marcua's blog

FeedMe Data on People's Sharing Habits!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:27:20 -0400

Michael and I have a blog post Over on the Haystack Blog describing some work we’ve been doing in studying how people share news and blog posts with each other through e-mail and other social networking tools.

So far, we’re posting findings from surveys, but soon we’ll give you a double-whammy: we plan on announcing what we found through a user study of a tool called FeedMe designed to help with sharing in Google Reader, and release FeedMe for everyone to use.

Stay tuned. Until then, take a look at the technical report for the juicy details!

Startup Bootcamp at MIT

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:21:00 -0400

I spent the day at startup bootcamp, which was an excellent opportunity to hear from startup founders and VCs about startups. As someone without a lot of experience in this field, it was wonderful to hear a bunch of different (at times conflicting) viewpoints on the startup world. I took notes on all but two of the talks, and put them here to read if you are interested.

Adam Smith: Xobni

How to execute well

Hire good people who are self-sufficient
External deadlines are useful and force progress
Keep onus on action
Expect/hope 1/4 of products to fail
Focus on the user, no other diversions
Run experiments, but use them helpfully—don’t scratch an itch just for kicks
Hire outside contractors for specific skills—designers, etc.
Look for partners/employees that are /unlike/ you, to round out weaknesses

East vs. West

More enterprise software on east coast
More resources, relationships for startups on west coast

Alexis Ohanian: Reddit

“Only your mom will use your website”

Look for organic traffic, no need for advertising or PR firms.

Seek evangelists willing to tell others to use it
Before being bought by Conde Nast, budget for advertising was a $200 for stickers
Wufoo sends handwritten notes to longtime customers to add a personal touch
Reddit gives free t-shirts to visits to HQ and gives them a story to go along with the shirt
Zappos delivers in 1 day even though they promise 5-7 day delivery: promise low, deliver high

“Facilitate Serendipity”

Being good is insurance for when you f*** up

Cofounders: pick someone you trust w/ everything

non-programmer founders job is to make sure programming cofounder has nothing to think about except programming
once you launch, non-programmer deals w/ all user/business issues

Ken Zolot

“Who Cares?” Make sure your message answers who cares about your technology, not just how cool your technology is

Don’t wait for something to come your way

Do something
Sense what reaction is
Reflect
Change what you do

Dan Theobald: Vecna

People matter, so businesses should be ethical, socially responsible, etc.

Vecna pays employees to do community service for 10% of their work time

Don’t hire people unless you are ready to become a manager

Don’t do bargain-hunting in hiring

Hire smartest people you can find, and take good care of them
Good employee = 10medium employee = 100bad employee

Avoid “other people’s money”—outside investors are only good if you absolutely need them to scale

Read “On the Folly of Rewarding for A, while Hoping for B” by Stephen Kerr

Vecna does profit-sharing based on share of points awarded by colleagues each quarter. This makes each employee feel invested in the company

Vecna bootstrapped from IT consulting

Retained intellectual property in contracts
Have customers fit into your roadmap for a more generically applicable product

Kyle Vogt: Justin.tv

Startup Productivity Hacks

Buy catered lunch—more efficient employees if they don’t spend an hour walking around looking for a place to eat. For 10 employees, catering lunch saves you hiring an 11th employee. (didn’t mention how much it costs)
Use Google Apps for stuff you don’t want to administer yourself
Use data-driven (A/B) development
Use hiring screeners (applicants send you code solving some problem) to test skills programmers must have—cheap way to ensure they can write code.
Keep on-site job interviews short, and push more discovery into hiring screeners
Don’t hire a PR firm—they just guide you to do work on your own anyway. If you need skills, hire in-house marketing staff if necessary
Put one person on funding, pitches, finding investors
Work from home (if you live with cofoudners)
Use hosted servers (don’t build technology yourself unless you’re a hardware company or want to dedicate MANY resources to it)
Listen to your users /the right way/. Users are good at loudy identifying what doesn’t work. Can learn a lot from watching users use your tool.
Buy a .com domain name
Be transparent w/ employees about data regarding company. They will trust you more, and even suggest ideas.
Don’t outsource core technology
Hire specialists when necessary
Hire people smarter than you, don’t settle
Have a plan for actually making $ (eventually)

Angus Davis

Youngest employee at Netscape

Started Tellme, which was bought by MSFT

Rest of talk was decided by a poll: presented ~16 ideas, and had users text msg./tweet the topics to expand on!

When you hit dicey situations as a founder, remove emotional attachment by thinking of yourself as a large shareholder and making decision that way.

Hemant Taneja: Venture Capitalist at General Catalyst Partners

GCP is in Harvard square, $1.7B, 75 companies (consumer, I.T., Energy)

Touched on social media/mobile applications, which are some of their focuses

Interesting idea on energy: there are two problems

clean energy
cheap energy as demand grows

See 1500 entrepreneurs/year, invest in 2 or 3. Startups they love

Brilliant founders
Solve hard problems
Address very large markets
Are ahead of the curve
Are capital efficient

Should you raise VC? Only if you have to

Webapps are easy to bootstrap. Still helpful to get funding, but only once you have data on what your growth needs will be
But energy experiments require serious capital to even try an idea Chosing a VC?
Smart, good listener that’s not going to be swayed by biases
Easy-going
Has bandwidth to help—not on too many boards
Transparent
Have a relevant network
VC firm has stable funding

What is a good termsheet?

Enough capital for significant milestone you are funding
legally simple—doesn’t restrict you too much in the future
Balance ownership for VC, founder, and management—don’t worry about specific values, just everyone’s vision in the coming years
VC is not focused heavily on the downside/insuring themself
Board of directors has domain experience Angels are good for funding consumer intenret market, but not necessarily for bigger investments such as energy market, etc.

Dharmesh Shah: Hubspot, OnStartups.Com

Likes bootstrapping, fast liquidity.

First time startup founders: maximize odds on seeing a modest return

Your idea stinks, so don’t make it better in a void—launch early so you can get the better idea

Output messaging is about pushing messages out to millions and hoping they will stick with someone. No longer succesful, as people are good at filtering out extraneous messages

Inbound messaging (Hubspot) is about pulling people in. It’s cheaper and more effective for startups.

Tools for marketing

Google—focus on SEO, not adwords.
- WebsiteGrader.com
- Adwords is good for experimenting with popular terms, but dangerous because it hooks you on a cost model that may change immediately when someone else outbids you.
- Pick keywords people will use, but not ones that are so popular that you’ll never make it into the top 10
- Can rank high by high pagerank (authority—this is hard) or by providing relevant and accurate cotent.
- Good content: make sure your title is meaningful. “ItsSoSoft” < “ItsSoSoft | iPhone blackjack application” < “iPhone blackjack application | ItsSoSoft”
Write a blog, not a business plan (no one reads business plans)
- Build a following before building the product—buy domain name, start writing before you even start coding
- Don’t be afraid to polarize
- Blog from a personal perspective—what you’re learning by starting the company, etc. Don’t pretend to be a big organization if you’re not.
Facebook page for buying ads gives you the best demographic tool on the market: for a bunch of different demographic information, will dynamically tell you how many people on facebook fit those criteria.
Twitter is mainstream now, so if you prefer short form to long form, use it! TwitterGrader.com

Robin Chase: Zipcar

Everyone you come into contact with is a free consultant. make sure you learn from people’s questions.

Intellectual Honesty—If you know your business model is broken, don’t blindly keep selling it, since you’re just hiding something that will grow into a bigger problem. Learn how to fix, change it, and suffer consequences earlier than later!

Start light—become a learning organization. Mistakes are OK, but not learning is not OK.

As a small organization, you are the stories you tell.

Goal #1: become sustainable/profitable. Get there with intellectual honesty, good team, good plan.

Don’t forget Luck: you get to where you are when preparation meets opportunity, but you won’t get lucky or unlucky all the time.

View on big problems—climate change is the biggest. See problems as business opportunities.

Partnerships with large car companies didn’t help, but since she was already in talks with them, she used it as a marketing opportunity with others: “I’ll talk to you after my meeting w/ Volkswagon!”

Aaron Swartz

Started infogami, merged w/ reddit

2 kinds of organisms:

r: make tons of children, and DNA will transfer by the numbers (cockroaches). e.g. delicious
K: have small # children, raise them carefully (humans). e.g. github

Hollywood launch—teaser, blow up the idea in peoples minds, and have a humungous lauch

Swartz is skeptical of this approach: doesn’t mimic software

Kills you with traffic jump
Killer bug destroys you immediately
Hollywood bases good movies based on initial launch…software is iterative!

So what’s the alternative? GMail launch

Have users from day 0: What’s the smallest usable piece?
while (users not happy) {fix/add features;}
As people are happy, let more in (using invite codes, or just opening up once enough people are happy)
Then, once everyone is happy, do a marketing launch (maybe)

Some stories

reddit: when they worked hard on features, no new users. when programmers went away or slacked off, traffic rose
recent project: he quit when traffic was flat. a few months later, looked at google analytics, saw spike in traffic

What to draw from this? Don’t assume that because you can measure something, you can control it. Sometimes, you need to give things time to spread, and hopefully if you strike it big, you can help the people following in your footsteps.

Announced boldprogressives.org—progressive change campaign committee

Avoid Subversion-Maintained Website Vulnerability

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:43:42 -0400

(Note: This vulnerability also exists for cvs and git-based repositories. Change these instructions appropriately.)

The news of this vulnerability came out a while back, but I spent the afternoon securing a few scarily exploitable sites, so I figured I’d reiterate.

If you store your website in subversion, you leave behind an “.svn” directory in each directory in version control. This directory contains the files in version control with extensions which may not protect them from being downloaded (e.g, site.com/file.php becomes site.com/.svn/text-base/file.php.svn-base).

To fix this, put the following in your root .htaccess file (or something similar in httpd.conf) for Apache:


    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all

For nginx:

location ~ /.svn {
     deny all;
}

Earn $30 for reading blogs!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:40:48 -0400

Michael Bernstein and I are working on a project that we will release to the public soon. First, we want to make sure it does what we think it will, so we’re running a user study.

