IN JAMAICA

the train ride was cool
until it broke the ***k down
beautiful landscapes

FROM CALCUTTA TO CHENNAI…30 HOURS AND 1041 MILES LATER
We just got to Chennai aka Madras, lost our umbrella along the way, and are holing up in Internet world until the storm subsides. I am so happy people are checking this out! Thanks for the comments and keep ‘em coming. We just had a delicious South Indian Thali plate that we ate on a banana leaf and they kept refilling the food until we could not eat no mo. 50 cents!!

I was hoping to find lots of great fabrics here since J. Crew made madras so popular…but any shopping I do will have to come later. Lugging around backpack is enough for now! We are staying on this street called Triplicane in Chennai that has some great Muslim hat stores, delicious places to eat, and a place that offers excellent circumcision.

Excellent Circumcision!

uh….code red code red
the malaria toilet
anxiety pee

So Hedia has been insisting that I write about the toilet situation in India. Truth be told, I’d rather not because I’m still here and having to deal with it on a daily basis. Basically, they are all gross and when I mean gross I mean they are wet with waterpee everywhere, a smelly hole in the ground for squat style, and NO toilet paper. And NEVER any soap! I do not understand this process!!!!

On Sunday we went to Guru Purnima which is like Happy Guru Day all over India. Earlier in the day we passed by a festive Sai Baba ashram where the folks were celebrating their Happy Guru Day! We went to Amma’s ashram in Calcutta, and for the occasion I got a brand new kurta. It is burnt orange and is basically a simple and nice embroidered shirtdress that goes to my knees with pants that you wear underneath that come in size 65 waist and you just use the string to make it fit your waist. Talk about one size fits all! So we get to the ashram and change there, since before that we were eating at our friend Sen’s house and kind of had to rush to get to the ashram. Keep in mind that changing quickly isn’t really possible, since I’m generally very sticky from all the summer heat. I got into my kurta and felt good, comfy, even a little airy, and checked to make sure that everything was on right.

Of course, that’s when I have to go pee. To go pee at the ashram meant going to a little shed in the back. No problem, I thought…I can now pee on the fly instead of having to plan how I will enter a bathroom, not smell anything, squat and try to use tp and try to keep my clothes clean and all that. Generally there’s a LOT of premeditation, worry, and fear that occupies my mind before using a toilet here.

THIS BATHROOM WAS SPECIAL. IT WAS THE INDIA-NA JONES OF TOILET ADVENTURES!!!

When I peeked into the shed I was met with a number of obstacles. First, there was about 2 inches of water consistently held in this slightly sunken shed, enough to make my kurta pants (salwars) wet and my feet gross. The toilet is on the opposite side of the shed, and in this case, there is actually a toilet even though it’s totally gross. This is where I start sweating. I have this crazy new outfit on that requires a lot of hitching up in order to stay dry, along with a 10-foot drawstring that will take an hour just to undo. Then there is my Mr. Friendly pouch that Jun gave me a long time ago that is discreetly holding the tp so that Indians everywhere aren’t laughing at me. HOW DO I GET TO THE OTHER SIDE WITHOUT GETTING EVERYTHING WET??

Thankfully, there are bricks. But only a few. They are placed in a way that can only make sense to an Indian (I say this a lot to myself while I’m here)- basically one here and there, and not in any order or direction that leads you to the toilet, which would make sense to me. The problem with the bricks is that they are regular small red bricks, and two are not necessarily placed together. So once you commit to being in the shed, you MUST have your feet placed on a brick at all times or you will FALL INTO THE MALARIA PIT OF WATER-PEE. Where’s a goddamn swinging vine when you need one? I forgot to mention that this shed has a very nice, meditative sound, and that is the sound of malaria mosquitos just waiting to suck my blood. While I spent most of my time panicking from one brick to another (why weren’t any two together????) trying NOT to fall in and just hold my balance and my Mr. Friendly pouch, I could hear Hedia’s voice cackling above my left shoulder like a little devil cloud hovering above. I know she forewarned me about India toilets…

On a quick side note, I have been doing very wellwith mosquito bites- meaning I’ve only gotten a few so far, and I’m living on the edge by not taking my anti-malaria meds although I keep telling myself I’ll start once I get a few more…

At this point, I was about to just give up and say, fuck it, this Guru Purnima is only going to be four hours long, I can hold it. As I made my way out, Sen, who directed me to the shed in the first place, saw me and said, “That is it! That is the shed. Use the shed.”

