Lew Perin’s thread starting 2022-12-01 12:14:43

Our India trip has begun.

We flew overnight, and now we’re in the Milano airport briefly, I hope.

The espresso at the Motta outpost is meh: well-made, I think, but the beans could be better?

2022-12-01 12:14:43 babelcarp

It’s the wee hours of the third calendar day of our trip. Now in the Dubai airport. Ready for the last leg: to Kolkata.

Relative’s duty-free item in hand.

DXB has changed a lot in 15 years. For one thing, the men’s room I used has no squats. (Not that there were no western toilets last time.)

2022-12-01 20:52:15 babelcarp

So we are indeed in Kolkata now.

(Or is it still Calcutta, as many locals still insist? And not just old people? I’d like to figure out who’s on each side.🤔)

Good news: at least in our relatives’ apartment, the crows of the city are flourishing.

2022-12-02 09:28:12 babelcarp

My least favorite thing so far is having to fear the dengue virus. (Malaria is no picnic, but there is prophylaxis, and we’re using it.)

The guy we came here to see get married had a horrible bout of dengue as a teenager.

Sleeping under a mosquito net means keeping hands and feet from touching the net, because the bugs are happy to bite through holes in the net. It’s no fun if you get up in the middle of the night to pee, because the netting is tucked under the mattress.

2022-12-03 13:48:05 babelcarp

The editorial page of the Times of India is like the Washington Post’s…and different.

2022-12-04 02:58:26 babelcarp

This guy will grind sugar cane into juice for you using a hand-cranked machine.

2022-12-04 07:15:01 babelcarp

This is the police station for our relatives’ neighborhood.

2022-12-04 07:20:54 babelcarp

The people who built this wall respected a tree enough to put a notch in the wall to accommodate it. Then someone came along and nailed a poster to the tree.😵‍💫

2022-12-04 10:50:17 babelcarp

On a back street there’s a pair of trees growing together, and someone installed a small shrine at the base.

2022-12-04 10:57:50 babelcarp

Makaibari is a Darjeeling tea garden that, at least in the West, is heard about less these days than it used to be.

They have an ad in the Times of India that mentions something called Roasted Darjeeling. What could that be, something like Lapsang Souchong?

Apparently it is, plus they found a use for the déclassé monsoon flush: https://lifestyle.livemint.com/food/drink/why-you-should-give-roasted-darjeeling-tea-a-try-111630594972982.html

@tea #tea

2022-12-04 11:19:41 babelcarp

Back in NYC I basically never eat bananas—they’re bland and mushy, and life is short.

Here in Kolkata they’re very very different: the sweetness is balanced by a slight tartness, and the texture is much denser, resisting your teeth like al dente noodles. :awesome:

Maybe it’s a different cultivar here, but I think there’s something to be said for fruit that doesn’t need to travel far.

2022-12-05 02:41:55 babelcarp

Big news in Kolkata: they’re busting all the hundreds of hookah bars in town for…violating the law that all tobacco must be labeled with a health warning!

Why? What I hear is, this is a lazy way of suppressing ganja use.

Good luck with that, authorities!

2022-12-05 04:57:05 babelcarp

We had a blissful afternoon today with our Darjeeling planter friend SMC and his wife Gaytri, drinking two of his teas and a Bermiok Sikkim 2nd flush I brought. That plus talking about life, the universe and everything.

2022-12-05 15:05:12 babelcarp

The tap water in Calcutta isn’t so great: way too much iron, and sometimes arsenic.😬

So all the water we drink in this apartment goes through a filter: unfortunately a reverse osmosis unit that tries to remove *all* ions.

That’s why the tea we make here doesn’t taste as good as at home. I should’ve brought some of my poor-man’s-Volvic powder: https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/fakemineralwater.html

It might be a little strange bringing that through Customs, though.

@tea #tea

2022-12-05 16:01:25 babelcarp

I don’t know this for a fact, but considering that Kolkata has police stations like this

https://social.tchncs.de/@babelcarp/109454193784966907

then maybe the cops haven’t deployed killer robots and widespread facial recognition surveillance?🤔

2022-12-06 03:47:09 babelcarp

Today was the first day of the wedding we came to Kolkata to celebrate.

