Dancing with Sikhs

updates are few and far between. i no longer get wifi in my office, and the ban on personal communication continues. i also have more friends, which means less time spent on the internet in my air-conditioned room. plenty to complain about, obviously.

this past weekend was a bit slower for me. it was flo's last night in delhi, so we spent friday night out on the town and saturday night eating dinner with the cook at the french guesthouse where she worked for 10 months. the cook was incredible but it was really sad to see flo go.

on sunday i had my wedding to go to, which turned out to be completely different from what i thought it was. it was not the wedding ceremony, but rather the pre-wedding music ceremony (these things used to last a week long, now they're a 'short' three days, as an older couple ruefully told me). it was a really rich set of families (senators were in attendance), so they had it in this massive resort which has been raised up like a phoenix out of ill-used farmland so that the rich people can have their weddings out of the city where there is more space, fewer loud eunuchs, standing facilities, and... more parking. the last one is apparently a serious concern. most of the guests from out of town just stay in the resort and get sloshed at the wedding. unfortunately it was bad form to take pictures so i just had to soak it in. they bring everything to you: whiskey and soda, myriad appetizers, and even a gorgeous college student sat down for me to talk to, which was good because my friend didn't know anybody either since he only knew the bride's family through his dad. we did talk to an interesting middle aged couple for a while.

gender roles are so funny here though (and by funny i mean rigid). i asked the wife a question about what she was wearing (it wasn't a sari and i was confused) and her husband answered. men talk to men. my kind of town (not really). anyway it's traditional for the bride's family to do all the music, but--this being the modern age--all we got was a really awesome old song by the bride's mother (who had the stereotypically high-pitched nasal tone of bollywood singers and everything; she was actually pretty good) about the different stages in a girl's life "from mother to mother". other than that, it was mostly a saxophonist who played solos to canned music in the background, including this song. no joke. i freaked out when he started but no one else was excited so i reeled it back in.

finally we ate and then the dj started and i finally got my chance to groove bollywood style. it was literally the best wedding dj i've ever heard. perfect mix of bollywood and western club stuff. the best part (aside from the hot girl whose name i forgot immediately) was that the entire families got up. this old woman with approximately 8 chins was shaking it pretty seductively. all the dads were drunk and one in particular was all about showing me the moves. it was so much fun. eventually my friend wanted to leave early because we had work in the morning. on the way home, though, i got to drive! never mind that it was on the wrong side of the road, and a stick shift (which i've done literally 4 times in my life including that time), and on crowded indian roads with traffic and dogs and pedestrians at 11pm. it was so much fun.

this reminds me. i saw a eunuch on the way to the taj. ze (gender neutral pronouns ftw) came through the aisles and just was obnoxious until you give zim money or were so ice cold that ze gave up. we were obviously the latter. but it was crazy--male features, in a sari, walking through a train clapping incredibly loudly and then demanding money. what a trip. in pakistan they've made them tax collectors because everyone hates getting hounded by them. i'd like to read a history book just about eunuchs. what an odd and very sad historical place in society. although i'm not sure transvestite clubs in berlin represent the height of assimilation.

this is getting long. in brief, my going out with french girls story is that we went to da club where i paid--get this--almost $20 for a double whiskey (my first and last drink of the night while we were out), danced to really awesome club music, and then proceeded to get absolutely harassed by this indonesian playboy douchebag and his indian friends, one of whom went after my friend so relentlessly that we finally fled at like 1am to go finish the party at their place. i saw the sunrise and a downpour and finally passed out at like 6:30. it was great and felt like europe. turns out you can go out like that here, you just have to be wealthy. and i mean wealthy. you know what's awesome though? seeing a skinny sikh dude totally rock out to electronica. that's something i will not soon forget.

i don't have many pictures but i did take some from my life and my rooftop. here they are.

this is how i do laundry now. note that indian food has not been kind to my otherwise-svelte figure.

sign on the subway. anyone who has ever heard a delhi resident having a phone conversation knows that this is asking the impossible. there is no inside voice.

laundry part two: drying takes all of about an hour when it's this sweltering. south delhi skyline in the background.

fancy hotel in the background there.

our impeccably manicured terrace garden, home to crows and mini-squirrels and the odd tiny translucent lizard. pretty amazing how easy keeping this stuff up is when you've got hired help.

You are a Happy Tourist.

"There are three types of tourists who come to India. Happy tourists, hippie tourists and hungry tourists . . . I think you are a happy tourist."

Thus spoke Munna, my auto driver this weekend. I felt hungry and smelled as bad as a hippie, but I'll defer to his experience.

I was in Agra this weekend, home to the Taj Mahal and other delights with my new friend Aude. I've decided to slowly infiltrate the French Delhi caucus. But I digress. She's been here about 5 months and still doesn't feel that the experience of living here is capable of adequate description. I'm inclined to agree, which make me feel less bad about never updating. It also doesn't help that I was sick for over a week and work late.

I have a bad memory, so I write things down in my notebook so I can remember to write about them. Here are some things I've thought or seen or noticed:

Indian English is . . . different. Most people I run with are fluent, like a second mother tongue, but it's still . . . something other than native speakers. For starters, there's a surprising amount of 1930s British diction. Men call other men 'my dear' and speak of 'fellows' and 'fine chaps'. If it were colder and in Russia sometimes I could swear that I woke up in Murder on the Orient Express.

But that's not all. They drop articles (definite, indefinite, don't matter none), ask for your 'good name', and attach 'maximum' to any part of speech to make it a superlative. It's too fluent to be cute in the way that a great Spanish or Italian accent is, but too quaint to be native. I'm into it.

Actually, I'm too tired, so I'm posting pictures instead. An album of the old facebook-max 60 pictures is here.

For the truly lazy, here are the highlights of the highlights:

one of the rare things that's still impressive even after you've seen 1,000,000 pictures of it

symmetry!

oh, you know, just looking at the taj mahal from the harem in the red fort

moar symmetry pls

then we went to a traditional carpet factory, where they use zero automation.

turns out not all of agra is as pretty as the taj. when i asked if this was a market, the driver just said, "No. Muslims." later he told us to be careful because the area had "many Pakistanis" in it. tolerance! yeah!

after agra, we drove about an hour away to fatehpur sikri, home of emperor akbar, grandfather of shah jehan (who had the taj built) and subject of a pretty epic bollywood movie. now also the home of a devious sufi, who swindled me out of $50 at a shrine. we saw this gigantic gate, which is supposedly the tallest in the world. the black things up top are bees nests. brandon, you would not have been pleased.