Segovia

I hit Segovia on the last stop on my trip. It’s a picturesque little town just a half hour outside Madrid by the high-speed train. It’s got lots of your standard setup, and old town wall, cathedral, fort, etc. The big attraction in Segovia is its still functional 2000-year-old Roman Aquaduct. It’s about ¾ mile long, and at its highest point is about 40 meters tall, dominating a large plaza in the bottom of town.

As far as I was concerned, though, the real main event in Segovia is the roast suckling pig, called cochinillo. Because of its proximity you can easily do Segovia as a day trip from Madrid, but I planned to actually stay there to make sure I’d have plenty of time to have roast piggy. While expensive, it was pretty damn tasty. They roast the things so that the skin get’s incredibly crisp and brittle, almost getting a consistency akin to a hard-shelled candy. The meat also becomes incredibly tender, reaching the kind of pull-apart tenderness you get with a really good roast chicken that allows you to just pull the chicken apart at the joints. Because of these two factors, the true mark of well-executed cochinillo is that you can cut the pig into serving portions using only the side of a plate. Apparently, if you are an asador and you need a knife to cut your roast suckling pig, then you suck balls. I didn’t think I was going to be able to see this as I was dining by myself and thus couldn’t spend the $150 on a whole pig, but fortunately a table next to me was a group of 4 and pulled the trigger. The waiter comes up with the cochinillo and a regular porcelain dinner plate, finds the natural separation point where the joint is between the hind leg and the body (I’m a little fuzzy on exactly where as I’ve never butchered a whole pig myself), and just forcefully shoves the plate in. The skin makes and incredibly satisfying “CRRAAACK” sound when the plate shatters it, and the flesh just pulls apart when the plate is forced through. They then serve the cochinillo simply with its jus. In addition to the piggy, the other big local delicacy here are the massive white beans from the region which are about the size of silver dollars. Aside from being about the size of my head, they were also pretty tasty.


For such a small city, Segovia was also a pretty happening place. Apparently there’s a university in town, and everybody was out hitting the tapas bars on Thursday night, and I took the opportunity to get completely bombed. This wasn’t really deliberate. I had eaten dinner at a restaurant that served a prix-fixe menu which included drinks. Normally you have to have at least two people to get it, but I guess the let me get it by myself because I’m such a nice guy. (Or more likely because a pair of women sitting next to me also got it and I could piggyback off them.) I guess they couldn’t divide the wine, so with the meal I ended up getting an entire bottle of Ribera del Duero, and entire 375-ml carafe of dessert wine, as well as a large double-shot of a house-made liqueur, all for myself. So let’s just say I was feeling pretty damn social by the time I get done with dinner.

I then went out and got in a conversation with a couple locals at a bar, and of course continued drinking. I actually only got one more drink, but it was one of Spain’s signature quadruple pours of brandy. This is something that has made boozing up quite economical on this trip. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and in this case it means I drink Spanish brandy when I go out. Some of them are quite good, and the bourbon they have here is trash, anyways. For whatever reason, whenever I order a straight up brandy, I get these monster quadruple pours that fill up half to two thirds of a regular Napoleon glass (not that I’m complaining). Well, apparently not many of the Romans here drink straight booze—the only explanation I can think of as to why I get such gigantic portions is because nobody here takes their liquor neat, so when they get the strange foreigner asking for it they fill the glass to the same level they would for a regular mixed drink. (A wrinkled brow and “Nada más? Sin heilo?” is often what I get from bartenders here, to which I have to confirm that yes, I just want straight brandy without ice.) So I had a pretty interesting time, although it was also interesting watching the room spin when I laid down to go to bed later. I suppose the entire bottle of wine plus the entire half bottle of dessert wine on top of the digestive and my venti sized brandy proved to be a bit ambitious for just one evening.

So that pretty much wraps up the show. I head back to Madrid for one more night before flying out early Saturday morning. As I am wont to do when returning from Europe, I’ll just stay up all night long and sleep on the plane in order to start re-adjusting to the time change. However, I’m sure there won’t be anything worth writing about happening that evening…

Salamanca

I caught the train up to Salamanca on Monday morning. I had to catch it early as I had to take the train way back up to Madrid, take another commuter train to another station, and then get on another relatively long (by Spain’s standards) train to Salamanca. So I spent the majority of the day just traveling, but that allowed me to finally catch up on my blogging (you may have noticed a flurry of new posts in the past couple days). I was glad I got going early as it really allowed me to appreciate the evening in Salamanca. None of the sights there are really A-list items, but it was very enjoyable due to its massive and incredibly lively central square, the Plaza Mayor. I had read that this is one of the best people-watching spots in Europe, and it didn’t disappoint. There were some particularly amusing antics going on as Salamanca is essentially a college town known for having one of the oldest universities in Europe and the annual “frosh week” that occurs at the beginning of each academic year was going on. For those not familiar with this, think of it as a type of light fraternity/sorority hazing that goes on for all the new students at the school. As a result, the square was often filled with groups of young students with painted faces wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants performing flamenco, throwing baby powder at each other, or engaging in other types of wacky bullshit which I’m too old and too American to understand. (I had actually seen a similar thing going on in Granada while I was there, too.)


I didn’t experience anything particularly unique food-wise while I was there. The first night I hit a local place and got the braised pork cheeks, which were good but certainly didn’t wow. I did really like the tapas place I went to the second night, though. This place was a little more modern and fancy with its tapas (although most were again things I had seen at other places). I also really liked the vibe. It had a pretty normal, rustic look to it, buy they were playing thinks like “Shout” and “Surfin’ Bird” on the stereo and was filled up with a relatively young local crowd. I initially screwed up by accidentally re-ordering the same pork cheeks I had the night before. However, I had a couple more tapas, the standout of which was the seared duck with orange marmalade and chocolate. I had actually seen this on the menu at another place on the trip and didn’t have an opportunity to try it as I had other priorities at the moment, so I decided to pull the trigger on it this time (I love duck). It was pretty good, as the chocolate really worked with the gaminess of the duck. I actually think I make a better orange pan-sauce for duck at home, but I may try adding in the chocolate here when I get my next couple duck breasts this fall.

After two nights and a day in Salamanca I headed to Segovia, stopping in Avila on the way. This was a cute little town with a huge medieval wall, but the highlight was a vinoteca I went to for lunch. They had a fantastic selection of wines by the glass including a couple ones with some good bottle-age on them, including a 2003 Reserva Rioja and a 2001 Crianza. It was also one of the places that gives you a free tapa when you order a glass of wine. This is common in Granada, but all the other cities I went to you had to purchase any tapas. There are apparently just some places or cities that still do it the old-school way and give you a free little surprise whenever you order a drink. I’m personally a fan of the old school train of thought.

The wine bar was also very enjoyable as I got into a long conversation with the Mexican girl working it. And this sealed the verdict—I just do not get the Spanish accent all that well. During the trip I was beginning to think my Spanish wasn’t nearly as far along as I had believed before leaving. I very often had difficulty conversing at length with Spaniards, even in pretty straightforward conversations that I would not have expected to have problems with. However, with this girl we just chatted away about where she was born and how she ended up in Spain, the characteristics of some of the wine regions in Spain, my trip, whatever. I guess I got too used to talking to Mexicans and Puerto Ricans back home.

Granada

We finally ended out car journey in Granada. It was a very good decision to go driving in Spain, as it allowed us to get much farther off the regular tourist trail than we would have been able to otherwise. It also allowed us to experience the countryside much more, which was really amazing. The most prominent feature of the countryside south of Madrid is acre after acre of olive groves that are carpeting the entire countryside. At least I think they are olive trees. I’m no botanist and I usually only see them from afar, but I think they are mostly olive trees interspersed with some orange groves (and also vineyards, in you’re in a wine region). You see olive trees here like you see corn in Iowa. It sometimes seems to be covering everything. This was particularly striking in the hillier areas, where you see the scraggly, brown hills covered by a perfectly green set of olive trees lined up in neat little rows, with a large row of tree-covered mountains in the background.

While driving in the country was a joy, driving in the cities just sucked. The street plan for the parts of the cities we were visiting was laid out for donkeys, not for cars. As a result, the historic parts of cities are labyrinths of dead-ends, one-way streets, and tight corners and spaces where you can barely squeeze a compact car through. Since I needed to be doing the navigating Juls did most of the driving (and put on a pretty impressive display of driving skills), but even with two people including a NYC driver that’s an expert with a stick and a obsessive-compulsive planner with a very good sense of direction and Google Maps on his iPhone, driving in the cities was often quite frustrating. Google maps on an iPhone, it must be said, does not work all that well in the historic parts of cities we’ve been visiting. The accuracy of the maps is usually not too bad, but the location positioning service is often unable to identify our location accurately, sometimes pinpointing my location half a mile away from where we actually are. The Google Maps app actually functioned better when I was in India this year, believe it or not. And it certinaly wasn’t much help in getting us into the train station in Granada. We so much difficulty finding the rental car agency where we had to return our car that eventually a cop stopped us and ended up escorting us to the drop point.

One thing that has surprised me on this trip is just how fast it is to get around. The Iberian peninsula isn’t near as big as it looks on a map. This was compounded the fact that Google Maps was again lying to me, both on the routes I pulled up on my computer at home before leaving and on my iPhone. For whatever reason, routes that it said would take 3 hours to complete ended up taking us maybe 90 mins, door to door. This is the primary reason I’ve had so much trouble keeping up with my blog on this trip. I thought I would have a fair amount of down time on some drives, but often by time I navigated our way out of the city and got us on the major highway and spent a little time checking out the scenery on the way to our destination, we’d already be close enough to where I’d have to start navigating us to the parking space at our destination.

