Greetings one and all from Vadodara, Gujarat in northwest India. Yesterday was a whirlwind day – the 14-hour flight from Newark to Mumbai, a good night’s sleep at the LaLiT Intercontinantal (as lovely a hotel as you’re ever going to find), then an early Monday flight to Vadodara and here I am, still alive and in one piece.
A few thoughts before I get on to work:
Everyone ought to fly business class at least once in their lives. That 777-200 I was on was jam-packed – too bad for the saps flying in coach (I can say that because I’m usually one of them!), but in business class there was plenty of space, plenty of good food and wine in abundance, and wonderful seats – all in all it made for a very pleasant trip.
Rather than sleep, I chose to spend most of the 14 hours reading “The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton” (a great read thus far), listening to surf and tropical music on the MP3, and taking three short cat-naps that I hope would enable me to be tired enough when I got to Mumbai that I would have a regular night’s sleep and trick my body into thinking last night was really last night and not Sunday afternoon. Did it work? As of now, yes. Tomorrow? I’ll let you know.
I guess I’m just not a New York guy. The Newark airport is such an immersion into New York culture. First of all, the opinions of the likes of Paris Hilton and Nicholas Cage aside, Famous Famiglia pizza is not that great – The Pizza Place at the Wynn, Papa Gino’s, and even Rino D’s in Gilbert have much better pizza. And to sit at a bar and watch the Yankees pre-game show on the YES network (Oooh, there’s A-Rod hitting in the cage!! Aaah, there’s “Jeets” taking ground balls at short!!) made me want to freakin’ hurl.
India in the monsoon season is very cloudy, damp, and EXTREMELY muggy. In fact, the dampness follows you everywhere here.
Traveling on the roads here is quite the experience. They don’t just drive on the left side, no one gives any quarter to anyone on a motorized vehicle of any kind – everyone’s fighting for the same space, honking, barely missing each other. And seeing cattle lying down in the middle of the roads just vegging out while all the traffic veers around them takes a little getting used to. Goats too. Supposedly you’ll see camels and perhaps an elephant (the latter used for selling rides) but haven’t seen either yet.
What I’ve seen of Mumbai and Vadodara so far reminds of Guadalupe, very tropical, very green, but lots of slums and metal houses not that far away from the very nice hotels. Islands of welathy in a sea of well-to-do. It’s not that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poor, it’s just the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor.
Not having done any homework on this, not sure how much of a threat terrorism is in the areas I’m traveling. But I will say that security is extremely tight at both of the hotels I’ve been to – every vehicle gets checked front, back, and underneath before you get too close, and everyone gets wanded. The soldiers at the Mumbai airport were stationed with automatic rifles at the entrance I walked through.
More later.