ACT II
So I re-enter and just decide that India is nice but not that nice, and I am just going to try to find two bricks that are reasonably close to one another and just put the pouch in my mouth, gather up my clothes, and squat and pee into the shedwaterpeemess. But then I realized that there would be a very bad splashing situation. To make a short story long, I finally made my way over to the ‘toilet’, did my business, and got out of the shed.

When I got out of the shed I found no less than six new mosquito bites on me.

the maggotron breaks
looking for the perfect beat
crazy sitar beats

Right now I’m about to join Arjuna who of course, managed to find Calcutta’s record slanger, aka The Record Prince. He has found all sorts of gems! The price he has to pay: Well…yesterday he decided to dig into the deepest crevices of the ‘back room’ by moving boxes around to find what he declared as the secret stash. Many of these records are stuck together by moisture and time, so there’s some fingerwork to be done to separate the bunch. Arjuna took out a five-inch stack and started to go through them, but in the process pulled out a record and woke up a bunch of swarming MAGGOTS and screamed like a banshee! The maggots were hungrily eating everything but the record, and now he’s slightly traumatized.

Now I’m about to go help him sort things out- we can’t be travelling through India with 50 pounds of records but there is some SERIOUS SHIT he is finding! Let your Bollywood breaks people know because when we get back…

Captured by the spirit of moldy Bollywood

The Maggot Room! No bigger than a small closet with a slopy ceiling.

The Record Prince himself

some of the Record Prince’s selection

crossing the ganges
dakshineswar belur math
holy place 2c

Yesterday we took the subway (not crazy) and bus (crazy!!!!) to visit Dakshineswar. After visiting the places where Sri Ramakrishna spent many of his days, we crossed a little boat to go to Belur Math, which is a place where many people travel to be in the presence of this sacred site.

Crossing the Hooghly/Ganges was a special experience- I had no idea what to expect and have some fears about being in water. The Hooghly is super dirty, just opaque brown liquid. The last time Arjuna crossed it he saw a dog limb floating and a bird on top if it eating it… While on the boat I thought of Tuni, who’s in Bangladesh right now working on her film about the music of the Ganges. I also thought about eating something because I was very, very hungry.

After our adventure for the day (meaning: covered in diesel-exhaust-soot and dried up sweat), we finally had our first meal that was at some Rajasthani-style restaurant above a Gupta Bros, a place known for their sweets. The experience was completely Indian (laugh and cry) and will have to have its own entry, eventually. Our meal was a shared lime soda, paneer something and aloo something (got to remember before we forget).

Oh and for the title…the next GTA needs to be in India. The driving here is seriously super crazy.

The Hooghly and Our Little Boats

like a steam facial
crazy ass smell wet wet HEAT
calcutta no joke

The first 30 hours of Calcutta life was not good for me. The only way to deal with the heat is to face it head on, so that’s where I’m at now. I have come to the understanding that it’s good for my face!!

I spent a lot of time our first day at some hotel (?!!?) in the middle of somewhere (??) on the balcony, watching the traffic. Although this is not the exact scene that I witnessed, it’s really summed up here:

I found that it’s best to look straight out the window when being a passenger in a car, stare into the far distance, and work on my breathing. It’s the only way NOT to have a panic attack!

Sudder St. is where we stayed in Calcutta.

Mangosteen yes yes
Cute purple and white fleshy
MRT is good

Singapore is good…we are at the airport waiting to go to Kolkata in an hour or so. My quest to eat all things ‘Po was totally blocked by well….blockage. CONSTIPATION!! I wasn’t hungry all day but did manage to have a Teh Halia- kind of a ginger chai type drink, thanks to TP’s suggestion. OH AND THE MANGOSTEEN! I have been wanting to try one forever, and finally did, and yes it was all the heaven it has been described to be.

Pictures soon (including the amazing Universal Zulu Nation copycat logo)

and…BIG DEAL!!

First posts are always lame, right? Setting up a blog should be easy but I like to make things hard.

Now listening: Funkmaster Flex Spins 90s (a 5 hour mixx!) pt.1

Get it for yourself.