I loved Granada. The big sight there, the Alhambra, in my opinion didn’t quite live up to the billing. It had some beautiful decorative work in it, but after spending several weeks in north India earlier this year it seemed like just another fancy Muslim palace to me, albeit with some particularly elaborate ceilings. I was actually more impressed with the Mezquita in Córdoba. It was my favorite city of the trip so far, though. It’s absolutely littered with charming little squares. You can be in a square, take a street out of it, and in another 50 yards you’ve arrived at yet another square. These will often have a small park with a fountain, be lined with tapas bars with outdoor seating and ice cream shops and stores. In addition, the city has a large Moorish quarter, the Albazýn, which is filled with helal butchers, hookah bars, Moroccan restaurants, and kitschy little shops with mid eastern and north African stuff. Most importantly, Granada had the prettiest women of any city we had been to in Spain.

I got some more great food in Granada, as well. To give Juls a break from a plain steak with soggy fries we hit a Moroccan restaurant one day, and the food was quite good, although I was enraged when I discovered that it was a non-alcoholic restaurant (having lamb tagine without of bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape is criminal, as far as I’m concerned). I also grabbed the house specialty from a Galician restaurant the people at our hotel recommended which was killer. It was bacalao (dried salted codfish) with a tomato-based sauce with shrimp, scallops, and clams. I also had a local specialty, fried eggplant with honey, that was quite good. There were two food disappointments while I was in Granada, though. They weren’t disappointing because I didn’t like the food, but were instead disappointing because I never got to try them. One of these was the ajo blanco. This is a cold soup, like gazpacho, which instead of tomatoes and cucumbers is made out of garlic and almonds. This, along with gazpacho and salmorejo (kind of like a thicker, richer gazpacho) are the three signature cold soups of Andalucía. As Granada was my last stop in Andalucía, I absolutely had to have all three of these before I left. I had already had gazpacho and salmorejo several times, but was having a hard time locating the ajo blanco. My last night in Granada, I actually went out in search of it, going from tapas bar to tapas bar asking every single one if they had either it or the tortilla sacaramonte which is a Granadan specialty which I also had to have before leaving (it’s a Spanish-style omelets with pig’s brains and various other meats). I checked out about 25-30 different tapas bars before I finally ran out of steam. Most of the waiters I asking didn’t even know what I was talking about, which wasn’t a good sign.

The one other problem I had in Granada was messing up my back at the gym. I had some free time my second day there and really wanted to get a workout in, and particularly wanted to get a workout for my legs, so stopped by a local place in the early afternoon (I can work out my upper body doing things in my hotel room with the furniture or with the jungle gym at a kid’s playground, and I also worked out on this trip in Madrid using the metal scaffolding constructed when work is done on commercial buildings, but for legs I need real gym equipment). This was a decision I came to regret. For those of you that weren’t aware, I injured my back in college and it’s given me trouble ever since. Normally I can manage it without too much problems, I just have to be very careful with certain activities, including training my legs in the gym. I wasn’t training very strenuously, but the equipment there wasn’t very familiar to me and I nevertheless ended up aggravating my back. It didn’t seem to be too bad, I was able to finish my workout for my upper body that I was also getting in and so far doesn’t seem to be interfering with my travel agenda too much. My only problem at this point is sleep—it doesn’t prevent me from doing anything I need to be doing during the day, but last night it was painful enough just lying in bed that it kept me from getting any significant sleep at all. Hopefully in a few days it will heal up enough so at least I’m able to get a decent night’s rest, but otherwise shouldn’t interfere with the rest of vacation. Quite frankly, I’m much more concerned this point at the impact it will have on my ability to train in the gym and the salsa studio once I get home.

If you're also checking out the snaps, note that I've needed to start a new photo album since Google Photos limites you to only 1000 in each. You can see the continued set of photos here. Note this album may disappear later if I'm able to trim the fat and consolidate all the snaps into one album.

The Coast

The day after seeing the hill towns, we moved on to the coast. We made an afternoon stop in Jerez on the way to the coast from Arcos. For those of you that aren’t wine geeks, Jerez is where sherry comes from. While I’m a huge wine drinker, sherry is a category I don’t indulge in very much, so I figured it would be a good way to educate myself on this very different style of wine. The uniqueness of the process by which it’s made and the widely varying styles in which it’s available makes sherry a pretty complex subject, so I was looking forward to educating myself a little more. We ended up going on two sherry tours (we had planned on only doing one so we could also see the Analusian Horse riding performance that is the other big draw in Jerez, bur unfortunately the horsies were sold out). The tours were targeted at the average tourist and were thus a little more high-level than a hard-core wine geek like myself would have preferred, but I still ended up learning some things and met some pretty cool people that were also taking the tour with us. My response to the tastings we had were somewhat mixed—a couple of the wines were something I enjoyed, but several of the sherries we had didn’t turn my crank at all. When I get home and try to duplicate some of the cooking I’ve had here I’ll maybe try some other producers which I may like more, but overall I’m still not sure if dry sherry is my thing. I specify dry sherry there as the sweet Pedro Ximinez sherry dessert wines are definitely my thing, and have been since long before this trip. The PX sherries are something Juls has some to appreciate on this trip, and she’s been drinking them like they’re going out of style.

While we’re on the subject of wine, I must say that the ubiquity of high quality wine at bargain-basement prices here has been one of the highlights of the trip. The average cost of a bottle of wine we’d get at a restaurant has been around $18-20, and even though we are getting two bottles every day (one lunch, one dinner), almost every single one of them has been quite good. I can’t remember the last time I got a bottle in a restaurant in the US for under $40 which I enjoyed. Some of the inexpensive wines here we’ve gotten in the $15-$25 range have been fantastic, and are things I would have been pleased with had I spent $60 on the exact same bottle at a restaurant at home.

After the sherry tasting, we continued to Cádiz to start our drive along the coast. We didn’t stop there, but just drove through to check out the town and the huge port in the bay. After that, we made a beeline to Vejer de la Frontera, a small hilltop town with very strong Moorish roots in the Andalusian hills near the coast. This town was a delight as there wasn’t much tourism, and was a very local scene. All the whitewashed homes, the winding lanes which were more staircases than roads, and the heavy Moorish influence gave it Greek-island type feel, and it was very relaxing and a nice evening stop. I also had a really nice meal there, a seared duck breast with a red wine and sherry vinegar sauce and a wine-poached pear. I also didn’t get any fries (although there was no starch component at all on my plate, hhhhhmmmn), and while Juls got a big pile of fries with here steak, these were at least the best fries she had yet had.

The next day, we got back into the car and headed back along the coast, stopping briefly in Gibraltar and Marbella. Gibraltar was interesting as it is actually British Territory, not a city, and being part of the British Empire has a very Anglican feel to it, right down to the boxy red telephone booths. We actually had to go through customs to get in and out, although I don’t think the border guards sweated the details. All they did was look at our passports, and when we re-entered Spain the immigration agent only looked at my passport as I flashed it open from 5 feet away. Juls apparently never even got hers out of her bag. Whatever.

We actually didn’t go up to the top of the rock. If was a very cold, rainy, and foggy day, and you could barely see across the bay, let alone across the straight to Africa. We just ended up tooling around the town in a public bus to get a feel for the place. By far the most interesting part, though, was simply entering and exiting the country. Because the country is so small (just 2.5 sq miles, 1/3 of which is dominated by its namesake rock), there’s hardly any place to put a runway. The one and only place with sufficient space for an airplane runway is running parallel right along the border. Actually, that wasn’t even sufficient as they had to extend it out into the bay with reclaimed land. Due to this, you actually have to walk across the airstrip whenever you enter or leave the country. It’s got stop lights and signals like you’ve have a railroad crossing to keep you from crossing the runway then a plane is about to take off or lang. Pretty wacky.

After Gibraltar, we continued on along the Costa del Sol to Marbella and then headed inland to our final stop, Granada. The coast here was very beautiful, but I can see why our guidebook didn’t recommend staying along this part of the coast. It’s very developed, and appears to be more a set of resort-y beach towns littered with condos and timeshares for retired Europeans that want a tiny sliver of beach and lots of sun than they are places of historic or cultural interest.

Analucía’s Hill towns

While Sevilla was a charming city, we actually got out of there one day earlier that we had originally planned. This was largely because we had already ticked off all the must-see stuff, but also partially because we weren’t too happy with the hotel we were in (it was a nice place, but nowhere near nice enough to justify what we were paying there). So we split early, giving us some more time to explore the pueblos blancos, the small Andalusian hill towns. If your Spanish is dreadful, they’re called pueblos blancos because, yes, they’re all white (and because they are pueblos). They’re also all located in the Sierray Nevada mountains, usually capping hilltops, and are filled with tight, narrow, winding cobblestone lanes. Arcos de la Frontera was the one we stayed in for two nights. We didn’t have a hotel reserved ahead of time, and when we arrived the only one we could get was in the attic at some place and had a sloped ceiling which at its high point in the room was around 7 feet tall, and dropped down to about 5 ½ on the opposite side of the room. My neck definitely got a little stiff in the two days I was there, but it was a bargain and the view was amazing as the hotel was right on the edge of the cliff the town sat on and we had windows on that side overlooking the whole valley below, filled with orange groves, a river, and the local shepherd tending to his flock.

We used Arcos as a home base to drive around the area and hit a couple other pueblos blancos the day after we arrived. We ended up cruising through the mountains, checking out Grazalema, Zahara, and Ronda on the way. The scenery in the mountains was amazing, and the towns were all really cute. Grazalema had a lively town square with a bunch of old guys hanging around on benches and chatting up the pigeons, Zahara had some tasty chow and was incredibly picturesque sitting in a valley floor under its obligatory Moorish castle on the hill overlooking the town center, and Ronda had an amazing cliff-side setting with a massive river gorge running right through the middle of town. Ronda was also interesting as it’s home to the oldest bull ring in the country and had an interesting bullfighting museum there.