The order of the day was the bridegroom’s last lunch before the marriage ceremony, and the relatives from his side, including us, were there.

The lunch (aiburobhat) was held on the roof of his building, and stairways all the way up were decorated with painted and live flowers.

2022-12-06 12:22:00 babelcarp

The groom was the first to eat, facing a table full of symbolic foods (including the head and tail of a fish) as well as a flame.

(I anonymized him so as not to blast his face all over the Internet.)

2022-12-06 13:59:38 babelcarp

This evening, sitting with another batch of our Calcutta relatives, I got into a long conversation about tea and—especially—water with a guy who fifteen years ago was a thirteen-year-old kid.

Now he’s a process control engineer at a water bottling plant, and his job is entirely about total dissolved solids. I thought maybe he could tell me something about Indian waters that would be helpful to my fake mineral water project.

@tea #tea

2022-12-06 15:24:28 babelcarp

No such luck!

Papai told me that Indian bottled water companies are constantly changing their mineral content to get new flavor profiles their marketing departments think will appeal to consumers.

Indian bottled water, it seems, is a kind of fashion industry.🤨

@tea #tea

2022-12-06 15:29:02 babelcarp

I keep hearing that Indian soccer fans are divided between Braziliacs and Argentiniasts, but here in Kolkata all I’m seeing is Brazolatry.

2022-12-06 15:35:49 babelcarp

We got to Calcutta Friday, but it’s only today that we got our breakfast practice working to our satisfaction.

Seen here are so-called multigrain toast, uncooked paneer (which we’ve been castigated for), chana, banana, and Rohini Red Thunder tea. :awesome:

@tea #tea

2022-12-07 03:33:04 babelcarp

2022-12-08 05:05:53 babelcarp

In sooty, humid Calcutta, external paint on buildings doesn’t last long.

2022-12-08 05:11:56 babelcarp

See the guy plastering on the fourth floor standing on nothing more than a stick of bamboo?

To a New Yorker accustomed to metal pipe scaffolding and sturdy sidewalk sheds that persist for months or years, it’s startling that even big construction projects in Calcutta use bamboo scaffolding lashed together with rope.

I heard they passed a law requiring safety harnesses for workers, but obviously enforcement isn’t exactly muscular.

2022-12-08 05:21:36 babelcarp

Last night was the actual wedding part of the 4-day wedding sequence.

Dress code was traditional Indian, and for me that meant a kurta (panjabi) over a dhoti.

Sorry, but this anonymized photo of me is the only image of the event you’ll see, because in this costume there wasn’t a pocket that would support a phone.

I have to say, after so many years of carrying a smartphone, I felt kinda naked.😬

2022-12-08 05:40:26 babelcarp

I’ve heard there are 40K weddings happening in Kolkata in a 2-month interval around now, due to a covid backlog and astrological strictures deprecating the rest of the year.

The wedding venue was certainly jumping, but the Hindu priests dawdled—that’s my word, obviously—for hours awaiting the most auspicious hour for the ceremony. They sat around on the platform, occasionally shifting one ritual object or another from place to place.

2022-12-08 05:48:52 babelcarp

This long lull was actually okay for us guests: lots of chatting with congenial people plus dipping into the lavish buffet.

But the bride and groom had to sit still in their extremely fancy costumes in separate rooms, maintaining the ritual fiction that they were about to behold each other for the first time.🙃

The record will show they’ve been an item for years, actually.

2022-12-08 05:54:11 babelcarp

Here’s the embarrassing part.

Spouse and I had forgotten to ask for the key to the front door to the relatives’ apartment where we’re staying, and blasting them out of bed in the middle of the night would’ve been more than we could get away with with them.

So did we witness the actual wedding ceremony? Technically, no.

2022-12-08 06:02:26 babelcarp

So speaking of the 40,000 weddings happening in Calcutta this season, of course there’s a whole industry supporting all that activity, and sometimes you glimpse it just walking around.

