‎I awoke to the sounds of magicians in my room

Hello ladies and germs...
well I suppose it's time for a first instalment of "White Boy Has A
Hard Time With the Heat as He Travels Asia, What Was He Thinking?". I'm not too sure how to go about doing these group email things (technically yes i do...smart asses); I figure different groups of you will want to know different things about my travels... and to be honest, I'm really not the type to just list of the things i saw and call it an email. Mind you... it might be a lot easier that way... but alas... those of you who enjoy reading bullet point lists or top 10's, you loose. It ain't going to be like that. ;-) Please don't mind the grammar and spelling... it's hot, I'm bothered and hungry.

So, I'm now at the end of my first week away... and what to say. Lots actually... I've discovered that I really like to complicate my life when traveling as I really feel like I have to organize as many interim destinations as humanly possible only to realize that once on the road, I've managed to totally annoy myself and create what i can only describe as misery and psychosis... kidding, kinda (It's all better now that I'm settle in KAthmandu)... it's sort of how this first week of the trip has been (as some of you who have rec'd emails from me in quite literally a panic from Mumbai) can attest. First off... why in the hell did I schedule a 24 hour layover in London? well actually I know why I did (wanted to meet the Madagascar crew, which I didn't). I must really like changing lots of Canadian dollars in to Sterling pounds, in order to pay for a flea bag hotel next to the airport so that I can watch the BBC. Brilliant I tell you brilliant. I think that 24 hours (didn't my Tokyo adventure teach me anything?) in Heathrow...not even LONDON, was more than I've spent in the past week in Mumbai, and all I did was pay for my hotel, buy a
meal and drink a pint of Fosters. FOSTERS'!! and then to have the freakin' waitress give me snide remarks, "what did you expect form the King Burger it's gonna be big! Well lady! I thought i was f'n hungry! and it was the only god damn hamburger on the menu! AND THE ENGLISH SHOULD LEARN TO MAKE BURGERS! IT'S NOT THAT HARD!sigh... atleast my time there enabled me to learn about the new theories on Stonehenge. I am now so much more enlightened... thanks ITV!!! ok ok ok... i know... I'm travelling and i should be more chipper.... and I am... now... it took me a while though. I think that I've experience what i would consider to be the worst case of jet lag I have EVER encountered. And that's when Mumbai enters the decor.

Mumbai, Mumbai, Mumbai... to be honest, I was expecting lots from Mumbai. Great stuff with a touch of hell on earth... and to be honest... well... In my honest opinion, not too much great stuff. I don't like Mumbai. It's very much like any other East Asian city I've visited... Bangkok, Saigon, Phenom Pen... it's huge, throngs of people, crazy amounts of poverty and it smells like shit. Mind you, I
was expecting worse when it came to the smell department. i was expecting to be slapped with a soiled diaper once I disembarked from the plane. I was pleasantly mistaken. :-) Mumbai has more of a stale room mixed with diesel and curry thing going on... and the curry thing is only during the day. There is the excrement smell that does pop up here and there but that's whenever you come close to a canal or open body of water... and Mumbai being a series of Islands, I won't
say that it didn't happen;-)

So yeah... back to me and Mumbai... well the fact that I arrived @ 2 in the morning did not help my situation any. Suffering from the exhaustion of my 5 movie flight (when you travel distances like that,the actual hours you travel seem like a very complicated way to keep track of things as there are time changes and all that, so I do it in movies), my next 4 days were nothing but a mish mash of sleepless days, several 2 hour naps in the day, 35 degree and 60% humididty heat. Couple that with the fact that it seems in Mumbai there are no noise laws (they see it fit to do construction with jackhammers under my window at 2AM) rat and dog fights and crazy neighbours listening to Bollywood movies all night; made for an environment that was not conducive to sanity. So in essence, I was able to make a few jaunts out in my neighbourhood to explore and find food (absolutely divine I must say) i spent much of my time loosing my sanity in my hotel room watching MTV, VH1 and the most insane (FOX News has nothing on the Indian news) news shows. Everything seemed to be BREAKING NEWS!!! OH MY GOD!! RAJ CROSSED THE STREET, more from Yasinder on site... no
seriously though... it seemed like every day there was some sort of new crazy breaking news. The show would have all these crazy graphics and extremely dramatic music. It was a riot. The absolute craziest things that I came across aside from the daily new terrorist warnings ( I really think that there was at least one a day)... was the poison milk scam. Every thing bad to them is a scam... you see, to me, a scam is when some dude bilks you for an extra 10 bucks because you are
a tourist... that's a scam... when ALL OF NORTHERN INDIA'S MILK IS BEING MIXED WITH PAINT, POTASH AND UREA!!! that my friends, takes is up a notch from scam to .... well... What the fuck? and just plain criminal... and yes that is exactly what happened. Milk transporters would take the milk they were delivering, transpose it in to larger vats, mix it with white finger paint, urea, potash and palm oil mix it
up and then send it on to it's final destination, being most milk plants in Northern India (Delhi and the like)... crazy... just crazy.

