I've been reading the Geoff Dyer book about India, and he's saying really interesting things, making valid points simply and cleanly. One of the observations is - well, he's talking about monkeys, the monkeys in Varanasi, and how they have a bad reputation, but don't seem to actually be dangerous, and he says something like, "If anything, the monkeys just livened the place up. The one thing Varanasi does not need, god knows, is livening up." In my opinion, that exactly describes how I felt about it. How much livening up can one take? Isn't that always the question.
So, what were some of my most memorable experiences? What do I think about when I think about India? Besides the usual suspects of heat, noise, color, etc. The next most obvious thing is the food, which was a pretty special and evolving thing. Why not start with that?
What did I eat in India? To begin with, let me say that even though I am a frequent international traveler, I have done most of my travel in Europe, and there's not much to be worried about in the disease, and related, food department. I get cleaner food in Europe than I do in America, and I work for and mainly eat from a big organic grocer, so that's saying a lot. But Egypt was a horse of a different color, cuisine-wise, healthy and safety wise, and so I did get nervous about that, as I did about India, and so I employ great precaution. In all areas, actually, not just food - any of the biggies, from vaccines to accidents, I worry when I travel in developing nations. I can't help it. I'm not one to fear so much, but I was terrified before I went to India; I had been terrified before I went to Egypt, but still - you can't let fear hold you back. (The Arab Spring followed a couple of months later, so that's charmed timing). But I am afraid of this type of travel; I just do it anyway, and do what I can to take reasonable (or extra) precaution.
For instance, mosquitoes tend to love me, and I tend to react badly (allergically) to their bites. They can cause all sorts of awful diseases, such as malaria (whatever, I just took the anti-malarials, even though taking stuff like that is not my cup of tea), dengue fever (no prevention other than avoiding bites), Japanese encephalitis (sure, there's a vaccine, but it's 600 bucks and could stop you from breathing randomly within 24 - 48 hours of vaccination, so much so that you can't fly until 3 days after the shot, so you don't go into respiratory arrest mid-flight), meningitis (I planned on getting the jab but my doctor was like, you don't need it). I didn't want ANY of those, so I took a multi-prong attack with it:
As it turned out, we did NOT all have similar standards of food hygiene. My roommate had lived for three months in Ghana in her college years, and she would eat a pizza the next morning after it was left out all night (except she's vegan). She had no concern for street food - street food, street fruit, she was all for it. Others were eating the chicken dishes at the first "three star" hotel (three start for Dindigul, India, which is a step below Motel Whatever) we stayed at; I was conservative until we ate enough meals there that their quality was proved, but still - no meat! No meat in India - well, OK, a little at the amazingly extensive and high-end buffet at the next place we stayed. That was fine, but even so - I still avoided the fruit and cold vegetables. Others were more undiscriminating, but I was one of the more conservative eaters. Even so, I had a few days of mild instability.
The worse that happened to any of us, medically, turned out to not be food-related at all, but an unidentified bug bite that caused swelling in the foot and ankle of one of the women in our party. It was alarming, this swelling, accompanied by an equally alarming creeping discoloration. Finally, they went to an ER in town (oh, thank the lord for sparing me the ER in Dindigul experience), and it turned out to be something supposedly not serious, even though it continued to look bad for days after. The ER visit, by the way, including a visit from the doctor, and 3 days of internal anti-biotics and an anti-biotic topical cream, was 60 rupees. That's about $1.20. So that's interesting; what does that say for American health care?
Back to the food, which was, frankly, delicious. Our group leader cautioned us that we may be thinking that with the heat (sweat) and work (more sweat), and lack of appetite that foreign travel and heat can bring, plus unfamiliar exotic food, we might think we'd lose weight. No, she assured us, you will GAIN weight. That didn't happen to me, but I did eat way more than I thought; in fact, I was forced to eat more than I wanted, which I will explain later.