Here, around the corner from where we’re staying, a worker installs blossoms in a big floral panel.

2022-12-09 03:50:16 babelcarp

In the wedding we came to Kolkata for, last night was less ritualized.

We met on the roof of the groom’s family’s house as on the first day and toasted the newlyweds. From then on the agenda was hanging out, eating terrific food, and dancing to a playlist on somebody’s phone piped into the PA system.

At one point a couple of small boys had a flower fight using “ammunition” drawn from a floral display put on the floor the first day. :awesome:

2022-12-09 04:01:44 babelcarp

The playlist had Bollywood songs everyone but Spouse and me knew the lyrics to.

It also had American pop music from the 50s through the 70s. The sensibility that picked those songs was opaque to me, but anyone who chooses “Hit the road, Jack” by Ray Charles and the Raelettes can’t be all bad.

The DJ had a habit of skipping from the middle of an American song to the next item: pretty jarring when you’re dancing.

2022-12-09 04:09:33 babelcarp

Last night we did indeed have the key to the front door, so it was pretty late when we went home. The side streets were quiet for the most part, but occasionally you’d come upon another wedding!

2022-12-09 04:11:42 babelcarp

For anyone who is familiar with bills for medical services in the USA, this ad in today’s Times of India is startling. An MRI scan during busy hours, the most expensive service on offer here, is about $43!

2022-12-09 05:11:07 babelcarp

We’re in the last day of the wedding.

At lunchtime there was the Boubhat ritual, marking—at least in the old days—the bride’s entry into the patrilineal household. For the first time, she makes and serves a meal.

Nowadays? Maybe she didn’t make the food she serves her husband and inlaws? In any case, the foods all have ritual meanings.

2022-12-09 11:42:24 babelcarp

That done, we guests got to dig into another fabulous Bengali meal.

I was surprised to see the caterers using a Chinese wok to fry fish, but a fellow guest said I shouldn’t be—it’s standard procedure around here.

2022-12-09 11:48:02 babelcarp

Overnight I was thinking about the fact that the guests all knew the Hindi lyrics to those Bollywood songs last night. I mean, Hindi isn’t necessarily their native language.

A guest today clued me in today. Non-native Hindi speakers from northern India speak languages close enough to Hindi that it isn’t so hard to follow the lyrics.

Southern, though? It’s more like a Spaniard trying to speak Hungarian. So maybe they sing along phonetically without really understanding the lyrics.🙃

2022-12-09 11:56:07 babelcarp

Spend some time moving around Kolkata and you start to notice blue-and-white stripes on fences, walks, and various street furniture all over the city.

What’s up with that? What I hear is, those are the colors of the Trinamool Congress, the political party that has dominated West Bengal for decades.

And apparently Trinamool adopted those colors to put voters in mind of Mother Teresa. Any similarity to the Argentine national team is coincidental.

2022-12-09 13:01:21 babelcarp

I love the way Indian commercial vehicles are decorated with hand-painted designs. Sometimes I think I prefer subtler embellishments like those on this truck rather than decorations with all the colors of the rainbow.

2022-12-09 13:12:20 babelcarp

In India the safety of drinking water is something you can’t take for granted, so lots of people drink bottled water.

But if you buy a bottle of water, how do you know it’s authentic, rather than having been refilled with sketchy water? (I once saw bottles being refilled from a hose on the track in the Siliguri train station.)

This water company thinks it has a solution.

2022-12-10 03:56:29 babelcarp

These are the wildlife sounds we heard from a small stand of trees near where we’re staying in Kolkata. The percussive clicks are from a creature that resembles a squirrel. And there’s some traffic noise. The rest? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2022-12-10 04:02:33 babelcarp

Before Trinamool—remember, blue and white?—took control of West Bengal, a communist coalition ruled the state Kolkata belongs to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Front_(West_Bengal)

Moving around the city, I can see their current presence is just a shadow of what it once was, but occasionally you see their emblem.

And a few days ago, I saw a procession of maybe ten elderly people shouldering the hammer and sickle flag.

