a little bit of tourism

Several weeks ago I finally made it to one of the main tourist attractions in my city, the Bara Imambara.



The Wikipedia page will tell you that "bara" means "big", and it will also tell you:

The Bara Imambara was built in 1783, a year of a devastating famine, and one of Asaf-ud-Daula's objectives in embarking on this grandiose project was to provide employment for people in the region. According to reports, the famine continued for over a decade and the construction of the building continued for this time. It is said that ordinary people used to work in the day building up the edifice, while noblemen and other elite were called at night to break down all the structure raised, as they were incapable of doing anything else, according to a chronicle of the period. This see-saw efforts continued till the famine period was over. It was a project that preceded a Keynesian like intervention for employment generation.

Interesting.

The friends that brought me around didn't mention the economics behind its construction, but they did explain that the labyrinth on top was built to be handy in an escape from the British (Wikipedia disagrees). Probably the rumored tunnel would have been more likely escape route, though, since the labyrinth is built on top of the building and just opens onto the large rooftops and a small balcony ringing the main chamber.


The main hall. The small thing in the middle that looks like a four-poster bed is supposed to be the grave.


This is one corridor in the labyrinth. It didn't seem all that maze-like, and it wasn't a labyrinth in the sense that my dad would use, but it was still fun to wander the corridors.


This view from the top of the main building, actually makes the rooftops look more zany than they actually are. Mostly they are flat, though the decoration is indeed beautiful.

Aside from the elaborate gates ("gates" doesn't really do them justice...) there are three main buildings in the complex. The Mosque, the Bara Imambara itself, and the Bouli. Wikipedia describes a bouli as a "step well with running water", but this vastly undersells, it. It was apparently used as women's baths and is an large, half-underground hexagonal building built around a pool in the center at the bottom, which opens to the sky. In this picture if you look carefully you can see the sky and inner walls of the building reflected in the (small amount of) water in the pool. The building itself seems simple at first glance but actually accommodates half-stories and a number of surprising stairways. It's not hard to imagine having a difficult time finding your way out (especially if it were still filled with women bathing! yuk yuk.)




The interior walls. If you were looking straight into a mirror you would see exactly the same thing, except with me in the bottom window taking a picture.

A few more pictures:






The friends that took me around. Thanks, guys!


Afterward we stopped at the drive-in for Indian sodas. Also called, "water with salt and pepper and sugar and that flavor they put on everything".

You can see the rest of the album here.

Oh and one final anecdote: Apparently when the British did finally arrive/invade, everyone fled the complex except for the Raja. The soldiers asked him why he had not left like everyone else. The Raja answered that the man who puts on his shoes for him had fled as well.

everything nice

Let's talk about Indian food for a minute.

It's delicious. Seriously I have had I believe all of one single dish I didn't like the taste of. Their flatbread is delicious and comes straight from the oven or fryer no matter where you order it. Fresh yogurt is everywhere. Paneer is way better than tofu. It's easy to get vegetables since nobody eats meat, and the vegetables are cooked in, you guessed it, delicious ways. I haven't read/seen Eat, Pray, Love, and I don't intend to, but anyone who focuses solely on the praying in this country is missing out.

Alas, nothing is perfect: the climate so conducive to cumin and oregano and black pepper and whatever else makes the food so delicious also happens to be well-suited for growing chilis, which are quite often as inextricably included in the food as any other spice.

I am not against spicy food per say. I like a little bit of spice, in the right meal. What I don't like is food that makes my mouth explode with pain. Why do people like this? Are they desensitized? Masochistic? Just faking it? Copious amounts of spice on food makes as much sense to me as copious amounts of salt, or temperature-heat, for that matter. You don't see people dumping more and more salt on their meal just to see how much they can handle and brag to their friends--or pouring boiling soup down their throat just because it gives them a kick.

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In other news, my room is really hot still at 12:30am because I was trying to keep the mosquitoes out, but it's full of them anyway so I'm just going to open a window.

international pedestrian's license

The streets here in India are driving me crazy. Nobody stops, ever, and they make no effort to accomodate anyone else on the road--either behind or in front of them. To compensate for this they make incessant use of their horns, which in their cacaphony somehow manage to sound both whiny and indignant.

