The Other World Cup

As I mentioned in the last post, India’s hosting the Cricket World Cup right now. This is held every 4 years, much like the other, more important World Cup, which features a sport played outside the Commonwealth. Several countries usually host together, as seen now, with India co-hosting alongside Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Pakistan was originally in on the gig, but was stripped of that right after the Sri Lankan team got attacked while on tour in Pakistan (a series of five-day matches takes long enough that it qualifies as a tour). The last World Cup was hosted by the West Indies, which not only shares hosting duties amongst the islands, but also fields one unified team. England also competes alongside Wales, but not Scotland, and the Ireland team combines Ireland and Northern Ireland, playing under a weird flag. No troubles there.

Anyway, India’s going nuts about this. Because the matches last all afternoon and evening, wherever you go, every TV is tuned to whatever match is on. There are Nike billboards everywhere with Indian cricket players on them, too, which featured them in full clothing before the Cup started, then were replaced with the same player, but shirtless, once it started. Lays has a series of promotional potato chip flavors out, representing stereotypes of the major countries (England Grilled Cheese, South Africa Peri Peri Chili, West Indies Hot n’ Sweet Chili, etc.).

The Cup hasn’t been without its problems, though, and India has once again shown that it really can’t put on an event like this and meet international standards. The first major problem was that Eden Gardens, India’s largest and most hallowed Cricket stadium, underwent renovations for the World Cup which were not finished in time, resulting in it being declared unsafe for play. The first match for there, India-England, was moved to a much smaller stadium in Bangalore, resulting in severe ticketing problems, as well as bigger issues for the England fans who now had to switch all of their plans to Bangalore, rather than Calcutta. This hugely compounded a ticketing scandal that saw the vast majority of tickets given away for free to anyone chummy with the cricket people, and resulting in fighting as regular fans scrambled to scoop up the handful of tickets put on sale to the general public. As is typical, the Indian press didn’t report much on this, and people here seem oblivious to the scandal. One of my friends got free tickets to the final in Mumbai (for which virtually no tickets are available to the public), and was bragging about how she didn’t have to pay anything. I had to explain to her that no one’s paying to see the matches–most every ticket is free.

This all has huge shades of the debacle that was the Commonwealth Games, another every-four-year knockoff that’s only played in the Commonwealth. India got to host that back in October, and because the Indian press was in the tank for it, everyone here was under the impression that it was wildly successful. In reality, everything was sloppily thrown together at the last minute, with venues surrounded by pools of stagnant water in the middle of Dengue season. A footbridge collapsed, killing 25 people. The Athlete’s Village was uninhabitably filthy, only remedied after teams arrived and complained. Many of the city-wide infrastructure improvements remained unfinished even months after the games had taken place. And they had the same ticketing problems, with most of the tickets being given away to anyone well-connected. The problem there was that most of those free tickets went unused, resulting in the same fighting to snap up what was available, but with the stadiums also being half-empty for the events. And like the World Cup, most of this bad news was swept under the rug. A Times of India poll showed that, after the Games, over 80% of Indians believed that India had "arrived as a sporting nation" and should bid for the Olympics. I guess none of these Indians know much about the Olympics’ standards, or that India has only won 20 Olympic medals ever, and that the IOC cares about that. I wonder whether they know that, while many were hoping for China’s Olympics to somehow crash and burn, they actually pulled it off without a hitch.

With the Commonwealth Games, the line in the face of criticism is "The events went flawlessly." Things may not have been pretty, there may have been a few deaths, and they may have thrown it all together at the last minute, but the Games themselves were smooth. Such could be the saving grace of the Cricket World Cup, too: the cricket itself has been stellar so far. The high point, by far, was the England-India match, the one moved from Calcutta to Bangalore. To skip to the end of the story, the match ended in a dead tie. 338-338. After 8 hours of pure batting and high tensions, England posted the exact same total as their former colony had put up before them. This is still the only match I’ve watched in full, as it was the best showcase the sport could have put forth. As England chased a total that the announcers described would require a "miracle," they slowly but surely found themselves slightly ahead of India’s run total for the bulk of the overs. Around #40, they choked. Hard. Their good batters started going down like flies, eventually leaving them at the bottom of their order, needing 28 runs from 2 overs (12 pitches). After a miraculous series of sixes, England pulled out exactly 28 runs, for a sky-high 14 run/over rate, tying the match. The best part was that, while everyone was a little dazed at India’s tie, everyone knew that they’d just seen one of the best one-day games ever.

Most matches seem to be decided halfway through the first team’s turn at-bat–you know what they’re going to get, and you know if the other team’s capable of chasing it. This one was good to the last at-bat, showing, I think, that a sporting event can last just as long as it stays exciting. You could play football for a week if it stayed close and you had an infinite supply of cortizone. The thing is, we don’t play our sports for more than a couple hours, because we know most of them would get out of hand, and although it’s a rare moment in cricket when it’s good to the last bowl, they play all day anyway. The tournament itself is still up for grabs, and there’s always the chance of another stellar game. But to be honest, I’ll still be very glad to get home and see some hockey. I can discuss the merits of cricket, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really compete with the other major spots. I think there’s a reason it’s only played in the Commonwealth.

20 minutes of highlights of the India-England match. Note that the sport requires 20 minutes of highlights. But it does give you some video of a real cricket match, and you also get to see Stumpy, the World Cup's mascot, at the beginning. England's run starts at about 17:30.