We’re looking for Google Reader users to try out a new extension that helps you share interesting items with people you know. E-mail the FeedMe team at feedme@csail.mit.edu to participate!

If you are: a Firefox user who uses Google Reader regularly (addicts are welcome!)
You can get: a $30 gift card for using our Google Reader extension at least every other day, for two weeks
We are: an MIT computer science research team
Dates of the study: preferably Tuesday, August 18 to Tuesday, September 1

E-mail feedme@csail.mit.edu if you’re interested. Follow your feeds while you help science!

NYT_Transformer and Data.gov: Your chance for a weekend hacking project!

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:14:00 -0400

The awesome developers at The New York Times’ Open blog have just posted about NYT_Transformer, a tool for converting between various data formats (XML, comma-separated files) and data storage mediums (flat files, databases).

This isn’t the first time such a conversion utility has been written—Babel comes to mind. The NYT_Transformer has a few perks in its favor, however, namely that it seems to be used in heavy production at The New York Times, and that it allows you to convert between databases and flat files (nice touch!).

Written in php, the tool is geared toward web applications. An immediate thought, aside from batch jobs for various internal projects, would be to use the tool for a greater purpose: a data converter for data.gov.

While data.gov is a nice start at centralizing the directory of the U.S. government’s raw data feeds, it lacks a utility for converting between various data formats. Given that the sunlight foundation is currently running a competition to build tools on top of data.gov, this is the perfect opportunity to go meta and build a data.gov browser with automatic format conversion. That would help standardize the site a bit, and would be a nice signal for the folks at data.gov as to the file formats that people actually want for various datasets. If you’re interested in working on this project, let me know!

MIT Database Systems (6.830) TA Course Notes

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:38:17 -0400

In Fall 2008, I had the pleasure of TAing Database Systems with Sam Madden, Mike Stonebraker, and Evan Jones. I figured that I could take notes to help students follow the lectures while clarifying any confusing points that were raised during discussion. It would also help me avoid the embarrassment of forgetting something mentioned during a lecture and having students explain it to me during office hours:).

I decided to take notes in plain text, mostly out of laziness. This turned out to be a challenge for drawing things like query plans, but forced me to distill explanations into a conversational tone that provided an alternative to traditional diagrams.

Some students in the class told me that they benefited from and enjoyed the notes, and so I decided to open them up for reuse by the rest of the web community. The topics are as follows:

Feel free to take a read through the notes, and shoot me an email with requests, corrections, or just to let me know you read something.

For completeness, This work by Adam Marcus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Enjoy!

Local Communities, Information Gathering

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:39:50 -0400

By way of danah boyd I found the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities, which published an introductory whitepaper that asks how local communities find, digest, and react to information.

Outside of designing software, my biggest hobby is reading the news, so you would imagine that I would feel well equipped to answer how I keep up-to-date with, and respond to, local events. Reading the questions the commission is tackling gave me pause, however, since I realized that all of my sources tell me how things are over there, and very little about what’s going on around here. I keep up-to-date with the people who live next door, but only by way of the abstracted and aggregated views of the national news media.

I have tried to sign up for blogs about my area, but they are either too commercialized, or have a low signal-to-noise ratio. And even then, if Hurricane Katrina strikes the northeast, I’ll know as little today about what to do next as I assume most people did the first time disaster struck.

So the national news tells us about there. Blogs tell us about what we know we want. Twitter tells us about now. Where do we find out about down the street, at the moment, and what everyone is doing about it? It seems that we’ve built a digital infrastructure to maximize information gathering at the expense of a local infrastructure for dealing with the more basic things in life.

Making the case for Raw Data

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:44:00 -0400

Tim Berners-Lee’s recent TED talk on Linked Data has inspired quite a few people to ask what exactly linked data is, how it differs from data on the semantic web, and how realistic it is to assume universal and unique addressability of data items. A world with linked data would be a world with richer, more explorable data, and that notion on its own makes Tim’s talk worth viewing. The most inspiring part of his talk, in my opinion, was the one in which he got the entire crowd to loudly demand RAW DATA NOW. Given the push for more open datasets in government, and given that more websites are becoming API-providing data platforms, it is important to demand raw data where possible.

The magic behind raw data

The best thing about raw data is that almost everyone knows how it works. This means that as far as the data (re)user is concerned, the datasets are text files (or perhaps a close variant) that they can download, open in some default application, and get some immediate use out of it.

If the US Federal budget dataset is released as a comma-separated file, a middle-schooler can download the file, open it in a spreadsheet application, and sum the columns to see how much we’re spending on the Department of Education this year. A more skilled high-schooler can upload the file to Many Eyes, make a pie chart out of it, and post it to their blog. A first-year college student can write a php script to allow people to comment on various parts of that pie chart, allowing you to drill in to various slices to get a finer granularity.

With raw data, you’ve opened more people to more visualization, exploration, and discussion than was available through the original web application that acted as a firewall to your database.

Hugging the data to death

During his talk, Tim spoke about “Database Huggers,” or people who, for various reasons, hide their data away in databases. Once the data sits in a database, the publisher might provide a specific and constrained view of the data by way of a website, or they might hide it even more, simply calculating some aggregate statistic over the data and claiming, without verification, that the data has certain properties.

There are several legitimate reasons for database hugging. Some data was meant to be private—academic, medical, and financial information are all datapoints we’d prefer to keep private. We’d hope our service providers will keep it out of the hands of others. Similarly, a company might have competitive reasons for keeping information private, especially when it would be equally valuable to their competitors and not too valuable to the public—lists of customers and transaction histories come to mind. Keeping this information far from the publicly accessible web is responsible and wise.

There are other cases, however, where the data should legitimately stay open and publicly accessible. Open government initiatives will result in many datasets published by organizations that will or should exist in the public domain. Many Long Tail websites, maintained by small groups of hobbyists, probably would not mind if the datasets they generate are published in their full glory. For these types of applications, raw data is ideal.

Even in the case of datasets that should be open to the public, database huggers will sometimes disable direct access to the data, instead opting to place it in a database that sits behind an html-generating web application. Thinking that you’ve hidden your data behind HTML, thus making it safe from reuse, is an unwise assumption. In about an hour, a decent programmer can write a perl script to crawl your site and tease the data apart from the obfuscated HTML that surrounds it, reverse-engineering your database without asking for permission. In fact, there are tools that make this process easier than writing a one-off perl script. And if you think you can block the person from accessing every page on your site in a short period of time, then they will just collaborate with everyone else who wants the data, write a Greasemonkey script to collect parts of the site that they browse, and eventually collect your entire presented dataset.

Databases are not inherently evil. They provide an excellent way to store, index, and query data, but they also have a way of separating the average user from that data. Most websites, for example, do not publish a read-only username and password to their database, for fear of arbitrary queries that could easily take down their machines, or at least keep the machines busy for a long time. We should design tools to maintain the excellent services that databases have been built to provide over the last four decades, without limiting the access to the raw data when such access would be most valuable.

Are APIs the future of raw data?

There is a middle ground between the highly private datasets and the obviously open ones. Most forward-thinking organizations have realized this. They have also realized that if they have something to sell, be it in meatspace or screenspace, it’s better to release the data about their offerings to anyone that wants to use it, so that people eventually end up at their site. They do this by providing a web API to make their dataset queriable, essentially telling other software developers which questions they can answer about the dataset (query for books by author, query for restaurants by cuisine). Amazon has some APIs, as does Yelp, and you’d have to be a pretty self-loathing web 2.0 company to not provide an API over some portion of your data. So are APIs the solution? Not always.

APIs are a step in the right direction—open data is better than obfuscated data. APIs help both third-party developers and dataset publishers get more out of a dataset. They have a few drawbacks as well:

The API is an HTTP interface to your database. This means that if someone else makes a third-party application that is immensely popular, it’s your database that pays for the brunt of its popularity. You weren’t expecting a huge ramp-up in server load? Too bad.
As kind as the dataset publisher is, they can’t predict every use of the data—if they could, they already would have implemented the best use cases. If they can’t predict how the consumer/developer will use the data, they might not publish a good hook into the dataset. This would either prevent or make awkward the interaction between the third-party application and the publisher.
Building an API for a dataset makes the people who are nice enough to share their data do more work on top of designing their application. Following common REST or CRUD conventions makes this easier, but still puts the onus on the developer. As a corollary, APIs don’t change with the data. APIs are frequently revised, meaning that a change in your data requires constant upkeep of your API.

One might argue that some of the criticisms of APIs are unfair:

Saying that raw data will reduce the load on your database implies that the third party has some cache of the data, which is thus slightly out-of-date. You could imagine some sort of Comet-updated raw dataset system, but it’s unlikely for now that dataset publishers will be willing to stream live updates to third parties.
Perhaps the limited API functionality is for good reason. Amazon might never want you to be able to download their entire dataset—they don’t want to waste the bandwidth and they don’t want competitors to know exactly how many items they have on hand.
Publishing any sort of raw data will require extra work on behalf of the dataset publisher. Perhaps API-writing is the least invasive of their time?

An ideal data management tool would allow raw data publishing when possible, and make it easier to build APIs when some limited access is desirable. We should not pretend to know the point at which raw data is superior to APIs, but the point exists somewhere. It’s important to understand the benefits that raw data provides on top of web APIs, so that you can think about when it would be valuable to use.

After all this time, the answer was text files?

You’ve probably become skeptical of these suggestions. Are we really supposed to throw away decades of database research in how to properly store, index, and query reasonably sized datasets so that a middle-schooler can look at the data in a different way? Of course not. The interesting research question becomes whether we can give the user the illusion of raw data while still benefiting from database technology where possible.

That’s one research direction we’re taking within the Haystack group. With the constraint that the raw data, in human-readable text files, should always be available, we’d like to blur the boundaries between databases and data-aware webservers.

Specifically, what we plan on designing is an apache web server module that recognizes when it is serving a dataset, perhaps by taking note that it is serving a .csv, .rdf, or .json file. In such cases, the server would cook the data into a database behind the scenes. Data-aware clients (in javascript for the time being, but in the browser one day) can then query the web server about the data directly. Updates become difficult, but we can make consistency guarantees about the original raw data text files to ensure that someone can download them and see up-to-date information.