I’ve continued to score really great food as the trip has progressed. I say ‘I’, because I think Juls is in hell. Being kosher and a picky eater that doesn’t (for some inexplicable reason) like uncooked tomatoes and anchovies, there just isn’t a lot here that she can eat. The food suits me just fine, though. If I did have one complaint, however, it is that it’s not very diverse. If you go to a restaurant that isn’t deliberately trying to make another culture’s food, such as an Italian or Chinese place, you tend to see the same things over and over again. You definitely see regional variation, but within any single region you could probably pick any two mid-range Spanish restaurants and they will likely have 75% or more of the exact same items on their menus. And of the items which aren’t duplicated there’s probably yet another restaurant not too far away that’s got it. It’s also rare at the mid-range places to encounter items I haven’t seen before at other places. It must be said, though, that this is quite common in many of the countries I’ve traveled to in Europe outside of the food meccas of France and Italy. American food culture has some serious problems with it, but one thing we have that is unparalleled relative to any place I’ve traveled to is the incredible diversity of options available to us. And this isn’t only due to the high availability of ethnic food in the US, either. Even if you limited yourself only to places serving new American cuisine, at home you’ve got a diversity of options and a creativity in inexpensive food that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

The most egregious example of the lack of diversity in the food in Spain is the ubiquity of French fries as the side dish here. 95% of the time, whenever you order something which needs a side dish, it’s going to come out with an obligatory pile of fries. And for all the skill they’ve got for other items, it appears that most Spanish cooks couldn’t turn out a decent plate of fries with a crisp exterior if their life depended on it. I haven’t gotten nearly as much of them as Juls as I’m often getting things like tapas or paella which doesn’t get a side dish, but between the two of us I think we’ve thrown away enough, limp, soggy, greasy, and under-seasoned French fries on this trip to feed and entire African village for a month. This is one of the reasons I liked Zahara so much. I ordered the house specialty at the restaurant we popped into, the slow-roasted leg of lamb. When they brought the plate out, I was extremely pleased to see that instead of a pile of oily fries, I got some heavily herbed roasted potatoes. Both Juls and I sat there staring at the plate for a few seconds, a bit stunned that the de rigueur pile of wet frites was nowhere to be seen. “Wow, just look at that, potatoes”, I said. This place was obviously very avant-garde. Roast potatoes as a side with roasted/sautéed/grilled meat? Who would have ever thunk it. Both the potatoes and the lamb were absolutely phenomenal, by the way.

While Spanish food could get out of the box a little bit more, where Spain completely kicks our ass is in quality of ingredients. (Well, they also kick our ass in that people here eat actual real food, rather than the phony processed garbage that people eat at home, and that they eat out with friends and family instead of in front of the TV, and that a quarter of their population isn’t morbidly obese, but I digress.) A tomato here actually tastes like a tomato, compared to the typical tomato which you get in an American grocery store which tastes like, well actually, I don’t think they taste like much of anything at all. I picked up a plum as a snack from the market a couple days ago, and it was absolutely exploding with flavor. Many of the grapes you get here leave your fingers all sticky and gooey when you eat them they are so flavorful and intensely sweet. With a more educated consumer, farmers markets, and supermarket chains like Whole Foods that place more emphasis on quality ingredients we are starting to roll back all the damage that was done by half a century of inadvertently breeding all the flavor out of our and food and we’re thus starting to close that gap, but we’ve still got a long way to go. I can pick up any piece of produce here in a local market and it will usually taste better than something I pick up at a specialty store or farmer’s market and do so at a price ever less than that for the tasteless crap that most people in the States are buying every day.

Sevilla

Sevilla was a great stop on the trip. The cathedral there is pretty wild, and in my opinion is more impressive than Notre Dame. However, the big draw in Sevilla is Flamenco. During our two nights there we checked out a professional performance, which was pretty amazing. However, even more interesting was the small local place we went to on our first evening. It was a Sunday around midnight, and we went searching in a particular neighborhood for a Flamenco bar. Things were pretty dead, and I was beginning to worry that the search would be a bust. However, after looking around for a while, we finally stumble on this tiny place with a live flamenco band and a bunch of locals just having a good time. From the looks of the goofy hat and camera some middle-aged guy was wearing, it appeared to be his birthday celebration and everyone was dancing and having a great time. Needless to say, it wasn’t up to the standard of skill that we saw in the professional performance, but it was fun to watch and amusing to note the universality of some white men being completely hopeless regarding dancing, be the dancing flamenco or otherwise.

One thing I’m coming to appreciate much more as I spend my time here is the profusion of the Muslim influence in Spanish culture. I always knew it was there, but I had no idea of the full extent to which so much of Spanish culture can be directly attributed to the Moorish influence, particularly here in the south. Be it in all the Muslim elements in Spanish architecture, the reflection of the Muslim call to prayer in the wail of the Flamenco singers, or even peoples’ appearance (which becomes notably more dark and exotic the farther south you travel), you can see it absolutely everywhere.

La Mancha and Córdoba

In Toledo, we picked up the car and headed to Córdoba. On the way, we drove through La Mancha, the flat, barren, arid plains in central Spain where Don Quixote was set. It was filled with olive and orange trees and had those funky little picturesque white Spanish windmills on many of the hill tops. We stopped in one town particularly known for this and spend about an hour taking photos. I took a lot of snaps here in particular because I always attempt to get one or two iconic photos from every trip I take that I can hang from my walls, and figured this would be about as good a chance at one as I’ll get in Spain. Unfortunately they were doing work on the castle in the background, so when I get home I’m going to need to PhotoShop out the crane in the background and the people on the street.


We also tried to go wine tasting as La Mancha is a significant wine producing area, but that didn’t really pan out as we couldn’t find any place that was open when we were driving through and could accommodate us without a pre-arranged appointment. Instead, we just took a scenic driving route through the wine country which allowed us to check out the vineyards.

We ended up in Córdoba that evening. We had to stay at a hostel in a dorm room because the Davis cup semi-finals were in town there that weekend and hotel prices had gone through the roof. This ended up being fortuitous, though, as we were able to do our laundry in the hostel and were sharing a room with just one other person, a charming French girl who was in Spain teaching English.

The big deal in Córdoba is the Mezquita, the huge mosque-cum-church that dominates the center of town. You would probably recognize if from the red-and-white striped arches that litter the massive room. It’s also neat to see the juxtaposition of two different buildings of worship. The mosque complex is enormous, and when the Christians booted the Moors from Córdoba they built their huge church right into the middle of the building, incorporating it right into the mosque. So you can be standing in a huge room with Muslim-style architecture everywhere, and then you walk twenty yards to the side and you’re then standing in what is unmistakably a Christian cathedral. And this is all done is a way so that the Cathedral is incorporated right into the structure of the mosque. Very cool.

No Whiners!

Some of you may have noticed that I'm about 5 days behind on my blog, and am creating posts and back-dating them. You have a problem with that? Well you can suck it! I'm on vacation, damn it! However, for those of you that actually give a shit (I'm not sure if this includes anyone other than my mom), I promise to get caught up soon.

Toledo

After Madrid, we caught the train to Toledo. This was an incredibly charming city, as it was formerly the capital of the Spanish crown and was filled with ancient fortifications, churches, and all the usual fun crap you find in medieval Europe. The old city walls and cathedral were a particular joy to check out. At least they were when not getting lost. Because the street plan for Toledo is about 800 years old (not sure about that, but I need to get this blog out and am too lazy to check my facts right now), it’s a confusing warren of streets that are very easy to get lost in. We arrived in the evening, and of course I dragged us out to a particular restaurant I had pre-picked so we could experience the best food Toledo has to offer, and got a little lost on the way back to the hotel. Well, maybe saying ‘a little lost’ would be an egregious understatement, but we ended up getting to experience about half the cities medieval charm at 1:00 AM without another tourist around, so it was a bit of an adventure.

Toledo has some very regional cooking. Partridge and venison are very big there, and I had them a couple time. Although they were all quite good, there was nothing particularly unique about their preparation. I think the dish of the stop ended up being the beef cheeks I had the first night we went out, prior to our 1.5 hour scavenger hunt for our hotel. They appeared to be pretty straight-forward, just a standard braise in beef stock with aromatics and maybe a little wine or vinegar, but were very well executed and incredibly tender. Despite the fact that braising is my cooking forte, I’ve never worked with beef cheeks myself, and definitely need to get around to trying them this winter at home.

Dessert-wise, the big thing there is mazapán, or marzipan as we’d say in English. Tasty, but as far as I could tell no different from the sugary almond-based dessert you get anywhere else. Of course, it didn’t prevent me from devouring half a box.

The last notable thing about the food there wasn’t related to preparation, but instead to nomenclature. In this part of Spain (possibly others, but I’m not sure), beans are referred to as ‘Judias’, or translated literally from Spanish as ‘Jews’. So you will commonly go into a restaurant and order something in Spanish which literally translates to “braised partridge with Jews”. Hhhhhmmmnn.

Madrid

Madrid, not unexpectedly, had a very different feel than Barcelona. Because Barca has the beach, Madrid has a much more metropolitan and less touristy feel. Also, the weather was much more pleasant. In Barcelona, I was generally sweating my balls off walking from place to place. Madrid, while even warmer (it was in the 90s most days), is a much drier climate, so while still definitely hot in the sun, it was pretty pleasant to walk around, so long as you were in the shade and not baking in the Iberian sun.

