My Old Blog

I admit I love to be amused. I don’t use the words “happy” or “fun” because those are harder to come by and mean different things to me than most people. I just like to be…..well, amused….you know, slightly entertained.

Life in India is certainly amusing, even entertaining. So often I get that grand, far off, once-in-a-lifetime feeling…..even when I’m being swindled for money or waiting an hour for something that would’ve been automatic back home…I just feel, at that moment, I’ve seen something I’ll never see again.

Like last weekend:

We left 3 hours late after 2 hours sleep on a 5 hour trip that took 12.

The wrong car came. The air conditioner broke halfway there and it was 100 degrees. The reservation we had at the hotel got somehow cancelled and it was Indian Independence Day weekend, which meant there were no rooms available anywhere.

So we’re 6 hours into a 5 hour trip and the Indian guy loses his iPod at a small village and they are calling around frantically to find a hotel to sleep in. The only thing worse than 7 people for 12 hours in a car with a broken air conditioner is then having to sleep in the damned car too.

Its late, and the girls are all complaining and I’m telling the driver to pull over and get me some beer, all sweaty and shit…..I couldn’t take it anymore. If I was going to put up with whiney women and sleeping in a cramped car when its 100 degrees trying to remind myself that its “all part of the experience”…..I need to drink.

We finally found a spot that said they had a room……one room, for all 7 of us. Fine, we’ll take it….and then there was no water in the bathroom.

So they came out and installed a hot water heater and we went to dinner (which was pretty decent). I went to bed early because I’d been drinking earlier and was asleep when they got home.

So Meenal was using the bathroom and the hot water heater breaks, and scorching hot water starts gushing out. I am asleep and only vaguely aware of what is going on.

By the time they finally get me up, my mattress-on-the-floor is almost floating and the entire room is ankle deep in water. A few more minutes and I would’ve drowned in my sleep.

So we now have like 12 Indians running in and out of our room all waiting for someone to tell them what to do. And, of course, we tell them how to fix it and…..like everything in India…it never really happens just the way you want.

There is no other room for us to stay in….so they are mopping up the one we almost drowned in. There was so much water in it they used up all the towels and most of the sheets at the resort trying to get it dry.

But we needed the sheets, especially when they brought in the new mattresses and dragged them over the still wet floor. Now we had two sets of wet mattresses and needed lots of blankets and more sheets to make sure we weren’t sleeping in a damp bed.

But they couldn’t get the number of sheets and blankets right. 4 mattresses = 4 sets of sheets right???? Not in India.

So we just went to sleep….and at this point we were all loopy and wondering what else could possibly go wrong.

Just at that moment, when I was expecting the roof to cave in…..we hear someone throwing up in the bathroom. One of the Indian girls had gotten sick off something we’d eaten at a rest stop.

Of course, the night did end. We all slept on damp mattresses and persevered to find amusement another day.

The rest of the weekend turned out really well. The next day we went back to the village where the guy thought he lost his iPod, which I thought was a fools errand….after all what are the chances of finding a lost iPod in the foothills of the Himilaya…..but he found it.

He asked around the village and some kid had picked it up and given it to his Dad because he thought it was a pack of cigarettes. The Dad actually had no idea what it was either, so he just returned it….and we bought the kid all the candy and chocolates in the town.

And then we got drunk down by the river.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 2:12 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.