From Guest Blogger Jeff Stone: Just a few years ago, malaprops -- the ludicrous misuse, or mis-translation, of English words -- were a common and hilarious sight all around Beijing. During the first couple of days in Bejing this year, we saw precious few - proof, I thought, that the Chinese had gained a full command of our language. Not to worry! Susan and I found a trove of them in the menu of a restaurant near the arts district "798." Bon Appetit! At a section of the Berlin Wall, we encountered a blind man being guided by his friend -- both of them wearing t-shirts from the Berlin marathon which, presumably, they had run the day before. The friend would read extensively from the exhibition kiosks before leading his buddy to the remains of the wall, guard tower and apartment blocks so together they could feel them. As I watched, it occurred to me we need an alternative term for how a blind person experiences the wonders of the world, since "sight" "seeing" clearly doesn't cut it. Any suggestions? If you thought Berlin was reborn on October 3rd, 1990, with reunification, you were mistaken. Berlin is being reborn daily, as you can see documented here. Construction absolutely everywhere -- above ground and underground. The blue pipes that snake through the historic district are carrying away water from the excavations. According to our rickshaw tour guide, Berlin means "swamp." Very interesting. I've just spent three days in Bicycle Heaven. Amsterdam. It's the city every other city tries to copy, with varying degrees of success. The sheer number of bikes in the city center was eye-popping. And if I were to venture a guess, I'd say the ratio of two-wheelers to people was 2:1. No, I didn't make a mistake there. I DO mean two bikes to every person. They were literally everywhere. Most were parked for the day by commuters in dense but orderly fashion. But plenty were in motion on the canals and on boulevard bike lanes. And if you're wondering who rules the roads in Amsterdam: bicycles do. They stop for no one, weaving and dodging and sailing through stop signs and red lights. My fellow travelers and I found it quite intimidating -- even frightening -- though the locals seemed unfazed. I wanted to rent bikes and join in the fray, thinking of my successful experiences in Paris and New York. But, alas, I got outvoted -- probably due to the lady lying in the middle of the bike lane moaning loudly while being loaded onto a stretcher.
Nonetheless, we logged lots of miles in this amazing city on foot, which enabled me to better document the bike scene, resulting in the slide show below. Oh, and btw, absolutely no one wears helmets in Amsterdam. Check out the New York Times opinion piece in today's paper pondering the question of whether American cities should follow the Europeans and ditch the helmet requirement. How do you stand on that one? Arriving in Paris after four days in Moscow, what was the most discernable difference between the two cities at first glance? The size of the vehicles people drive. In Paris bicycles, motorcycles and Smart Cars seem to be multiplying overnight. In Moscow, the same can be said of large, flashy sedans. True, at $8 a gallon, gas in Paris was double the price in Moscow. You would think crippling traffic would be incentive enough to downsize, but Russians don't seem to be feeling the pain. Maybe the explanation is as simple as the difference between a European society that's in a tight economic squeeze and a Russian society that's sowing its wild oats in the post-Communist era. Maybe it's the difference between a culture that believes in austerity in the name of the environment and one that won't worry itself about such things until every oil well is sucked dry. Or maybe it's both. Whatever the explanation, my husband Jeff observed there seems to be a simple inverse relationship between the size of people's apartments and the size of their vehicles in these two locales. According to his calculus, Muscovites have tiny apartments and big cars; Parisians have big apartments, tiny cars. I'll go with the Parisian model anytime. After all, what good is a big car if it's stuck in traffic all the time? Jeff's Unscientific List of Popular Cars:For more on traveling in Russia, click here