Cricket: The Sport of Gentlemen With a Day to Blow

It was bound to happen. Eventually I’d have to learn cricket. It’s not only the national sport in India, it’s the ONLY sport in India. Seriously. They don’t play anything else. And right now India’s hosting the Cricket World Cup, AND they’re favored to win it. So this place has cricket fever, and unlike polio, I did not get any booster shots against that. So I’m starting to come down with it. Kinda.

At its heart, cricket is very similar to baseball, and not just in the bat + ball department. It’s a sport anybody can play, it’s steeped in history, and it bridges blue and white collars. It is, however, even more repetitive than baseball, it lacks the complex managerial strategies of baseball, and each match takes about 7 hours. 7. Freaking. Hours. Seriously. And for the World Cup they use a shortened version of the game. The real deal takes up to 5 days, and is often played in a best-of-five series to boot.

I’ll write a brief post later about the one good cricket match I saw (the rest have sucked), but for now, I’ve had so many requests to explain cricket that I’m going to give it a go here.

Concept: Cricket is best compared to a home run derby, rather than a real baseball game. You get a whole bunch of at-bats, and you try to rack up as many points as you can. One team takes its whole turn at bat, sets a score, and then the other team goes and "chases" that score.

Batting Flow: You have 10 people in your lineup. The lead-off guy starts and takes pitches until he gets out, then the next guy takes pitches until he’s out. This continues until either all ten people get out or you go through 300 pitches, whichever comes first. Batters can last hundreds of pitches (this takes hours) if they’re consistent and strong, or they can get out immediately if they suck. I’ve seen both.

Scoring: After you hit the ball, you run back and forth between home plate and the single base. If you get to the base, you score one run. If you get there and back, it’s two, and so forth. If the ball makes it all the way to the outfield wall, it’s worth four runs, and if it’s a home run, it’s worth six. You can choose not to run at all (see getting out, below). To do that, you just stay at home plate after you hit, and you score zero for that pitch.

Getting Out: There are two easy basebally ways of getting out. First is the pop-out. Any time you touch the ball with the bat and it’s caught before it hits the ground, you’re out. The second is the force-out. If you’re caught between bases when the ball gets back, you’re out. There’s no such thing as a strike-out. If you whiff, you just score a zero on that at-bat. However, if you whiff AND the ball hits the stumps, you’re out. When you’re batting, you’re basically protecting the stumps, and the pitcher is trying to hit them. If he hits them, you’re done. These stumps are actually the home plate equivalent. To get forced out, a fielder has to touch the ball to the stumps before you cross the safe line. This can be done by throwing the ball straight into the stumps or manually touching the ball to the stumps. Note, then, that you aren't really running to a base--you're running a shuttle between two lines, and you're safe once you pass the line, even if you overrun it. The final meaningful way of getting out is called "leg before wickets." This is basically where you use your legs to protect the stumps, rather than your bat (because you whiffed and it hit your legs). If the umpire determines that the ball would have hit the stumps had it not hit your legs first, you can be called out. They have a really neat review system for this called "Hawkeye" that’s very similar to tennis–it predicts where the ball would have gone based on its trajectory when it hit you.

A Nuance to Batting: To throw a wrench in things, there are actually two batters on the field at a time. One starts at first base, running the shuttle between bases opposite the batter. You only score when both players reach their base, and you can register the out by getting either runner out. These two batters form a "partnership" and actually trade off their at-bats. Every time the batter scores an odd number of runs, the other partner takes his place at bat. To illustrate: I hit a single and run to first while you run home. Now you’re the one at home plate, and you start batting again. I’m still in the game, not out, and will bat again as soon as you hit a single (or a triple). If my partner gets out, I stay in the game with the new guy and we form a new partnership. One consequence of this is that you try to have a right and left-handed batter in at the same time, forcing the pitcher to mix things up whenever the two switch places. Another consequence is that there are actually 11 people in your lineup (I lied earlier... sorry) because you have to have an extra guy to form the last partnership, otherwise you’d have only one guy on the field after 9 outs. That 11th guy usually REALLY sucks at batting.

A Nuance to Game Flow: Like I said, you bat until 10 outs or 300 pitches, whichever comes first. In fact, the game is divided into 50 "overs" of 6 pitches each, rather than just 300 pitches. After each over there’s a very short break and the fielding team is allowed to change pitchers/bowlers. "Runs per over" is the key statistic during a match. 6 is good (300 runs per game). 7 is very good (350). 5 is weakish. 4 or below is very weak.

Pitching/Bowling: The first thing you’d notice watching a game is that the pitches bounce before they reach the plate, meaning that spin becomes huge, and resulting in a wide variety of pitch types. Each bowler is allowed to pitch 10 overs, and they can only be switched between overs (you finish the over you start). The team captain picks who’s going to bowl each over, and there winds up being a lot of strategy in this, as every bowler is different.

Fielding: Everyone fields. All 11 of your guys are in the field at once. There’re like 100 different positions that fielders can assume, and you do a lot of shifting based on the batter. When you switch bowlers, you bring someone in from the field, and the old bowler goes back to his position, and people swap positions more to accommodate the switch. People, therefore, can typically play more than one position.