One thing that was pretty nice about Madrid was the fact that the historical center is pretty compact. Almost everywhere we went was within reasonable walking distance. The metro there is also first-class, so it was very easy to get around. The only problem we had with transportation there was me almost losing my fancy sunglasses. One evening, a train was just shutting its doors, so I sprinted for about ten yards and jumped to catch the doors before they close. Unfortunately, I had my sunglasses hooked into my pocket by just one arm, and when I ran to the train they came flying out of my pocket, slid across the floor, and dropped into the crevice between the train and the platform onto the tracks below. This was no bueno, as they were my favorite sunglasses, were a rather expensive set of frames, and are a critical part of my travel wardrobe. Because I pack extremely light (everything I need for 22 days in one 9x14x22 bag, including my large and bulky work laptop, with room to spare), a lot of the clothing I have is pretty basic and gets dressed up by accessorizing with a nice pair of sunglasses, a nice watch, and a good pair of shoes. Thus losing my good sunglasses means I just lost a critical piece of my wardrobe for the next 2 ½ weeks. (Come to think of it, having the right accessories--glasses, belt, watch, etc.-- is what separates the schlubs from the men with style back at home while not traveling, as well, but I digress). Luckily when the train passed I was able to see my sunglasses sitting in a small crack tucked up between the train tracks and the wall, so I was able to jump down onto the tracks, fish them out, and get back up before the next train arrived without electrocuting myself in the process. The only problem was I ended up with a coating of repulsive subway floor grime on my hands from when I boosted myself back up on the platform. In retrospect, this might not have been the swiftest move. Aside from the concern of zapping myself on the tracks, I suppose I would have had a very big problem had I misjudged the height of the platform and was not able to jump back up after fishing my glasses out. The trains here are much more modern and efficient than the ones in Chicago and New York, and they come by very frequently, every 2-3 minutes or so, and when they do they do it with a vengeance, zipping right into the station at high speed, stopping on a dime, and zipping right out. Because I was in the very middle of the platform, had I not been able to jump out before the next train came I may have had a little bigger problem than losing my sunglasses.

Aside from possibly getting squished by the metro, there wasn’t too much drama in Madrid. We did do a lot of partying, though. We went out salsa dancing the second night in town, and went to this Cuban place that was a lot of fun. I couldn’t fully whip out my skills, as they danced Cuban/swing-step-style which really isn’t my thing, but people were very friendly and very interested in us as they could immediately peg us as foreigners. We also met some very interesting people there, including a couple German girls and a VERY friendly Russian-Peruvian girl that I was dancing with. We didn’t get back to the hotel that morning until about 5:30 AM, so it was definitely a good time.

The next night we met up with Selene and Helena, the two German girls we went out with the night before, and went out for Tapas, a drink at a very flash rooftop lounge downtown, and then out to a different place for more salsa dancing. Once again, we ended up rolling into our hotel at aroud 5:00 in the morning.

The most interesting things about Madrid, aside from all the salsa dancing with friendly Russian-Peruvian girls, were the Prado, the royal palace, and a bull bar we went to. The Prado had the best collection of paintings I’ve ever seen. The royal palace was also pretty neat, although being fairly well traveled and having already been to Versailles, Schonbrunn, a half dozen palaces for the local kings in Germany, etc., it seemed somewhat like the same royal getup. The bull bar was a kitschy little place with tons of paraphernalia from the local pastime. You can think of it has a hard-core sports bar exclusively for bull-fighting. It had about a half dozen bull’s heads from fights, and was covered with photos and other bric-a-brac from fights, mostly focusing around where bullfighters got gored during the contest. If you hunt in the photos you can find photos of a fighter that had a bull’s horn shoved into his neck under his chin, with the tip of the horn protruding out his mouth. They have the photos of this proudly displayed with the suit the bullfighter was wearing on this fateful day. Seeing Picasso’s Guernica in the modern art museum was also a bit of a charge. I’m not a huge art guy, so usually what I’m saying to myself when touring a world-class museum is “OK, this is all fine and good, but where the fuck are we eating dinner tonight?”. But Guernica is definitely one of Europe’s must-see sights and seeing the massive painting in person was a real treat.

Speaking of which, I got some interesting food in Madrid. I tried callos, which is a stew made out of tripe and blood sausage. It was good, but didn’t completely turn my crank. I also tried another local specialty, Cocido Madrileño, which was a stew made out of garbanzo beans, pork, and beef, which was cooked in an earthenware pot. You first eat the broth like a soup with noodles, and then monge on the stewed meat. However, by far and away the big culinary standout in Madrid was the Galician restaurant we went to after hitting the Prado one day. The octopus with potatoes and pimienton I got was out of this world. I spent about 15 minutes talking to the restaurant owner at the end of the meal asking how he prepares it so I can replicate it at home. I have made octopus a few times, and can do it competently, but the result I get is nothing like this. I think I’ve got the trade secrets now, though.

After the meal with the octopus, Juls and I got into a lengthy discussion about how everywhere we go in Spain, the restaurant owners are always giving us free shit. It seems like at over 1/3 of the places we go, they are bringing us out free dessert, and giving us free glasses of wine, extra aperitifs, whatever. Our best guess is that it’s the combined factors of her speaking perfect Spanish, my speaking crappy Spanish, me showing obvious interest in all the particulars of the food they make and also particularly always ordering regional specialties wherever we go. It seems like many of the people here are very proud of their regional and local dishes, and if you show a particular interest, you’ll be their best friend in not time. The guy from the Galician place with the crazy-good octopus was probably the best example. After we finished lunch he hung around and talked to us about Galicia for about 20 minutes and brought us a couple monster pours (we were completely trashed) of the local coffee liquor they make in-house.

Barcelona!

Got into Barcelona relatively on time on Friday. I ended up taking an earlier flight for my first segment of my trip because rain was forecast both in Chicago and at Newark where my first connection was, both my connections were tight, and it would have been a disaster if I missed my second segment to Lisbon due to delay in arriving at Newark. Luckily, I got through without a hitch. The one downside is that I didn’t sleep a wink on my long segment from Newark to Lisbon and was already pretty tired before I even left Chicago from not sleeping well and having had very busy week before I left. Not that it mattered that much. It was my first night in Spain on a Friday night and I wasn’t even going to allow myself to be tired.

It was a good thing, too. I ended up catching up with some people that night for drinks that I met via an online social network I belong to. The plan was to just meet up for drinks, grab some dinner, and head back home and make up for my huge sleep deficit. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. After dinner, two of the three girls I was out with invited me to head out to a club with them, and since I’m working on overcoming my overly sensible, stick-in-the-mud tendencies, I said to hell with it and went out and partied. My travel buddy for the first 2/3rds of this trip, Juls, didn’t come with as she was even more run-down that day when I was. I got a slightly quizzical look at 3:30 AM when I rolled back into the hotel room (after I had originally told her I’d be home at 11:00), but she didn’t seem perturbed.

The next night was the same. I was planning on catching up with my friend Montserrat that had just moved to Spain this summer. Between a couple friends that Montse brought and the three girls from Friday and a few more friends of theirs which we had all invited along, we had quite a quorum. Montse took us to a fantastic tapas bar and then out to a club for another night of partying. I was having a great time, but was beginning to think I would be so sleep-deprived the next day that I’d hardly be able to see straight.

No matter. I functioned surprisingly well on Sunday. The particularly strong Spanish coffee Juls was drinking all day that I kept stealing sips from certainly helped. However, I was certain that if I didn’t get a full night’s sleep that evening that I’d keel over and die by EOD Monday. Alas, I didn’t get a decent night’s sleep on Sunday, either. Juls and I had plans to meet our other local friend Sonia out for drinks that evening, which we were both saying was going to be just drinks, a light dinner, and then home at around 11:00. This was particularly important, as we were catching a train to Madrid on Monday and had a very full day planned and couldn’t sleep in. But of course we were drinking and dining on Spanish time. So 11:00 turned into midnight, which turned into 1:00,…, and next thing we know it’s 3:15 before we’re getting to bed. Ironically, it even took me a while to fall asleep, presumably because I was worried about my impending death the next day from an entire week of sleep deprivation.

However, I managed surprisingly well on Monday. Although I’m not counting my chickens just yet as the day isn’t over--I’m writing this while on the bullet train to Madrid, and it’s entirely likely that by the time I arrive in Madrid and check into the hotel that I’ll be a walking zombie (in this case, the shuffling, slack-jawed, drooling king, not the sprinting, foaming-at-the-mouth, 24 Hours Later kind). This is pretty surprising as I’m not normally a person that functions very well without an adequate amount of sleep, but I suppose the mere fact of being on vacation has me particularly energized. I am eagerly looking forward to an evening where I have nothing planned and can get to bed at a decent time, though.

Believe it or not, I actually did do some things in Barcelona other than drink and socialize. The city’s extremely pleasant and enjoyable, and there are tons of things to see. The big highlights are all the modernista architecture, particularly the Antoni Gaudí stuff, and the local Catalan seafood. Well, some people may say it’s the beach, but I say f#@k the beach, bring me the shellfish. But hey, that’s me. My particular favs were all the tapas from the bar Montse brought us to on Sunday, the fideua pasta at the restaurant Sonia brought us to on Sunday, and the arroz negro I had the afternoon before leaving. For those not familiar with it, fideua is basically a seafood paella dish, but instead of making it with saffron-flavored rice, it’s made with toasted vermicelli noodles. This is something I had always known about but never actually tried, and was specifically looking for on this trip. It didn’t disappoint. It was, naturally, made with the fresh local seafood, and had a rich, nutty flavor from the heavy toasting of the noodles.

As good as the fideua was, though, it paled in comparison to the arroz negro. It’s called, literally, “black rice”, because it’s made with the ink of cuttlefish, squid, or octopus, which gives the entire dish a dark, dark black color. It kind of looks like something that you put in the oven and forgot, burning it all to a cinder. This is a Spanish variant of a dish you can get all over the Mediterranean. It’s a common thing to get in risotto form in Italy, and I had this dish about wherever I could find it (also in risotto form) when I was in Croatia a few years ago. It’s a particular favorite of mine. I love me some cuttlefish/squid ink. Here it’s a bit different, as they make it like…you guessed it…a paella, where they substitute the cuttlefish ink for the saffron. Of course, they also add the meat from whatever cephalopod they got the ink from, and in my case also some other seafood like clams and some shrimp. The ink gives it a strong, briny, seafoody flavor which is very unique. Mmmmmmm!