How weird is this? I hadn't seen any snow since the October shocker here in New York. And then last weekend I went to Seattle to visit friends. There, the city, accustomed to being sodden with winter drizzle, came to a virtual standstill with the accumulation of a mere two inches of snow. Over a two-day period, I saw only a couple of snow plows, both of them on major highways. Beyond that, it was up to the intrepid among us to negotiate the slushy and rutted hills that define the city by the bay. Jeff and I slipped and slid our way downtown on Saturday afternoon to check out some sights and were wowed by the Seattle Central Public Library building designed by the brilliant Rem Koolhaas (who has the awesomest name for an architect I could ever imagine). As for the breathtaking design, I'll let the accompanying pictures speak for themselves. But as for the function, let me say that Seattle has managed to redefine the metropolitan library as a place where people of all walks of life can seek both knowledge and refuge. Inside the soaring, light-filled space, we found the usual bookworms and students and tourists like us. But the frigid temperatures and snow clearly had motivated all kinds of nomads to come inside. Overflowing hikers' backpacks defined the Occupy Movement protestors; stuffed shopping bags and ragged overcoats defined the homeless; paint-spackled workclothes defined the day laborers, speaking mostly Spanish. They weren't just hanging around. They found seats at the hundreds of public computers -- provided for them, whether they had paid the taxes to build the municipal library or not. On the third floor -- or whatever floor it was you got to after taking two of the longest escalators I've ever seen -- there was a job resource center with a staffed help desk and hundreds more computers -- all of them in use. The library was as hushed and serious as any. But its colorful decor was a perfect backdrop for the diversity of its patrons, who seemed right at home taking shelter from the storm. Well, I may not have been able to get anyone on Facebook to take me up on my offer of a ride to Washington to join protesters opposing the Keystone XL-Pipeline, but Bill McKibben and Co. managed to convince 12,000 people to show up at the White House last Sunday! What an amazing turnout to turn President Obama's head toward the importance of killing this project and sending the message that he's really the pro-environment, clean-energy guy we thought we had elected.Thanks to my husband Jeff and my daughter Sylvia, I had company as we helped to form a human chain encircling the White House three-times over to let Obama know that if he wants his supporters from 2008 to put in the effort to get him reelected, he has got to do his part. President Obama apparently was out playing golf on what was a gorgeous day, but I think there were enough cameras, tweeters, bloggers and reporters in attendance to deliver him the message. (See my slideshow below). Last week, the president made it clear in remarks to the press, that he is seriously weighing the potential environmental damage against jobs that could be gained by his approval of the pipeline. So, what started out last summer as a longer-than-long shot chance to turn back big oil, is looking a little more now like a winnable battle. But that doesn't mean we should put our slingshots away. Goliath may be on his knees, but he's still out there. The day I was slated to picket the White House and risk arrest to block the Keystone XL Pipeline was instead the day I attended the funeral of an amazing woman, Elizabeth Bata, a Holocaust survivor who for 93 years stood tall for what she believed in. So after hunkering down for Hurricane Irene and then hosting my son Ben on his 21st birthday (down from his temporary gig in New Hampshire), I made my way to Washington to lend my voice to the outcry (see this post for the details on the issue). A few thousand protestors were in attendance in Lafayette Park on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend to support the people who were getting arrested for trespassing on the sidewalk bordering the White House. By and large, these were people who had, like me, gone door-to-door to get Obama elected in 2008. But after the president announced last Friday that he would abandon his recent efforts to toughen air-quality standards, these people were frustrated and angry. If Obama disappoints them yet again by approving this pipeline, they'll be sitting in droves --- not under Obama's nose on the sidewalk, but on the sidelines of his re-election campaign. Do I hear a movement afoot to draft Al Gore? (Renewable) Power to the People?And what if the pipeline took a turn and ran through the White House grounds, like this...?In a few weeks from now you'll find me sitting down at the gates of the White House, with a few hundred like-minded people, waiting to get arrested. Why? Because I believe NASA's James Hansen and a whole cadre of eminent climate scientists when they tell me that if President Obama green lights a new pipeline from the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada to oil refineries in Texas, he will be guaranteeing our children a future on a dangerously overheated planet. President Obama has the unilateral authority to decide, as early as September, whether to "light a fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America," to quote the folks at tarsandsaction.org. And we need to raise our collective voices and insist that our president honor his campaign pledge to transition us to a clean-energy