Lineup Composition: We’re getting more technical here. I think you could watch a match without really knowing this. You’ve got 11 guys in your lineup and in the field. Each bowler can only bowl 10 overs, so you need a minimum 5 who can bowl, and really you want six. So you wind up with 5 people who just bat, plus a couple who can bat and bowl, plus a few who’re bowling specialists but also have to bat. The major consequence here is that outs are really important, even if you don’t go all-out and don’t get to use up all 50 overs. In the first games I saw, I’d thought "Who cares that this guy’s out? He’ll get replaced by someone fresh, and there’s no chance of ending things because of the 10 outs–you’re pitching all 50 overs anyway." Outs are important because you want to get past the great batters at the top of the order. If you can spend your last 10 overs pitching to the schlub bowling specialists at the bottom of the order, you’re likely to give up far fewer runs, even if they don’t get out. The game may be about runs, not outs, but getting the right people out leads to less run production ability. Also, though, you do tend to mow these batters down. That is, once you get to the part of the lineup of mostly bowlers, they can start dropping like flies, and you can bring the game to a rapid conclusion.


I really think that if you read this and watch 15 minutes of cricket, you’ll have it down. I can’t say I particularly LIKE the sport, as it has severe limitations when it’s 7 hours long. It’s also, like I mentioned earlier, repetitive over those 7 hours and doesn't have baseball's managerial complexity. Further, while outs are important, they tend to come out of nowhere. All of a sudden, someone's out. Like a goal in soccer, but without the gradual buildup of tension before it. But while I’m here, cricket’s all I’ve got. Plus, the Indians have a really good chance of winning this thing. With the way the Illini are playing, I think this is my only hope.


Epilogue/HuffPo Dish: Are you wondering "how to watch cricket?" It's a common search query, as are "cricket how to," "cricket rules," "cricket for dummies," and "what are the rules of cricket?" It's easily answered, too: my blog post answers all of these queries.

This is Search Enginge Optimization, something that Content Farms like the Huffington Post do to attract people to their mass-produced, extremely low-grade writing. My writing, though, is impeccable :)

Agra: The Hatred is Probably Mutual

Agra is a total shithole. Don’t get me wrong: the Taj Mahal is magnificent, but God Damn the town ain’t. Agra’s well aware that every tourist will come to it regardless of what they charge, how dirty the place is, or how big of assholes they can be.

The Taj was Rs.750 each for tourists (about $17-18) with no free re-entry. Beyond that, though, you are not allowed to bring in ANY food. They frisk you and dig through your bags. Ostensibly, this is to keep the grounds clean, but the real reason is that they know all guidebooks tell you to see it during daylight and at sunset, and that without food, they know no one will last that long. And that every foreign tourist will grudgingly pay the extra $17 rather than take a moral stand. Note that fees for Indians were something like Rs. 25. Some nominal fee. They only screw the foreigners.

So that didn’t get us and Agra off to a good start. But the knowledge that this is a tourist trap pervades everything in town. You can’t drive straight up to the Taj. Rather, you get dropped off at the end of a long street leading up to it. This street happens to be lined with extremely aggressive shops selling absolute crap. I inspected a few things, and they were all of abysmal quality. I wanted some postcards, but even those were terrible.

There is no reliable food near the Taj, so you wind up having to just do the chips n’ biscuits lunch. Of course, all shopkeepers have smudged out the "maximum retail price" marking on all products and sell it for whatever they feel a foreigner will pay. In India, everything’s marked with an MRP, and while stores are allowed to sell for less than this (occasionally they do, but only by a little bit), they cannot charge more. In practice, this isn’t really enforced, and Agra seemed not to care a bit. Again, they know no one will visit India without visiting Agra, so they have absolutely no incentive to cater to tourists.

Enough bitching about Agra. The Taj itself was great. Apparently everybody says "oh, it’s so small," but neither Pete nor I found that to be true. It’s not some sprawling complex, to be sure. It’s just a mausoleum for a guy’s favorite wife (think about that one). So the inside is only a few rooms. The draw is that it’s a giant building entirely in white marble. The sun does amazing things with that, especially at sunset.



After begrudgingly forking over for our evening session (going in, we didn’t think we’d have to re-pay, and the guidebooks did not lead us to believe we would), we really were not in the mood for any more Agra. We just wanted some sunset Taj. This wasn’t meant to be, though, as we were instantly accosted by the hordes of "guides" inside the main gate. I don’t quite know how that racket works, but my guess is these guys pay the nominal Indians’ fee to enter, then charge a few hundred rupees to spout nonsense to foreigners as you walk around. We passed, but not just because this was a scam. The first guy who came up to us barely got two words out of his mouth before doing that ever-so-Indian custom of coughing out a gigantic heap of phlegm. It went something like this: "Excuse me.... acchhhh, HACK, HACKHACK, nchhhhh, THWOOP!" Why yes, sir, I would LOVE to walk around here with a tuberculitic pensioner. JUST how I want to experience the Taj! Next, as we sat at a bench inside, a guy came up behind us to ask for our photo. Pete and I simultaneously mistook him for a guide and rebuffed him. He was at a perfect height for both of us to just elbow him in the balls, and I must say, the temptation was there. Once we realized what was going on, though, we obliged. A few minutes later, a bizarrely sweet family came up to us just to say hi. The young son (10?) asked me "where are you from?" When Pete and I answered, the girl (sameish age) said "Welcome to India!" and the rest of the family then welcomed us. Then they left. I really was waiting for somebody to ask for change, but it never happened.

Not the family that approached us:


On our way out, we were quickly pounced on by a 14-15 year old boy who said, while barely looking up from his cell phone "Hey! I waited for you! I really did! Come check out my shop!" We had not seen this kid before, but this was his schtick to drag people to a particular shop, where he’d get a commission of some sort. Something about his ridiculous line, but equally ridiculous sincerity, convinced me to give this kid the commission on my purchase (some kid was going to get credit--might as well be him). Unfortunately, yeah, the post cards sucked, and without any more Taj to see, Pete and I knew it was time to bail. We just decided to wait out the evening at the train station, which actually had a decent restaurant. So chalk that up for Agra. Their train station doesn’t suck. That’s something.