I was actually a little freaked out on Monday as this is a regional specialty which I wasn’t able to get the first couple days and won’t be made (or not made as well) at other places we’re going to on this trip, and hence I absolutely must have gotten in Barcelona. I think Juls was a little confused as to why I had arranged the entire last day here around being able to get a big plate of what looked like a plate of rice with strange seafood which somebody had burnt to a crisp with a blow-torch, but I think she was pleased in that once I got it I was finally able to shut up. She’s definitely being a good sport. Being kosher, Barcelona isn’t a particularly good food destination for her as just about everything is made with crazy seafood or pork (more on the pork later). But I guess that leaves more squid ink and Serrano ham for me.

As for the architecture, well, you can check out the photos here. All the Gaudí stuff speaks for itself. The aesthetic kind of reminds me of Dr. Seuss. In particular, the Sagrada Familia was really amazing. It’s hard to believe that this church is still several decades away from being completed. I guess I’ll have to come back and see it when it’s done.

End of the road

Bikaner, another desert town, was my last stop on my car tour. As with everywhere else in Rajasthan, the fort and the palace is the obligatory stop. In the case of the palace, it’s actually now a fancy-pants hotel which I had dinner in (and significantly overpaid for). While the interior of the fort was pretty cool, the thing I really liked was the atmosphere and the autorickshaw ride I took through the old town. I wanted to see an old 16th-century Jain temple in the old town, and because you can’t fit a car in the narrow, winding streets, my driver hired an autorickshaw for me. It was driven by this amiable old guy that took me around a bit, pointing out some old havelis along the way. I really enjoyed the spin we took down a busy market street, lined with small shops selling things to the locals. We drive by several shops selling dried spices and chilies which looked pretty tasty. The rickshaw driver points and says “Good masala”, as we drive by one. The temple was pretty cool, too. Despite its age, it looked very colorful and vibrant due to a restorative paint job they had done on it recently. While there the temple high priest, a shirtless guy with a big, fuzzy desi-fro, gave me a little background on the place. Apparently, he is the 32nd in a direct line of continuous ancestors with the high priest gig at this particular temple, dating back to when it was built in the 16th century.

My favorite aspect of Bikaner, though, was the omnipresence of camels on the streets. You’d run into a fair amount of camels throughout Rajasthan, particularly as you headed west towards drier areas. However, these were mostly in the country or in tiny cities like Jaisalmer. Bikaner’s a decent-sized city, with an urban population around 550,000 people, and all the congestion and traffic you’d expect of an Indian city that size. It cracked me up to see camel carts weaving in and out of busy intersections filled with rickshaws, cars, and motorbikes.

Because of my lost sick-day in Jodhpur, we didn’t have time to get to Madawa, so Bikaner was our last stop. The next day it was straight into Delhi, with 8 hours on lousy country roads. During the trip, I was figuring out how to present my driver’s tip. Because of the crap he pulled in Udaipur, the tour operator actually told me I shouldn’t tip him at all, but I didn’t feel very comfortable doing that as he’s otherwise done a pretty good job. Were it not for that occurrence, I figured I would have given him a tip amounting to slightly greater than 15%. I subtracted out the difference in the cost of the hotels which I ended up staying at in Udaipur in order to make myself whole, and then gave him the balance, which came out to a little under 10%. I was steeling myself for some drama when I gave it to him, half expecting him to complain and ask for more, but thankfully he just thanked me, told me to call if he came back to India and needed another driver, and left.

The good news is that I had time for dinner. So I catch a taxi to Bukhara, which is supposedly THE place to have Indian food in Delhi. I almost balked at the last minute when I found out how much it cost, but figured I could go for a splurge. The restaurant is located in a high-end hotel in the city, and one thing that struck me about it was the security. When my taxi pulled in, we were stopped at a security checkpoint where the guards actually searched both in the trunk and under the hood of the car. I guess they thought I looked like a shady character. While waiting for a table, I struck up a conversation with a couple people that just happen to live about 3 miles from me in Chicago, I ended up joining them and their two Indian friends from Mumbai and Dubai for dinner. Good times.

The next day I caught my flight to Hyderabad and went out the meet my work colleagues. I stopped by the office there, which is a pretty fancy setup. Deloitte has 5 large office buildings in a large, government-sponsored corporate campus called HITEC City. Driving down the street, you’d see office buildings with marquees advertizing plenty of household names, Amazon, Google, Oracle, Dell, and Motorola among them. The offices themselves are modern steel and glass setups that look pretty much exactly like a Deloitte office in the states look. So I finally meet the crew that I’ve been working with for the past 2-4 years face-to-face, and then we head out to a team dinner. It was a fun time and the meal was very nice, but there was a planning screw-up with the meal. I was all fired up to try the local cuisine which Hyderabad is so famous for, so the first thing I say when I get the menu is “Where’s the Biryani?!” To my horror, the waiter informs me that this is a north Indian restaurant. I turn to the team and shriek “Dude, I just spent 20 days in Rajasthan, Delhi, and UP, and you bring me to a north Indian restaurant! WTF!” Well, I may have actually been just slightly calmer than that. Some people may be seeing some additional feedback on their year-end evaluations in a couple months, though.

In terms of things to see, Hyderabad was pretty low-key, but I really enjoyed the city. It’s a much more pleasant and livable city than Delhi—more trees and grass, better roads, less dirt and trash, few people making inappropriate comments as I walk by them in the streets, etc. I think the fact that I’m staying in a much nicer hotel than at any other stop on my trip helped, too. Hyderabad may also have been the best food destination of the trip, too. Over the next day, I was able to score a couple of those biryanis, and they didn’t disappoint. This may be something that I’ll need to play around with when I get home.

So that wraps up the gig. I’m finishing this post at the airport as I digest my last biryani which I grabbed at the hotel this morning and wait for my plane back to Delhi. After that, I’ve got a 6+ hour layover, and then my 15-hour flight back to Chicago. It will be nice to be back.

Musings on the gym, regurgitation, and camels

Jodhpur was pretty nice. The big attraction, as is the case with most cities in Rajasthan, is the big fort overlooking the town. The town itself is known as the “blue city” because many buildings are painted blue, as is the tradition of the Brahmin caste which largely populated the city (or something like that). Walking around you do definitely see quite a few powder blue buildings, but not some much to make you say that the whole city is blue. That is, until you get up in the fort and are looking down at it from the top of the hill, at which point you say “Oh, yeah, it’s blue”. Be sure to check out the snaps as I got some pretty cools ones there.

Aside from the city itself, I really enjoyed the people in Jodhpur. I had many decidedly non-commercial interactions with people. Since I didn’t get a good night’s sleep either night in Udaipur, I slept in a bit the first evening in Jodhpur to catch up. By the time I worked out in the morning and got cleaned up, I had missed breakfast. So I headed out looking for some street food, and found an interesting looking place that was making some kind of pakora, some fried thing that was like a big mash of some kind of mystery paste, potatoes, and a whole green chile. Pretty tasty. I also picked up some scrumptious, drippy-goey Indian sweets there. As I was doing this I got in a conversation, or maybe just a semi-conversation because he hardly spoke a word of English, with a guy also grabbing a bite there. He was recommending certain sweets to try, etc. He actually bought me the different things he recommended, which was a refreshing change of pace. I thanked him, waved goodbye, and headed over to check out the town center. While milling around there I ran into him again. He sees me, and says, “Oh, you must have omelette!” “Omelettes?”, I think to myself. Anyways, he pulls me over to this shop to order a masala cheese omelette. I’m not really hungry any longer at this point and don’t want to spoil my lunch, but it’s nice to interact with somebody that doesn’t have an ulterior motive and I want to be polite so I sit down, I share a chai with him while waiting for my omelette. While waiting, his brother, a bodybuilder, shows up and we also get in a conversation as he hoovers down a plate of egg whites. I wasn’t very impressed with the omelette, but it was again nice to connect with some locals. And to my embarrassment, he buys my breakfast again over my protestations. So it was a nice start to the day.

After that I burned off my superfluous omelette by hoofing it up to the fort and checking it out. I then head over to the market, and go searching out a particular place for lunch. It occurs to me that I’ve got time, so I decide to grab a workout. All I can do in my room is pushups, situps, and chair dips, so it would be nice to get one workout in while I’m in India for my back, shoulders, and biceps. So I ask the guys at the restaurant if they know of a gym in the area, and luckily they know of one about ½ mile away. It takes me quite a bit of time and multiple queries for directions to find the place, but eventually I get there and walk in. There doesn’t appear to be anyone working the desk at the moment, but the few guys working out there come over and invite me in. I ask if I should pay somebody first, and they all respond, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Just come on in.” So the workout commences. I’m just in my street clothes, but it doesn’t really matter as that’s what half the guys there are wearing anyways. It’s about 4:30 at this point, so I suppose the after-work/school crowd is now arriving, and the place if filling up with people. It definitely wasn’t that great a workout, but was a rather amusing experience. After hitting my recently neglected muscle groups, dispensing 75 pieces of workout and diet advice, posing for about 50 photos with 15 different guys (including quite a few flexing poses, to my embarrassment), and being told about a dozen times that I look like Salman Khan (a Bollywood actor I don’t even vaguely resemble aside from the fact that we’re both in shape), I ask one more time if I should pay somebody. I’m told by the guy that works as a personal trainer there that showed up after I did, “No need”, so I thank everybody and head out.

