The busy highway
While I’ve not been tempted to explore along the really busy
main road around the hotel, and we’re too far out of Malda to explore the town
itself I have been enjoying India within the hotel:
Food continues to be very good. The breads (roti, chapatti, parathas) are
tastier and less sweet than in Bangladesh – and there are poppadums! I'm still hanging out for decent coffee, which
I hope will happen in Kathmandu.
Two favourite deserts are gulub jaman (balls of milk curd
which are deep fried then soaked in sugar water) and kulfi (milk curd flavoured
with cardamom and other spices which is churned and frozen). We have eaten our hotel out of kulfi (and
beer – they don’t get many Australians here) – a sure sign it’s time to move
on.
Gulub jaman
I have seen a new-to-me innovation in lavatories: the
flushable squat toilet. [I recently
‘worked out’ squat toilets: after years of approaching them in a similar manner
to western lavatories and facing out when using, which often resulted in
significant splashing, I started thinking about how a man would pee. I now face the wall behind the toilet (generally
a particularly unattractive view) and have zero splash!] There’s also no queuing for the loo (for me)
when there’s a 30:1 male:female ratio at the meeting.
The flushable squat lavatory
Internet in the hotel is unusual: wifi is available in the
lobby for Rs 100 (about $2)/hour – but that just gets the modem turned on
(often for longer than an hour, if reception forgets about it). So one person buys an hour’s internet and
everyone else in proximity uses it! We
have appreciated the desire of some of our fellow guests from Japan to connect
online frequently.
There is a helipad, of sorts, at the hotel – apparently for
VIP guests (sadly we didn’t see any).
It’s a good thing there was a sign telling us it was a helipad – it
would have looked remarkably like a vacant patch of land with goats grazing it
if they’d not.
Hotel helipad
Our meeting has been far more animated (and thus longer)
than in Bangladesh: everyone has an opinion and insists on sharing it! Our meeting made the front page of the local
newspaper...above the fold
The meeting in the paper: I'm in red on the right
Our days are long and run to an Indian timetable: we
breakfast about 8am (westerners queue at the door from 0800 sharp...everyone
else drifts in half an hour later); the meeting starts around 9am and runs to
about 11 when there’s a short break.
Lunch is around 2pm, with another break around 4.30pm. The meeting continues to around 6.30-7pm and
dinner is served at about 9.30 (again, westerners are ready and queuing some time
before this). It’s taken a while to get
used to the long breaks between main meals, and the shorter time between dinner
and breakfast.
The Indian cricket team has just wrapped up a tour of
England and Wales, and the US tennis open has just ended, so I’ve been watching
a bit of TV when I can. The ads are mostly
overacted, Bollywood style (very fun to watch!) and are selling home products
(vegetable purifiers, light bulbs, water heaters) and personal electronics
(phones, tablets), but there’s one particularly odd one which is on high
rotation as I'm watching the T20 between India and England: it starts with a
cat lying stretched out on the floor, dozing.
A man puts his mobile in between the cat’s hind legs and after a second
the phone beeps and vibrates, the cat looks very surprised, the man removes his
phone and we can see it has a PAyTM app which has been recharged. The idea of a virtual ATM on your mobile is
fantastic but I'm not sure what the cat has to do with recharging it? My Indian colleagues can’t explain the ad to
me – but they seem surprised that I'm perplexed by it!
There have been some highlights from the recent kabaddi
season on TV: kabaddi is a traditional Indian game with elements in common with
rugby, wrestling and indoor soccer. It’s
very interesting to watch but incredibly complex (to me) and I still don’t
understand the rules. It’s no wonder the
subcontinent took cricket to heart – it’s such a simple game in comparison!
I’ve also found the (mainly Hindi) cooking channel, which is
excellent entertainment. One program on
in the early evening is Pure Sin TV: a very strict Indian lady (who looks like
she does not enjoy sin very much) in slinky western evening dress cooks deserts
on a candlelit set with soft Indian music in the background. She has tips for putting a “crazy-twist” on
common desserts like gulab jaman, which mostly seem to involve adding whiskey
at various production stages. The
website advertised for recipes and more information is www.foodfood.com
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