Up next: that’s all for the cities. I’ll write a bit about train travel, and another post about general India-traveling tips

Jumping photos at the Taj:




Sadly, I didn’t get to use this as I’d hoped. Someday.

Amritsar: Down with the Sikhness

There’s this phenomenon called "Delhi Belly." Basically the Indian equivalent of Montezuma’s Revenge. I’d throw out Maharaja’s Revenge if you pick up the bug outside of Delhi, but as it turns out, Delhi Belly is actually distinct to Delhi. As in, Pete got sick in Amritsar, brought on by our first night in Delhi. I didn’t get sick until the day after we got back to Delhi. Tulsi recently visited Delhi and even she got sick. So travel tip number 1 would be, when in Delhi: Don’t. Touch. Anything.

But we didn’t hit either Sickness or Sikhness until the evening of our arrival in Amritsar. First we stopped off at the border with Pakistan (about a half hour from Amritsar) for their daily border-closing ceremony. The border’s open during the day and closed at night. The closing draws huge crowds of Indians on one side, and not so much from the Pakistanis on the other side (quite surprising considering that the nearby Pakistani city, Lahore, is much larger than Amritsar). As the soldiers did their marching around, a dude in a white track suit led the crowd in cheers, and none were lacking in enthusiasm. At several stops on this trip, Pete and I were stopped to have someone take their photo with us. I suspect this is mostly because of Pete’s long blondish hair (he said in Korea a guy did the same thing and said "you look like movie star!"), but here it was because we were the white dudes at this super anti-Pakistani event. Of course each group of people had to take TWO photos with us, too, so they could swap the photographer. We happily obliged at first, but this became pretty tiresome after the 6th photoshoot.



There were some other white guys:


Nationalist hoopla finished, we got back to the train station to find that our driver didn’t want to drive us into town, and the only ricks available were cycle shaws. No motor. With old dudes at the helm. Younger shawsters have a sense of shame, I suppose. This meant we were passed by regular shaws (one of whom matched our speed for a while and laughed at us) and that we had to get out and walk when we had to go over the overpass. At least it was cheap, and I guess I felt like we did a good turn. The cycle shawers really looked like they could use the business. Haggard comes to mind.

The main draw here is the Sikh Golden Temple, which I guess I could compare to the Golden Mosque, if not for the incredible animosity between the two religions. Also the fact that the Golden Temple is totally open to all, nearly 24 hours. We stopped by at 10:00pm for a ceremony where they move a holy book into storage for the night. We came back in the morning and got to see the place in a completely different light. Anyway, it’s a big square with a moat in the middle, and a bridge leading to an island. On that island is the temple itself, totally decked out in gold. A great site, and very welcoming. They also had the world’s most gruesome museum, with paintings of all of the horrible things Muslims had done to Sikhs over the years. This included: sawing people in two down the center, encaging children alive in bricks, and pouring burning hot sand over people. They also had like 100 death photos of martyrs dead bodies. Think when we put Uday and Qusay on display so clerics could verify their deaths. That sorta stuff. Sadly, no photos of the museum.





In Amritsar there are a bunch of places advertising "dry fruit." Sadly this is just the Indian term for nuts. And there weren’t even any good ones. I really had my heart set on some CostCo-style giant bags of mixed dried fruits, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead we countered Pete’s Delhi Belly with Pizza Hut. Partly because we ordered interesting drinks and I downed some cheesecake for dessert, this actually became the single most expensive meal of our trip. Pizza Hut, in addition to being just as delicious in India as it is in the States, is a fairly classy joint. Clean, nice bathrooms, attentive staff, diverse menu.





Finally, the Temple provides accommodation for all travelers, Sikh or not. These are provided at a nominal fee, provided they aren’t full of course. And of course we showed up on some bizarre holiday called Lohri, which we deduced was a North Indian bonfire holiday judging from the smoke in the air. The next day, everything had cleared up, showing that it wasn’t pollution in the air. But yeah, we couldn’t sleep with the pilgrims and had to settle for a dive hotel. :(

Next: I covered both ends of Delhi on the last trip, so a brief post on our Agra excursion. After that, I’ve got a post in the works just about the trains, and I’ll do a compendium of travel tips after that. Then, I swear, no more travel blogging.

Delhi: Rickrolling the Rodeo

We didn’t really hit Delhi too hard. Mostly, this was a city for regrouping and absorbing. I guess I have some regrets on this, because Delhi definitely has some stuff to see, but at the same time, we’d already seen our share of forts, and taking this time to regroup definitely improved the quality of the trip as a whole.

Our first day in Delhi was just a day to crash. We arrived at about noon on the overnighter from Jodhpur, showed up at our hotel, and just slept until around dinner time. A week of walking around every day, sleeping every other night on the train, and then closing things with an all-day adventure in Jodhpur had taken its toll. It was at this point that I noticed my hair was falling out and my snot was gray, and Pete noticed that he had soot in his earwax. Perhaps a week in Rajasthan is approaching maximum western tolerance.