Later that night I also had a great time chuming around with some locals at an internet café, and then went out to grab a nice dinner. So Jodhpur was on track to be a fantastic time. And then disaster strikes. That night I become seriously ill. At first this manifests itself simply as an extreme case of traveler’s intestinal problems, but it progresses to include a severe stomach ache, fever, chills, and nausea. By the next morning I’d gotten to the point of experiencing my second or third worst illness of my adult life, which needless to say, kind of throws a wrench in the plans of driving 4 hours to Jaisalmer and going on an overnight camel safari that evening. My driver, who had stopped behaving lake a jerk the day before, updates my hotel reservations and arranges for me to stay another day in Jaipur and brings me some “Indian medicine”. I thus spend almost the entire day lying around in bed and trying to sleep. I also hardly ate. All day long I just had two mango lassis and two bowls of milk porridge. I did get up in the evening to go across the street to the internet café and finalize my flight reservations to visit my colleagues in Hyderabad 6 days later, in the middle of which I run outside into the street and throw up the copious amounts of water I had been trying to force into my stomach in an effort to rehydrate myself. I barely made it outside and ended up splattering some of my vomit all over a cow that was hanging around near the front door, but I didn’t get the impression that she minded all that much. At least after this my stomach felt much better.

The next day I’m well enough to drive in a car, so we head to Jaisalmer. My buddy from New Zealand said it was his favorite city in India, and some of the photos I had seen look amazing, so I had high expectations. I ended up being a little underwhelmed. I think the uncooperative weather had a lot to do with this. Jaisalmer is situated in the northwestern Indian desert, just 90 km from Pakistan. Its fort, along with just about all the other buildings in town, are made of the local sandstone, which blend into the desert background and supposedly achieve a golden glow when lit up by the dusk or the evening lights. Unfortunately, though, it’s overcast, rainy, foggy when I get there. This appears to have been my luck recently, showing up in the desert and getting rained on. So I think it may have ruined the appearance of what is otherwise a very atmospheric place.

By the next morning, I’m feeling close to 100%. About my only serious lingering effect is that I no longer have any appetite for the rich, spicy Indian curries I had previously been enjoying so much. I’m now getting by mostly on lassis, the western-style breakfasts which heretofore I wasn’t touching, and drier and less rich food like tandoori items with rice. I even feel good enough for the camel safari at this point. However, the weather is still lousy. It’s not raining, but is still overcast, foggy, and damp. After being sick for three days the last thing I’m interested in is freezing my ass off in the damp desert evening, but the forecast keeps saying it’s going to be sunny, so I go for it. Alas, this also doesn’t quite live up to expectations. I pictured myself being Lawrence of Arabia for a day, and instead it was more like a day at the petting zoo, after which I froze my ass off in the extremely damp and cold desert evening with the crappy, moisture-soaked blankets they provided. I did make some nice company while out there, there was an excellent dance performance in camp, and it was fun to get to ride a camel for an hour or so, but if I had to do it over again I would have just paid somebody to let me take an hour-long camel ride in Pushkar and then instead of spending the night in a hut with damp blankets that were fouled with camel shit, I could have spent it in a hotel with clean sheets and indoor plumbing. Maybe next time.

India is too damn photogenic

I forgot to realize that I had to create a second photo album for all the snaps I've been taking because I went over the 1000 photo limit on google photos already. You can see the rest here. There are some really good ones in there, including the Kumbhalgarh Fort and some ones I took on the road on the way there. The Rajasthan countryside between Udaipur and the fort is really beautiful, but unfortunately the photos I took from the car really don't do it justice. It's a semi-arid region that kind of reminds me of the mountain west, but with more exotic looking plants, and tons of fields of poppies in the valleys. Also be sure to look for the snaps of the two women carrying full-sized bales of hay on their heads.

Holy Hucksters

After Jaipur, I spent a day in Pushkar. It was a beautiful place, but it kind of got on my nerves. It’s another sacred place where people go to bathe in the waters around a small lake. It’s basically the same drill as Varanasi, but 10x cleaner. Unfortunately, the charm of the place was largely spoiled for me due to the ubiquitous scam artists posing as holy men around the lake that won’t leave you alone until you perform some ritual of throwing flowers petals into the lake, which of course they charge for. They then give you a red string tied around your wrist, so unfortunately you can’t claim to have already done it. I don’t think it would have amounted to all that much money, but I didn’t want to give these guys any money on principle. So to a large extent I minimized my time walking around the lake just to avoid them.

I’m sorry to report that this has been a persistent problem in India. Almost everywhere you go in the developing world you’re going to have drivers that try to grossly overcharge you for fares, people running gem import scams, touts, merchants that try to sell you overpriced face merchandise, tour operators that bring you into a craft shop to see the craft performed and you later end up being pressured to make a purchase for which they get a commission on, people begging in the street, service providers trying to run a bait-and-switch on you, etc. However, what goes on here in India is at a whole different level from anywhere else I’ve been. It seems as if almost everyone I meet at best has an ulterior motive for talking to me, and at worst is an outright thief. For every single interaction you have, you have to be working to anticipate the various ways that they are trying to scam you or setting you up for a scenario in which they will try to pressure you for money. This is really a shame, as it seriously undermines the all the other things which make the country so enjoyable. It also results in making genuine connections with people here extremely difficult.

Fortunately, my day in Pushkar was salvaged by the company I made. While walking around I met a couple Israeli women. We struck up a conversation, and ended up going to dinner together to a fantastic little dive place in the middle of town. We had the veg thali since they said it was the best in town (no meat is ever eaten in Pushkar due to the religious strictures here)(you can think of thali as the sampler platter). Not exactly the cleanest place I’ve ever been to as there were flies swarming around the kitchen and there was a layer of grime on everything, but it was fantastic, and the place had the kind of hole-in-the-wall charm I love and prices to match. $2.00 for thali with seconds, fresh-made chapatis, and chai). I think I paid for it a little the next morning in the form of some minor digestive issues, but luckily it passed pretty quickly and I was OK by the time we got back on the road.

The next morning we headed to Udaipur, stopping at Ajmer on the way. Ajmer was and interesting stop for two hours. I also had another fabulous lunch. It was chicken handi, a spicy chicken dish with a cream-based curry sauce with lots of peppers. I’m beginning to realize that you can’t really go wrong with food in this country.

You certainly can go wrong with service providers, however. When we arrived in Udaipur I was a little disappointed with the quality of the hotel which my tour provider had set me up with. It was clean, but very old and decayed looking. It had peeling paint and stains on the walls and ceilings, sheets with stains and holes in them, a cruddy looking bathroom with a leaking toilet so there was standing water on the floor and substandard plumbing, and a bed that was a rock. Given what I had paid I was expecting more. However, I wasn’t planning on being at the hotel aside from sleeping and showering, so I figured I’d just live with it.

That night, though, the bed turned out to be much more uncomfortable than I had anticipated, so much so that I wasn’t even able to get a full night’s sleep (not that it mattered all that much since I would have been prevented from sleeping in the early morning due to the noise, anyways). So I dropped an email to my tour provider to complain the next morning, at which point he immediately texts me back saying that I’m in the wrong hotel. Needless to say I’m surprised at this. When I purchased the driver and hotel package I was given a packet of vouchers for each hotel. At every hotel I then had a reservation, and at every one I was immediately asked to give them the voucher for the stay which specifies the hotel and is my proof of payment. However, starting a couple cities back my driver started handling all the vouchers, so I hadn’t even looked at the voucher for the past couple cities, so I had no idea what the hotel name on the voucher for Udaipur was. So I go to the front desk and ask to see the voucher. The guy working the desk, the same guy that checked me in the night before, says that my driver never gave it to him. I find this a little odd as this is my proof of payment and every other places we had been to had immediately asked for it. So I got back to my room to finish my workout and shower up. When I come back out, my driver is by the front desk. I ask both him and the clerk where the voucher is, and now the hotel guy says that it’s already been sent to the office. Leaving aside the fact that it’s only 9:30 AM, the guy had now changed his story. So it seems to me like he doesn’t want me to see the voucher.

My driver commences to apologize profusely. He says he was confused because the same people own both hotels, and that’s why he mistakenly took me to this one instead of the much nicer place I was supposed to be. I’m a little perplexed by this as I doubt the voucher would have been ambiguous as to where I was staying, although I can’t confirm this because I can’t get a hold of the voucher. The other part that doesn’t add up is that there should have been a reservation for me, and that the hotel should have realized we were in the wrong place when we arrived because I wouldn’t have had a reservation there. So there are some things that just don’t add up in the “oops, I accidentally took you to the wrong hotel” story.

Here, however, is the story that fits all the evidence: my driver was trying to scam me by taking me to a cheaper hotel. As he stated, both the dump I ended up at and the nicer place I was actually booked at were owned by the same people. He takes me to the dump knowing I wouldn’t know where I was actually supposed to be so I end up seriously overpaying for my crappy room (which was pre-paid), and now the room at the nice hotel is freed up for another guest. The hotel then brings in more $$$ equal to the cost difference between my lousy room and the nice one I was supposed to be in, and my driver gets a chunk of that back. And it would have worked had I not complained to the tour provider about the room. Further evidence to support this is the fact that I was unable to move to my originally booked hotel the next day because it was full. If they had open rooms there would be no point to moving me to the cheaper property, and it's evidence that they gave my room to someone else, despite the fact that I had a fully pre-paid reservation.

I was about 80-90% sure about this, but asked the tour provider to send me a scan of the carbon copy of the voucher he wrote for me. Sure enough, there is little ambiguity as to the name of the hotel I was supposed to be checking into. Please note the comment about scams above. I had expected that a hired driver would try to further profit from me by cross-selling me overprices tours, taking me to shops and restaurants where he gets a commission, etc., but I’m quite disheartened to find out that somebody I had come to think of as a friend was literally trying to take money out of my pocket.

So relations with the driver are pretty chilly at the moment. Believe it or not, he’s behaving as if he’s mad at me, which I think takes quite a bit of temerity. Not that I really care all that much—I’m not interested in chuming around with somebody that was trying to steal from me.

