Thali vs. Delhi Belly

We are currently in Jaipur, staying at the Madhuban heritage house, at which the Queen of England once stayed, or so they say. They have a lovely (by Indian standards...) garden where they serve breakfast (as well as show eyebrow-raising puppet shows), and as you can see from the photo, I have good reason to fear that my children are getting spoiled.

I must say that while this is a grand adventure for my kids and parents, it's kind of adventure-lite for me, considering how much of my traveling was done in my twenties and early thirties, with either my brother, my friend Andi, or Anthony, and generally on about $30 a day -- food, lodging, transportation, entry fees, bribes, and souvenirs included. Historically, I have just thrown caution to the wind. Whereas this is more like throwing rupees to the wind. I feel relatively okay about this for myself, and my parents, but fear that my children won't ever understand the joy of sleeping outdoors on a luggage cart at a train station in Germany, simply because one is trying to save the $7 overnight hostel fee. For other examples of the high life to which my children are getting accustomed, see the photos below: high tea at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi, our hotel room in Agra, and one of the many overpriced English-language-menu-with-Chinese-food-option-for-foreigners restaurants at which we dine.

Yes, we dine places that offer Aloo Gobi on one side, and Kung Pao Chicken on the other. And yes, of course I mock my father for ordering from the Chinese menu at each of our restaurants. I must sadly confess that my children eat an awful lot of scrambled eggs. My mother, who has lost her voice for much of the trip, orders just soup or tea everywhere we go. So it's only me ordering Indian food -- "no spicy" in the hopes that my children and parents might actually try and like it. I will say this: when I order well, my children and mother do like much of the Indian food (but my father will stick to his chow mein, thank you very much). At dinner tonight, for our last meal in Jaipur, our table order is typical: one bowl of wonton soup, one Chinese chicken stir fry, one scrambled egg, one chicken dumpling (called a mo-mo), and one "little spicy" chicken tikka masala.

Our favorite meal is at the least fancy restaurant of our trip, today for lunch. It is still very clean and obviously meant for some tourists, since there is an English-language printed menu. But it seems more geared at Indian middle class, and offers the local specialty, a thali (platter with many small dishes on it). In the "fancy" restaurants, they actually have a separate area where our driver eats, and I must say that bit of colonialism irks me each time. In this restaurant, he just sits down and eats with us, which we all prefer. He steers me away from one thali, "No, that is not for you," to the one below, which turns out to be my favorite meal in all of India, and the whole meal costs us $12 for the 6 of us, versus the $30 for the 5 of us (without the driver) that we've been paying at the fancier places. It's a vegetarian meal and is so good that even the girls and my mother keep asking for more and more bites off my plate. It doesn't actually look huge, but in fact there is plenty to share. The girls and our driver order dosa (Indian crepes, basically).

I will admit that between careful ordering and eating, along with brushing our teeth with bottled water, and sterilizing all fruits and vegetables that have been brought into my brother and sister-in-law's house, none of us get even a touch of Delhi Belly during our trip here (and knock wood, only two days to go...). But I'm not 100% convinced it's because we've been eating in fancy restaurants. The worst food poisoning of my life -- and Andi's too, I'm sure -- was when we ate in a so-called "nice" restaurant in Indonesia. It was fancy enough to have electricity and refrigeration, which only meant that instead of making the gado-gado sauce fresh, they re-heated it, and not long enough to kill whatever godawful germs were in it.

Because of that, and the fun of buying things from carts, I am normally a huge street food fan. As is my brother, and sister-in-law, neither of whom have had any street food here at all in the five months they've been living here. In desperation one day, I do have one street food fried-potato thing, but I must admit that while I am good at choosing carts that look quaint and trustworthy in places like Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, and Mexico, here they mostly just look dirty and scary. At one point, while I am shopping for scarves, the girls look longingly at an ice cream cart. Even the scarf shopkeeper, Indian himself, tells them unequivocably "No! You don't want that!"

  

Besides the potato, the only other things we buy from a cart are a coconut and a wrapped/industrially produced ice cream bar. The coconut is safe because there's juice to drink. Tip on coconuts that I learned in Sri Lanka: If there's still liquid in it, it's sterile (since with any hole the liquid would just evaporate). So sterile, in fact, that during WWII in Sri Lanka, they used coconut juice for intravenous liquids during surgery and recovery.

Other food factoids and explanations of the photos below, clockwise: 1) Do not adjust the color on your screen. Carrots in India are red. 2) In India people just live out their lives on the street, and the man below is probably upper-middle class, and using the sidewalk space to make 100 chapatis or naan in the barrel/fire-oven shown. 3) We still don't know what these little green fruits are called, but they're nearly flavorless. A candidate for the least interesting tropical fruit ever. 4) While jack-fruit is delicious when yellow, juicy, and ripe, I apparently don't know how to pick one. This is a young jack-fruit, and therefore more vegetable than fruit.

Leapin' Elephants!