For dinner, we headed to a sort of fancy strip mall called Connaught Place. There, we gravitated to the KFC for food, then followed things up with a bar called "Rodeo," recommended by Fodor’s as trying way too hard to be American western-themed. The payoff was immense. Where to begin with this place? The employees were all in ridiculous cowboy costumes. The bar stools were saddles. Their tap wasn’t properly calibrated, resulting in mostly head on the beer. Their solution to that was to devote a bartender to pouring and spooning out head. This reminded me of the U of C’s dive, the Falcon Inn, where the bartender was perpetually drunk and, rather than give you a decent pour, would just give you two glasses of half head. Rodeo eventually had two Koreans singing karaoke (they were really good, actually), but when we arrived, they were playing the most spectacular 80s mix ever. Safety Dance, Just an Illusion, 867-5309, the works. And Never Gonna Give You Up.






For those unfamiliar, the music video to Never Gonna Give You Up is basically the worst major music video ever. Rick Astley can sing, but his dancing is just awful and the video is completely derivative. A solid internet meme is to trick someone into watching that music video. This is called "rickrolling." As in "I just rickrolled Phil. Pwnd." At its heart this consists of just sending someone a Youtube link and saying "you’ve gotta watch this!" but usually you try for something more elaborate than that. You can create a video that starts legitimately, then transitions to Rick Astley, for example. Or you can be like the Cartoon Network and rickroll the Macy’s Day Parade. The next time you’re at a juke box, scroll to Rick Astley and see if they’ve got it. Anyway, the beauty here was Rodeo had rickrolled itself.

When we got back to Delhi, we really only checked out two things. First, the Indian Rail museum, which we found fitting considering how much time we’d just spent on trains. After that, though, we went to Delhi’s Baha’i Temple. Baha’i is a religion that more or less combines all religions into one set of beliefs. They had a brief reading of scriptures while we were there, for example, and read from Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic texts. They are monotheistic, at least, so I don’t know how Hinduism would jive with that (or how any of these religions would jive with each other, really), but the upshot is that they’re just a really peaceful religion. Ultimately, they’re probably about as weird as Scientology, but the difference is that the Baha’is aren’t suing or fleecing anyone. Rather, they just build really awesome temples and invite anyone to come. And their celebrity corps is more two-bit, including Dwight Schrute, a shortstop for the Rangers, and a guy who played a recurring terrorist on 24.

The Baha’i have a temple on each continent, broadly speaking. The one in North America is actually in Wilmette, north of Chicago. Since it’s easily accessible off the Purple Line, I spent a few evenings during the Chicago Years hanging out there. It’s really well-maintained and just super peaceful. The inside features incredible acoustics, and is also very calming. The Delhi Temple may not be as calm, as it was actually quite crowded, but the building itself is just stunning. It’s shaped like a giant lotus flower in a pond, with enormous grounds around it. This was the only thing we saw in Delhi with that much open space. Everything else was wall-to-wall. And the interior, with silence, no photography, and restricted entry, kept the Indians from ruining it, too (note: whenever a tourist trap turned into a shitshow, it was always due to Indian tourists. Westerners have respect for their surroundings). If you’re ever in Delhi, do not miss this.







The skull of an elephant that got hit by an English train in 1894. The engineer got to keep one tusk, while the other went to the queen:

Jodhpur: Head to Higher Ground

Jodhpur is one of the more recognizable locales in Rajasthan. It was one of Pete’s special requests, and the only one of these cities that I could picture before doing any travel research. In terms of size, it slots below Jaipur, but above the Jaisalmer and Udaipur.



Many of the houses in Jodhpur are painted a light blue color, giving the city a light blue look and earning it the nickname "The Blue City." We learned that this is because they used indigo, which kept the houses cool in the summer and also warded off mosquitos. The look is cool both from afar and up close.





Although Jodhpur’s a decently sized city, there wasn’t a whole lot to do here, other than the fort (there’s gotta be a fort) and absorbing the blue. So we only spent a day here. Took the midnight train to Jodhpur, arrived in the morning, and left that night for Delhi.

Our first stop was the fort, on a hill with a beautiful view of the city, and awesome in the early morning light. This fort was also home to the first wifi we’d had since a brief spat in Jaipur. We arrived on a Tuesday morning still oblivious to that week’s football games. So imagine our shock when, at Mehrangarh Fort, we discover that the Seahawks had whupped the Saints in the Wild Card round. Pete pulled the scores up on his iPhone, then pulled a youtube clip of Marshawn Lynch’s incredible, tackle-breaking run. The 60ish (I’m poor with age estimates, especially when you have to factor in a lifetime of malnourishment) barista at the museum coffee shop came over to check out the iPhone. They do have iPhones here, but fancy phones aren’t nearly as common, and I think it’s quite possible this guy had barely ever seen the internet, let alone streaming video on something the size of an order pad. Pete then tried to explain what was going on to the guy, which was futile on so many levels. Seriously, nobody knows much about football here, and I’m sure this 60-year-old dude had no idea what was happening, even if he could understand the words Pete was saying. Anyway, once we’d had our fill of celebrating the Bears’ impending Seahawks matchup, we checked out the awesome fort and its views, then headed into town.





Pete wanted to bring back some tea, and we found a cool tea shop while exploring old town. A young guy named Deepak sat us down and chatted us up for a while. The whole time I was expecting him to segue to "so... I’ve got these diamonds I need to get to Delhi," but he never did. I can’t say we talked about anything meaningful, but he seemed to enjoy it, and if he had an ulterior motive, he never showed it.

Tea in hand, we headed back to the town center to kill the rest of the day, which was fading fast. Around 6:00, as the sun was about down, we started to notice all of the Asians (tons of Asian tourists all over Rajasthan) were putting on their surgical masks. Stupid Americans, visiting Rajasthan without surgical masks. Air quality rapidly deteriorated during the evening rush, to the point where we made an executive decision to ride the day out at any rooftop restaurant we could find. The only alternative would’ve been to run back the fort, but fortunately getting 4 stories up was enough to make things breathable. Like Jaipur, Jodhpur’s in a big, smog-trapping valley, and when that combines with poor emissions standards and a whole ton of people, things can get ugly in a hurry.

