Day 10: Visiting Places

One last word must be said about this miserable hotel we've been staying at for the past four days. In a city, a country, a continent, so hot you would want the shower to work well, especially shower from a $40 hotel in one of the poorest places in the world. So imagine a shower that has trickling hot water that is at best lukewarm, and a shower head that doesn't release any water because the diverter doesn't work, what will you do? The hotel is managed by two non-smiling people, probably a couple because you never can find a woman in public without the company of man, at least not here in the conservative North. So they're probably married couple. She's the typical bossy lady in a marriage and if smiles have a scale she has a negative score. Here are a list of complaints: Wrong food brought in to us Cold hard-boiled eggs already peeled by fingers of unknown hygenity ("cold" boiled egg is a problem in a country of constantly questionable sanitary standards) After 11 PM everyone goes to sleep! What sort of hotel does that? All the food is yucky at best They won't clean the room without being asked to (and no apologies) So we are hoping to change hotels. Today we also went looking for apartments, which was our solution to ridding ourselves of dependency on hotels. We visited three places, and each is a character: The Castle: this is a pink thing of a house behind walls and a gate. The "madam" inside was, you guessed it, not smiling, and didn't look happy to see us. Her house was some disney land model of a castle for color-challenged designers. So tacky, like many things here. These wealthy people have no taste. Anyway, she didn't want to rent to us because, according to her, there's no AC. Jennifer said that she had been denied many times in the past because she was a single, white woman who would corrupt some helpless young man somewhere. Again, think conservative tranditional mindset. The illegal immigrant hideout: yes, this dark, sterile (except maybe the mosquitos) apartment has lots of beds! Who is sleeping in all of them? The AC is turned on by some huge circuit box with colorful buttons. And there was, I think, a pair or two of socks? On the kitchen counter? Is someone still here? We didn't say anything, but we were obviously dismayed. Well, "obviously" only to ourselves because when we got downstairs we were invited to the manager's office. Are we going to sign a lease? Hah! The broker who had brought us to these places went back to his office again and decided to show us one more place, right next to his office. Now this is a building next to another building being built. Before describing the "flat" that we were going to be shown, I would like to describe what I saw from the buidling being built. It's all brick. Good. It's being built by nearly shirtless, malnourished, gaunt, and very dark men; that's normal. But are they going to survive? The whole construction site is propped up by eight thin pieces of wood, none of which is nailed to anything. You just see layers off brick on top of wooden planks that rest on these timbers nearly as gaunt as the arms of the poor workers'. And, and, and, there was a woman working. For a society that hides its women in lots of clothes, it's amazing that they would still be doing men's job too. And this one was carrying six large pieces of brick on her head from one side of the street to another, sort of like what you see African women do in pictures, but instead of fruits and veg, she's got heavy bricks on her head. It was really disheartening to see all this. And all this in the merciless sun. Anyway, we climbed up three, dusty stairs of the finished building (just not finished cleaning). It was actually nice, roomy, both Western and Asian toilets, lots of space, even a place for a puja (Hindu prayer), The only catch is that it doesn't have AC and not furnished and very expensive (well, we mean $200, but that's a lot for India, that's more than a lot of people in this city make in a year). So the bargaining game is happening now as we rejected the offer and let our friends do the bargaining for us. There is so much going on around here and I just don't have all the time I want to evaluate, to sort the images into some sane, structured paragraphs in order to understand.

cycling with steel mystery pots roadside mommy