Charlie Meatball

Wow, that was fun.  Although we stayed in Hyderabad minus a weekend jaunt to Goa, it was quite the India experience.  I’m only going to post some quick stories from the first week, then I’ll go back and include pictures, then I’ll post about the second week of the visit.

Sarah got in around 1 AM.  Ali, my new driver, helped me to make a little sign for her and we waited with Sari, Chador and Burkha clad women, men in kurtas, and lots of tired but still rampaging kids.  She arrived tired but in pretty good spirits having had a mostly empty flight to Hyderabad.

The next morning I took a slow-ish morning, introduced her to Timothy (pronounced tim-O-tee) and the rest of the staff at the house, and planned out the day: morning breakfast together, I go to work, Sarah works from the guest house then goes out during the middle of the day after shops & museums open, then we meet up for exercise in the early evening followed by dinner and hanging out watching videos in my room.  Sarah toured around Hyderabad most days while I was at work and seemed to get to most of the museums of the city - with some good stories about the public health museum that I will let her tell sometime that is not in close proximity to meal time.

Goa wasn’t quite what we expected.  The flights were easy enough and kinda fun.  Especially fun were the stewardess uniforms (it’s amazing how daring a knee-length skirt-suit looks when compared with Saris, Burkhas and Chadors) and in-flight meals of good Indian food followed by especially good “After Mints” (fennel seeds coated in sugar along with some crunchy savory things - yum!).  Less fun was the muzak that played throughout the entire flight like an hour-and-a-half elevator ride.

First impression of Goa was crazy tumult and ten times the number of foreigners than we’d seen in all of our time in India previously.  The hotel was beautiful, built on the ruins of a Portugese fort on the edge of a sandy beach, though the room itself was a touch, um, damp from the humidity.  The people there were, with only a very few exceptions, Indians on vacation, which was kinda cool.  At the same time, we felt very conspicuous, especially when a group of men began taking cameraphone pictures of Sarah as she lounged by the pool.

Turns out we were there in the off-season, and while the rates were cheaper, none of the foreign guests would arrive for another couple weeks.  The crazy parties, the international scene, even the paint on the houses, even many of the structures themselves, would all be showing up in a couple of weeks for the beginning of the season.  In the meantime, there were a lot of domestic tourists getting a taste of Goa for bargain rates and locals who were beginning to get their businesses together for the coming season (painting and maintenance work was being done all over).

What remained was just the hotels (only partially opened) and the beaches.  The scene of the beach where we were was eerie and pretty - with the ruins of the fort and the River Princess, a huge rusting semi-abandoned tanker, just offshore.  Though the water looked beautiful if a bit choppy, we were told not to swim because monsoon season had not yet been over long enough for the water to calm down.  It’s unclear if this was because the monsoons mean that the water was unhealthy (lots of yucky stuff flowing out to sea as a result of the monsoons) or because the rips are really bad, or because the hotel expects that their guests aren’t experienced swimmers.  In any case, no one was swimming and there seemed enough good reasons for us not to.

Beaches were sandy, but a bit dirty.  We had fun throwing a frisbee around and doing agility drills until a stray dog wanted to join in.  He was a bit mangy, so neither Sarah and I wanted to pet him, but he seemed harmless and cute enough until he got a bit excited by me running a drawn-in-the-sand agility ladder and bit me on the butt.  I think he was just playing around because it didn’t even hurt and wasn’t close to breaking the skin, but that was the end of agility drills on the beach.

We tried to get up the energy to go out, especially on Saturday night, but the off-season parties are a long way from where we were staying and we had been on a 7 AM wakeup schedule from Hyderabad, so we didn’t make it.  Goa fail!

Because hotels were mostly closed, we only had the five star for one night, so we got to find out what two-star was like.  This was primarily about learning to appreciate air conditioning, bathrooms that are separated from the shower by some curtain or other divider, towels that were dry and not the color of wastewater, and the relative lack of bugs of the guest house in Hyderabad.  Compared to the guest house, the ants were much smaller, but much more active, the beetles were much bigger and more plentiful, and the mystery bites much more common and painful.

Nonetheless it was a good time.  We enjoyed the time at the beach, found a friend at a restaurant called Flambe, and did a lot of walking with cows and observing of cow fights (involving one cow going up to another and rubbing their head against them and perhaps licking them, usually followed by the attackee cow taking some sort of notice such as looking at the attacker or grunting before returning to chewing cud/grass).

In the airport we found a funny menu and lots of pushy people, all of whom would arrive at precisely the same time as us.

Tomorrow: Photos, then hanging in Hyderabad in week 2 of Sarah’s visit.