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.