Now, although i did spend copious amounts of time "adjsuting" in my hotel room, despair not, I did get out and about... I promise. I managed to make it to the Taj hotel to pay my respects and say a prayer for my friend's mother who was killed in the 11/26 attacks. It was a lot more intense than I expected it to be. To be honest, I didn't really know what to expect. The reality of it kind of hit once i was on site. The memorial was very nice, a bronze statue of the tree of life set in front of this waterfall in this glassed room just off of the lobby. Very tasteful.

Other than that, I managed to see the gates of India, and generally walked around the Fort and Colaba districts. Like I mentioned before, from what i did see in Mumbai, it didn't resonate with me all that much... I really felt cities like Saigon are much more interesting to explore. I also felt (now this might just be my jet lagged paranoia)that the Indian's were exactly all that friendly. In Bangkok everyone wants to be your friend no matter where you are... they do call Thailand, the land of smiles for a reason... In Cambodia, they are just so happy to have tourist that they are so so so nice... I call it the land of the glowing smile... Vietnam, well... I call it the land that Smiles forgot, because nobody smiles. It's all very stern, but in the end, when you get to know people they are really quite
warm... when it comes to India (PLEASE REMEMBER I WAS JET LAGGED!) I really felt that when i would walk down the streets, everyone's eyes would follow me down the road and shoot daggers at me. Again, jet lag and this might also just be Mumbai's vibe... Someone i know who goes to India quite often said that there is a ultra nationalistic Hindugroup who does not like foreigners... maybe i was in a district (the Fort District) where all these dudes hang out.

Now... the food... wow... I have had hands down some of the best Indian food on the planet. I had the best samosas (they were of a Punjabi variety) and this absolutely amazing veg kofta. wow... i've been eating like like a king (all veg... not a splurt of meat in 7 days, with this heat, it seems like the last thing i'd want)... do you guys know the scene in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" in the restaurant when Mr. ( I forget his name) ate all the food in restaurant and then proceeded to eat the last waffer thin mint?... well that's kind of how i felt. If you don't know that reference, i suggest you find it on youtube... it's quite funny, gross too. I have to ask my friends who have been to India a question though.... do all Indian waiters sit and watch you eat? All of my dinning experiences consited of the waiter standing about 3 feet from me and watching me eat. Occasionally he'd go off for 2 minutes, but then return to another spot of equal distance to the last and then watch me eat. It's just one of those odd things I've experienced.. :-) all good.

So yeah... it might seem like I'm being hard on Mumbai/India... and i'm not. I know better to judge a country, a people and a culture by my first 4 jet lagged days there. there might be some of you who remember the emails I sent my first week in Bangkok a few years back. Within 24 hours I was ready to jump back on a plane and high tail it home... well... I know better now, and I know that my last few weeks
of my trip, which will probably be in India will be absolutely fantastic.

So now, I'm in Kathmandu but I've just been warned that the power might go out, so I'll leave you waiting with baited breath for the next instalment of "White Boy Sweating Bullets in Nepal" I just found out that my placement is not going to be in the isolated monastery in Besishare (?)... instead I'll be just outside of Pokhara.
I'm pretty psyched... it's going to be quite an adventure. I hope you are all as excited about it as I am. ;-)

Oh... and as a final note... don't be shy about sending emails... being on the road can get lonely at times and even just a small "what's up? Did you know that the toilet paper is on sale at Jean-Coutu this weekend?" can bring a wonderful smile to a traveler's face.
;-)

namaste
chris
ps: two things... for the people who like lists ;-)
- thanks to everyone who helped out with advice before the trip. Your help was invaluable.
- If you know anyone who didn't get this email and you think would like to read it... pls. forward it on.