It wasn't at the restaurants - we basically ate in the hotel restaurant every night. Meals were included, as well as incredibly cheap anyway. They took 25 minutes to come, so the routine was, go to the dining room - it was not a huge hotel, plus, the group of ten white people stuck out - so they knew and expected us every night. Indeed, we had a reserved table. We'd order the food, then go shower and change or head to the bar, do whatever we had to do, and then they would call us and find us when dinner was ready, and we'd regroup and chow down, reviewing the events of the day together and often laughing a lot. Dinner was usually late, for me - Indians apparently eat late, like 8pm is early, and 9pm is more normal, whereas I prefer 6 or 7pm. Plus this was spicy, heavy food. I wasn't having a salad at 9pm, I was eating aloo gobi, veggie malasa, and uttapam at 10:30pm, with an early morning start the next day. It was a bummer, because you can't just lay down and sleep after a meal of spice and rice; it's awful. (Between this and the jet lag, I got only 4 - 5 hours of sleep every night for almost the first week).
The food itself was also so good, I ended up eating a lot. Eating late meant I went way too long between meals, so I would eat too much already, but then the food was ALSO super delicious - rich, spicy, creamy. Sauces and dips and curries and breads and rice dishes - some of the gravies were SO good, they must have been brimming with ghee (the clarified butter that is used in respectable cooking - has to be a caloric bomb). We would all order various things which arrived in small bowls, but it was never a one-to-one thing - we all shared and passed everything.
There was always more than enough food and you were bound to like at least a few. This was good because even though of us who regularly eat Indian food in the states - and I have an India restaurant whose take-out I get so frequently, all the delivery people know me; I eat lots of Indian food is my point - were still unable to decipher much of the menu. Either we didn't know what the dish was, or we did know what it was - what WE knew it as - and we'd order it, but when it came, it was something else, something we didn't expect, either what we thought but prepared wildly differently, OR it was something else entirely, like they just brought us what they wanted.
This phenomenon only increased as we ate there - night after night. They got used to us and started to bring what we liked, or what they thought we would like, no matter what we had actually ordered. In fact, my favorite dish I only had once - I could never get it again because we weren't sure what we had ordered in the first place and maybe it was something else anyway and not even what we ordered. It was a potato dish, so I ordered as many variations of "aloo ____" but it never surfaced again, alas. Like not being able to step into the same river twice, one cannot get the same aloo dish in India twice.
We also gained confidence in eating Indian dishes in general - almost everyone's spice level increased, no matter where we each started (my roommate was miserable a lot because she can have almost no spice), whatever we thought we could tolerate, we got used to more. More spice. So we gained spice confidence, and we gained hygiene confidence (day after day, and no one was getting sick), and plus the waiters got used to us and took their own course of action increasingly since we didn't complain and ate what they brought us anyway.
I got addicted to this traditional Indian drink, fresh lime soda. It was lime juice, fresh squeezed, served in the bottom of a tall glass, with soda water, simple syrup, salt and sugar on the side. You mixed as much as you like of each item, and they were addictively delicious. When one is overheated, this fresh lime soda is so refreshing, it's like the original and pure essence of refreshment, before colas, before beer, before margaritas. It was primal refreshment; it was prehistoric refreshment: our ancestors probably sucked limes to cool off 10,000 years ago. I ordered them every day, and when they were gone, I missed them. I realize I could make them at home but I just haven't yet. By the way, along with regular limes, they also had sweet limes, which are orange inside and are edible citrus, not quite an orange but close. Those were also delicious, to eat.
I had PLENTY of sweet limes because our charming hotel, good old Parsons Court, was fanatical about distributing evening fruit plates; they had confused ideas about where to spend their money, and they decided fruit plates would make them seem fancier, I guess. They had these painfully slow supposedly upscale (but not really) glass elevators, one of which never worked, and yet their sheets were coarse as burlap, the pillow lumpy and small. The lobby area had nice furniture, but the "koi" pond (with actual fish) was full of broken pipes and one sad plastic plant.
It was a strange place, and one of the most unexpected amenities was the daily fruit plate, which was a dinner plate with an assortment (varied daily) of fruit, mostly apples, grapes, banana and usually a sweet lime. Included and wedged under the tight shrink wrap was also a pack of butter cookies - not a small 2-pak either, but like a 12-pack of butter cookies.
The butter cookies never varied. Since they were small, edible at any time and safe, we all kept them around to eat in emergencies, which did happen, but even so they built up. After a few days, we were overflowing with butter cookies. Packages of butter cookies were on almost every surface in every room. We took an 8-hour train out of Dindigul, and our guide advised us to take the fruit and butter cookies, as we would not have food otherwise. By this time, we all had plenty. The hotel was devoted to the fruit plate; they insisted on it. If it was not in our rooms when we got back in the evenings, then we were pointedly handed one as we left the dining room after dinner.