2022-12-10 08:45:49 babelcarp

I *think* this is a recording studio. But in any case, someone in Calcutta is waving their freak flag high.

2022-12-10 11:28:45 babelcarp

It’s been five days since I posted, not because there’s been nothing to mention but because I haven’t had wifi in the Nilgiris or on the way there and back.

2022-12-16 08:24:49 babelcarp

Sunday was a travel day. We went there to enjoy the scenery of the Nilgiri hills while checking out an experimental factory that’s trying to improve the quality of the tea made in the region: https://www.teastudio.info/post/evolution-of-tea-machinery

We got up before dawn to get to the Kolkata airport in time for the flight to Chennai, connecting in the afternoon to Coimbatore and then by car to the hills.

#tea @tea

2022-12-16 08:26:48 babelcarp

But at the Kolkata airport something maddening happened. With my stuff in trays going down to the x-ray machine, I waited in line to have my person scanned. Unlike other airports, the Calcutta’s human scanning happens far from the x-ray line, so I couldn’t check visually on the progress of my stuff.

The human-scanning guy, when I reached him, made me put my wallet in its own tray and send it toward the x-ray machine before my body could be certified as harmless to Indian aviation.

2022-12-16 08:28:11 babelcarp

When I finally reached the place to collect my stuff, the wallet sat in its own tray as expected. But it wasn’t alone: 4 or 5 500-rupee notes lay scattered around it.

So who went through my wallet and what did they take? No cards were taken, and the $100 bills were all there, so it could’ve been much worse.

2022-12-16 08:31:31 babelcarp

I went to the camo-clad functionary at the end of the x-ray line and complained to him. He insisted the bills must’ve somehow fluttered out of the wallet under their own power.

I started yelling that I don’t believe in ghosts. So he called his colleagues, who supposedly reviewed the security camera footage and reported that there was nothing to see.

I screamed that that only showed that their camera didn’t cover all the territory it should.

2022-12-16 08:33:08 babelcarp

I went through two higher levels of officialdom, eventually reaching a suave guy who must buy his clothes at some more upscale version of Fabindia.

(We had shown up at the airport very early out of, well, a different kind of paranoia.l: fear of missing our flight.)

Long story short: no satisfaction from the authorities and no certainty while still in the airport about how many 500-rupee bills had flown away. Mr. Soigné said they’d text me if anything turned up.😬

2022-12-16 08:38:59 babelcarp

Much later, when we got to our cottage in the Nilgiris, I was able to figure out how much we had lost: about 20,000 rupees.

We had a stack of 500-rupee notes as our payment medium (500 rupees ~= $6.) That morning I’d divided it between my wallet (easy access) and money belt (pain-in-the-ass safety.) But I hadn’t noted how many bills had gone into each tranche, which is why I didn’t know the extent of the damage till evening.

2022-12-16 08:48:03 babelcarp

My guess is that the malefactor wasn’t executing a well-practiced routine, rather taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity in a hasty, sloppy way. A slick thief wouldn’t have left those stray bills in the tray.

2022-12-16 08:51:42 babelcarp

Obviously this couldn’t have happened had I not made a dumb mistake, and for the rest of my life I’ll always put my wallet into my luggage before submitting to an airport scan.

So ends this tale of woe.

2022-12-16 09:41:43 babelcarp

The Nilgiris are insanely beautiful mountains. I don’t know why people call them hills, unless it’s just that in a country that has the Himalayas, standards for mountainhood are high.

And part of the beauty is that tea is everywhere, even more so than in Darjeeling. There are big plantations and there are countless tiny plots, mostly tilled by tribal people: the bottom of the Indian hierarchy.

Here’s tea growing next to our cottage.

#tea @tea

2022-12-16 09:50:43 babelcarp

One thing I wish I’d learned during the Nilgiri trip is why so many tea fields are pruned to knee height rather than the waist height I’ve seen elsewhere. Why would you want to stoop in order to pluck?

Actually “plucking” isn’t a good description for what mostly goes on in the Nilgiris: they typically use shears to decapitate a stem so the only machinery capable of processing it is CTC hardware.