Traveler’s tip: I think one day was enough in Jodhpur. It was a long-ass day with the very early arrival, no hotel room, and late train out, but that’s Rajasthan. None of these towns deserved more than a couple of days, so the trip really has to involve a lot of town-hopping. We smooth-talked a nice hotel into letting us drop our bags there for the day, and we also took a couple of outside naps. That, with a leisurely lunch and dinner, made the day work great. So give Jodhpur one slow, leisurely day.

Next up: Delhi for a day, then turban time in Amritsar.

Jaisalmer: Anthony Bourdain Got High Here

Our overnight train to Jaisalmer was a doozy. For starters, when we tried to board, the door was blocked by a bunch of soldiers unloading crates of something so small and heavy that it had to be ammunition. When we got on, we found more soldiers, who would gradually disembark along the way. One would think the military would have better means of transportation than sleeper class on the Jaisalmer Express, but what do I know? Oh, also, about 20 15-year-olds largely unsupervised. Good times. A scenic ride, though, through some awesome desert.

Jaisalmer is a much smaller town than anything else we’d been to. There’s no airport, and they didn’t film any Bond movies there, so it winds up being less hostile to tourists. This was a far cry from Jaipur, where everyone and his mother wanted you in their rickshaw. The draws here are threefold: the fort (catching a pattern to Rajasthan?), desert tours, and bhang. This fort was unique in that it’s still lived in. It hasn’t been converted lock-stock into a UNESCO site like the rest of the places. It’s just part of the town that happens to be surrounded by walls. No entry fees, and you’re free to explore. You could see everybody’s laundry, right next to guys selling postcards. And since the place is decaying (our guidebook called it an "architectural time bomb") there are all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore. This made it both crowded and private in its different parts.





As mentioned, we also partook of the desert tours. To varying degrees, they jeep you out to the desert, you ride a camel around, and they jeep you back. These range from ultra-touristy evening trips to see the sunset to much more hardcore trips of 2 weeks or longer. We chose the former. Which basically meant we rode some camels around in a circle for an hour, watched the sunset, then drove back. No regrets! This was the only clear sunset we had the whole trip–the only one where we actually saw the sun disappear on the horizon. In every other city, the pollution was so extreme that the sun disappeared long before the horizon. The benefit to those sunsets is that the pollution also makes the sky totally psychadelic, but au naturale has its appeals, too. As for the camel ride, I think an hour was plenty. Those things weren’t exactly comfortable. Or fragrant.





And yeah. Bhang. Bhang is some sort of cannabis product or something. I’m hazy on the details, but according to Wikitravel, they serve it in milkshakes, plus cookies and chocolates as "take-away" packs to bring with you into the desert. Trying out strange Indian drugs while in the middle of the desert near Pakistan didn’t sound like the best laid plan, so Pete and I decided to pass, but we did discover the shop Anthony Bourdain had visited. There’s one legal bhang shop in Jaisalmer, authorized by the government and right next to the fort. We walked by, and it was run by two dudes who’d clearly done too much bhang over the years. If anybody out there watches Tony B, drop me a line if you remember the episode when he gets baked in Rajasthan. I’d love to hear his take on Rajasthani food. And bhang.

Travel tip: there were only two ATMs in Jaisalmer. One was anything but 24hr, and the other was out of cash the first time we tried it. So I do recommend arriving in Jaisalmer with some cash. There were actually plenty of places advertising cash advances against credit cards, but those things are expensive enough in the States. Christ knows the APR for a cash advance in Jaisalmer.

Downtown Jaisalmer:



Pete’s Faces in Places:



Next up: one day in Jodhpur, the blue city.

Jaipur: No, not this way! Not this way!

Jaipur’s a very large city. Not on par with Delhi or Mumbai, or even Bangalore, but still much larger than the other cities we visited. It still had lots of cool stuff, but for as calm as Udaipur was, Jaipur was intense.

In addition to being very dirty, dusty, and sooty, it was the most aggressive city towards tourists. As we sat at the train station on our arrival, we waited for the free car to come pick us up from our hotel (this is common–the place was not expensive). As we waited, no less than 7 rickshaw drivers absolutely hounded us, talking about how awful our hotel was. As it turned out, our hotel was great–it just doesn’t pay commissions to rickshaw drivers who drop off tourists just looking for hotels. As the stay wore on, we honestly couldn’t go 15 seconds without some yahoo coming up to us to say "My friend, my friend, please come look at my store," or "my friend, my friend, where are you going? I’ll drive you." If you replied, they’d follow you and refuse to take no for an answer. If you ignored, they’d snap at you for being rude. I know they were the ones being rude, but it still was quite taxing for this to happen constantly.



In Bangalore, the rickshaws are metered, but that wasn’t the case anywhere else on this trip. Jaipur was the #1 city for rickshaw haggling. Because the tourist destinations were mostly on hills, they rightfully expected some extra pay for that. Further, since most were somewhat out of the way, the standard was to pay a rickshaw to drive you there, wait, and drive you back. This all made the process quite complex, and took the power of knowledge out of our hands. For one trip, though, we wound up with a pretty nice guy who agreed to drive us to a fort and back for Rs.300 (still a rip-off, but not THAT much of one). He chatted us up quite a bit, telling us about his other job as an English teacher, and about his kids. It could’ve been all bogus, but he seemed nice and wasn’t really pressing much else on us. When we got back, though, we asked him to drop us off at a restaurant a few blocks away, and he wanted Rs.350 because of that. When we balked, souring the end of this long day, he exclaimed "No, not this way! Not this way!" He didn’t want our relationship to end on such a note. We were friends! We still had to pay the 350, though.