economy and put the brakes on the kind of environmentally destructive and energy intensive practices being used to mine Canada's vast pristine forests and bogs for this dirtiest form of petroleum fuel. The development of the 1,700-mile-long Keystone XL Pipeline would invite the full exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands, the world's largest oil reserve outside of Saudi Arabia and the our country's single greatest source of oil. From August 20th to September 3rd, thousands of Americans from all over the country will take turns joining in peaceful protest with dedicated environmental activists like Bill McKibben, Danny Glover and David Suzuki. They will risk arrest by getting within shouting distance of the White House to demand that the tar sands be left in the ground in order to give the planet a fighting chance to get back to a stable climate. So I'm giving three days of my time to the movement-- not much, given the high stakes. If anyone wants to join me, I'm going down on August 21st. But there are three weeks in which to act. So choose a time that's convenient for you. This issue needs your voice. Click here to sign up: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/sign-up/ today's haul Feeling rather smug, having tricked mother nature into delivering me an array of goodies despite placing my garden in a questionable location as far as sun is concerned. But with carefully amended soil, hand-watering and heavy mulching (sounds obscene!), I guess anything is possible. On the eve of my daughter Sylvia's graduation from college, I share with you a moment from her early literary education, which actually was optioned by America's Funniest Home Videos. Those of you who know her will recognize the spark, drive and stick-to-itiveness that still define her today. Love ya, Syl. credit: Sanjib Das I didn't think it was possible, but I was just transported back to India for 98 minutes via an incredibly vivid, complex and emotionally wrenching documentary called Marathon Boy, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jeff and I were transfixed by this real-life "Slumdog Millionaire" story, told brilliantly in cinema verite style, about a 4-year-old boy plucked from the depths of poverty by a coach who trains him to be a champion marathon runner with the potential to one day fulfill India's Olympic dreams. But what starts out as a tale of redemption for both the boy and his financially impoverished mentor, devolves into a messy struggle among promoters, politicians, petty bureaucrats, thugs and family members who all want a piece of the boy's legacy for their own selfish reasons. In an interview, the director, Gemma Atwal, said she initially was driven to explore the psychological and spiritual relationship between the guru and his disciple. But as the story unfolded over five years of filming, it began to resemble "a Bollywood movie scripted by Dickens." In a discussion after the movie, she said even she was shocked at the twists and turns that eventually tore the characters apart, revealing the very raw underbelly of Indian society. And she remains unsure how to judge the actions and motivations of the coach who walked the fine line between saint and sinner -- which is just how we felt at the end of the movie. Editing her 300 hours of film into 98 minutes, the director was masterful in capturing the flavor of the India Jeff and I remembered from our brief two-week trip there earlier this year (click here for . The intensity of the politics, the ubiquity of the media, the tenacity of the bureaucracy, the vibrancy of the street scenes, the crushing poverty, the filth -- it was all there in sharp focus. And the passion of the people -- their way with words, their expressive eyes, their ingenuity -- that came alive, too. If you want a brief trip to India, try and see this film. The movie was partially underwritten by HBO and therefore won't have a theatrical release anytime soon. (Still, I predict an Oscar nomination.) And there's no air date yet for the film on TV. So if you're in the New York area, do yourself a favor and see one of the three remaining screenings between now and Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival. There are still tickets available to all three. Look here. Before I leave the subject of India, I have one last sweeping observation worth sharing. It has to do with egocentricity. We as Americans, no matter how worldly or well-read, still have a tendency to think that the rest of humanity is not only expecting us to pay a visit, but spend their waking hours studying our culture and keeping up with our news. On our first morning in India, the waiter serving us breakfast asked where we were from. "New York," I said. Nodding his head politely while he clearly searched his storehouse of knowledge, he then said with a smile of satisfaction, "Oh yes, I've heard of New York. That's in London, right?"