Once the hotel situation was sorted out and I was moved to another property, the day actually ended up being pretty nice. Udaipur is a really charming place. It’s actually the city where much of Octopussy was filmed. It has a huge palace on the likeside, and a couple more actually out in the middle of the lake. It’s obviously a much more wealthy city than any of the other places we’ve been. It’s also by far the cleanest. I spent the afternoon checking out the city and grabbed a much-needed glass of wine in a terrace on the lake (my first in 7 days, wine is pretty hard to come by here). After that I want to an area outside of town filled with cenotaphs, monuments erected in honor of deceased rules of Udaipur. It was an extremely photogenic place and spent a good 90 minutes just walking around and taking shots. It kind of reminded me of Recoleta Cemetary in Buenos Aires. At night I went to a dance performance that was absolutely fantastic, and grabbed another killer meal on the lakeside. It was this smokey mutton curry that is a Rajasthan regional specialty. I was a little curious as to how they would make a curry smokey (you obviously can’t grill it), but I found out when they brought it out. It came in a small covered metal pot that appeared to be its original cooking vessel. The waiter takes of the lid, and inside sitting on top of the curry is a large lump of smoldering hardwood charcoal sitting on top of a thick leaf to keep the ash from getting into the curry. And it lived up to the billing—it was definitely quite smokey. And good.

The next day we drove to Jodhpur, stopping by the temples in Ranakpur and the amazing Kubalgarh Fort along the way. Wasn’t much conversation in the car, but that was just fine by me. I’m wrapping up the post just now in Jodhpur. Seems like another place I’m really going to like. There are definitely no problems with the hotel, either. It’s a heritage hotel built in an old haveli, which is an Indian term for private mansion. It’s also situated right in the center of town, immediately underneath the fort. It’s also within walking distance of everything I want to do tomorrow, which is good as I won’t need to bother with my driver until we leave for Jaisalmer on Saturday. So it should hopefully be another good day tomorrow.

A word about creepy Indian men

One of the unique things about India is that many of the dudes here are quite willing to openly express their admiration for my physique. More often than not this comes if the form of indiscreet staring, but is sometimes also vocalized. Unfortunately, this not always done in an appropriately bro-tastic fashion, such as “Dude! You’re totally buff!” The complement is appreciated, but oftentimes it is expressed in a way that gives me the willies. The first time was worst. It was my first day in Delhi. At the Red Fort, I had a young twentyish man come up to me and sheepishly ask for a photo. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t asking me to take a photo of him, but that he instead wanted a photo with me. “Um, uh, sure” I say. He stands next to me, his friend takes a photo, and next thing I know literally a dozen other young guys show up asking for the same thing. The whole experience was a little surreal, and a bit awkward. But it was all OK up until one of the last guys grabbed a photo of me and says, “Ooooooooooh, you have a niiiiiiiiiiiiice, boooowdy!”, sounding disturbingly like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films. This creeped me the fuck out. Not bro-tastic. Not bro-tastic at all.

I have become somewhat inured to this over the past 12 days. Usually, it’s a completely innocuous exclamation of “Nice muscle!” directed my way when I walk past some random guy on the street. This happens about 20-40 times a day (no exaggeration). Maybe about a half dozen times I day I’m asked if I work out, or am asked for workout tips, which I also have no problem with. I’ll also periodically get a “I like your body,” or a “I like you” (this latter one also gives me the heebie-jeebies, although I usually chalk it up to being simply a language issue). Then there’s my personal favorite, “Hey, James Bond!” Only about once or twice a day am I asked if somebody can take a photo with me. However, as with the Red Fort, these usually come in packs – when one is seen taking a photo with me, another 4 immediately come out of the woodwork for the same. I always accept, as I’d be quite a hypocrite to decline request for a photo given the amount of shots I take of the locals every day (done discreetly as possible, but usually without their consent). I then just pray that there won’t be any inappropriate, if inadvertent, homoerotic overtones to the conversation that will leave me feeling violated afterwards. Thankfully, there usually there isn’t. There was, of course, the guy in Khajuraho that upped the stakes by asking me if he had correctly guessed the size of my penis (not as completely out from left field as it might sound here since he was a tour guide we were just talking over lunch about the philosophical context of the erotic sculptures in the temples there, but still definitely not bro-tastic).

It would certainly be refreshing if I got a “Nice muscle” or an “I like your body” from a female for once. Alas, it’s only the guys that are telling me how much they like my pecs. The ladies are mum on the subject.

Jaipur

Just got done with Jaipur. It's called the "pink city" because the majority of the buildings are painted pink by tradition (actually more of a salmon color). I missed a couple of the city highlights there because I didn't manage my time very well. Because I worked out in the morning I got a bit of a late start on the day. I first went to the large fort in Amber in the hills overlooking the city, which was definitely the highlight, sights-wise. After that I came back to the city and I headed out for lunch and to see the sites. Realizing I was low on cash, I blew 45 minutes looking for an ATM. After that I spent another 40 minutes or so looking for the restaurant I was searching out. It was well worth the time investment, though. It was this atmospheric little mom-and-pop hole in the wall on the city wall, and it had fantastic food. The garlic naan there was phenomenal, and the house specialty, a paneer curry with a yellow-brown sauce with vegetables, was absolutely fantastic. I also met a couple interesting fellow travelers there, an older American woman that has been teaching in an international school in Paris for the past 40 years, and a young guy from New Zealand. This stretched out my late lunch even more, though, so by the time I started walking around the city and seeing sights, everything was closed. However, I'm not particularly bent out of shape about it, as I was able to get the feel for the city and saw the fort, which I think is probably the most interesting part.

Since it was a weekend evening, later that night I caught up with the guy from New Zealand with the intent of meeting some nice charming young ladies out. We went to a restaurant which we were told had a nice bar and may have a good scene, but it was dead. After that we sought out a night club we thought someone had recommended. I say "thought" because there obviously was some kind of misunderstanding, when we arrived at the place we saw that it was not in fact a night club, but a cricket club. It was closed, and definitely had neither tasty cocktails nor charming company. After that we went to plan C, which was to check out a lounge located in a fancy hotel in a former palace. Rooms there started at $350/night and ran up well into the thousands, so drinks were likely going to be pretty pricey, but I was more than willing to cough up some cash for a little decent nightlife at this point. So we catch up tuk-tuk up there (we couldn't find any taxis), wanting to get dropped off a couple hunderd yards from the entrance as we thought the staff there wouldn't look very kindly upon a couple young, single guys showing up in a golf cart. Unfortunately, the tuk-tuk driver didn't speak any English, so he rolled us right up to the front gate of the resort for our grand ghetto-style entrance. Somewhat embarrassed, I get out of the car, walk up, and ask if the lounge is still open. Of course, I'm told that it's not. I'm not sure if that was actually case or if they just didn't want us mixing with the clientele that was paying $800/night for a room, but I guess it really didn't make any difference. Out of options at this point, I pack up and head back to the hotel for some shut-eye so I can get ready before heading to Pushkar tomorrow.

No, I’m not dead

I’m just busy. I’ve had so little free time at the start of the trip that I haven’t had time to write a post. Deal with it. So I’m writing this one a little after the fact. A big part of the problem I’ve had is related to the fact that I’ve had to spend most of my free time making plans for the latter part of my trip. I also haven’t had as much time to spend on the computer since my first couple travel connections were flights, which didn’t leave me much train/car/bus time to kill.

So Delhi was worth a brief stop, but it wasn’t exactly my favorite travel destination. It had a couple nice historic sites downtown, including a medieval fort and a massive mosque built by the same crew. I also rolled through the area of town with India’s national monuments, major government buildings, and the president’s house. By far and away the highlight of Delhi, though, was a tomb of one of the ancient Mughal Emperors. It was very atmospheric, and I was able to get some great photographs (great by my standards, at any rate).

There were definitely some things about Delhi that I didn’t like. First of all, it’s the most polluted place I’ve ever been in my life. Right after getting picked up at the airport by a driver from my hotel, I asked him if there was a fire nearby because there was a noticeable acrid smell in the air and there was a thick smoke-like haze everywhere. No fire, that’s just how the air is. To be fair, it’s particularly bad out by the airport as the area is basically a plantless dust-bowl, but everywhere I went there was a thick haze in the air. On my flight leaving Delhi a couple days later I get in a conversation with a Chinese woman from Beijing, and she actually mentioned what a problem it was. If you’ve got somebody from urban China complaining about the pollution and smog, you know you’ve got a problem.

Delhi was also pretty sprawling. It’s not very tourist-friendly, without a small, walkable core to it. I suppose a certain amount of sprawl may be inevitable in a city of 13 million people, though. It’s not as if the population density wasn’t high. The concentration and sheer mass of humanity packed into the streets in the area I was staying in was shocking. This is probably partially my fault, though. I picked a hotel that was described in reviews as being located “at the end of a long, dark alley situated in the middle of a slum”. At the time I chalked this up to people being prissy, insulated little whiners that haven’t ever traveled to the developing world. At least in this case, though, they were absolutely right. The “street” we were located off of was basically a big dusty, dirt track lined with small concrete block shacks with corrugated metal roofs, or in many cases just corrugated metal walls, as well. Off this you then had to walk about 40 yards into a side alley which at many points was no wider than 4 or 5 feet across to get to the hotel. I would not have thought it possible to get that much dust and dirt in an urban environment with so many people. Ironically, I actually liked the hotel. The rooms were decent, the staff was helpful, and the building was quiet, and they had great food. It was just in a horrid location. Being there actually gave a fascinating look into the life of India’s urban poor. This neighborhood had crappy back-alleys off of back-alleys that seemed to go on forever, with legit looking businesses and people’s homes tucked into them. It’s as if there’s an entire hidden world in these crevices and crannies hidden from the streets.

