bodies in a tangle of gray.

Just imagine being on a 3-hour bus ride and looking out the window the entire time because something that striking shows up every couple of minutes. I think thats what's messing with my perception of reality as reality.

[travel] I have ten girlfriends! (in Canada)

Further adventures in India...

Cast of characters:
- Small-town internet cafe operators #1 and #2 (STICO #1 / #2, both men)
- Me

STICO #1: You have such pretty blue eyes.
STICO #1: Hey, [STICO#2] come look at his eyes!
STICO #2: Wow! So blue, and with patterns. Just like spiderman!
Me: Um, thanks.

(a minute passes)

STICO #1: So, are you single?
Me: No. Girlfriend.
STICO #1: How many girlfriends you have?
(???)
Me: ... (in a very facetious voice) I have ten girlfriends!
STICO #1: Whoa! Ten?! Wow!
Me: (serious voice) Just kidding. I only have five girlfriends.
(too late... apparently the number is fixed at ten)
STICO #1: He has ten girfriends!
STICO #2: Yeah! Ten girlfriends!

Several other people have now asked me how many girlfriends I have.  I typically answer with some number between five and twenty.  They have interesting ideas about America.

[travel] Sociocultural bingo

I find I really get the most out of a country by trying to interact with as many different combinations of big-city/small-city/rural, traditional/modern, rich/middle-class/poor as possible.

I'm now planning out each country's travel to ensure I get as much of this range of experiences as possible. Usually I will fly into a major city and then take a bus or plane out to a smaller city, and from there, explore nearby rural areas by car, bike, or motorbike.

[travel] Building up an immunity.

I dont know why I didn't think of this earlier... If I don't put on suntan lotion all the time, I won't have to put on suntan lotion all the time. Aside from the obvious tautology, what I mean is that if I expose myself to gradually increasing amounts of sun, my skin will start to tan, and then I will only need suntan lotion for more extreme situations. I have to do this carefully though... my skin is extremely light and will burn badly in less than an hour of midday sun. So far it's been going well, and my body is starting to churn out more melanin in selected areas. My upper arm and lower arm side by side look quite interracial.

A rather daring woman I met on my travels has done the same thing with the bacterial soup of 3rd world tap water. All the tour books (and various people) tell us that we will get horribly sick if we drink the water. However, this woman started drinking very small amounts of the water and then gradually increased the dosage once her immune system had built up the appropriate defenses. I'm scared to try this for a couple of reasons though. First, the specific bacteria and viruses in the water vary from region to region, and secondly, there's a lot of other nasty stuff in the water (eg arsenic, pesticides etc).

A tangent on skin color: Our bodies have evolved to have the right skin color for our place of origin. Essentially we need some amount of sunlight to produce Vitamin D, which is essential to good health, but too much sunlight gives us skin cancer. Our skin is shaded to a happy medium between these two risks, and light-skinned people can deal with excess sunlight to a limited extent by tanning. However, dark-skinned people can't lighten when faced with reduced sunlight. This has posed a problem for the large-number of dark-skinned people who have migrated to less sunny climates. A recent study has found a number of health-related issues for this group. That whole “15 minutes of sunlight a day” to get your appropriate levels of Vitamin D only applies to light skinned people... for a dark-skinned person living in the US, it's more like 2 hours. One way around this requirement is vitamin D3 supplements, which do not require sunlight to be used by the body.

[travel] Mumbai slum tour

In Mumbai you can see the slums from the airplane even after it has landed. I can see them right now while waiting for my flight to Dubai..

My host offered to show me around some of the more productive slums in Mumbai – I opted for that as opposed to the organized tour. The ones I visited house a cottage industry of various small scale mechanical and electrical engineering production runs. Each business consists of one or two machine tools in a cramped room, so any complex project involves cooordination of several businesses. The tools they are using (mills, lathes etc) appear to be 30-50 years old. However, they have figured out how to use these old tools to precisely machine complex items that are hard to do wihtout modern CNC tools. Since the tools are cheap and labor is extremely cheap, they can effectively compete with more well-funded companies with better tools. I got the chance to talk (via my host, who interpreted) with several of the owners and understand how their businesses wotk.

These small shops were intermixed with people's homes, open drainage ditches, and shared community bathrooms. The spacee between buildings was very narrow, and I had to duck through several doorways.

It was all fascinating, and there's no way I could have seen any of it without the help of my hosts.

In less than four hours, I'll be in the gleaming urban canyons of Dubai. Contrasts are interesting.

[travel] The evasive Slumdog

I really wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire before getting to Mumbai, but none of the nine flights I took prior to Mumbai had it as an option. Ironically, my flight out of Mumbai had it. However, the flight was short enough that they deactivated the personal seat-back entertainment system when the movie was 90% finished. In fact, the last thing I heard was “This is your final question. For 20 million rupees...[click] We are now beginning our descent into Doha. Please turn off all portable electronic devices, stow your tray tables...”

The next flight I took had it (weirdly, a Boeing 747 for a 1-hour flight...), but the flight was so short they wouldn't give me a headset. The next flight, a much longer flight, had no personal entertainment system. Grr.

[travel] Halfway...

I feel like the crossing from Dubai to Turkey has shifted me over the hump, into the downhill portion of the trip. I no longer feel like I'm moving further away from home. Even though this crossover point was probably somewhere near India, psychologically, it feels like I've just hit it by crossing over into Europe. My friends Adi and Daniel are now flying east to meet me, not west. Coming up is:

Turkey
Israel
Jordan
Egypt
Greece
Croatia
Romania(?)
Hungary
Czech Rep
Poland
Netherlands
Denmark
... with some possible detours (Italy, Morocco, Switzerland) depending on people who may or may not be meeting me.