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 10:01:37 babelcarp

@tea Judging by my experience In Nilgiri restaurants and tea stalls over 3 days, most Nilgiri CTC tea is dreck, suitable only for milk tea ir maybe paint stripping.

But let’s not dwell on that, let’s talk about Tea Studio, which was established to set a standard for what Nilgiri tea can be.

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 10:07:36 babelcarp

Tea Studio was founded by Indi Khanna, 45-plus-year tea industry veteran in collaboration with Kevin Gascoyne of Maison Camellia Sinensis (thanks, Kevin, for the introduction!) It’s run by Indi’s daughter Muskan.

It was great establishing a friendship with Indi and Muskan. Spouse and I can’t wait to show them some NYC hospitality.

#tea @tea

2022-12-16 10:19:04 babelcarp

Tea Studio is technically a (very small) bought-leaf factory. The leaf it buys comes from (so far) five tribal smallholders willing to put in the work necessary to grow and pluck leaf up to TS standards.

The picture here shows the narrow administrative/tasting floor suspended over the factory floor.

The factory floor is the cleanest I’ve ever seen. To enter it, you have to mask up and put on a hairnet. I thought of hairs in bingcha as I prepped.🤨

#tea @tea

2022-12-16 10:34:32 babelcarp

To prevent your feet from tracking dirt into the factory floor, before admittance you’re required to put each of your shod feet onto a strange device that coats them in Saran Wrap. You have to pull really hard to get your foot out!

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 10:44:41 babelcarp

The workers on the factory floor, including the assistant manager, are all tribal women.

The growers they buy from are incentivized by the alternative: Indi says fresh leaf prices in Nilgiri shlock tea bought-leaf factories range around R15/kg. That’s less than 25 cents!

To give you an idea of how poor some—not all—tribal people can be, here’s a picture of an isolated hut .

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 11:00:48 babelcarp

(We interrupt this Nilgiri episode to tell you there’s gonna be a party tonight across the way here in Kolkata.)

2022-12-16 11:58:47 babelcarp

Tea Studio is how small? They can only make 100kg of finished tea a day.

They don’t sell direct to the consumer, by the way. I’ve seen their tea sold by Maison Camellia Sinensis, but there are other vendors who’ve sold their stuff too.

2022-12-16 12:19:54 babelcarp

Here’s the tasting table on the second floor of Tea Studio.

2022-12-16 12:55:22 babelcarp

Tea Studio sources its equipment mostly from China, because that’s where the most advanced stuff is made.

Here in action is a machine that does what the Chinese call killgreen: https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=shaqing&define=1

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 13:06:52 babelcarp

This is a machine used to wok-fire longjing (obviously not the extremely expensive stuff there’s 100% hand made): https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=longjing&define=1

2022-12-16 13:20:46 babelcarp

And here’s a Chinese version of the sine qua non of Indian orthodox tea manufacture, the rolling table.

I love that it divides the circle in three.

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 13:28:08 babelcarp

This object isn’t in the factory, it’s in a place if pride in Indi Khanna’s home. It’s a *functioning* antique Chinese hand-powered wooden rolling table.

I wonder how long the ridges would last in daily use and how to replace them.

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 13:37:14 babelcarp

The sad thing about our visit to Tea Studio is, we didn’t get to see the factory in full production. The reason is that it rained in the Nilgiris every day all week long. You can’t make decent tea starting with wet leaves.

&tea #tea

2022-12-16 14:23:04 babelcarp

Our astute drver took us to a number of places of interest.

Due to how rarely the clouds parted, the scenic lookouts were pretty much a washout. Was this the place from where you could see both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka? I forget, because when we were there you couldn’t.

2022-12-16 14:32:15 babelcarp

Nagarajan took us to Singara, one of the big plantations that welcomes selfie-taking Indian flatlander tourists into their fields.

No matter what the finished product might be, there’s something wonderful about walking between rows of tea bushes.

I noticed one shoot doing the purple-leaf trick there.