The fact of the matter is, during our two weeks in India, almost no one just assumed we were American. Looking at our fair skin -- and maybe the blue eyes in our group -- they guessed our nationality in this order almost every time: German, French, English, Australian, South African. And when they discovered we were American, they seemed surprised. When people just came out and asked, "Where are you from?," we learned over time not to just blurt out, "The U.S." or "The United States," because more often than not, the look that came back was a puzzled one. So we started saying "America," which clearly was a more recognized place on the map for Indians. Looking back, I realize that saying we were Americans may not really have clarified anything at all! Who was to say that we weren't from Canada or Guatemala or Peru -- all part of the Americas? But then, as Americans we have kind of co-opted the name to mean the "United States." A little egocentric of us, don't you think? Last night Sylvia, Jeff and I gathered around the stove and re-created the prawn dish mentioned in an earlier post (see below), only we used frozen langostines from Trader Joe's, which I highly recommend if you can't get fresh prawns. All I can say is, I wish you all could have been here to savor the experience with us. Lord knows we made enough for a crowd. We used fenugreek, tumeric and curry straight from a spice shop in India and the flavors literally burst out of the pan, but I'm convinced that even with ingredients from your local store, this dish will please. As temperatures dipped into the teens last night and the drafts found us through the cracks and crevices of our windows and doors, we were warmed from the inside by this wonderful dish, which sits somewhere between a soup and a stew. I've converted the metric measures from the earlier recipe and I've multiplied the amounts, enough to serve six. So enjoy!
(Oh, and by the way, if you make it, share with us your insights by leaving a comment.) Prawns Moily 5 oz. of prawns (or frozen langoustine tails from Trader Joe's) 3 T coconut oil 1 t fenugreek 1 large onion, sliced into rings 6 large cloves garlic, sliced 4-inch piece of ginger, julienned 1 large green chili pepper, seeds removed and julienned 1 t Indian curry powder (I like the Pereg brand) 1 t tumeric powder 2 t salt 1 cup water 1 14-oz. can light coconut milk (or regular) juice of 1/2 lime 1 large tomato, cut into julienne strips Heat the oil in a sauce pan and add the fenugreek seeds. When warm, add the garlic, ginger, green chili, onions and curry powder and saute until transparent. Add the turmeric powder and water. Add the cleaned prawns (or langoustines) with salt. When the prawns look cooked (or the langoustines heated through), add the coconut milk and continue heating, being careful not to allow the broth to come to a boil. Finish with lime juice and julienned tomato. Serve over basmati or rice of your choice. Can be accompanied by Naan bread to soak up the broth (fresh or frozen Naan can be bought at Trader Joe's, too). Before we went to India we heard all kinds of opinions from people who'd done the trip before us. Many said they were glad they'd been there once, but wouldn't go back -- too much destitution and too much filth. Some said they preferred the north of India, others said they loved the south. People were split on whether it was worth going out of the way to see the Taj Mahal on a relatively short trip. Others said it was an absolute highlight not to be missed. So, for those of you who are considering a trip to India, here are my two cents, or rupees. I think Jeff, Sylvia and Ben would agree with me. First of all, I'm so glad I went and I would go back again. The sites are otherworldly, the people warm, hospitable and soulful. There's a large and growing middle class in evidence everywhere, and they're proud and excited to share their country with foreigners. Yes, there's squalor and noise, but they are part of the tableau that has to be experienced by all five senses and can't be conveyed by the limited dimensions of film and radio -- or even a multi-media blog -- as good as those depictions might be. As Americans we can't possibly know what it's like for the developing world without standing in the middle of it, and even then, we still can only imagine what it's like to live in the shoes of the more than a billion have-nots in the world. We loved the richly-spiced food and though we ate heartily, we all found we had shed a few pounds by trip's end. If you're a woman, bring scarves and tunics, leggings and long skirts, because you'll want to blend in as much as possible. But buying colorful local clothing was easy and inexpensive, too, and supported the local economy, so pack lightly and indulge.
