| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 07 February 2005 |
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So Evelyn went over to talk to them and we
ended up talking to them for quite a while. They are two teachers from the
University of Maine here on an NEA grant to study Indian dance. Their names
are Karen and Richard. We swapped stories and advice, getting the better of
the deal since they were already well-experienced with India, having been
here three weeks already (with another month to go). They made suggestions
on everything from what to do in Agra and Jaipur to which train to take to
Jaipur to how to eat Indian food using only the bread as an eating
implement. They are the second couple to recommend the Sunrise Hotel in
Agra and they actually had a telephone number for it.
They also had a better idea of what prices should be and we discovered
we had been overpaying for some services and items. We will have to be more
careful next time.
They also had some interest in seeing out new edition of the Lonely
Planet guide. Well, they were a big help to us.
Evelyn had finally conquered her jet lag the night before, but then she
had a Pepsi and tea with dinner and was up until 3 AM. Listening to flying
insects landing near her head in the bed didn't help her relax either. Mark
also had trouble sleeping.
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This is essentially a travel day. There is not much
left to do in Khajurao. We have arranged for a taxi at 3 PM. We had
breakfast at about 8:30 AM. (Given how late we got to sleep last night, it
would have been nice to sleep late, but we really had only the morning to do
anything interesting.) Mark had run out of the exotic breakfasts and had
fried eggs and toast. Since their veggie cutlet was not very good, he felt
he had made a better choice this morning.
After breakfast we took a cycle-rickshaw to the center of town for Rs5.
(Gradually we are discovering what the prices of things *should* be.) Mark
still wanted to get some Indian music cassettes for the room at night.
There was a music store on the main drag, but when we walked down there, it
was closed. The guy who was following us two nights before saw us and asked
what we were looking for. With some effort we conveyed that we wanted music
cassettes. As we walked down the street various shop owners tried to get us
into their stores. Mark would ask, Do you have music cassettes? Oh,
yes! But when he came in, they did not have them. They would tell him,
Oh, music cassette. Probably not find in town. However, the one boy kept
saying, Come, I will show you where there are music cassette. Then you
come to my shop. Just to look. We followed him and by gosh he found us a
shop front with cassettes for Rs25 a cassette. Mark bought two and thought
he was a fool not to have bought more. He had brought only two music
cassettes from home and we are getting sick of them.
So we did go to the young man's store.
We have many fine things.
Okay, I will look, Mark said.
We really did not see anything we wanted.
You promised to buy.
No, we only promised to come and look.
But many people come and look.
Good, then with so many fine things you will be a rich man.
He realized he had talked himself into a corner. Mark and he bantered
for about ten minutes. Thinking back, Mark feels guilty he did not do
something for him, as he did help Mark. Mark did all he promised, but feels
he should have done more.
Then we went back into the Western Group at the cost of one-and-a-half
cents each. We sat in the shade and wrote our logs. Yeats wrote about the
bee-loud glade, and while this wasn't quite the mosquito-loud glade,
there were definitely mosquitos and other bugs here. Still, there was a
breeze and shade to keep us cool (today was sunny, unlike yesterday's
welcome overcast morning). Occasionally some people would come and sit near
us. A group of young women in saris sat down. One of them kept looking at
us. Namascar, Mark said, looking up from his log. She giggled and said,
Namaste.
Well, it started to get late so we left. We hired a cycle-rickshaw
back to our hotel, checked out, and wrote in the lobby. (In retrospect, we
realized we should have asked if we could extend our check-out time to 3 PM.
It wasn't as if it was really crowded.) We paid our bill and the manager
short-changed Mark by 40 paise. Mark pointed out it was short and the
manager said, In India 40 paise is nothing. (A pais is one-hundredth of a
rupee.) At Evelyn's suggestion, Mark put down 60 pais and Rs7 more and
said, Could I have a Pepsi? A Pepsi is Rs8. The manager was not happy.
However, one of the bellhops whom Mark had joked with a few times saw the
transaction and had a grin three feet wide. One does not often best his
manager, apparently, and Mark had made his day. He personally brought Mark
the Pepsi, still grinning at him.
