India – a whole new word?

So, I’m in India. Delhi, even.

I arrived @ 5.30am this morning, ended up spending about 3 hours waiting until it was a godly hour to approach the YMCA (where I’m staying in Delhi) and currently it’s 4.43pm.

I feel very white. Now, I’ve always been white. Whiter than most. In face chances are, we’ve had a whiteness competition together at some point and I’ve won. But, it’s just weird being called ‘Sir’ by everyone. Also whilst I’m here, I think I’ve flown up the the socio-economic ladder and am now closer to the top. And that’s weird too, because I’ve been been asked for money before, but I don’t think I’ve actually been properly begged before. On my way from the airport to the hostel, there was a little Indian girl who made eye contact with me and ran over to the car where she started doing backward sommersaults. I didn’t have any money to give her (the smallest note I had was 1000 $RS, so she just kept tapping on the window, speaking very quickly and desperately in Hindi and making eating motions. I said sorry, and then had to stare straight ahead because there was nothing else I could say.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow when I start travelling with other Quakers and where I don’t have to be the person who decides where to go  – I’ve established quite effectively that I don’t really like travelling by myself. I tend to get nervous, simply becuse I have no idea what’s happening. That’s how I ended up in a random Indian tourist provider (I have no idea if they were legitimate or not) and basically had to tell them that I wasn’t interested in travelling around India. Nobody was mean, but I think that me travelling by myself, makes me uber paranoid and am half-expecting the tuk-tuks to deposit me in another dimension.  

I hope tomorrow has more awesome.

 

 

 

Right now, I’m just trying to work out how to cross the road.

Difficulty relating?

I just found the headline ‘Sarah Palin and Princess Diana are cousins, genealogists reveal’ to be one of the most amusingly useless tidbits of information.

Part of me suspects that it was either ancestry.com aiming to get free publicity or else someone from the McCain/Palin camp is getting pretty desperate in trying to find anything that will change people’s view of her. Though Sarah Palin being a princess ties in nicely with Matt Damon’s assertion that this vice-presidency is akin to a Disney movie rags-to-riches story come wrong.

Boo.

I find it really curious how quickly those comments appear on the American political videos. It’s probably close to about 1 per second. It’s certainly too fast to maintain any semblence of dialogue with each other. The internet has the ability to foster online discussions. Youtube isn’t that place.

It does however have a cat in a bottle.

AAA+++ Embarrassment

I like Trademe.

I get about 12 emails a day from Trademe telling me about new auctions matching my saved searches.

I’ve even started using it for buying clothes.

I was quite happy when I won a bunch of auctions for some cool clothes – a pair of jeans, a (manly) cardigan and a proper white business shirt.

I decided I’d save on postage and pick them up.

I met the guy and found out that I knew who he was.

I now own clothes which were considered not cool enough for him and now I’m not sure whether I should wear them outside in case I bump into him and he asks me about his pants.

I will now insist on having everything posted to me.

How embarrassment.

Children, Animals & Lolly Scrambles

The past few days have been relatively whirlwindish.

The plus side is that when people ask me what I did over the weekend, I’ll have a good answer.

The downside is that I’ve had to get a blog to write about it.

My partners sisters are staying with us at the moment, so we’ve been tourists over the last few days which doesn’t normally happen and it’s been fascinating to go to places and watch how the ‘youth’ interact with one another.

Just writing that sentence makes me feel old.

Rainbow’s End.

I remember Rainbow’s End as a mecca of theme park amazingness. During story time at primary school, I would write about how I had visited and been on the bumper boats and roller coaster. Even though I never had.

Now, Rainbows End is a curious place, where the time goes really quickly because you’re constantly standing in line. It was in one of these lines where I was reminded the danger of having large roving death squads of tweens. In the line for the fear fall (that’s right, I went twice), there were a group of four Polynesian kids trying to get the attention of a group of Fijian Indian girls in front of them.

These are some outtakes:

“Hey you! Girls!”

“Yeah?”

“Have youse got boyfriends?”

“Yeah, my boyfriend’s name is Liam”

“Haha, shame, Liam doesn’t like you”

“Then why is he txting me right now?”

Ouch. Upon being shot down:

“Shame, I don’t like Indian girls anyway, because they smell like curry”

I’m yet to find an Indian that smells like curry, and even if I did I think that’d make them much more awesome, because curry itself is quite appealing.

I also witnessed a Lolly Scramble. There is nothing quite as frightening as the mind-control exhibited by lollies. The clowns had buckets of lollies and got the kids chanting the magic word ‘lollies, lollies!’ Then the lollies were thrown into the air, and wee tykes started scrabbling on the concrete, until all the lollies were accounted for. The winners were mostly big children and those kids that are willing to eat things off the ground. Heh, I think that’s a good metaphor for life.

Small things of interest – the Mad Butcher supporting the SPCA.

That pesky problem for the SPCA about where to put the old animals is finally settled.

And, also I thought this was quite funny from the Auckland Zoo because I don’t hear much about the rainforest on Newstalk ZB.

And finally, zoo has bunnies.