One night, I don't know what happened - we ate a late lunch and everyone skipped dinner or something - my roommate and I were alarmed by a knock on the door at close to 11pm, and it turned out to be a hotel employee with our two fruit plates. I mean, we could have been asleep. Comparing notes the next morning, it turned out that some of us were woken up by the fruit plate delivery. I never fully understood it. But I grew to both love and hate those butter cookies.
Later, we moved to a *much* better hotel, a Taj property, which was incredibly nice, an actual luxury hotel, with expensive room service and a minibar and glossy pool, etc - and a lovely, cruise-ship worthy buffet, where the service was extensive and excessive, even - I couldn't think of things to want as much as they wanted to be there to get them for me. It was a bit schizophrenic, the difference in quality between our two hotels. The buffet there was also delicious, with Indian and Western food, and some koftan korma that - well, it was as luscious as any grass-fed steak I've ever had. Indian food at it's best is spectacular. But they hotel wasn't nearly as interesting, and I soon missed the 25-minute wait and the fruit plate. Luckily, we still got to experience not getting what we ordered - despite the almost exorbitant service, we all experienced order kerfuffles in the areas of both drinks and the made-to-order stations, but maybe that was a language issue. India: you'll get what you want, even if it's not what you asked for.
Now, the food at the children's home where we were volunteering was another story, which will be next.
So, what were some of my most memorable experiences? What do I think about when I think about India? Besides the usual suspects of heat, noise, color, etc. The next most obvious thing is the food, which was a pretty special and evolving thing. Why not start with that?
What did I eat in India? To begin with, let me say that even though I am a frequent international traveler, I have done most of my travel in Europe, and there's not much to be worried about in the disease, and related, food department. I get cleaner food in Europe than I do in America, and I work for and mainly eat from a big organic grocer, so that's saying a lot. But Egypt was a horse of a different color, cuisine-wise, healthy and safety wise, and so I did get nervous about that, as I did about India, and so I employ great precaution. In all areas, actually, not just food - any of the biggies, from vaccines to accidents, I worry when I travel in developing nations. I can't help it. I'm not one to fear so much, but I was terrified before I went to India; I had been terrified before I went to Egypt, but still - you can't let fear hold you back. (The Arab Spring followed a couple of months later, so that's charmed timing). But I am afraid of this type of travel; I just do it anyway, and do what I can to take reasonable (or extra) precaution.
For instance, mosquitoes tend to love me, and I tend to react badly (allergically) to their bites. They can cause all sorts of awful diseases, such as malaria (whatever, I just took the anti-malarials, even though taking stuff like that is not my cup of tea), dengue fever (no prevention other than avoiding bites), Japanese encephalitis (sure, there's a vaccine, but it's 600 bucks and could stop you from breathing randomly within 24 - 48 hours of vaccination, so much so that you can't fly until 3 days after the shot, so you don't go into respiratory arrest mid-flight), meningitis (I planned on getting the jab but my doctor was like, you don't need it). I didn't want ANY of those, so I took a multi-prong attack with it:
- Pest and Human [in that order] Bug Repellent Soap, which was safe for shampoo as well (and yes, it was my main shampoo)
- A 48-hour slow release B-1 thin plastic patch one wore on the hip, buttock or shoulder area. This, I figured, may not actually work as a repellent but might reduce my mosquito attractiveness down to regular human levels, especially useful as it was waterproof (and therefore could be left on for 2 days). It meant I had some protection, even when sleeping - because you have to wash the DEET off sometimes. (It also perplexed my Vedic massage therapist, who saw 99% of every square inch of my naked body)
- DEET. 30%, but the alcohol-based time release one. Not much smell, nor, happily, irritation. I limited it to feet / ankles / lower legs, and the neck and front chest area.
- For my face, I hoped for the soap to work, and I daubed lavender essential oils (supposedly a mild repellent) behind my ears. I also spritzed to keep cool with lavender-scented water, doubling as well as a repellent
- For my hair (and face), I had a bandanna treated with Permathin (a repellent used on clothes and tents) in its very fibers, and I wore that during evenings and early mornings.