If you prefer programmatic access to the files, the module turns into a REST(, SQL, SPARQL, you favorite path language)-capable endpoint. If you prefer to get down and dirty with the data, you’ve got the text files.

We certainly don’t want to stand in the way of a world with Linked Data, so if you’d like, the tool will eventually return data with URIs. We can’t guarantee the URIs will resolve to anything useful, but that just might require a human’s touch. We’re not sure how that fits into the picture for the average data publisher, since the marginal benefit to the individual of universally addressing your own data is small, whereas the benefit to everyone else of adding another linked dataset grows with the number of datasets it is linked to.

And now, for some questions

We’re early in the development of our tools, so we’re open to your ideas and suggestions. Keeping text files up-to-date with the database that’s proxying them is nontrivial. Thinking of the ideal client/server mode of operation will also take time. We probably haven’t thought of the most important must-have feature yet, so any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks to Ted Benson, Sam Madden, and David Karger for their thoughts on this post.

(Cross-posted on the Haystack Blog)

Rethinking the Newsroom

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:05:00 -0400

I’ve had a lot of discussions with people about what news will look like in a digital age. Clay Shirky has just written this piece about that topic. He’s managed to say a few major things:

Big newsrooms were a means to an end. Unfortunately for them, what we actually want is information via journalism, and until recently, not everyone could afford the printing press that was a prerequisite.

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.”

It turns out that a side benefit of being a market with little competition was that advertisers could pay for your more extravagant expenses.

“For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.”

Putting information into bits on computers has made it easy to extract the bits and redisplay them without DRM or paywalls. You won’t get around that, and so the model has to change.

“And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”

While well thought out, it leaves us wondering what comes next. Competition is good in that it lowers the price to entry. It’s not good in that no one entity has enough money to run the Baghdad Bureau. We’ve also heard that local newsrooms are shutting down, since craigslist has killed their income sources. So if we’re losing local journalism and the high-expense war reporting, where does that leave us?

One question I’d love to have the answer to is where the big expenses lie. Is it the Baghdad Bureau, or the printing press? If it is true that the NYT spends so much on printing and delivery that it can afford to send all of its paying subscribers a free kindle, does having a web-only presence allow it to continue paying for the high-quality journalism without paying for print media? A read-through of their quarterly report might help with that—-let me know if you know about this!

[update: put quotes around the parts I quoted from they Shirky piece]

Driving in India

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:10:00 -0500

The key thing to remember about driving in India is that it is different, not worse than driving in the US. It also works, which the US’s system would not at the scale of transport that India’s population requires. Here are some basic rules of life when driving in India.

Honking

If you do not honk in India, there are two possible reasons:

you are walking, or
you have a broken horn.

I even started honking at cars while walking in the road at some point, mostly in jest.

Here are some things that honking might mean:

I am passing you on the left
I am passing you on the right
You are getting too close to me
I am a car, you are a motorcycle
I am a car, you are a dog
Since you are a cow and are laying in the road resting, I will honk at you, but will make every attempt to pass you.
You are a truck and I am a car
You are going too slow (usually accompanied by flashing headlights)
You are making a U-turn or are a person crossing the street. Since I am driving my car in the correct direction on the highway, I have asserted myself and will not slow down, although I may change half of a lane.
I am going the wrong way down the highway
I am going around a turn, and don’t want to slow down, but can’t see if there is someone coming in the opposite direction
I haven’t honked in 1 minute
I haven’t heard a honk in 30 seconds.

If you don’t hear a honk in a while, something is wrong, and you should check your surroundings for danger. Horns on cars and motorcycles are standardized, but trucks and busses have horn sounds commensurate with their size. They all sound jolly, but you know to be scared when you hear the melody coming from a MACK-truck equivalent or coach bus. On a related note, trucks and vans play some pretty amazing songs when they go into reverse instead of the shrill beeping you hear in the US.

Lanes

Some roads have lane markers. Do not be confused, and do not ride in the lanes. Lane markers are for riding ON, not BETWEEN. If you’re not a truck but you’re staying in a lane, you’re doing it wrong. You should be darting between trucks more frequently, and you’re endangering everyone else who is doing it.

Motorcades

When a VIP passes you, their security guards will pass you by and wave you to the side of the road so that the VIP car can pass by. Do not be alarmed, as you’re not getting pulled over. Just wait for the caravan to pass, and then slam on the gas! AS soon as you are in the clear, keep as close to the caravan as possible. After all—-they are pushing people to the side of the road, so shouldn’t you be taking advantage of this to go 120km/h?

Motorcycles

By far, the most popular mode of transportation is the motorcycle. Saje tells us it costs 35000-50000 Rs ($700-$1000) for one. Most are sized way smaller than an American one, but look pretty stable and solid. The most common configuration is to have two people on the bike (often, women in Sarees sit sideways on the back, with the cloth dangerously close to the chain). Seeing three people (A family including a little child) or seeing one person riding it alone are both as likely. Seeing four people is not uncommon, and seeing two people with the person on the back carrying something that could snugly fit in the trunk of a small car is common. Random things I have seen the second person on a motorcycle holding have included a television or two 3-meter poles.

Motorcycles are the best way to get around. They don’t stop at stoplights (though few cars do, either), they don’t pay any tolls, and since they hold as many people as a car does, who needs more:)?

Helmets are not common, and if they are worn, only the driver wears it, not the child in front or in back of them. Protecting a small child means sandwiching them between parents.

Auto Rickshaws

These guys are only slightly less annoying in pestering you to take a ride than their pedal-powered equivalents. They have three wheels, and the power and stearing facilities of a motorcycle. Fully loaded, they have no pickup, which is why they try to never stop. Calling them a deathtrap seems unfair, since there are so many, and it’s so easy to pick one up for a several-kilometer journey. They vary in size, as we discovered when we got the smallest one and lost all feeling in our lower body while smushed in the back. Their turning radius is amazing though, and are good for pulling a semi-circle to drive the wrong way out of a traffic jam. I can’t imagine that they are more than a shell on top of a motorcycle, with all of the components exposed, and the driver sitting on top of the battery.

Cows

While dogs are more prevalent, cows (and bulls) are everywhere, including the middle of cities. They generally stay to the side of the road, but nothing stops them from walking in it, crossing it, or taking a nap in it. Drivers give them their respect, and living with them is quite nice. We saw one farm with cows on it, but otherwise, all cows we

saw were on the road, train platform, or anywhere where you might fancy eating some garbage. In cities, countrysides, and popular attractions, the cows would flourish. Interesting note: when cows do walk in the street (as in, walk in traffic, not just crossing two lanes of it), they seem to go with traffic, not against it—-even the cows have some decency when it comes to traffic rules.

Funny story about cows: While driving in a busy rotary, a cow was blocking our way. After some honking and waiting, Saje hit the gas a bit, and the minivan bumped the cow in it’s back half. It blinked quietly, fishtailed a bit, looked forward, and walked away, minding its own bovinely business.

Bicycles

Bikes are quite common, but these aren’t the Walmart Huffys or sweet roadbikes you see in the US. The closest thing I can compare it to is a commuter or hybrid bike, but without the logos or paints, with more rust, and with none of the parts matching. There is no bike lane, so bikes tend to drive where a lane would be if it was painted on the road (if the road had asphalt). They never wear a helmet, but ride slower and less aggresively than bikers go in Boston, so perhaps it’s for the better. Like motorcycles, you won’t be surprised to find two people on a bike, but three is less common. It’s also not uncommon to see these on some highways, along with pedestrians.

Trucks

These guys are narrower and shorter than their American breatheren, but carry way more. Rather than carry shipping containers, they resemble trucks that carry dirt in the US, but with stuff piled way higher. To secure those items, a tarp is loosely tied to the top, giving the illusion of security. I have seen MACK-like trucks carrying loose rocks piled higher than the top of the open container, with nothing holding them down except densepacking.

They drive slower than in America, but you must still watch for them. Many are painted in bright yellows, reds, and greens for decoration, and almost all of them say “Use Horn”and “Use dipper at night”, requesting that you utilize headlights.

Many truck cabins are pimped out, with everything from streamers, fuzzy things, cloves, and shrines adorning the inside. This makes passing them a whole lot more fun. The music they play is also to die for!