Two weeks is not long enough to cover both the north and the south. If you have the luxury of a month, then go for it, and spend a little more time in each place than we did, adding a few more stops to the southern route to cover the technology centers in the southeast. But if it's two weeks you have, then we'd suggest sticking to the north and adding, perhaps, Varanasi and/or Jaipur and Rathambore National Park. Instead of early January, I'd suggest waiting till it warms up a bit in February and there's less morning and evening fog -- especially if you want to be sure to see the Taj Mahal at its best. We got lucky. And speaking of the the Taj Mahal, you have to see it with your own eyes. It's magical. Don't miss it. One of my mother's well-traveled friends, Rita, who has a great eye for art and beauty, said if she could only visit one sight in the whole world, it would be the Taj Mahal. And Ben, who has seen many of the natural and man-made wonders of the world in his travels, is inclined to agree. So go, and enjoy. And don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. As you no doubt have gathered, I've always got a lot to say! I can't say what's going on in people's homes, but from what I can tell from the hotels we frequented, conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions is on the minds of people in tourism and commerce in India. Every hotel we visited encouraged the reuse of towels, had exclusively florescent bulbs, power outlets with on/off switches that prevented energy loss from “phantom loads,” and master key switches at the entry doors that cut off all power on exiting the room. And even some of the smaller accommodations like the Brunton Boatyard in Fort Kochi and the Wilderness Camp in the Thar Desert sported spanking new solar panels and solar hot water heaters. We even saw small solar arrays on the houseboats in Kerala! While these energy saving improvements seem minimal, it’s more than I’ve seen in many of the American hotels we’ve visited in recent years. Aside from the hotel efforts, there was evidence that solar-powered rickshaws are coming soon to the traffic-choked streets. Ironically, we got a glimpse of what the rickshaws might look like in the workshop at the vintage car museum. While there were plenty of trucks hauling goods, there were also bicycles and pedal rickshaws piled high with deliveries. Ride sharing is a way of life. Several of the stores and stands we visited packed our purchased items into shopping bags made out of recent newspapers rather than plastic. What struck me most, though, was what I saw – or didn’t see – every time we took off in an airplane for another city. Even over the biggest metropolises of Delhi and Mumbai, the number of glimmering lights was a tiny fraction of what I’ve seen over even small and medium-sized cities in the West. With India growing at its current staggering rate, an increase in the number of lights is, of course, inevitable. We can only hope that the lion’s share of them will someday soon be powered by renewable energy sources. A few of you have asked me how I managed to update this website while keeping to such an ambitious itinerary. The answer is, I wrote most of the copy while in transit from one city to another and it helped that my past work experience was all about daily deadlines. We tended to get back to the hotel most nights by 10:00, which was way before my usual bedtime, as some of you may know. So after some reading and catching up on news, I would fire up the internet connection and get to the business of uploading material. This was a pretty tedious process until I figured out how to compress the photos into a manageable size without compromising their quality. A few hotels had pretty iffy internet connections and now and then I lost data, but on the whole, India lived up to its reputation as being technology central. All in all, I have to say, inventing and maintaining a website isn't as challenging as I thought it would be. I hardly had to know a thing about programming or code, thanks to the website creator I used. It's funny; about 20 years ago, when we were applying my son Alex to kindergarten, my husband Jeff raised some eyebrows by asking the head of one school why she was making such a big deal about teaching kids computer programming language when they'd grow up to have any application they needed right at their fingertips. Well, I thank god that someone out there was taught enough computerese to make it possible for someone like me to whip up a website on the fly. Alex, by the way, didn't get into that school. But he has dreamed about writing computer code for applications he needs that don't exist. So there you go.