- Clothes treated with Permathin (not all of them)
- Naturalpel "natural" bug wipes for when the 12-hour DEET wore off - yes, some days started at 5:30am and there was no return to the hotel for over 12 hours (quite a few days, in fact)
- A fan. Low-tech, I'll admit, but I figured they must bite less in moving air. Also good for the fantastic heat
- One of those plastic "bug bands" which can either be worn or placed nearby, like smokeless incense, which was how I used it; I placed it beside me when I reclined in a poolside lounge chair (thick white towels, down pillows, perfect crystal water - so nice) and when I was on the overnight train - I hung it in my little snug compartment, from the bunk bed above me.
As it turned out, we did NOT all have similar standards of food hygiene. My roommate had lived for three months in Ghana in her college years, and she would eat a pizza the next morning after it was left out all night (except she's vegan). She had no concern for street food - street food, street fruit, she was all for it. Others were eating the chicken dishes at the first "three star" hotel (three start for Dindigul, India, which is a step below Motel Whatever) we stayed at; I was conservative until we ate enough meals there that their quality was proved, but still - no meat! No meat in India - well, OK, a little at the amazingly extensive and high-end buffet at the next place we stayed. That was fine, but even so - I still avoided the fruit and cold vegetables. Others were more undiscriminating, but I was one of the more conservative eaters. Even so, I had a few days of mild instability.
The worse that happened to any of us, medically, turned out to not be food-related at all, but an unidentified bug bite that caused swelling in the foot and ankle of one of the women in our party. It was alarming, this swelling, accompanied by an equally alarming creeping discoloration. Finally, they went to an ER in town (oh, thank the lord for sparing me the ER in Dindigul experience), and it turned out to be something supposedly not serious, even though it continued to look bad for days after. The ER visit, by the way, including a visit from the doctor, and 3 days of internal anti-biotics and an anti-biotic topical cream, was 60 rupees. That's about $1.20. So that's interesting; what does that say for American health care?
Back to the food, which was, frankly, delicious. Our group leader cautioned us that we may be thinking that with the heat (sweat) and work (more sweat), and lack of appetite that foreign travel and heat can bring, plus unfamiliar exotic food, we might think we'd lose weight. No, she assured us, you will GAIN weight. That didn't happen to me, but I did eat way more than I thought; in fact, I was forced to eat more than I wanted, which I will explain later.
It wasn't at the restaurants - we basically ate in the hotel restaurant every night. Meals were included, as well as incredibly cheap anyway. They took 25 minutes to come, so the routine was, go to the dining room - it was not a huge hotel, plus, the group of ten white people stuck out - so they knew and expected us every night. Indeed, we had a reserved table. We'd order the food, then go shower and change or head to the bar, do whatever we had to do, and then they would call us and find us when dinner was ready, and we'd regroup and chow down, reviewing the events of the day together and often laughing a lot. Dinner was usually late, for me - Indians apparently eat late, like 8pm is early, and 9pm is more normal, whereas I prefer 6 or 7pm. Plus this was spicy, heavy food. I wasn't having a salad at 9pm, I was eating aloo gobi, veggie malasa, and uttapam at 10:30pm, with an early morning start the next day. It was a bummer, because you can't just lay down and sleep after a meal of spice and rice; it's awful. (Between this and the jet lag, I got only 4 - 5 hours of sleep every night for almost the first week).
The food itself was also so good, I ended up eating a lot. Eating late meant I went way too long between meals, so I would eat too much already, but then the food was ALSO super delicious - rich, spicy, creamy. Sauces and dips and curries and breads and rice dishes - some of the gravies were SO good, they must have been brimming with ghee (the clarified butter that is used in respectable cooking - has to be a caloric bomb). We would all order various things which arrived in small bowls, but it was never a one-to-one thing - we all shared and passed everything.
There was always more than enough food and you were bound to like at least a few. This was good because even though of us who regularly eat Indian food in the states - and I have an India restaurant whose take-out I get so frequently, all the delivery people know me; I eat lots of Indian food is my point - were still unable to decipher much of the menu. Either we didn't know what the dish was, or we did know what it was - what WE knew it as - and we'd order it, but when it came, it was something else, something we didn't expect, either what we thought but prepared wildly differently, OR it was something else entirely, like they just brought us what they wanted.