Mumbai and home

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:22:42 -0500

We arrived at the Victoria Terminus (VT is the British name for it, but it’s been renamed to CST since). This train station is supposed to be the architectural Taj Mahal of the British empire, but I can hardly compare the two. It was 6 am when we got off the train, and it was still dark out, so we waited to leave the station and dropped our big backpacks off at a holding area for the day.
Before leaving the station, a woman walked up to us and spoke to us in perfect English. We semi-consciously ignored her and walked away, as is the custom on your 18th day of being in India—-generally, you ignore anyone that makes a remark at you since they are just trying to sell you something, etc. I guess she was used to this, so she explained that she worked for the government as a tour guide (still dubious), and wanted to give us advice on where to go. She also said she has seen way more hollywood stars than us (her list was definitely longer than mine:)), and explained that she was born in England and moved later in life. She gave us some advice, and then we parted ways.
Before we left VT, I had a horrible need to go to the bathroom. Luckily, we were prepared with toilet paper and all. I walked into the (for pay) bathroom, and the guy taking money at the door took the toiler paper away and said “no paper.” I walked out, but Meredith pointed out I’d have no other option that day. So I walked back, and he was frisking for toilet paper, so I went in with none. I’ll save you the details, but you can read about how one goes to the bathroom in India elsewhere, and you can fill in the details of how on my last day in India, I became an inaugural member of the Indian population. While I was mentally preparing myself for the experience, I stood in a line of 20 people for two stalls. I had time to reflect, and was assisted by the man cleaning the urinals (which we were standing next to). He was soaked from head to toe, and wearing flip-flops. Cleaning meant walking from urinal to urinal with a hose, spraying EVERYTHING, an scraping the walls with a hay broom. Needless to say, the result was like being in the front row of a Gallagher show, and I became one of the dirtiest people in India. Using the toilet signs you up for someone smashing on the door if you’ve been in there for longer than a minute. Such is life.
After running out of the bathroom and bathing in baby wipes and hand sanitizer, we were on our way! We briefly got lost in the wrong direction looking for a cool market and ended up in a market with hundreds of chickens and their feathers. Breakfast at McDonalds because nothing else was open and I was going to fall over from low blood sugar. Of course their selection was waaaaay different than anything you’d have in the US for breakfast. Then we began a walking tour of Mumbai.
We made our way to a large green open area in between the high court and Mumbai university, where there were 5 or so simultaneous cricket matches going on. On every corner of the field, and throughout the city, there were vendors selling crushed sugar cane juice that looked amazing, but was served in a glass cup that was not washed after its last use. Being chicken, we avoided the drink even though it looked amazing.
Heading down a different street, we saw a neat church, a library run by the Asiatic society, and a way more green park than the last one.
We then kept walking down a major street, a block of which had Dildo vendors displaying their wares. Really? Dildos?
We turned off onto a smaller street to see the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue. The guards at the door, when asked if we could go in, said “Are you Jewish?” After affirming, they let us in. The place was very pretty, painted sky-blue even on the inside, and having some of the most ornate designs I have seen in a synagogue. We bought a book on Jews in India, got a view from the top pews, and headed back into the street (no pictures, sorry!). On the way out, we took note that Madonna had been there two years ago. Heh.
We were hungry and thirsty (close to delirium because we were a bit irresponsible in walking around, and it was RIDICULOUSLY hot), so we bought some suspicious water at a street vendor. Your last day somewhere makes you feel invincible I guess.
We made our way to Gateway of India, a big structure that looks like a gate that is open to the Arabian sea/Indian Ocean. It was touristy, with mostly Indians posing for pictures. We then turned around from looking at the ocean to see the Taj Hotel, the site of the terrorist attacks on 11/26/2008 (known in India as 26/11). The hotel looked like a palace, and looks like it’s in great shape. There are signs along the entrance floor telling people that they are “Working to restore a symbol of Mumbai’s enduring spirit & dignity,” and I’m sure that once they do, the hotel will be regal as ever.
We went to a restaurant for lunch, and I had the first thali which seemed like what I would consider a Thali. It was very tasty, and only made taster by the fact that I ate with my hands. I hope my friends at home allow me to do the same when I am out with them.
We made a long walk back, essentially seeing the same sites we saw earlier. Stopping by a bookstore, we saw, front and center, a book on how to fix several brands of Nokia phone. I had heard about this repair-everything culture before, but it never struck me how prevalent it was. The book had circuit diagrams and listed every possible problem you could have with a phone and how to fix it.
We had some time to kill, but not enough to see the beach, so we went back into the McDonalds near Victoria Terminus. We shared an ice cream cone, and sat around watching high-schoolers do homework and flirt. Some car had a horrendously loud sound system, and one of the techno songs they played was the Venga Boys song we had heard on our first night. It was a relaxing sendoff in a bustling city.
We got a taxi at the station after getting our bags. The ride took more than an hour in intense traffic, but we were leaving at 6 pm and the plane took off at 1 am, so no biggie. We drove through some slums (55% of Mumbai lives in such slums). Essentially, these are corrugated tin-walled living spaces stacked on top of each other so you have to use a ladder to get from one family’s floor to the next. No one looked terribly sad (but this is from the highway. I hesitate to use the word slum, because while the word slum implies how it looks, the slum is far from what you would expect economically. Despite the surroundings, people have set up a functioning economy, where there are home renters and owners, people work at various locations, and the economy of the slum exports $550 billion worth of products per year to the rest of the world. Not somewhere you’d like to live, but not exactly the complete image you might paint for yourself.
As we drove past the slum, we saw an astounding amount of kites in the sky. If you have read the “Kite Runner,” you’d have the explanation of how it’s done (at least in a fiction book based in Afghanistan). From the book, you glue glass shards to the string, fly the kite, and try to drive your kite’s string into another kite’s so that you can cut it down. The kite running part comes from the point at which you cut the kite—-your partner-in-crime, once the opponent’s kite is cut, makes a mad dash toward where the kite might fall, and races half of the other children in the neighborhood to get the prize. I’m not sure that part actually happens given that running around to random places might be unacceptable, but it certainly sounds poetic. We had seen this throughout India, but as a final vision of the place during the waning hour of sunlight, it was quite exhilarating to see tens of kites flying high over the neighborhoods of Mumbai.
Equally exhilarating was the way in which we ate dinner at the airport. After trying to reason with the driver to know how much markup he charges westerners (“come on, I’ll pay you what you wanted, but I’m leaving India and want to know how much you overcharge westerners” didn’t work), we tried to get past the security check at the entrance to the airport. We arrived at 7 pm for a 1 am flight, so the guard told us that there is no food in the terminal, and that before going in, we should “go upstairs” and get a bite to eat. We thought it was strange that there was no food inside, but took his advice. We went upstairs, where we explained to the guard with a massive gun why we were up there, to which he kept responding “What’s wrong?” until he let us go. We walked for a good 2 minutes in a long corridor that seemed to not be designed for public consumption. Finally, we were pointed in the right direction by someone who looked very confused at out presence. Upon walking in, we were welcomed by about 100 employees of the airlines turning around and staring at us, and saw the banner at the back of the room, which designated this the “employee canteen.” We were about to turn around when someone ran toward us and told us to sit down and eat anyway. What a wonderful man! For ~$1 each, we got 2 chai, 1 uttapam (a dosa infused with potato), a cheese sandwich (did I mention Meredith was stuffed with Indian food?), Pani Puri (deep-fried bread stuffed with potato and tamarind, and drizzled with tamarind juice and yogurt), wada (like a samosa, but with fluffier breading), and an atmosphere that made you feel at peace with yourself as you waited. Once we were ignored by our neighbors, we felt at home and enjoyed ourselves. Upon returning to the airport to enter the terminal, we saw that the guard had changed, and that the place was filled with places to eat. I’m happy he tricked us—-what a great final dinner in India!
At the airport, we changed clothes and took baby-wipe showers. We went through two security scans, and spent/exchanged the rest of our money (the exchange system enrages me, but I won’t get into that I guess).
The place ride home was delightful—-at around 2 am India time, we were served dinner, which everyone on the plane except for me refused. I then joined everyone else in passing out for a few hours, and then woke up to watch some shows on my seat’s TV. Our neighbor ended up being not only talkative but immensely interesting. He’s a Christian from Goa, and speaks perfect English. He works as an engineer in Goa, and travels to New Hampshire to share knowledge with the sister plant several times per year. We spoke about the massive cultural differences between Hindi-speaking India and much of the south (from his perspective). We also spoke about peace (India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine—-two different perspectives on different places). He was interested in Meredith’s engineering background, and what I did at school. I’m happy he was there to share some final words with—-we’re now in e-mail contact, and he has an open invitation to stop by Boston the next time he is in town! One interesting thing he mentioned was reverse culture-shock. Sure, you’re shocked by the other’s culture when you first land, but when you return to your country, you’re shocked again by how different everything is, as if you never saw it before.
That was our experience upon arriving in the US. Culture shock was everywhere, in a strange way. I felt uncomfortable crossing the street without cars beeping to acknowledge me. We were stricken by the whiteness of the walls in our apartment, and the cleanliness of pretty much everything relative to what we were accustomed. For some reason, since returning, I no longer drink filtered water, and I think the reason is that I am trying to convince myself it’s a nicety that doesn’t matter, and I thus can’t justify anymore. Weird small things, but they add up.

