(no subject)
Siiiiiiiick. And whiny. I was fine in India, I was fine on the way home, I have not been fine since. Either I have a slow burn bug that I picked up there, or I got food poisoning. Either way, I've been not in good shape for the last few days.
Bob went on a short backpacking trip with Elise. They left this morning and he's supposed to be back in time to meet me and the inspectors at the new house tomorrow. We also need to make decisions on flooring tomorrow, because it's going to take up to five weeks to get it delivered and ready to install, and we'd really like to be moved out by the end of June.
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Some final thoughts on India. I really enjoyed myself in Goa, but I'm not sure that I'd go back to where we stayed again. It was fabulous. But it was so fabulous that they basically charged US prices for everything (i.e. around $100 for a nice dinner for two, with no alcohol). That's not something I do regularly here, but it's ridiculously overpriced for there. Other than the accents of the employees, we could have been in any high end resort in Hawaii or the Florida panhandle. Actually, FL would probably be cheaper.
The other weird thing is that we were under surveillance all the time. After a while it felt like we were living in an episode of The Prisoner. Beautiful seaside villa, everybody drives around golf carts (they call them buggies), and any time they can possibly anticipate a need they jump out of the woodwork. Case in point - I was walking back to our room, which was about a six minute walk from the main hotel. I walked under the camera, and within a minute there was a nice man with a buggy basically begging me to get in and let him give me a ride the rest of the way. It took a lot of convincing of all the staff, that no, the crazy american ladies would really prefer to walk.
There's also this cultural thing where you have to let the staff do their jobs. Down to waiting for the waiter to place the napkin in your lap before a meal. I tried to push my own chair in and nearly caused a riot. I understand better now - I'm not helping, I'm removing their reason for existing. It's a hard habit to break when I'm there. I try to let them do their thing and tip them well when they do. The flip side of that is that a couple of people on staff said they were always thrilled when Americans come, because we are so easy to take care of. Maybe they were blowing smoke, but maybe they weren't. The thing about India is that the country is chock full of trash. Even the nicer homes in the cities are surrounded by open sewers and literal piles of trash 10-20-30 feet deep. Everywhere. Nobody cleans up anything, Also, it's not so weird for a westerner to be able to afford this kind of hotel, but for an Indian family to go they have to be off the charts wealthy - I overheard one woman telling her kid not to spend more than 60k on his car this time at breakfast. So they are used to having a huge household staff to clean up after them, and they just leave their shit everywhere. They drop things on the floor in restaurants and walk away, they use a separate plate for each individual item on the breakfast buffet., leave little piles of snack food wrappers to blow away in the wind by the pool. Stuff I wouldn't dream of doing.
The other funny thing about India is that even in the nicest places everything is always falling apart - badly made to start usually. The bathrooms at the Novotel (where the conference was in Hyderabad) are notoriously awful. The sides of the tub are too tall, and the glass door only covers half the tub (WTF? this is intentional) - I personally know of two people who have fallen and hurt themselves badly getting out of those showers, and I am terrified of them. You also can't keep anything on the left half of the sink because it gets water on it every time you shower, because there's no door there. And the floor floods, the tile gets slippery. It's a bad bad scene. At the Taj, different design, similar problems. The shower looked great, but flooded the entire bathroom every time we used it because the gasket on the bottom of the door was installed backward. Also, the toilet seat fell clean off the toilet once. They fixed that right away, but it's funny to me that even at the nicest places they are really going for looks but have left behind basic building standards.
So, great trip. Loved Goa but I'll probably stay somewhere cheaper if I go back. Next year, maybe Varanasi. I'm still a little scared of the big cities.
Bob went on a short backpacking trip with Elise. They left this morning and he's supposed to be back in time to meet me and the inspectors at the new house tomorrow. We also need to make decisions on flooring tomorrow, because it's going to take up to five weeks to get it delivered and ready to install, and we'd really like to be moved out by the end of June.
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Some final thoughts on India. I really enjoyed myself in Goa, but I'm not sure that I'd go back to where we stayed again. It was fabulous. But it was so fabulous that they basically charged US prices for everything (i.e. around $100 for a nice dinner for two, with no alcohol). That's not something I do regularly here, but it's ridiculously overpriced for there. Other than the accents of the employees, we could have been in any high end resort in Hawaii or the Florida panhandle. Actually, FL would probably be cheaper.
The other weird thing is that we were under surveillance all the time. After a while it felt like we were living in an episode of The Prisoner. Beautiful seaside villa, everybody drives around golf carts (they call them buggies), and any time they can possibly anticipate a need they jump out of the woodwork. Case in point - I was walking back to our room, which was about a six minute walk from the main hotel. I walked under the camera, and within a minute there was a nice man with a buggy basically begging me to get in and let him give me a ride the rest of the way. It took a lot of convincing of all the staff, that no, the crazy american ladies would really prefer to walk.
There's also this cultural thing where you have to let the staff do their jobs. Down to waiting for the waiter to place the napkin in your lap before a meal. I tried to push my own chair in and nearly caused a riot. I understand better now - I'm not helping, I'm removing their reason for existing. It's a hard habit to break when I'm there. I try to let them do their thing and tip them well when they do. The flip side of that is that a couple of people on staff said they were always thrilled when Americans come, because we are so easy to take care of. Maybe they were blowing smoke, but maybe they weren't. The thing about India is that the country is chock full of trash. Even the nicer homes in the cities are surrounded by open sewers and literal piles of trash 10-20-30 feet deep. Everywhere. Nobody cleans up anything, Also, it's not so weird for a westerner to be able to afford this kind of hotel, but for an Indian family to go they have to be off the charts wealthy - I overheard one woman telling her kid not to spend more than 60k on his car this time at breakfast. So they are used to having a huge household staff to clean up after them, and they just leave their shit everywhere. They drop things on the floor in restaurants and walk away, they use a separate plate for each individual item on the breakfast buffet., leave little piles of snack food wrappers to blow away in the wind by the pool. Stuff I wouldn't dream of doing.
The other funny thing about India is that even in the nicest places everything is always falling apart - badly made to start usually. The bathrooms at the Novotel (where the conference was in Hyderabad) are notoriously awful. The sides of the tub are too tall, and the glass door only covers half the tub (WTF? this is intentional) - I personally know of two people who have fallen and hurt themselves badly getting out of those showers, and I am terrified of them. You also can't keep anything on the left half of the sink because it gets water on it every time you shower, because there's no door there. And the floor floods, the tile gets slippery. It's a bad bad scene. At the Taj, different design, similar problems. The shower looked great, but flooded the entire bathroom every time we used it because the gasket on the bottom of the door was installed backward. Also, the toilet seat fell clean off the toilet once. They fixed that right away, but it's funny to me that even at the nicest places they are really going for looks but have left behind basic building standards.
So, great trip. Loved Goa but I'll probably stay somewhere cheaper if I go back. Next year, maybe Varanasi. I'm still a little scared of the big cities.