After two years in the Philippines I was fearless in traffic: you knew that somewhere within that jeep a driver was peering intently out, or that the motor would just go around you. In Vietnam the rule was the same--the waves of mopeds would flow smoothly past so long as you strode across deliberately and predictably.

In India this is either not the case, or the amount of traffic has gotten in my head to the point where my darty-little-squirrel instincts have taken over. Why?

The first thing of note is that every major intersection in this city is a roundabout. I have encountered a variety of roundabouts and traffic circles in my day, some simple, some confusing. The smaller ones can be nice when you're on a bike because you can cruise on through.

Unfortunately, "cruising on through" is the modus operandi here at every intersection here for every class of vehicle. Worse, because there are no lanes and it would be irrelevant if there were, and because often the round thing in the middle is little more than a glorified pole, there is little to no circularity going on in terms of vehicular motion. Right turns (which are like left turns in less confusing countries) are often made by taking the shortest distance from lane A to lane B, opposite to the "natural" flow of the circle. It's up to the driver.

Due to the fact that the sidewalks here make Philippine sidewalks look like Le Grande Promenade, the streets themselves are a mixture of not only swarms of tricycle cabs ("autos") and bicycles, a large amount of smaller cars, and the occasional bus or large utility vehicle, but also pedestrians. Generally the slower vehicles keep left, but especially if you're a motorcycle you should really feel free to pass whereever, because it's fine really.

The basic attitude of drivers is: "if I see a potential problem, I will honk at it and keep going." And keep going they do, as long as there is a few inches of room on either side. Or not--I've been run over twice already, each time by the third wheel of jitney trying to get around me.

the honeymoon

There's a point on the bus ride home when, standing in the aisle as the ticket checker pries past you, praying you can hold it in on either end just a few more minutes, sinuses mauling your temples, knotted gut knifing itself, sweating as profusely as always, that you think: "well, the honeymoon is over".

And you dream of places perhaps equally muggy but far less offensive to your immune system and with far more accessible friends and where you have your own kitchen and unlimited internet and a refridgerator.

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But a few nights later, sitting in the relative cool of your rooftop, digestive systems no longer on red alert, the nightly call to prayer of the mosque across the street echoing through the slow german electronica of your headphones, simple sentences echoing through your head from your impromptu hindi lesson earlier that afternoon, you figure you can probably handle another bus ride.

random fact for the day

My bathroom window opens not, as I had originally assumed, on the great outdoors but instead on a hallway. This morning while standing there in my underwear I made awkward eye contact with one of my taller neighbors who was walking by--the window is roughly at the level of the infamous fence in Home Improvement. Maybe I'll get some advice on my latest amusing familial debacle next time I'm in the shower.

weather or not

Yearly weather averages for places I've lived (you can only compare 3 at a time--Indiana is similar to DC but a bit cooler). Take a minute to play around on the site and figure out what is being shown, it's interesting.

india

I am in India this summer, which so far hasn't been far off my expectations: the weather is hot, the food is good (except for dessert... hold the syrup please), and in general it manages to conform almost laughably well with my western conception of the orient. It does this most gratuitously via your nose. Walking through the market or just down the street, each inhalation is a surprise: spices, gasoline, dust, incense, urine.

Thursday evening we went on a long quest to find a black market fuel canister for a stove. The term black market is a bit misleading--there were no furtive instructions or secret back rooms. The gas market here is highly regulated and in order to get fuel you have to get on a long waiting list at the official gas store. In the meantime you can buy a smaller tank and get some guy at the the stove repair shop to fill yours from a larger one. If you don't know exactly where to look, however, you may spend hours wandering through congested market streets and down narrow alleyways, asking people along the way for directions and learning, again and again, that it's about ten minutes away.

We found it, in the end, and rode a bicycle rickshaw back home.

Random thoughts:

• I'm not at all outlandishly sized here, which is great when riding motorcycle cabs. It's probably also part of the reason I'm much less of a big deal just walking around, despite the fact that I haven't seen another white person since I got here other than they guy I'm working with.
• Mustaches.