Goa

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:35:03 -0500

Landing in Goa after our goodbye to A.J. (1-hour flight), we made our way into the hot hot sun. Goa is something close to paradise if you love heat, relaxation, and Bob Marley. Patrick (our bed+breakfast owner’s son) picked us up in a car playing Casey Kasem top 20 list of American songs. It was refreshing to drive along beautiful beaches and hear The Killers et al.
Our bed and breakfast was called Martha’s (after the proprietor), and the sign in front advertises the restaurant’s amazing waffles. The place was the smallest, quietest, and dantiest one we stayed at, and we quite enjoyed ourselves. Martha and her family ran the bed+breakfast, and so her two Daughters handled the restaurant and checkins, her son took care of taxi services and motorcycle rentals (I think?), and her husband helped with all sorts of odds-and-ends. They were warm people, and really tried to make us feel at home (next to their farm with pigs running around!). They said they would remember us if we ever contacted them again, since Meredith is such a unique name. We’ll see:).
While Goa is one of the smallest Indian states, the beaches and spice plantations, which, aside from Panaji, its capital, are the only sights, are along a four-hour stretch of land.
Almost everyone travels by motorcycle or scooter here, and not renting one put us at a great disadvantage, since taxis couldn’t be haggled with (they were called by the bed and breakfast, and knew we had no way to get to a place where we were in a position to haggle). Meredith and I were scaredycats, so we took the hit anyway.
The beaches were amazing. I’ve never been to the bahamas, but I imagine that’s why people go to these places. Meredith and I burn easily, and so we avoided them for the most part except for to take pictures and watch the sun set.
Since the Bahamas are so close to the US, it makes more sense for Americans to go there. As such, we saw three other Americans (in one group), and the rest of the folks where European. Mostly German and British folks.
Since the place was more of a resort-like area, and the primary customers where “rich” foreigners, the food was vastly more expensive than it was elsewhere. This meant we spent $8-10 equivalent for two of us on a dinner or lunch. The meals were great though - we had a rice with fish curry dish, Xacuti, fish tandoori, all of which are in some way specialities of Goa.
Everywhere else in India, it’s not uncommon to see a shrine set up by the side of the road by some religious group with flowers hanging around the diety. Since Goa has way more Christians, it was common to see a shrine to a crucifix by the side of the road, also with flowers hanging around it.
Side note: the reason Goa has so many Christians is that until 1961 (formally before that), it was a trading colony of the Portuguese. Many more people spoke perfect English (I don’t know how one follows the other), and everyone we spoke with that spoke excellent english was Christian.
Since we didn’t spend much time on the beach, we took a taxi into Panaji, the capital. We tried a walking tour around the city, and got lost a bit, but it was all through fun places to see. I had coconut juice (we really let loose here—-we were no longer concerned for our health for some reason:)) out of a coconut. Coconuts are way more green and smooth on the outside, and the juice is very tart. The vendor charged 20 rupees (40 cents) for one, and I got the pleasure of seeing him hack the top off of it to make a sipping hole with a machette. Our walk brought us to many beautiful churches (some of the cleanest white buildings we saw in India). We also walked through smaller neighborhoods, crossed a river a few times, and found a humungous temple dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman. The building was either salmon pink or orange depending on the paint used (and the colorblindness). Meredith pointed out some flower-shaped relief sculptures at the entrance that had half of their petals broken off. The solution in this case was to paint the petals back on, meaning that half of the flower was a sculpture on a wall, and half of it was paint on the wall. Really interesting way to fix things that need to “just work.”
To save money, we found an autorickshaw to take us back to our hotel. He was waaaay cheaper than the taxi (I’m embarrassed to say how much the taxi was, but the ballpark was $10, whereas the autorickshaw was ~$4). The ride each was to Anjuna beach (our hotel) was 30 highway minutes, so perhaps the cost was justified in petrol.
Upon heading back to our hotel, we went down to the beach to see the sun set—-beautiful! We then walked back and wondered why everything was so dark (made it hard to find restaurants). Finally, we walked into a completely pitch-black one. They explained that the power was out everywhere, but that they could still prepare dinner for us. We decided to give it a shot. This place was classy, and we were not dressed our part, but we were the only ones there, so no biggie. They made veggie Lasagna and veggie Musaka, both of which were Goan takes on the meals (unexpected vegetables, cumin seeds and the works). Afterward, we asked them for a candle (I had a flashlight, but we wanted to be protected from motorcycles in both directions walking home), and they fashioned us a candle holder our of a soda can. Rock!
Since most of the visitors we saw were European (either college-age or burnt-out hippies in better shape than us), our Goan beaches catered to their likings: beach-front raves, and yogurt. The raves were an all-night thing (even though being caught with drugs can land you in jail for a long time), and even featured fireworks (how?!?!). A German bakery we visited (I swear it was hard to find a south Indian restaurant around here) let you sit on the ground, drink various expensive teas, and eat mounds of yogurt and fruit. While I won’t say Goa made me more enlightened, it was fun to witness the place.
The train to Mumbai was the Konkan Kanya express, which goes along the Konkan coastline. This is supposed to be the most beautiful coastline in the world, but the train (in both directions) for the most part travels at night, so you don’t actually get to see anything. We had some great food on the train for 80 cents each. The first dish was a standard vegetarian dish with dal, rice, some vegetables, chapati, and pickle (mango in brine). The second and more interesting dish was veg manchurian (every vegetarian dish is called ‘veg’), which was some amazing sauce and hardly recognizable balls of something which I would say is doughy, but I can’t be sure. It ranks up there as one of the best dishes I had on the trip, but I honestly can’t put my finger on what it was.

Kolkata

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:16:23 -0500

Our train arrived on time, which was refreshing. When we got off and went to the prepaid taxi booth, we were hassled pretty heavily by the drivers to go with them, which is usual. By this point, we had gotten used to it and ignored them, but we’d break every once in a while and start repeating “no!” at them. Kolkata is the intellectual capital of India, and it shows; a smiling taxi driver enjoyed A.J.’s chorus of “no!,” but decided to give him a quick education. As he turned to walk away, the driver corrected A.J., explaining that “It’s pronounced nay!” Thanks.
No other city had as many yellow taxis as Kolkata, and we later found out that this was due to a recent supreme court decision to ban autorickshaws due to emissions. We took a taxi to the hotel, dropped our stuff off after waking up the poor hotel employees, and took another taxi to Chowringhee street, which had the majority of the tourist attractions we would be visiting.
We made our way down a few streets by foot looking for a cheap eat recommended for breakfast in our Lonely Planet book. The food was amazing and cheap, and we even had the pleasure to have the largest beetle I have ever seen bless the floor with its presence. I learned that of the three of us, I am the only one disturbed by insects larger than my pinky.
Making our way back to Chowringhee street, we entered the Indian museum, the largest museum in India, and one of the oldest in the world. Exhibits included animal skeletons, rocks, paintings, insect and animal replicas, and an awesome room containing dioramas of the major cultures of India.
We walked away from the main drag, which was a tourist trap larger than any one we had seen before. Along our walk, we were approached by several men that talked us up convincing us to go to their store a few blocks away. One even told us that we looked like we were from California (LA specifically), and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s not a compliment. At a major intersection, A.J. darted across and left us in the dust. Meredith and I tried to stick together, but she screamed “BUS!” at some point and ran back to the sidewalk. I was stuck between a bus and a trolley, and had a bus driving at me. Luckily, I was in my predicament with a natural problem solver, who slapped the side of the bus blocking us as we walked around it, dodging other traffic until we made our way across. Meredith had an easier time, luckily.
Heading to a quieter part of town, we ate at an indo-chinese restaurant that wasn’t as good as one I tried in New York, but was still a good mix of Indian and Chinese foods.
After lunch, we tried Bengali desserts—-Roshgulla (soft cheese balls in a sugary syrup, less floury than gulab jamun) and Sandesh (finely ground cheese and seeds forming a dense Halva-like texture). A child tried to grab my dessert box, but I showed him it was empty, which seemed to be good enough for him to leave me alone.
We then walked back toward the middle of town and walked for a while along the park. We made our way to the Victoria memorial, which was closed by the time we made it. We walked around the park for a while, and stopped by an open-air concert with an amazing female vocalist. We then continued on, looking for the english-language water/light show as night fell. We were told that for some reason it wasn’t happening tonight, but as we left disappointed, we saw the beginning of a 5-minute version of the show. It was nice to sit down, and while we didn’t get a history of Kolkata, it was a good break.
Arguing for lower rates from taxi drivers, we went down a line of taxis asking each one for a better rate until we were happy, and headed back for the hotel. It was too late to get a good fish dish, which disappointed me, since Debmalya told me the fish would be amazing. We got some tea near the hotel instead, and enjoyed our assortment of crackers back at the hotel. We made final packing plans, as the next morning we would get in a taxi and head off to the airport.
We woke up crazy early, and got to the Kolkata airport with plenty of time to spare. Security is about as dumb as it gets—-you first scan your bag, which is wrapped with easy-to-subvert plastic ties, and then carry the bag to the ticket coutner, where it is (presumably) not scanned again. At least the US has something right—-scan the bag after the person carrying it no longer has possesion of it. Oh well.
Flew to Mumbai (2 hours) and grabbed our bags at the super-futuristic Mumbai domestic airport. It’s actually not quite so super-futuristic, but Thomas Freidman tries to convince everyone it is. Good for him—-it’s clear he’s only ever been to Mumbai and Bangalore:)
We said our sad goodbyes to A.J., who told me I smelled as I hugged him goodbye. Turns out he had a pretty annoying experience coming back: first he almost got duped by a taxi driver while trying to see Mumbai proper, only to turn around and head back to the airport, and then got to Delhi for his flight to JFK early only to hear the the Delhi flight left 1.5 hours BEFORE it was supposed to take off to avoid fog. After much arguing, he got on a different flight home, which took him through Belguim. Poor guy spent over 48 hours in some kind of transport state before getting home.

Darjeeling

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:19:24 -0500

We had an awesome night in the hotel in Siliguri, which featured a dinner fit for the elite, though one we could hardly characterize as Indian. A.J.’s dish was the most amazing one, featuring a sizzler (it sizzled loudly as it was brought out) of vegetables and paneer served in a cabbage. The sauce was amazing, and the vegetables rocked!
After breakfast, we took a jeep for a two-hour trip to Darjeeling. We were originally going to arrive in Darjeeling the night before and take the toy train back to Siliguri, but since we were delayed a day, we opted for the jeep. The jeep followed the same path as the train, but took two hours instead of eight, so we felt vindicated.
The path to Darjeeling was beautiful - it was the only all-green, all-mountain experience we had in India. There were tea plantations everywhere along the way (Darjeeling is known for its teas, as is Asam, a state to the east). As we approached Darjeeling, it became clear that the big-city atmosphere we became accustomed to everywhere else was gone, which was relaxing in its own right.
We got a quick (three-hour) tour of Darjeeling, which featured a visit to a Buddhist monastery, a ride to tiger hill (the highest point in the area), and a trip to the War Memorial Batista Loop. The memorial, dedicated to Indian Gorkha soldiers from Darjeeling who had died at war since independence, gave us a beautiful view of the surrounding peaks and valleys. Tiger hill is supposed to be visited at 4 am for sunset, when it is clear enough to see Mount Everest and other fun sights. The fog at noon blocked all visibility, so we took pictures with where Everest would have been, and looked equally happy.
Upon finishing the tour, we wanted to get some momo (dumplings, tibetan-style) and Darjeeling tea. We asked someone where to go, and they suggested some chicken/pork places. Upon further prodding for a vegetarian place, he led us down a small alley to a no-menu joint that was hardly more than a kitchen with tables, and definitely didn’t see foreigners. We ordered soup, 8 momos each, and tea, all of which were amazing. I initially thought I was jipped a momo, but after we finished, our waitress plopped another on my plate, reminding me that I only received 7 to start. The bill came to 39 Rs (80 cents) for the three of us. Amazed by the low price, we decided to leave a hefty tip (something that seemed normal in the bigger cities, and still put us at around 40 cents apiece). The waitress ran after us telling us we made a mistake, but we happily told her to keep the rest. Hopefully we didn’t offend anyone.
On the way back, our driver stopped at a tea factory (that produces some teas for Tazo, the Starbucks people), where we learned about tea production in a very dark and scary set of rooms, and then bought some souvenier teas.
Our driver was pretty cool, and explained lots of things to us. The most interesting involved the independence movement in Darjeeling. From what I could understand, residents feel that because many citizens are ethnically different from the rest of West Bengal (we didn’t see many people from tibet or nepal in Kolkata), they deserve independence. I couldn’t get him to go farther than that, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Meredith felt sick on the car ride to the train station. The train arrived on time, and once we boarded, it was pretty clear that Meredith had whatever I had gotten over. Instead of putting her through several days of discomfort, we put her on antibiotics as well, and she woke up in Kolkata several hours later feeling like a champ!

