Fffzzzzt

So my hair has now reached new fuzzy heights. The humidity here is really high and I’ve reached the point where combing it, or even just trying to run my fingers through it will just poof it up even more within minutes. So for those Friends fans out there, the episode with Monica’s hair in Barbados…it’s not a patch on mine. Let’s hope it calms down before next weekend, otherwise I may not be able to fit my head in the car to drive myself home.

The weekend seemed to come and go in a flash. One major difference  to the game plan, I suppose is that fact that I am actually still in India when I should have boarded a plane back to London approximately 19 hours ago. Woohoo! I stayed! Today I went to work with Frontline to get a better idea of how it’s all put together. I cannot believe how few people actually go into making that magazine, it’s incredible! Quite an insightful day.

I have failed miserably at finding myself a rickshaw driver for the past fortnight. People advised me to find a good driver to trust at the start of the trip and then you can call them whenever you need them to pick you up and they won’t rip you off because they want your repeat custom. So the first guy that I decided was friendly, not pervy and gave an honest price gave me his number but when I phoned him to get picked up the next day, his rickshaw had hit a bus. I was totally horrified and asked him if he was okay. “Yeah yeah,” he said “But I just might be a little late.” Urhhh, no. Don’t think I should continue this beautiful relationship with a blasé bus-hitter. So I moved on.

I then found another rickshaw on my way back from the beach but on our way home he suddenly stopped and said “Do you mind if we carry on driving with the cable cut?”. Of course I asked him what did he mean the cable was cut, and he showed me that the cable leading to the left side of his bike handle was, in fact, snapped. “You mind? Perfectly safe madam.” We did actually manage to jolt a few more hundred metres before grinding to another halt.    “Taxi!”

People in the main are really, really nice and very polite. Hospitality is high up on the priority list here and I would be very surprised if other travellers felt differently. HOWEVER. There are just a couple of things that have touched a nerve and once you’ve noticed you can’t help but get irritated by it. The first of these is queuing. I will first raise my hands and confess that I am a die-hard Brit when it comes to queues and it seems nowhere in the world (including Europe) seems to match it- perhaps you can correct me here. India is no exception.

I ended up queuing for a shameful amount of (unnecessary- as later it infuriatingly turned out) time today for a train ticket and quickly learned a few rules.

1) Dive in. As you’re about to join a queue, don’t wander to the back and wonder whether this was in fact the end of the queue, the right queue or how long you may have to wait. Dive straight in. In those precious few seconds, people will fill that two-foot gap and keep pushing you further backwards.

2) Take a shawl, because the incessant breathing on your neck will become too much after 15 minutes, and the condensation build up gets sticky after an hour.

3) Get ready for the crunch. The closer you get to the ticket booth, the more of a squeeze it’s going to become, so get ready for face-in-face action where people will try and shave off a few minutes waiting by slipping in front of you.

4) Tutting and giving evils are pointless. It might work at home; we’ve all been there when we’ve given a very telling tut to someone for trying to push their way in, they usually become embarrassed and that’s the end of that. Here, if someone pushes in in the queue, point and shout at that person, rallying everyone around you to do the same thing until the whole line is doing it and the person are forced to leave the building.

This isn’t so much a rule, but I have also observed that men will quite happily stare at your breasts to while away half an hour but the minute you get to the ticket booth and he’s pushing in front of you, suddenly you’ve become totally invisible.

And this is my two pence for the day.

 

Note: This blog was actually written on Monday but the power went whenI was writing it. Thank goodness wordpress has an automatic save. Thank you thank you thank you.