@tea #tea

2022-12-16 14:40:10 babelcarp

At another plantation under a momentarily blue sky, pickers were working riws pruned to waist level. I can’t tell from the picture whether they were using shears, but given the fact they were told to collect wet leaves, I can’t imagine they were hand-plucking to a two-leaves-and-a-bud standard.

2022-12-16 14:51:16 babelcarp

In the bug town of Ooty there’s a semi-open-air market (no outer walls or common roof—each stall provides its own.)

It’s really gigantic, with many hundreds of stalls selling foods, hardware, jewelry, and what I imagine is everything else a Nilgiri resident might need.

I wish I’d shot a video of the guy tying flowers into ropes at high speed at this stall.

2022-12-16 15:07:41 babelcarp

This stall sells betel nuts and betel leaves, everything a paan user needs.

2022-12-16 15:11:43 babelcarp

The Government Botanical Garden in Ooty was a fun way to spend an hour. It has lots of fascinating trees and other plants.

It also has a planting that faithfully represents Indian geography, including every single state. :awesome:

2022-12-16 15:19:05 babelcarp

Nilgiri is famous for its wildlife.

We didn’t encounter elephants, tigers or leopards, but there were lots of bison. And a number of species of birds we hadn’t seen And rhesus monkeys everywhere.

How many monkeys do you see in this picture?

2022-12-16 15:26:40 babelcarp

You run into wildlife indoors too.

This frog seemed to feel at home in our always damp cottage.

No mosquitoes this time of year!

On a less pleasant note, Spouse attracted the attention of two leaches. It’s extremely hard to remove the whole beast from your flesh, but the word is, you should spread salt on the lesion.

2022-12-16 15:33:35 babelcarp

Food on our Nilgiri trip was a mixed bag.

If I never again eat an indianized Chinese or Thai meal it’ll be too soon.

But the best South Indian food I’ve ever had was served at our guesthouse — for breakfast!

Everything on this table—except for intentionally bland iddli—was hauntingly spiced. The orange stuff in the small bowl, they said, was tomato chutney but tasted like a spicy carrot paté. What looks like vegetable soup they call dal.🤔

2022-12-16 15:50:58 babelcarp

Tell me something I don’t already know, Weather Underground!

2022-12-18 03:53:41 babelcarp

I blundered into some knowledge that’s improved our lives in this Calcutta apartment with reverse osmosis water. If you use a crazy amount of leaf making tea, you can overcome the taste-flattening effect of deionizing the water.

@tea #tea

2022-12-18 04:01:22 babelcarp

Yes, I’m acutely aware I could’ve eaten my own dogfood, as they used to say in Microsoft, and mixed up some mineral-doping powder and brought it here: https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/fakemineralwater.html

But crossing customs with a small amount of unidentified white powder?😬

@tea #tea

2022-12-18 04:07:29 babelcarp

Calcutta Sunday traffic as seen from the front seat: arterial road edition

2022-12-18 12:27:12 babelcarp

Calcutta Sunday traffic as seen from the front seat: local road edition

2022-12-18 12:31:13 babelcarp

Just as in the USA, you see billboards pretty much everywhere you look in populous areas of India. And most of them use images of pretty people to subconsciously persuade you that you could he like them if only you used the same products.

In India the billboard folk are way way paler than the flesh and blood people to a far greater extent than in the USA.

2022-12-18 12:47:53 babelcarp

2022-12-18 12:55:22 babelcarp

More evidence that we are no longer in the USA

2022-12-19 04:13:03 babelcarp

2022-12-19 04:16:34 babelcarp

I walk past this little teashop in Kolkata a couple of times a day during what would be business hours in the USA, but it’s often closed.

They sell tea they scoop out of stacked up tea chests marked with big labels that categorize and price the teas but obscure the exact provenance. Is the tea sold from the chest it was originally packed in or are the chests just decor? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@tea #tea

2022-12-19 08:47:32 babelcarp

I don’t know what’s reasonable for Assam, but their Darjeeling prices are ludicrously low. The highest price I’ve seen there is 4000 rupees per kg. That’s ~$50. I don’t how that tea could be authentic and fresh and of decent leaf quality.