Delhi to Siliguri Summary

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:30:00 -0500

Delhi

Arrived early in morning after a train ride with a nice Sikh family that featured a schoolteacher mom and a dad who looked like Ali G. He wore a skull and crossbones doorag, camo pants, and a SWAT TEAM shirt. He was also a partner in a company that represents Marshalls in purchasing bathroom accessories, and does $3M in business with the US. They gave us some snacks, including Gajak, which was really tasty, and gave us newspapers to keep ourselves clean while we ate DELICIOUS food on the train (some of the best food we had on the trip was on trains, for 39 Rs (less than $1) per head.
Got a driver for the day for about $24 for the three of us. He was from nepal, and really cute (including his cellphone ring)
Visited Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in Asia, which was built by the same guy that built the Taj Mahal (Shah Jahan). On the way in, Meredith and I lost sight of A.J., and by the time we saw him, a tout had attached himself to us and wouldn’t let us leave until we paid a camera fee for a camera we did not have. He essentially ruined the experience for us, since we left to avoid him without properly taking in the experience.
Briefly stopped by the Red Fort, which we decided to avoid because of long lines and being “forted out” after Rajasthan. A bit of a mistake, since this and Agra fort (which we later skipped as well) are magnificent and different than the Rajasthani ones. This fort is mostly symbolic—-it’s the last bastion of defense for India, so if you take that, then you’re in charge of India.
Headed to Gandhi’s cremation site, which sits in a beautifully green and calm park in Delhi with the cremation sites of many other important people in modern India’s history. The monument was simple yet inspiring, and it was good to reflect quietly about just how amazing the man was. Then an entire school of children came screaming into the site, but it was as we left, so we didn’t mind so much.
Went to Akshardham, which is in the guiness book of world records as the largest hindu temple. Construction finished in 2005, and it shows. The complex surrounding the temple is HUGE, featuring many distractions like water/light shows and boat rides. The temple itself is awesome. We had a samosa each for 6 Rs (12 cents, the going price) outside the security line, in which I was felt up like I was never felt up before (but at least it was delicate). The food court in the complex was huge, and we ordered too much food by accident, but managed to eat it all since I was ravenous and felt invincible.
Headed to Humayun’s tomb, which is a masoleum for the second Mughal emperor. I’ll post an entry on Humayun’s tomb along with Akbar’s and the Taj Mahal, since they are all of similar architecture and serve similar purposes.
Drove past parliament/various minister’s offices, and then India gate, which looked nice in the foggy night.
On the way back to the hotel, stopped by a store to buy extra toilet paper. Will write an entry on storefronts. One of the rolls had urine on it. Oh well.
For dinner, we decided to try Mcdonalds, since it’s so different from an American one. We had a Veg surprise (A.J.), McVeg and McAloo Tiki (Meredith and I), and we all had fries and soda. The raw vegetables were so refreshing, since we weren’t allowed to eat them all trip. The icecubes in the soda were also nice (another nono, since the ice might be from bad water). All of the burgers are essentially some take on a potato patty with some peas. Nothing like an American veggie burger patty exists - it’s all made of vegetables you can recognize by sight or taste. +10 for Indian Mcdonalds!

Agra

Woke up at 5 am to drive to Agra with Saje, who had taken the extra day to drive to Delhi. He pulled another fast one on us, and we ended up at a ridiculously classy breakfast place, which ran us ~$24 for the three of us. We were not pleased, but they did have a man with a jumping monkey outside.
First went to Sikandra, which is Akbar’s tomb. Will discuss more in the Mughal masoleum entry.
Went to Taj Mahal. Oh. My. A $15 entry fee (Indians are charged $1) was well worth it. We got a guide by ignoring a guy who asked us for $20 (quoting the US price!) and then $5 for a guy who asked us for $2 and passed our quiz to test his knowledge. This was after our car was chased by a guide on a motorcycle as soon as we entered Agra. So much to say about the Taj, will discuss more in the Mughal masoleum entry. A.J. bought some souveniers, and on the way out we saw a cute cuddling monkey family, and gave our water to a kid who spoke pretty much perfect english for the four phrases he knew.
Ate lunch at another classy place with Saje. Lots of Stars of David (they were common throughout the trip). It turns out that these are common on Mughal architecture—-who knew?
Went to Agra fort, but got too scared to enter when our hotel in Varanasi told us our train was cancelled. Went to train station, where they told us everything was fine. Got on train, and were woken at 4 am and told to get off train. Got out in Lucknow, which is, by the way, not Varanasi. A.J. and Meredith waited on the platform while I made my way through the crowd to find out what to do. Waited for the next superfast train (faster than an express, which came and went) until 8 am at the suggestion of other people who were doing the same. Found a random sleeper cabin (we were supposed to have AC, but who’s counting at that point), and sat down next to a cute old Nepalese (?) couple that didn’t speak with us. Next to us were some really friendly and chatty Muslim guys who gave us lots of snacks, in exchange for which we gave them some snacks and bought them chai. Made the fact that we arrived at 4 pm instead of 8 am a whole lot better.

Varanasi

Arrived in hotel at 6 pm. Had dinner at Kerala Cafe, which served ridiculously cheap (less than $1 per head) south indian food. One of the best meals we had. Idli is neat, sambar rocks, and Dosas are awesome. A.J. learned what a Sada Dosa is—-it’s a Dosa with nothing in it—-oops. Meredith had more luck with the Rawa Dosa.
Varanasi was called Banares by the British.
The big “attraction” in Varanasi, which is quite a religious city, is the Ghats, or steps down to the Ganges river. There are tens of these Ghats. Some are bathing Ghats to bathe in the river (which sometimes has 3000x the safe limit of faecal coliform bacteria). Others are cremation Ghats, which you can see being used if you come at the right time (we didn’t).
We went down to the river at 7 pm to see a Fire Puja (Hindu Prayer) at Dashashwamedh Ghat, which included several people standing on platforms singing, clapping, and moving several kinds of incense around rhythmically. We also avoided touts to the best of our ability, although I got a handshake from a guy who quickly turned the handshake into a body massage, which I brushed off and walked away from.
The next morning, we walked through all the Ghats, and saw people bathing and some ashes. We also saw clothes being washed in the river, which made me realize how western clothes are cleaned when you give them to the hotel:).
After the morning Ghat-walk, we took a car to Saranath, which is a city nearby, and the place where Buddha walked to after achieving enlightenment to give his first sermon. A.J. meditated at a place where he did while Meredith and I walked around the ruins. While standing in line to buy tickets for getting into the ruins, I realized that Buddhists, while peaceful, are also pushy, and follow the same non-line rules that everyone else does.
After seeing where the sermon was given, we went to a nearby Buddhist temple, where we saw a cutting of the Bodi Tree. The original tree was in Bodh Gaya, and is the location of Buddha reaching enlightenment. This cutting is from Sri Lanka, which claims to have a cutting of the original tree.
We took the craziest taxi ride I remember (except for the autorickshaw in Udaipur which tried everything possible to avoid a parade blocking the whole town) to Mughal Sarai, which is where the train station was. The train was supposed to arrive at 6 pm, and due to Delhi fog, arrived at a timely 3:30 am, at which point Meredith had fallen asleep on two rat-infested floors, A.J. was ready to kill anything that moved, and I was hyped up on Chai. At around 3 am, a high-schooler sat with me and asked me which books to read to get into the IITs (the MITs of India that have something like 2000 slots for 300000 applicants), and I suggested he email me so that I could hook him up with someone that actually knew something about getting into a selective school.
We had a lot of time to reflect while sitting on the train track. We met many dogs (track dog eats poop on the track, while platform dog mostly lies around on the platform). Platform cow has a turkey neck, and does rounds checking each garbage can (which are on hinges so that the cow can eat from the can without tipping it over) for new contents. Finally, disease rat spreads love and fecal matter everywhere. It was great fun, and I would do it again.

Varanasi->Siliguri train

After A.J. almost demolished a family for sleeping in our beds on the train at 3:30 am (I would have done the same, but he was in front), we ended up sitting with them until our arrival in Siliguri at 6 pm the next day (we were supposed to have arrived at 8 am).
The entire day was spent sitting and eating random train food, but it was really just me eating cheap dosas and other assorted food from random stations (tasty potato soup wrapped in grape leaves, etc.) while my companions looked at my like I was nuts for eating food off of the newspaper it was served on. At least I wasn’t hungry:).
The train went through Bihar, which is one of the poorest Indian states (for many reasons, including horrendous flooding that destroys roads for three months at a time). The countryside was beautiful, but the number of (five-year-old) beggars on the train made it clear that this wasn’t a rich area. I woke up once to a child pushing my leg to wake me up asking for money. He left after continuing to push my leg for one minute. I later ran into him running down the aisle with rice and a chicken dish, which he threw on the ground, grabbed a dish from the train’s kitchen, and mixed with his hands. I’ve never seen someone eat so ravenously. Later on as I was hanging out the door watching the countryside, he looked at the camera with curiosity. I showed him that it takes pictures of things and keeps the picture (using my hand and the countryside as an example). Finally, I turned the camera on him, which lit up his face when he saw the result. I felt bad taking a picture, but I think he learned what the camera did once he saw the photo.
We arrived in Siliguri, called our Darjeeling hotel to cancel since it was too late and elephants would block the road, and found an amazing hotel in Siliguri. For 1000 Rs ($20) we each got a double, which was the cleanest and most amazing room we’ve had on the trip (and probably in my travel experience in general - this place rivaled any three- to four-star hotel in the US).

Darjeeling onward will follow!

Rajasthan Summary

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:17:00 -0500

Keeping a daily journal of our trip got a bit cumbersome and boring, so here’s an overview of the trip post-hoc. This posting summarizes Rajasthan. I’ll do the rest of the trip later, and then post in greater detail regarding the most interesting topics in the coming days.

