Dog versus Hog

a lot of times at night, you can hear dogs or pigs squealing and screaming as they're either run over by a motorbike, kicked, or in some kind of brawl with another animal.

so, here's a bunch of little things i keep forgetting to write about:

villages: see last entry about the village wedding
kids: see last entry about camel trek & village wedding

in India, you see lots of things that you've seen before, but in combinations that you have never seen:
-temples with solar panels
-old men in hot pink turbans riding motorcycles
-dignified old women in extravagant saris & jewelery wearing a baseball cap
-old men with awesome curly old mustaches with their hair died bright orange from henna.
-goats and cows dodging motorcycles and tuk-tuks
-gorgeous people with totally fudged up, un-salvagable teeth

white bulls are maybe the most amazing, powerful, divine, intimidating looking creatures i've seen before.

every door in India is locked by this funny big sliding metal thing with a big padlock in it. there are no doorknobs.

there are the most adorable hairy little goats running around everywhere. they are scared of everything.

almost every car horn on a bus or truck plays some hilarious little melody. the buses and trucks and rickshaws are always covered in stickers, tassels, weird paintings, big rainbow letters, etc... it's a weird entrepreneurial thing, like the vehicle owners are competing to have the most festive vehicle to draw more attention and more business.

tuk tuk trucks are the craziest most adorable little round pick-up truck things. it's like a tuk-tuk with a truck bed in the back.

there's these huge monkeys with gray/white fur and black faces that steal stuff from stores and jump around the shop roofs, looking for trouble.

the kids in this cyber-cafe are watching some movie called Ravan Raaj, holy cow, if any of you out there have the means to rent it or something, please do, it looks totally amazing.

the milk here is totally unprocessed, visibly full of creamy fat, because it is always just delivered by some farmer nearby, possibly extruded from a divine teat only hours earlier.

men dress SOOO much better in India. lots of fitted dress shirts, old-fashioned parts in their hair, tight-fitting undershirts, awesome striped polo shirts, fitted slacks with bell-bottoms, mustaches. there is a weird horrible AWFUL SHITTY style that some men have of weird long frosted shaggy hair, crappy polo shirts with screen printing on them, like 1995's Claire's 13-year-old girl jeans with awful embroidered designs and fake wear in the knees & buttocks. oh gawd. make-a-me sick.

men hold each other hands and put their arms around each other frequently. it's weird but kind of adorable. they're all best pals and have no insecurity about such things.

the traditional formal style for Indian men is also really good. there's like this reaaaally long shirt thing with a short collar that sticks up and buttons in the front with long sleeves, and these fitted linen pants that bunch up at the bottom. it's a really good look. i think, though, that when MOST white people try to pull this off, they just look like shitty hippies. i think it's called a Punjabi shirt or something. usually it's an off-white color, but sometimes it's bright red or bright orange or some other insane fantastic color.

all of the clothes in India fit my bod very well. it's so easy to shop, in that sense.

actually, i have to apologize to everyone i did not find a gift for, because, in another sense, shopping here is a total horrendous, nerve-wracking nightmare, and i've been avoiding it as much as possible. you walk down these big flea-market streets and everyone yells things at you, everyone is like the most pushy, shitty, obnoxious salesman you could ever imagine, and they all want you to come to their shop. if you do stop at someone's shop, they will almost never let you leave without buying something, and they will try so hard that it is just like painful and totally embarrassing for everyone. sometimes there are really nice merchants though, who don't give a hoot and will just let you shop. i really hate shopping here.

one night, me and Laurel did find an awesome little tiny grocery/convenience store hybrid thing, and it was such an incredible relief from the way shopping usually is. we just wandered around in there for like an hour looking at all the weird stuff. it was very cool inside.

tourists, in huge groups, are usually way more fun to watch than the attraction that they everyone is stopping to see.