So the cross-country road trip is long over.
And if there have been no updates since, it’s because life been a long series of habitual nothingness.
In the time since the road trip, mid-Nov through mid-Jan, P and I were in India… chilling our butts off, if there is such an expression.
It was sort of sad leaving the States, leaving the life we had established for ourselves – a life that was just the two of us. It had nothing to do with leaving ‘the States’, which to most Indians at least, is like committing monetary suicide.
It was about leaving the home we had pieced together with curtains and cushions and vases and Ikea goodies. It was about the $60 bed we loved so much and were so proud of. It was about the $4k car that we pinched pennies to pay off. It was about the experience of driving away for weekends, driving to SF after a boring two weeks in San Jose, it was craving Indian kebab and heading to Zafran every few days. It was about having Smithwicks on tap at O’Flaherty and requesting pecans in every salad. It was about dropping Pratik to work and meeting him for lunch and then picking him up in the evening. Well, it was a weeny bit of a heartbreak leaving our lives and knowing that we will probably not return to it.
And, there were the butterflies, Vietnamese butterflies, in my tummy. We realized when we moved to the States that moving to a new country was not as easy as it sounds. There’s a ton of stuff that one must unlearn and a ton more to relearn.
Anyway, with so much going on in my little brain, I really lost it at the driver in the car behind us in the parking lot at Ahmedabad airport. Baba came to pick us up and he had barely backed out from his parking spot when the driver behind us began honking at us. I turned around sharply and showed him the middle finger, and launched into a series of expletives. Pratik, being Pratik, told me to calm down… (as he continued to do through the rest of the India trip).
But really, I think there are some things people need to learn in life – like not honking the house, rather street, down, and not breaking the queue. Gosh, I lost my temper at a jackass who totally ignored the fact that Pratik and I were in line at a movie ticket counter. I really gave it to him, the obnoxious bastard. I should have punched him hard actually, to make sure he remembered never to go out of turn ever again in his life. He did offer an apology at the end (of a very loud tirade where I asked him whether he ever went to school and learned waiting in line.. haha), but a very ‘I’m a dude; you’re just another angry young woman.. shut the hell up,’ kinda apology.
UGh, Men.
A lot of Pratik’s school friends were in Ahmedabad when we were there, so we had a lot of rocking parties. One that stands out in memory is the one when Nupur puked all over the bathroom, Varun slapped me, Janak kissed me several times, Diya fretted over Janak, Varun launched into a monologue of some very serious expletives, Vikram tried to be the Maj. Vikram and control the outlaws, Gunjan wagged his tongue at every camera in sight, and everyone hugged everyone else like there was no tomorrow. That, incidentally, was also the first day I made Babganoush, and it was a huge huge hit. TO see my super simple Babaganoush recipe, click here. Twas a lot of fun.
Calcutta was great too. It was the last of the big Indian cities that I had not seen. A lot of people had warned about the craziness of the city, the population, the over-Bangaliness and all the rest, but honestly, I really liked the place. It is overpopulated but where in India is it not. The city is crazy.. but that goes with its history. It’s not Chandigarh which had an architectural plan before the first brick was laid. This is a city where the tram line runs in the middle of a busy road, and people must run to the very middle to get on the tram. It’s a city where the Metro is worse than the Mumbai locals, and the taxi drivers go to sleep in the middle of green signals at traffic intersections.
It’s nuts, but the city is cheap, the food is f-ing fantastic, and there’s culture, there’s life. It’s not a hostile city, and more people could communicate in English than in Delhi. P and I explored more Calcutta in a month than my parents did in 6 months. By the end of our trip, I was taking my mom out to show her the various markets I had discovered.
It was really much colder in Calcutta than I had expected it to be, and much of my nights were spent acclimatizing to the cold conditions (after Ahmedabad, and a warm summer in SJ).
Can’t remember anything else of particular interest that happened in the two months we were in India. Will update with another post when I do remember something.