Jaipur

Albert Museum is neat. You get a sense for how old India is when you stand in front of an unprotected statue from 8 BC. In the US, this would be behind bulletproof glass with Argon gas protecting it, but in India, it’s just another piece of history.
Amber (pronounced Amer, and having nothing to do with the color) fort looks amazing. It’s one of three forts protecting Jaipur (though Amber used to be the main city in the area until Jaipur was built). It’s also the largest one. There is a palace per season for the Maharaja to move between.
Our first exposure to Mughal architecture. The Mughals, while taking over most of northern India, made peace with the people they ruled (except for the Maharana of Udaipur, who fought to his death). You see this mix of cultures in the architecture—-flowers from the Mughal side and elephants (Ganesha) from the Hindu side.
We learned about vegetable/stone paintings. By crushing stone and mixing it with vegetables, you can make paint that survives far longer than traditional paints. You see this on walls and cloth, and the paintings come in many deep colors.
Jaipur is known as the “Pink City,” and it is! The walls in the old city are all a pinkish color, including more modern stores that have developed in the marketplace.
The city palace is a nice museum. The coolest two things were a man in a Santa costume that had not an ounce of fat on him and very pink skin (on his mask), and two humungous jugs made of silver that a Raja brought with him on a boat to the coronation of one of the kings of england so that he could carry water from India to maintain his purity while abroad.
We saw our first lake palace here—-literally a palace on a lake—-a beautiful sight at sunset, with malaria-carrying mosquitos as a special gift!
Do not go to Juntar Muntr without a guide. It’s a set of amazing astronomical instruments from hundreds of years ago, but the inscriptions are horrible, and so you have no idea what they do without an explanation. Nice park to sit in though—-I shook a few hangs and posed in pictures with people who wanted pictures with an American.
We went to our first Hindu temple, which also featured statues of Jesus, Moses, and a few other homeboys on its outside. A.J. was surrounded by some teenagers, who treated him like a movie star and practiced their English on him.
At night, A.J. and I tried our luck as aimless wandering in the streets, only to find out that aimless wandering is not only fruitless, but also scary!

Jaipur->Jodhpur

Hung out at a neat Jain temple in Ajmer - already posted an entry on this.
Didn’t go to the main attraction in Ajmer since the car wasn’t allowed near it for some reason. The main attraction is a Dargah, which is a Sufi Muslim tomb.

Jodhpur

The old city has a cluster of buildings with bright blue exteriors. The Brahmins (holiest caste) used to live in these houses, and as a side note, the blue somehow acts as an insect repelant?
I liked the Mehrangarh fort here a lot more than Amber fort. The audio tour (included in the greatly inflated non-indian fee for entry to all historical sites) was much better than that in Jaipur as well, so I’d highly recommend seeing this one. Also cool was the fact that people live on the grounds of the fort, which may have made them uncomfortable to have us walking around their homes—-I can only hope that they are used to this. I saw my first cat!
The temple where the Ranis (queens) were cremated sits near the fort, and was not only beautiful, but featured a large mom-and-puppies family, as well as a crapload of pigeons.
While walking through the temple, my stomach felt funny, but I thought nothing of it.
We had our first seriously scarly Thali (very cheap, but very unsanitary), and I drank a salt lasi which was warm and not a good idea given the state of my stomach
After lunch, we went to a park and walked around. It was very relaxing, and our first experience with greenery since arriving in India. We had more than our fair share of stardom. One girl shook Meredith’s hand and spoke to her in Hindi, not responding to us while her friends egged her on. Then her friends came and spoke to all of us in perfect English and took pictures with us. We were invited to play cricket by another group. Some parents wanted us to take pictures with their kids, and then asked us for money. We saw monkeys (common throughout the trip). Some kids just followed us around saying “hello! hi!” which we repeatedly responded to. As we left the park, we were accompanied by kids playing various instruments with the hopes of getting money.
Umaid Bhavan Palace is a neat palace/hotel built during a drought by a Maharaja who figured he might as well build himself a palace in order to give people jobs. A true public servant, and an excellent example of how to get us out of our current economic hardship:).
Between the palace and the hotel, I became violently sick. By the time I was at the hotel, I was a gonner. By 10 pm on new year’s eve, I had passed out only to be woken by the loudest explosions I have ever experienced. Thinking we were being bombed, I was a bit scared, but once I heard the venga boys in the background, I realized that India doesn’t have fireworks, they have M-80’s. I’ll write an entry on getting sick, so fear not!

Jain temple in Ranakpur

With the help of Meredith, I managed to stand up and get dressed, eat toast, and sit in the car for the entire day on the way to Udaipur. We stopped at an awesome Jain temple, which has 1444 columns in it, all of them unique.
At breakfast, we met Karim, an Iraqi who is doing his Ph.D. in Delhi. He had a long discussion with us about what Americans thought of Iraq, and asked us to pose with him in a picture, and then got our contact information so that we could have dinner in Udaipur. The whole time I tried to keep my toast down and not faint. Being sick sucks.
Jainism is a nonviolent religion that branched out of Hinduism—-the most devout Jains will put a cloth over their mouth and sweep the ground in front of them so as to not kill insects.
I used my first squat toilet at the temple. Indian toilets are basically a hole in the ground (with plumbing). The best feature - no toilet paper. You pour water into a bucket so that you can pour it after your hand after you clean yourself. A rule of thumb: clean with your left hand, eat and shake hands with your right. To clear up any mental images you are forming right now, realize that we knew this, and brought toilet paper and purell with us.
We stopped at a buffet restaurant (note: this is not common, it’s a tourist trap). The food was apparently good, but I sat in the car and ate toast.
The trip from the restaurant to Udaipur was through a nature preserve in the mountains, and was very enjoyable and beautiful.

Udaipur

Lacking sustenance, I finally learned about fruit juice. For a day, I enjoyed toast and mixed fruit in a juice box. It was like mana Nirvana.
Udaipur has an even nicer lake palace than Jaipur. Sorry Jaipur.
We went to Jagadish temple, which is dedicated to Vishnu, one of the three (of thousands/millions) major dieties in Hinduism. We were tricked into our first guide here, but he was very good, so we didn’t mind. We learned a bit of trivia about Hindusim, including a very sketchy reason for why there are so few cats (our guide said that since they are near the bottom of the reincarnation hierarchy, the are bad luck, and are thrown in the forest—-REALLY!?!?). Neat acronym: GOD - Generator (Brahma), Observer (Vishnu, who preserves), Destroyer (Shiva, who transforms/reincarnates). Ganesha is the elephant god (son of Shiva and Parvati), whose raised trunk represents good luck and welcomes you. He travels on a mouse - how could you not love that?
The city palace was really interesting. We got a guide there because it was cheaper than an audio guide. Our guide has an amazing quaf and hairdye job. He also invited us to dinner at his place. We were almost game, but then Saje snapped us back into reality, and we decied to avoid being kidnapped in exchange for a home-cooked meal. We saw Karim, our Iraqi friend here, who promised to contact us for dinner that night. After more pictures with him, we went our separate ways.
We hung out in a park overlooking the city, where “necking amongst teenagers” is common, according to Lonely Planet’s book. We didn’t see necking, but we did see some hand-holding, got some great views of the lake palace, and found a few awesome-o birds!
We went to another park where we spotted Karim again, but felt that it would be too sketchy to make conversation again, so we avoided him like 13-year-olds.
After some mishaps, I decided to give antibiotics a shot. Zithromax destroyed the problem overnight, and I was not only completely fixed up, but also felt invincible with my new-found cure. This opened up my palate to even dirtier and sketchier establishments, which improved my food street-cred, I hope.
A.J. and I ventured (not aimlessly!) outside at night to look for a cybercafe. After walking for about 3 km, we gave up and turned around. Being nervous about the dark, I decided to walk behind some women, as they seemed unthreatening. Luckily, A.J. chided me for being a moron. In the US, it would be bad to follow a woman at night—-in India, you might get a punch in the face by her relative:).
Before leaving Udaipur, we drove into some very pretty hills surrounding it looking for a temple, but finding it was closed, so we went to one of the many other temples in the area. It was a much smaller Jain temple, and one of the priests showed us around silently before going back to his duties and letting us be. Saje showed us some nice views and gave us a lesson - “naga” in Hindi means “snake.”
Saying goodbye to Saje (for now), we headed to our first (overnight) train from Udaipur to Delhi. Woohoo! More on the good and bad sides of train travel in its own posting.

Youtube is (one part of) the next Google

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:52:31 -0500

This article in the NYT, inspired in part by This blog post by Alex Iskold made me think about the future of search.

Both pieces speak for a growing group of children that increasingly depend on video, not text, for their information consumption. Neither piece cites studies for this, but there is no doubt that video will play an important role in the future of learning/entertainment.

Now that Youtube is a larger search engine than Yahoo!, which was previously second to Google, an extreme question would be to ask if Youtube will one day overtake Google. I can think of two reasons for this offhand:

In addition to informational queries, youtube would be a good place to can also find entertainment. A Google search might not be an immediate place to look for entertainment, but Youtube or Hulu might be a decent places to start.
Until text extraction from audio becomes more prevalent, search engines won’t be the place to find video/audio content, whereas sites such as youtube can get around that problem by using tagging and other user-generated content to describe items people might search for.

Given these two (non-exhaustive) points, does it stand to reason that Youtube will eat its parent Google? Probably not. What’s more likely is something Google predicted a while back: search won’t stop with webpages. They created Universal Search on the premise that you should be able to query one location (using text) and find results that combine webpages, news, video, audio, and any other content that spikes some sensory function.

So why is Youtube still number 2, rather than Google getting all of Youtube’s searches? Some ideas:

Branding. Especially if you’re an impressionable first-timer, you might return to “that video site” to find more videos.
No Silver Bullet. This one is good for computer science researchers. Universal Search is a product, but the problem it’s trying to solve is far from solved. On the search side, it’s a hard problem to figure out how to mix various media. On the video side, it might still be too expensive to do text extraction and full indexing on all text in every video/audio piece on the web. But that’s not more than a year or two away, if that. Every search engine on the winning side of the search engine battle has enough idle CPUs to solve that problem:).
Generic Search is Hard. Universal Search attempts to solve the diverse media combination problem. More fundamentally, even if that problem was solved, it would still be harder for Google to rank video results (from the entire web) based purely on crawled content than it would be for Youtube to rank videos based on access rates, structured metadata describing videos, and content extracted from less diverse video formats.