Anyway, Jaipur DID have cool stuff. There were three forts, Amber Fort being the largest. Some movie was filming while we were there, so one pavilion was taken over by a dance sequence being shot. Based on the moustaches, it seemed like the standard fare of "evil prince kidnaps helpless hot chick; random women dance in the background." The fort itself was huge, and not explorable in any coherent fashion. Lots of wandering through rooms and stumbling upon ancient latrines. Some of the rooms were oddly reminiscent of boss rooms in Zelda–big open squares with some pillars at one side, followed by a small dead-end room (that’s where the silver bow is, right?).




Beyond that, Jaipur had a really cool ancient observatory called Jantar Mantar, full of huge ancient sundials and stargazing charts. One sundial was accurate to 2 seconds. We also got to check out the Monkey Temple, which sadly was not run exclusively by a society of monkeys. On Pete’s suggestion, we took the second half Rs. 10 bag of monkey food and just heaved it at a group of monkeys (MONKEY BOMB!). As expected, shit took off.



Traveler’s note: food in Jaipur was sketchy. The larger the town, the harder it is to find that one good place. We relied heavily on the guidebook, which was dated and composed largely of places that had since jacked up their prices. I recommend doing some research on places to eat before going. Museum cafes only work on a certain level.

Escalator to nowhere:



Next up was Jaisalmer, a desert city.

Tags: Rajasthan

Udaipur: Now Showing Octopussy Nightly at 7:30

After almost a day of training to start the trip, going from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, then transferring, we wound up in Udaipur, The Lake City, also quite uniquely dubbed the Venice of the East.

This city was instantly quiet, calm, and clean compared to Bangalore. Pete had Mumbai as a brief benchmark, and was also struck by this. Living in Bangalore, I’m used to sights like random enormous heaps of trash that are basically ad hoc dumps, construction sites with the workers’ families begging out front, and cow feces EVERYWHERE. In Udaipur, they’d limied things to just the cow feces.



On our way to our hotel from the train station, we noticed two recurring signs. One was a series of signs pointing to Savage Garden, which Pete and I made sure to photograph. The other was restaurants advertising nightly screenings of Octopussy, the Bond flick. I’ve never actually seen it (and still haven’t, sadly), but apparently a good chunk of it takes place in Udaipur, where the eponymous villainess lives in the Lake Palace. We didn’t get to see it because when we tried to on our last night, the restaurant’s DVD player was broken, and we were too hungry to want to switch restaurants. I did see some clips on Youtube, though, and all I can say is that rickshaw chases wouldn’t work like that. It would end within 2 minutes when one stopped for gas or the other blew an axle by flying over a pothole. I really would like to see the part of a rickshaw chase when both have to slow down to 5mph to get over a speed bump.



Pete wanted to pick up a suit and/or shirts while in India, and Udaipur turned out to be the place to do this. Each of these touristy towns has some sort of specialty in terms of shopping, and Udaipur’s were miniature prints and tailors. Most places advertise suits for Rs.3,000 (about $65), but those are pure polyester. For a merino wool suit, the going rate is Rs.6,000. Pete instead bought three tailored shirts for total Rs.3,300, and then began to haggle over an already-made wool suit that fit him perfectly. He wound up buying that the next day for Rs.4,201, with the owner wanting the extra rupee "for luck."



So the tailored clothing here is sorta cheap, I guess. I buy my shirts from Marshalls and TJ Maxx for $20-$25, almost exactly what Pete paid for his. His are probably somewhat higher quality, as they’re tailored and in very nice fabric, but mine are almost exclusively Calvin Klein slim fit, so it’s not like I’m buying crap. The only major advantage was that he got to select his fabrics from a huge array of choices, while at Marshalls you buy by going there once every other week or so for a few months and snagging what’s good when it arrives. As for suits, mine are from Jos. A. Banks, and they’re $150 when they go on sale. Adding tax and tailoring, and I think they come to about $180 each. Pete definitely had me beat there, but he also was buying ready-made. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Jony (the young, friendly owner) that I might come back at some point, and he said it’d be Rs.5,000 each for me. That’s still cheap, but I must say it’s not THAT cheap. You can’t pay for the trip with suits. Since a suit’ll be tailored anyway, the only real advantage is the wide array of fabrics, while Banks only has 5-6 to choose from on the $150 suits. Anyway, I’ll keep looking in Bangalore to see if things can be had more cheaply. We actually haggled really well on the suit, if not so much on the shirts.

As for the sightseeing, Udaipur had several highlights. We didn’t actually get to go in the Lake Palace, as that’s now a privately-owned hotel, but we did take a boat tour around the lake, which was the key, anyway. I’m sure there’s some cool stuff in the palace, but the main thing about it is that it’s in the middle of a damn lake. The city palace was also great. It’s a large complex built up to the lakefront, and in the courtyard they had a light show in the evening that was narrated with the history of Mewar, the kingdom of which Udaipur was the capital. As far as I can tell, Mewar’s history is mostly women ritualistically killing themselves by fire, followed by now-widowed men fighting with nothing to lose. The light show closed by describing the formation of the current trust (I was waiting for the narrator to drop "501(c)"), then trashing the eldest son for suing said trust. I guess public family strife is still a step up from mass femmecide, though.