This phenomenon only increased as we ate there - night after night. They got used to us and started to bring what we liked, or what they thought we would like, no matter what we had actually ordered. In fact, my favorite dish I only had once - I could never get it again because we weren't sure what we had ordered in the first place and maybe it was something else anyway and not even what we ordered. It was a potato dish, so I ordered as many variations of "aloo ____" but it never surfaced again, alas. Like not being able to step into the same river twice, one cannot get the same aloo dish in India twice.
We also gained confidence in eating Indian dishes in general - almost everyone's spice level increased, no matter where we each started (my roommate was miserable a lot because she can have almost no spice), whatever we thought we could tolerate, we got used to more. More spice. So we gained spice confidence, and we gained hygiene confidence (day after day, and no one was getting sick), and plus the waiters got used to us and took their own course of action increasingly since we didn't complain and ate what they brought us anyway.
I got addicted to this traditional Indian drink, fresh lime soda. It was lime juice, fresh squeezed, served in the bottom of a tall glass, with soda water, simple syrup, salt and sugar on the side. You mixed as much as you like of each item, and they were addictively delicious. When one is overheated, this fresh lime soda is so refreshing, it's like the original and pure essence of refreshment, before colas, before beer, before margaritas. It was primal refreshment; it was prehistoric refreshment: our ancestors probably sucked limes to cool off 10,000 years ago. I ordered them every day, and when they were gone, I missed them. I realize I could make them at home but I just haven't yet. By the way, along with regular limes, they also had sweet limes, which are orange inside and are edible citrus, not quite an orange but close. Those were also delicious, to eat.
I had PLENTY of sweet limes because our charming hotel, good old Parsons Court, was fanatical about distributing evening fruit plates; they had confused ideas about where to spend their money, and they decided fruit plates would make them seem fancier, I guess. They had these painfully slow supposedly upscale (but not really) glass elevators, one of which never worked, and yet their sheets were coarse as burlap, the pillow lumpy and small. The lobby area had nice furniture, but the "koi" pond (with actual fish) was full of broken pipes and one sad plastic plant.
It was a strange place, and one of the most unexpected amenities was the daily fruit plate, which was a dinner plate with an assortment (varied daily) of fruit, mostly apples, grapes, banana and usually a sweet lime. Included and wedged under the tight shrink wrap was also a pack of butter cookies - not a small 2-pak either, but like a 12-pack of butter cookies.
The butter cookies never varied. Since they were small, edible at any time and safe, we all kept them around to eat in emergencies, which did happen, but even so they built up. After a few days, we were overflowing with butter cookies. Packages of butter cookies were on almost every surface in every room. We took an 8-hour train out of Dindigul, and our guide advised us to take the fruit and butter cookies, as we would not have food otherwise. By this time, we all had plenty. The hotel was devoted to the fruit plate; they insisted on it. If it was not in our rooms when we got back in the evenings, then we were pointedly handed one as we left the dining room after dinner.
One night, I don't know what happened - we ate a late lunch and everyone skipped dinner or something - my roommate and I were alarmed by a knock on the door at close to 11pm, and it turned out to be a hotel employee with our two fruit plates. I mean, we could have been asleep. Comparing notes the next morning, it turned out that some of us were woken up by the fruit plate delivery. I never fully understood it. But I grew to both love and hate those butter cookies.
Later, we moved to a *much* better hotel, a Taj property, which was incredibly nice, an actual luxury hotel, with expensive room service and a minibar and glossy pool, etc - and a lovely, cruise-ship worthy buffet, where the service was extensive and excessive, even - I couldn't think of things to want as much as they wanted to be there to get them for me. It was a bit schizophrenic, the difference in quality between our two hotels. The buffet there was also delicious, with Indian and Western food, and some koftan korma that - well, it was as luscious as any grass-fed steak I've ever had. Indian food at it's best is spectacular. But they hotel wasn't nearly as interesting, and I soon missed the 25-minute wait and the fruit plate. Luckily, we still got to experience not getting what we ordered - despite the almost exorbitant service, we all experienced order kerfuffles in the areas of both drinks and the made-to-order stations, but maybe that was a language issue. India: you'll get what you want, even if it's not what you asked for.
Now, the food at the children's home where we were volunteering was another story, which will be next.
No comments:
Post a Comment