This environment was just a block or two away from two of the city’s most significant sites, the Jama Masjid Mosque and the Red Fort. I wanted to stay there partially because I did want to be able to walk to as much of the things I wanted to visit as possible. I didn’t spend too much time outside the hotel, though. Even once you got outside of the serious slum area I was in, it was still pretty seedy. There was a market just to the north of me, but navigating the crush of people there was so difficult, and the area was sketchy enough that even I needed to seek refuge back in the hotel. This is saying something as I often enjoy seeing the seedy underbelly of places I go, and am generally able to shrug off conditions in cities I travel to that people would find appalling back home.

The squalor I experienced in Delhi was just about made up for by the quality of the food. There was a renowned restaurant just a few blocks from me that I hit on Saturday. All I can say is “wow”. The food there was almost unbelievably good. I had mutton burra, a kind of barbecued mutton (although I actually think it was goat), aloo gosht, a rich goat brown curry with potatoes, and sahi paneer, a cream and tomato based curry made with paneer, the ubiquitous . I didn’t recognize it by name, but when I came out I realized the shahi paneer was something I’ve had many times before at Indian restaurants in the US. Normally, it doesn’t turn my crank all that much. At this place I damn near licked the bowl clean, despite the fact that I had ordered two full entrée-sized portions of food. The other items were equally as good. The total cost for this feast ended up being around $5. (Incidentally, this place wasn’t in the full-blown slum with the men bathing themselves on the sidewalk and homeless cripples and midgets laying around on the street, it was just in the adjacent semi-slum with the stores with piles of decapitated goat heads out front) (I think one of those goats ended up in my food, by the way). And while this place was definitely the standout for food, the other places I ate at didn’t disappoint either. Even my hotel (in the alleyway in the middle of the slum) had great food.

I don’t want to give the impression that all of Delhi was so shockingly desperate. Many parts of it are relatively nice, it’s just not where I ended up.

While the food was great, the nightlife was a bit of a bust for me. I was there on a Saturday night, so I had high expectations for going out and meeting some pretty Indian girls. Most of the nice clubs are in the high-end hotels in the city. One of the guys from my hotel recommended one, so I threw on the set of nice duds I brought and headed out. Upon arriving, I saw a fancy, modern hotel, with a swank looking club on the first floor, and some rather attractive ladies walking in that were no doubt representatives of the moneyed Indian upper class. This was all rather promising, so I head in. I get to the door, and the host asks me “Are you a guest in this hotel?”. “No”, I tell him, at which point he informs me that the cover charge is 4000 rupees. I do the math in my head, and thinking that can’t possibly be right, pull out my phone and use the calculator to confirm that yes, this clown just asked me for $90 US to get into the club. Based on the cost of living and relative purchase power, this would be like being asked for $450 to get into a place in the US. Thinking I don’t need to spend that kind of money to go in and feel awkward because I don’t fit in with the crowd and being resentful because I know I never would have been asked for such an outrageous sum if I were either female or not a foreigner, I decline, head back to the hotel, watch a bit of Indian MTV, and go to bed. This of course reminds that I actually hate night clubs and how much I despise the bullshit at them, regardless of in what part of the world they’re located.

One of the things I was able to polish up in Delhi was the plans for the rest of my trip. I booked two flights to get me to my next two cities, and then arranged for a private driver to take me the rest of the way. Being by myself, the driver was a bit of a splurge, but should be worth it. I’ll get to cover a lot more territory in my time, and will have lots more flexibility. It will also allow me to spend my time experiencing the places I’m at, instead of trying to figure out train and bus schedules every single night. As part of the package I also had the tour operator who set me up with the driver pre-book all my hotels up until the 17th when I finish with the driver, so the rest of the trip will hopefully be hassle-free. Here’s the schedule:

Day 1-2: Delhi
Day 3-4: Varanasi (with day trip to xxxuusdfklsj )
Day 5: Khajuraho; get picked up by driver
Day 6: Orccha
Day 7: Agra; Fathepur Sikri
Day 8-9: Jaipur
Day 10: Pushkar
Day 11-12: Udaipur
Day 13-14: Jodhpur
Day 15-16: Jaisalmer
Day 17: Bikaner
Day 18: Mandawa
Day 19: Delhi
Day 20-21: Hyderabad
Day 22: fly back to Delhi, catch one last Indian meal, fly home

So next it was on to Varanasi. This is a holy city for Hindus, who believe that they can be purified by bathing in the river waters, and that someone who dies there can also be freed from the continual cycle of death and reincarnation central to their religion. In addition, many people are cremated along the holy river there for reasons which escape me and I’m too lazy to look up at the moment. So you can walk along the river and see some startlingly intimate portions of people’s lives going on: people performing their ritualistic bathing in the river, public cremations on wooden pyres in full view of anyone passing by, and nightly outdoor religious ceremonies. All this sacred activity is going on intermixed with the completely mundane activities also going on along or in the river: people watering their goats and cows, doing laundry, kids flying kites and playing cricket, etc.

I’ve traveled an awful lot, but it must be said the Varanasi was completely unlike any other place I’ve ever been. Just really amazing. In addition to all the aforementioned highlights, one of the most charming and simultaneously repulsive aspects to the city was the intermingling of animals with the people in the urban environment. While not the cheek-to-jowl setup of Delhi, it’s still very densely populated, and in this environment it seems every third person is keeping a cow or a small pack of goats. There are no fields for these cows or goats, they’re literally just living out in the streets, in the back alleys, or in the steps along the river (called ghats) where people bathe, wash their clothes, and cremate their dead. So it’s charming because, well, how can it not be? It cracked me up to be driving around in traffic in the middle of the city waiting for a herd of cattle to get out of the way. And it’s repulsive because, as you can probably imagine, the city is inundated with shit (literally). There really isn’t any trash pick-up, so the animals do their business, and there it stays. This is particularly true of the most touristic areas along the river. There’s one main road that runs parallel to the river, about 60-70 yards away. To get to the river (and most likely your guest house), you have to navigate a mass of tiny back alleys crammed with homes, small shops, guest houses for the religious Hindu visitors, and craft shops (silk weaving is apparently big business in Varanasi). Many of the residents in this area keep their own sacred cows, and many that don’t bring their cows and goats through there to get to the river. So I found it to be incredibly quaint to have to step over a lounging 1200 pound brahmin bull to get to my hotel, but at the same town was absolutely disgusted by the amount of feces lying around. And the people there were extremely nonchalant about it. Women would clean their laundy, then lay it out to dry on the same ghat steps that the animals are continually shitting all over. Guys are just sitting around on the steps along the river (ugh). I didn’t even want to think about the amount of goat crap on the cricket ball the kids were playing with. And of course, all this runs off into the river which may of the locals and Hindu visitors are bathing in. I did my damnedest to not touch anything or anyone the entire time I was there. Being both a city boy and a non-dog-owner, I’ve got serious issues with animal feces, and felt filthy the entire time I was in Varanasi, and continued to do so until I arrive at my next location, washed every single item of clothing I had work during that time as well as my jacket, cleaned my shoes, wiped down my bags and everything else I was carrying (including my laptop, cell phone, and all other personal belongings). It was a fascinating place and definitely worth going to, but if I come back I think it’s going to be in a head-to-toe gore-tex suit with a gas mask. Either that, or stay in a hotel that whenever someone enters they are stripped naked, have their clothes incinerated, and a given a jail-house style power spray wash and fresh clothing before they are allowed in.

After Varanasi I caught a flight to Khajuraho. It’s a city in central India with a large cluster of Hindu temples covered in incredibly intricate sculptures. The recurrent themes in the sculptures are Hindu religious images, women, and sex (or as the non-English speaking caretakers of the temples say when they point at them “Kama Sutra, Kama Sutra”). While the erotic content was amusing (there were some particularly acrobatic scenes depicted in some cases), the sculptures were also great art. And while the architecture there was amazing, I also loved Khajuraho because it was clean-ish. There was still an awful lot of dirt in the air, and while there are still cows and goats roaming the streets most everywhere you go, the levels of dirt and shit were tolerable. I think this will be much more representative of much of India. Enough animals wandering around through traffic to be cute, but not so many that you feel like your entire body is coated with a thin film of cowpie every time you come back from being outside. Thank god. Apparently, the amount of cows in Varanasi is particularly large because of its religious significance there.

At Khajuraho I hooked up with my driver and we headed to Orccha. It’s a small town with a massive fort, a set of medieval palaces, huge Hindu temple, and other associated historical structures. I really liked this place. All the buildings were amazing, particularly the large Hindu temple. It was almost like visiting the zoo. It had a bunch of monkeys hanging around on the roof, a vulture and it’s new offspring perched along the dome, a large bright green parrot zipping around the upper parts, and a bunch of bats that were living in the dark underside of the ancient stone dome. A young Indian guy was able to let me into the locked door leading to the interconnected sets of hidden halls and stairwells in the building to lead me up there. He hustled me for an exorbitant tip at the end, but it was well worth it to see the menagerie in the building and to get some fantastic shots of the other buildings in the town from the roof, including one of me feeding the monkeys on the rooftop. I also scored some amazing street food in Orccha. It was called aloo something-or-other, unfortunately I can’t remember. Essentially, it was a deep-fried crushed potato, which was then stir-fried with some onion, cilantro, some kind of soupy brown beans or lentils, garam masala and other seasonings, and served with a mango and tamarind sauce in a bowl make out of two large tree-leaves formed into a bowl using toothpicks. Killer.

After Orccha, it was on to Agra. I saw a certain building there which you likely have heard of. It didn’t disappoint. Be sure to check out the photos when they are up (taking a while as I have yet to stay at a hotel with functioning internet in my room). As I write this post I’m on the way to Jaipur. I’ll try to post more regularly going forward. Now that I’ve got a driver, I should have 2-3 hours of car time every couple days which should allow me to keep up. Cheers.