We spent a night in Udaipur, then took a night train to Jaipur. Which was decidedly less clean, calm, and quiet than Udaipur. But it just showed us, immediately, how different each city is in Rajasthan, the Land of Kings. We didn’t hit another city much like Udaipur, and I’m quite glad we started with it. It was a nice intro to India, before we got to locales that were a little edgier.

Our jump shots:





And again, I apologize for Pete’s photography. My photos were better :)

Rajasthan Rampage Tour: a Primer

I just got back from 2 weeks across north India with a friend of mine from Watseka, Pete. He’s pretty well-traveled, but had never been to India. With me here, and with some other friends of his in Mumbai for New Year’s, he decided to pull the trigger. Sanju had no objections to the trip (she’s about to leave for Bangkok for a week–vacations seem the norm here), so I met him in Mumbai, and we toured North India for two weeks.

We hit:

• Udaipur, a city on a bunch of lakes, with some amazing palaces on islands
• Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan and home to a huge fort, as well as a cool old outdoor observatory thing, plus tons of soot
• Jaisalmer, a not-very-touristy-but-totally-should-be desert city in far western Rajasthan, also home to a cool desert fort and camel safaris
• Jodhpur, the "Blue City," named because many of the houses were painted a shade of light blue, using a paint that warded off mosquitos. Also home to a big fort with free wifi.
• Delhi, sort of a home base for the second half of the trip. Home to a whole lot of people, and also an amazing Baha’i Temple.
• Amritsar, the "Sikh Capital," home to their really cool and surprisingly tourist-friendly Golden Temple.
• Agra, home of the Taj, but otherwise a hellish locale.

We traveled exclusively by train, aside from the flight into Mumbai and out of Delhi. That was quite an experience, but I’ll do a full post on that later. Trains in India are a destination in themselves.

I hope these posts don’t get too repetitive. I’ll try to write more about the events than just, like, temple descriptions. But yeah, this was bound to be part travel blog, part updating the ‘rents. So bear with me if any of these drag.

BEAR DOWN

I just got back, and my mind is completely on football. This is alternately known as "American Football" and "what?" here. Nobody really knows what it is, and it's impossible to watch on TV. Partly due to the time difference, no bars show it, and it doesn't show up at all in Indian TV guides. At our last hotel, in Delhi, Pete and I were able to follow Jeff Joniak and WBBM on a web feed, through is iphone, which was connected to the internet via our hotel's [thank God] wireless. The hotel actually had extensive cable TV, which multiple sports stations. They were showing, among other things, a China-Uzbekistan soccer match and the semi-finals of women's table tennis at last year's Asian Games. No NFL. But yeah, Pete and I got the radio feed, which was good enough.

We'd been in Agra all day that day, so we were beat when the game started at 11:30PM here. We'd taken the 6:15AM express train, had a really long day fighting the hellhole that is Agra, and then taken a late express train home. When we left, we actually didn't even know the outcome of the first game, just figuring we'd find out when we returned. But that night, with the Bears up 21-0 early, we both passed out. However, when I got Maharaja's Revenge in the middle of the night, I multitasked with the iPhone to find that not only the Bears had won, but the Jets too. I woke up Pete, and he thought he had to be dreaming. He has several Pats fans friends who were dicks about sports and would deserve to be gloated over. Don't we all?

For the wild card games, we were in Jaisalmer, the least touristy and most out-of-the-way town we went to. There was no wifi in that town. Normally we'd see plenty of restaurants in the touristy areas advertising free wifi, but there was none of that in Jaisalmer. There were only two ATMs in that town, and one was anything but 24-hr. So we didn't find out that Seattle had stunned New Orleans until the afternoon of that Tuesday, when we miraculously got free wifi at a coffee stand inside Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. Via the iphone, we also got to watch Marshawn Lynch's ridiculous run to cap the game, a clip which the old barista watched over our shoulders just to check out the iphone. Pete, as always overestimating English fluency of Indians, attempted to explain it all to him to no avail. I also got to email my parents at this point to inform them that we were alive and not being held hostage across the border. Both miracles of technology.

So staying in touch with football has been somewhat difficult. No TV, not even public, and at the mercy of internet radio feeds. As if I'm perpetually on a Sunday road trip. However, tThe guy who ran the Santha Pub Crawl had lived in Chicago for a while, and he mentioned some sort of Super Bowl Party. That'd start at like 5:00AM here, but I'll have to go. Obviously I'll find some way to watch it if the Bears are in it. And if they aren't, that means I'll have to root against the Packers. Either way I'll have an interest.


One thing to note: on our last day in Delhi, I lost my camera to a pickpocket, losing all of my photos of the trip. This is the biggest of several enormous kicks in the junk that I've experienced in India. The saving grace on this is that Pete took tons of photos, many of which were better than I took (although I DID take quite a few totally rocking photos). So the photography on this will be provided by Pete and his feed. I'm also soliciting recommendations for a new camera.

Rajasthan

Sorry I didn't post this week. Or next week. Or the week after that. I'm touring Rajasthan with a friend of mine from Watseka. Mumbai-Udaipur-Jaipur-Jaisalmer-Jodhpur-Delhi-Amritsar-Delhi-Agra-Delhi. Gonna be off the hook.

Use this time to catch up on my previous posts. For those of you who came late to the game, there're a few good ones in here.

I'll see you all on the 17th. Or the 18th, or whenever I do my first post.