 

Given that it's Leap Day, we feel like there's really no choice: Today is the day we ride an elephant up to the Amber Fort. My mother refuses since she is afraid of heights, slopes, and strange rides (along with speed and cold), effectively ruling out biking down-hill, skiing, hot-air balloons, and now, elephant rides. In a completely unexpected turn of events, my father opts out of the elephant ride, citing the fact that he sat on one in the Bronx Zoo at age four and still remembers it. This from the man who buys Peeps every year at Easter and hides them in the glove compartment.

This is actually my second time on an elephant, having ridden in Thailand in my twenties with my friend Andi, but that's certainly not going to stop me from getting on with my girls! Other than the joy of sharing this adventure with my kids, my favorite part of the ride is actually the fact that our mahut (elephant trainer) is on his cell phone nearly the whole way up. It's the ultimate ad for coverage:"Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Sorry, the trumpeting is so loud here."

   

Photos at the Amber Fort itself:

 

 

 

Another favorite aspect of the elephant ride is that two different entrepreneurial photographers take our photos and call out to us from the walls on the way up. "Look for me! I'm Tony!" And "Look for me! I'm Ali!" Naturally, I don't actually look for either of them, but on our way out of the fortress, Tony find us. He tries to sell me the photos, which he's already printed out, for 500 rupees, but since he and I both realize it's a sunk cost for him, I give him 100 and we're both happy. More amazing is that after we drive away, we decide we want to pull into a viewing point down at the bottom, well outside the fort. It is there that Ali finds me, and I give him 150 rupees for his photos, since we are  so amazed at the magic of him tracking me down. We still can't figure out how he knows to look for us there, since even we ourselves don't know we'll stop in that particular parking lot till it happens.

Jaipur is known as the Pink City, for obvious reasons having to do with the main palace in town pictured below, part of which is still currently occupied (on occasion, at least) by the local Rajah.

 

  

 

The Pink City is pretty in pink and perfectly pleasant, but frankly we are just as enamored with a temple whose name alone makes it unlikely to every be as popular as the Pink City, the Amber Fort, or the Taj Mahal: "Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II Museum Trust, The City Palace, Jaipur, Gatore Ki Chhatriyan" has fewer tourists, probably because nobody knows how to tell the tuk-tuk driver where they want to go. Consequently, it is very fun to poke around and explore at a leisurely pace without scads of people popping up unexpectedly in front of your camera.

  

 

The only problem with celebrating Leap Day with a six and eight year old on an elephant in India is that it will be hard to top it when they're ten and twelve. I'll have to start my planning soon.

Porno Puppets & Other Obscenities

We are in Rajasthan, an Indian state known among other things for colorful crafts including hand-stamped woodblock printed fabric (we buy a ton), camel leather shoes (Aunt Coca gets one pair for each girl to go with their saris), and hand-knotted Oriental carpets (the one thing I love but don't buy, since spontaneous $4,000 purchases are not in my current souvenir budget).

 

Of the crafts, puppets would seem to be one of the more accessible and appropriate for the children. However, the particular show we see, one evening in the garden of our hotel, is not just colorful but off-color, too. One marionette turns out to be a man one direction, and then a woman when flipped upside down. The puppeteer takes full advantage of this configuration and manages to manipulate it in such a way that both puppet heads show at once, as he graphically simulates the making of the beast with two backs, the makin' of bacon, a romp in the hay, bananas and cream, a feather-bed jig, getting Jack in the orchard, having a bit of giblet pie, nugging, quimsticking, some squat jumps in the cucumber patch, trimming the buff, vitamin F, winding the clock. In case you are getting worried about my in-depth knowledge of oddball euphisms, I would like to come clean about my getting dirty and tell you that most of these are taken from the Department of Translation Studies, at the University of Tampere, Finland. In the course of researching this paragraph, I come across this most excellent list of euphamisms for every private part and act both sexual and scatalogical. Sometimes I wonder how I ever made it through college without the internet.

I am relieved to report that my girls have no idea what the puppets are doing, but all the grown-ups are practically crying. My sister's family saw this same puppet show when they were here over Christmas and I am told that my high-school and college-aged nephews nearly peed their pants they were laughing so hard.

 

  

But what is really obscene is the amount my father tips at the end of the show. I am trying to get out some money to tip, and am fishing in my bills for a 100 rupee note. My father gets there first, handing the puppeteer a 500 rupee note, which is really far too much for the local economy (at $10). To compare: we have been told to tip 500 rupees per day for our driver/guide whom we adore. Or, we could hire a rickshaw driver in New Delhi to pedal us around for seven hours for that price. My mother gets the girls their own -- fully G-rated -- puppets, bargaining the puppeteer to a fair my-husband-just-drastically-overtipped-you discount.

There are two sides to the raging over-tipping debate: my father's side, which is that $2 per person is nothing to see a show and, besides, the $10 means nothing to us but a lot to the puppeteer. Valid arguments but, on the other side, we are supposed to do our best as responsible travelers not to raise prices egregiously on the local economy, thereby ruining it for the locals. Of course we will always pay more than a local, but if the discrepancy is too great, then the local shopkeepers/rickshaw drivers/restaurant owners/puppeteers will only want to sell to/drive around/feed/perform for tourists. I mean, how guilty will we feel if we read in the papers that the children of Rajasthan are suddenly being deprived of pornographic puppetry?