I was on the streets of New York City during the Friday evening rush yesterday and was struck by the relative quiet around me. The sensation was like the one you have when emerging from a loud rock concert and feeling like you've got cotton in your ears or like you're in a scene where the soundtrack is missing. Here's a sample of what we've been listening to constantly in India for the past two weeks. It's not an exaggeration. Trucks bear signs on their rear ends imploring tailgaters to honk. It seems to be the only rule of the road that is universally obeyed. In our two weeks on the traffic-choked streets and byways of India, our drivers amazingly only collided with two motorcycles and one boat. And while some terse words were exchanged, no one was hurt. Good thing, too, because in the book Sylvia was reading on the trip -- based on a real life story -- a taxi driver was dragged from his cab in India and beaten to death after causing a traffic pile up! On our last day, we stopped for a little while to watch the activity at a motor vehicle driver licensing test site, where we learned that Indians really are trained to thread their two and four-wheelers through needles. The test course consisted of figure eights and a kind of "slalom" course with tightly spaced gates. But as we have learned, technical "proficiency" doesn't necessarily translate into vehicular order on the road. Regional and local authorities are trying to do even more to educate the populace on safer driving habits. In Delhi and Agra, a new helmet law had gone into effect for drivers of motorcycles and scooters. Many male drivers actually wore them -- although virtually none of their female passengers did, many of whom rode side-saddle, and sometimes with a baby in arms. In Mumbai, I saw a poster for a day-long festival dedicated to road safety, featuring a performance by a troupe of dancing traffic cops! In Kerala, Jeff saw an article in the local newspaper announcing that with the opening of a new stretch of divided highway, there was going to be a public education campaign to teach people to actually adhere to the formal rules of the road: to observe lane makers and stay within them, to drive only in one direction in each lane, to obey traffic signals, to use rear-view and outside mirrors to confirm the road is clear before pulling into traffic, to use headlights at night and to not stop or park a car smack in the middle of the road. These things are second nature to us here (and virtually everywhere else we've been in the world), but let's just say we hope the rules actually catch on sometime soon in India, where motor vehicle sales are expected grow by the millions in each of the next several years.
Note: to check out day-by-day "India Diary" posts with pictures, click this link :/days-13--14----cruising-the-backwaters-etc.html Ben and Jeff attended a cooking demonstration at our hotel here in Kochi, southern India and Sylvia and I got there just in time to have a taste. It was a local dish called "Prawns Moily." How delightful! The preparation was so simple, but the flavors complex and so, so fresh. And like everything we've eaten for the last two weeks, all the ingredients were locally sourced. The prawns, for heaven's sake, were from about 100 yards away! The coconuts practically dropped in our laps here and their oil, juice and milk are used frequently in cooking in this region, called Kerala. Don't be scared off by the use of coconut oil. I've been using it for years and its reputation as a bad oil is undeserved. Quite the opposite. If you make sure you use the unprocessed, organic "extra virgin" brands of coconut oil, you'll reap benefits too numerous to mention here, and I promise you, you won't get fat and your cholesterol numbers may improve. Here's the recipe, chock full of great Indian spices we've come to love and will be bringing home with us because you just can't get them as fresh at home. Sorry for the metric measures. I don't have the time right now to convert them. (Meanwhile, check "India Diary" for more info and pictures of Kerala: /days-11--12----tropical-kerala.html ) Prawns Moily Preparation time: 10 minutes; Cooking time: 15 minutes Prawns 20 grams Coconut oil 30 ml Fenugreek seeds 1 gm Onion (in rings) 100 gm Garlic (in slices) 10 gm Ginger (julienned) 10 gm Green chili (slit) 12 gm Curry leaves 2 sprigs Tumeric powder 1 gm Salt to taste Water 60 ml Coconut Milk 100 ml Lime Juice 10 ml Tomato (sliced) 75 gm Heat the oil in a pan and add the fenugreek seeds. Add the garlic, ginger, green chili, onions, curry leaves and saute until transparent. Add the turmeric powder and water. Add the cleaned prawns with salt. When the prawns look cooked, add the coconut milk and continue heating, but be careful not to allow the broth to come to a boil. Finish with lime juice, garnished with curry leaves and slices of tomato, cut into small bites. Chinese fishing nets, where prawns and other fish are caught. These land-tethered contraptions are found almost exclusively in Kerala. These were only 50 yards from our hotel. In 1991, Jeff and I traveled to Budapest, just after Hungary came out from under the USSR's thumb. No one spoke a word of English. My French and Spanish were of no use. Cab drivers didn't even know the English word "hotel." So we relied heavily on a city map and our walking shoes to get us around. The problem was, we could never pinpoint our location on the map. We were sure we were standing in front of a certain landmark, but the street name never matched the map. Perpetually lost with no one to ask for help, we took to wandering aimlessly around the city -- stumbling on interesting, albeit, decaying points of interest like the zoo and a palace, and marveling at bullet damage still evident on building facades from World War II and various political uprisings. It wasn't until our visit was almost over that our friend, Rob Bata, who'd been raised there, explained to us that the reason our map was of no use was because the streets all over Budapest were being rapidly renamed to purge all memories of communist repression. Even if the maps were being updated, they'd have to be re-printed almost daily, since the transformation of the city was happening, literally, overnight.