2022-12-19 09:04:38 babelcarp

Even with the crappy reverse osmosis water here in Kolkata, a lot of the virtues of Tea Studio Nilgiri white tea come through when you push it aggressively: boiling water, 6g / ~200ml, 5 minutes.

No astringency, hardly any bitterness, complex taste unlike any Chinese white tea I know, with a hint of citrus maybe?

@tea #tea

2022-12-20 08:09:47 babelcarp

Around here in Calcutta there are two of what we New Yorkers call bodegas and Montrealers call dépanneurs. This photo shows the tea shelves at the family-run, non-chain of the two.

If you look closely you’ll see they carry unspecified flush tea from the respectable garden Castleton. They also have the genre of “roasted”—smoked?—tea I first noticed in an advertisement in the Times of India not long after we got here.

#tea @tea

2022-12-20 08:19:34 babelcarp

Today’s band name: Blister Pack

Say you got to India a week ago and, from a combination of sleeplessness on the planes and jet lag thereafter, you developed a bad cold. You’re in the Nilgiris and you don’t want to spend another night lying awake due to congestion.

You find a hole-in-the-wall pharmacy in Ooty where the friendly pharmacist (?) figures out you need this combination of antihistamine, decongestant, and acetaminophen.

She’s right, actually.

2022-12-20 08:37:46 babelcarp

Bicycle rickshaws haven’t entirely vanished from Kolkata. Many of the remaining ones look decrepit, but not this one!

2022-12-20 08:48:20 babelcarp

Lottery ticket sellers are everywhere in Kolkata. As in the USA, there’s a bewildering variety of lotteries to choose from.

The prices, though! I don’t know how low they go, but it’s easy to buy a ticket for under a dime.

(Customer’s face intentionally obscured)

2022-12-21 07:41:25 babelcarp

Calcutta has more than 4000 more-or-less artificial ponds: https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/ponds-belong-kolkatas-heritage-and-must-be-protected-benefit-future-generations

Within an easy walk of where we’re living there are 3 rectangular ponds of varying salubriousness. Poor people fill big canisters from the ponds and cart them home: free water. I’m not sure if anyone actually drinks the water, but it’s used for everything else.

This is the smallest of the three.

2022-12-21 08:46:42 babelcarp

This pond is bigger and less well tended.

2022-12-21 08:50:15 babelcarp

This, the biggest of the neighborhood ponds, is kind of shabby too.

That—wild? feral? let’s say unowned—dog is one of many many in the neighborhood. They often wander around in packs, but you quickly learn not to fear them, because toward humans they’re quite mellow.

Toward each other? Well, sometimes you notice a dog missing one ear.

2022-12-21 09:51:21 babelcarp

Calcutta pigeons getting their daily ration of rice and dal as crows heckle them off-camera

2022-12-21 09:59:18 babelcarp

Well, we aren’t in India anymore.

We’re, uh, enjoying an 18-hour layover in the gigantic Dubai airport. I’m embarrassed to say we’ll probably log a greater walking distance today than we did any day in India.

We’re gonna spend the hours from 10PM to 6AM in a sleeping pod, hoping not to get sick again from a sleepless night.

By mid-afternoon the 23rd we should be in NYC.

2022-12-22 12:48:58 babelcarp

Random Dubai airport notes:

The (recording of a) muezzin doing the call to prayer piped over the PA system is awesome.

There are lots of money changers. Don’t use them unless one of the currencies is the local one or they’ll actually do two conversions, taking a cut on each.

They have a hell of a time keeping more than one or two USB chargers per gate functioning.

People feel safe stretching out to sleep here, even single women.

2022-12-22 15:46:27 babelcarp

Pod sleeping at the Dubai airport worked great. Now waiting to board our flight to NYC.

One way to think of DXB is as one giant shopping mall serving an American city of, say, 4 million people?

From the customer’s vantage point, it seems to be staffed almost entirely by Africans and Filipinos. They *seem* cheerful and motivated, but what do I know? They aren’t the people dying in construction accidents.

Where are the Emiratis?

2022-12-23 02:45:51 babelcarp