In the end, Branding might be king, and the technical details won’t matter. If that’s the case, then Google and Youtube will live on their own islands, neither harming the other. The more interesting case would be if some search engine managed to combine media results as in Universal Search, and convinced users that this is the better alternative. Thoughts?

In Jodhpur: a marketplace, a mindgame, and some biscuits

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:13:39 -0500

When we got to Jodhpur, we had two hours before it got dark. The RTDC (Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation) itinerary suggested spending a bit of time at the Sojati gate and Clocktower, near an open-air marketplace. Saje (our driver) doesn’t know Jodhpur well, and met a guide at a restaurant, but we declined the extra fee since we didn’t know if the guy was good or had credentials, and Saje couldn’t explain to us how he knew the guide would be good. We payed for it with the following experience, which should be better now that we’ve been explicit with Saje as to the things we want to see on the map, and the order we want to see them in.

The Sojati gate has an open air marketplace next to it, and saying “Sajati Gate” in an americanized accent wasn’t getting through to Saje, so he kept going “Ah…” without affirming our destination. We suggested he ask for directions to the open air marketplace, which he took to mean we wanted to go shopping, at which point we spent an hour driving around going to different places where he’d get commission, and him being really tired from the long ride earlier in the day and feeling lost. Finally, someone told him to go to the clocktower (which I excitedly agreed with), and we headed toward it. As an aside, people are ALWAYS happy to give you directions, even if you are a driver and they are your competitors on autorickshaws.

After the hour of bungling, we made it to the open-air market, and I was pretty cranky since I had no intention of any more commercial spending in India except for restaurants and historical/art sites. It turns out A.J. and Meredith were pretty cranky, too, and we all walked around being pissy at one another in a very polite “no, it’s my fault, but why did you say market if you didn’t want to go to a market” sort of grammatical construction. We finally decided to get out of the lack of the carbon monoxide and into a shop. A.J. insisted it would be rude to not come back with something after putting Saje through the driving ordeal to get here, but everything in the store (which had EVERYTHING in it, and was refreshing because it wasn’t a tourist trap, so we weren’t mobbed as rich white people) was uninteresting. Finally, we spotted some crackers, and Meredith and I recognized some Parle-G’s (the most amazing name ever) which we’ve had before and enjoyed. At 15 Rs (30 cents) for more than we will ever eat, we wanted to get those so Saje would be satisfied.

And that’s where the fuck-fest of a story begins. I reached into a glass case to grab a package, and a random guy walked up to us and said he could help us with our purchase, grabbed a package, and walked over to one counter (the counter of the guy selling food in the larger clothing store). The guy started to ring it up, but I got annoyed at the lack of help, so I got another package and went to buy it myself, since I didn’t need any help. The “assistant” looked confused, and said he was helping me. He then rang up the purchase, and asked me for money. I asked him to give me the package first, so he walked me over to another counter with a guy who put the package in a bag behind a counter. Our assistant asked us for the money again, and I said no again. He seemed annoyed, and walked back over to the cracker counter. He got a receipt from the cracker guy, and asked for the money again, so I told my homeboys that we were leaving the store, and we walked out. The guy came after me, walked me over to the bag counter, and gave me the bag. We walked back to the cracker counter, and I gave him 20 Rs to give to the cracker guy. I got my change back, checked the bag to make sure the crackers were still there, and walked out with the guy doing what I can only imagine as his version of flipping me off.

We had our crackers, and the whole experience lightened the mood once we laughed it off. We came back to the car with an unnecessarily large shopping bag, which seemed not to matter to Saje anyway, came home, had some buscuits and a light dinner, and enjoyed ourselves!

Jaipur to Jodhpur by way of Ajmer Jain Temple

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:10:17 -0500

(Note: we spent a day in Jaipur as well, but I’ll document that in a big summary of the entire trip)

We’re now driving from Jaipur to Jodhpur on NH-8, a one-lane (in each direction) highway with no divider. This means that every minute or so, Saje passes a bunch of slower trucks, and the rest of the time, he is riding both lanes to see oncoming traffic so that he can judge his next maneuver at 100-120km/h.

The occasional cow sits in the middle of the road (or worse yet walks around), but patience is high!

One interesting item of note was a sign for an all-women’s college of engineering in Rajasthan. Rock!

We just reached a car accident between two vans. Everyone (not us, but our driver for example) that passed by got out of their cars to help. Within a minute or two, they flipped a van back over (with people inside it), and cleared the road so traffic could pass. Two ambulances showed up a minute later, which I did not expect. It looks like everyone is in relatively good shape.

We next drove through “Marble City,” where even the hospital is named “Marble City Hospital.” Every shop (open-air lot) is a marble shop, wherfe you can buy mostly unfinished 1mx1mx3m blocks of marble. Saje tells us that the marble is Makrana marble, from a quary 300 km away.

This trip reminds me a lot of Dave and my trip to the southwest. Specifically, the road, houses, establishments, and surroundings look like Navajo country in Arizona. There is flat desert with mountainous formations in the distance. You can see houses far from the road, and every few kilometers, you hit a town that stretches for a while.

There is a steady stream of army trucks traveling in our direction. Saje explains that we are 400 km from the Pakistani border, and while nothing bad is forseen, there is some army buildup on both sides of the border. Our conversation with him was funny. After he explained the trucks, we asked him if anything bad was brewing, and he said no. We then got into an awkward (mostly one-way) conversation with us describing how we’re supposed to read the news daily, but don’t have access to it, and don’t know if anything of note has happened recently, to which Saje explained that the Mumbai attacks (now clearly not news more than a month later) are to blame for the buildup.

Along the way, we stopped at the the Jain temple (red temple) in Ajmer. We weren’t allowed into the temple proper, but we went to an attachment that had a really neat display of the story of Jainism’s religious history. The display was probably in a room of size 30mx20m that took up three stories. It showed the mountain that Jainism started at with its first of 24 prophets, and 13 planets, whose significance I don’t quite understand. A local “artist” showed us around for free, claiming 22 members of his family (starting with his grandfather’s father) took 30 years to create the display. I believe it took someone 30 years, even if it wasn’t his family:). Anyway - the display was amazing - it used 500 kg of gold to coat the scene and thousands of detailed figurines. There were many thousands of emeralds, and the walls were painted with stone/vegetable colors, which the artist claimed don’t fade at all. As with most monuments, the walls (on the outside of the display, which was protected) were completely trashed - etched with (mostly english) grafiti that destroyed the mood a bit. For a final surprise, the artist magically had a business inside the temple, where we were his “guests” and he showed us pictures of him being an artist, gave us tea, and then sold us some very nice paintings. We chose to visit this temple, so we didn’t feel screwed, but it was very clear that our driver got a cut from the deal.

We stopped for Saje to take a break from the long ride, and saw a few camels, a peacock, and some green trees at the side of the road.

Also along the way, we stopped at an amazing restaurant, which we all agreed had the most spectacular food thus far. We had Paneer Paratha (bread stuffed with cheese), Kaji Kowa (the best dish), Paneer Bhuti (also delicious, but we don’t know what was in it either:)), and Kashmiri Briyani. The food came to 240 Rs (about $5) for the three of us, which should scare you, since this is the exact type of highwayside cafe that destroys travelers with horrible sickness.

Rajasthani Forts

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:04:00 -0500

I wanted to condense everything about forts/rulers in Rajasthan that I can remember into one entry because it would get repetitive after the third city.

Rajasthan is to the west of Delhi - the farther west you go, the more desert-like it gets, but we didn’t go as far west as Jaisalmer, which is in the desert. The state of Rajasthan was originally ruled in sections by various Rajas (leaders) and Ranas (warriors). A Maharaja (and maharana) is like a king of a region (maha means something like “first”).

The Mughals made attempts to invade Rajasthan and merge rulers, but none worked until Akbar realized that he should just leave the maharajas in charge of their kingdoms and marry his blood line into theirs that there was success. Jaipur and Jodhpur were OK with this, and thus their mahaRAJAs co-existed mostly peacefully with the mughal rule. Udaipur was not cool with this, and its mahaRANA (get it, warrior king?) declared war with the Mughals, and made life harder for the Mughals until they eventually won anyway.

The time periods we saw forts built were mostly 14-1600’s. Keep in mind that modern day Rajas/Ranas still exist, but their post is ceremonial. Once India achieved statehood in 1948, the rulers lost their ruling powers, and settled into ceremonial rolls, setting up trusts to maintain their forts and other historical facilities in their city. That didn’t stop them from owning large hotel chains like the current Raja of Jodhpur, so they aren’t poor for it, just politically powerless.

Back to forts. A fort would generally project the king, not the kingdom. There were walls surrounding cities up to 40 ft. high, but the fort walls just protected the king (this is obviously an overgeneralization). In as generic a way as possible, a fort contains one or more palaces. A palace may be exactly what you imagine, or it may be smaller - the smaller a palace is, the more of them there are in the fort. For example, Jaipur’s Amber Fort contains a palace for each season (including monsoon) to handle various climates, but they are smaller than Jodhpur’s single massive palace.

More important than where the king stays is how many queens, or Ranis he has. There is again a Maharani, or “first” queen, but the numbers we heard went all the way to 16 queens for a king. The queens had a 16-or-so-step process for getting ready each day, for which they would have tens of women to assist them. Finally, the queens were protected by Eunichs, since they weren’t allowed to interact with men. In Jodhpur, they were so serious about this, that when a queen went to England in a covered Rolls Royce and a tabloid caught a picture of her bare ankle while she tried to get in the car from her covered human-carried carriage, the royal family bought every copy of the published tabloid to avoid it getting back to India.

The forts in their palaces have several features:

The entertainment room, where music might play while the king/queen enjoy.
A similarly-purposed entertainment courtyard, where dancers might come.
A room that is not convincingly romantic that the king and queen would make babies in.
A meeting room for royal family to meet (including lesser Rajas) to discuss all things ruler- and state-like, including war and taxes.

Details on individual forts will come later.