So what's the point? Well, India has recently undergone an overhaul of its city names and nothing is familiar anymore, if it ever was familiar to a foreigner in the first place. Fortunately, the maps seem to be up to date. But the people haven't always conformed. Some still call Mumbai, Bombay and Kolkata, Calcutta, Chennai, Madras. I'm sure in a few years the new names will fly off our tongues, the same way Beijing and Sri Lanka and Tanzania are the new norm. But it has already been 15 years since Mumbai and Chennai were introduced and almost 10 since Calcutta, so the process of undoing Anglicanization is a long one. For all we know, New York City is really Mannahatta again, but most of us just didn't get that memo. It's a good idea when you go to a new city -- especially one where prices are subject to change on a whim -- to familiarize yourself with the fare system before you board your vehicle of choice. We didn't take that advice. But fortunately, we were paying in rupees and not in Euros. Sylvia and Ben paid 20 rupees (50 cents) for a rickshaw ride that cost me and Jeff 100 rupees ($2) for the exact same route when we mis-read the meter. We thought it was a bargain to pay 200 rupees ($4.50) for a five-minute cab ride to Victoria Station, until we found out it was supposed to cost 16 rupees (35 cents). Oops! Imagine accidentally paying $100 for a $10 cab ride in New York City. The fare for the first class train to the seaside suburb of Bandra was $1 each, and we actually paid the right amount this time. But there wasn't a single ticket-taker on the 20-car train, so for everyone else, it was free! Oh well, any which way, we made some hard-working people very happy that Sunday afternoon. And we enjoyed the pretense of traveling like real Indians and blending in with the crowds. Check out other Mumbai experiences and photos at "India Diary:" /days-9--10----mumbai.html
Okay, as usual, I overpacked. Who doesn't? But in my own defense, how can you pack lightly when you have to bring layers enough for temperatures that range from 45 to 85? I will say, though, I have a packing system that should be taught at the university level. The cornerstone is a collection of velcro-sealed "envelopes" that keep clothes compact and organized. Inside the envelopes, the clothes are rolled, not folded, which keeps them wrinkle-free and crams 40 percent more in the same space. Believe me, I've done the comparison. When you're moving around a lot, like we are, you can just keep everything in their pallets and move them from suitcase to drawers and back. Simple! Not to be too graphic about it, I put laundry in one of those roll-up vacuum bags that compresses everything and keeps it hermetically sealed off from the rest of your stuff. I recommend microfiber underwear, which washes and dries in no time. And If you're a traveler and you don't own a pair of wool socks, you need to listen up. I know this sounds gross, but you can wear a pair of quality all-wool socks for four, five, even six days, unless you're slogging through the Amazon or running marathons. I like the Smart Wool brand, which come in all kinds of colors and styles for women and men. And no, they're not a sponsor on my website, though if they want to make me an offer, I'm all ears. I like to think that when airport security opens up my suitcase for a look, they whistle in awe at the neat puzzle inside and, out of respect, just close it back up, undisturbed.
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