A little while later Mark saw the manager ransacking the front desk.
He came over to Mark and asked if he'd taken his calculator. No, Mark
hadn't touched it. A few minutes later he came back to us and asked Mark to
check again. Mark told him he had his own calculator, showing him the
palmtop. We don't know if the calculator was really misplaced, or if the
manager wanted to tell his staff that the American who had bested him was a
thief, or if someone else took it. But when the taxi came, the bellhop came
out to watch us go. Mark raised his right hand to his forehead.
Namascar, he said. Namaste, the bellhop returned.
We got to the airport at least ninety minutes before our flight. Mark
looked quickly at the stores; then Evelyn took a look. Evelyn got some
postcards of the explicit temple art. She then asked Mark if he thought she
could mail these postcards in the United States, or would it be sending
pornography through the mails? Could she get away with putting the
postcards up at work? These are question about boundary conditions of
arbitrary and capricious rules. Should a film get a PG rating if it shows a
woman's breast? Would it be a sin, Father, if I was eating a ham sandwich
and crossed the International Date Line and it was now Friday? Is staring
at a woman for fifteen seconds sexual harassment? Well, Mark thinks the
answer to every question like this is, It depends and, Arbitrary and
capricious rules can only be enforced arbitrarily and capriciously. That
makes these questions very dull. They are like, What if I flipped a dime;
would it come up heads or tails?
Okay, so here we were, all psyched up for what airport security would
be like this third go-round. Surprise, surprise. It was polite, friendly,
even a little laid-back. None of the empty your pockets routine. They
examined the contents of Mark's suitcase's main compartment, and they passed
him through. We don't think that security at the other airports was out of
line, but we just got stung by the rule that four or six batteries on board
are okay but more constitute a threat and the insistence that the batteries
be taken out of Mark's palmtop. There is a battery backup in the internals
of the palmtop, but you never want to depend on that for more than a few
minutes at a time. And the palmtop has been fairly if not extremely useful
on the trip. All the e-mail suggestions people have sent us for the trip
are in it and easy to index on a given subject. It does currency
calculations. It has an alarm. We have people type in their phone numbers
if we want to contact them when we get back. Mark even wants to start using
it to make notes on the sights we visit, since they are forced to be
legible. Mark worries about Thing. His palmtop is Thing because it is
small and very useful, like Thing in the Addams Family.
Anyway, we got through security to the waiting room and they had
entertainment. There was a dog--clearly already a mother--who was
alternately sleeping and rolling on her back to be patted and scratched.
Actually, rolling on the back is a sign of submission from pack days. When
humans pat and scratch a dog who has rolled over, they are unwittingly
repeating a very old ritual of wolves where one wolf submits to another and
the second wolf makes physical signs of acceptance. Like a hard pinch on a
cheek, it may not even feel very good to the recipient, but the affection it
symbolizes may be psychologically gratifying. In any case, this dog was
kow-towing to everybody in sight and a bunch of people were signaling back
that they accepted her. Mark doesn't know why this is, but some semi-feral
female dogs seem to have very pronounced nipples.
Well, the flight was okay, though the backs of the seats seemed a
little loose. The high point was probably seeing the Taj Mahal from the
air. We will see it closer up soon.
We had been warned that the touts make life miserable in Agra, but the
actual airport was not nearly as bad as Varanasi's airpost for being dragged
down and eaten by touts. The Sunrise Hotel was recommended by both Max and
Staci and by Richard and Karen. It is a real coincidence that both have
stayed at the Sunrise, so Evelyn called there. Amazingly, the call got
through--this was the only time that calling from a coin phone worked in
India. They said they would send a taxi for Rs200. Evelyn said not to and
we took our own taxi for Rs50. That was something of a mistake as it turned
out, but we wouldn't realize that right away.
Evelyn wanted to ask at the Government of India Tourist Office window
about tours but someone who was wearing what appeared to be a Goverment of
India badge said they pick up at all the hotels every morning. This sounded
odd, but Evelyn decided we still had our original plan--go to the Tourist
Office in the morning. (Later, she realized that the badge was merely a
badge allowing this person to be in the airport.)
We paid in advance and found the appropriate taxi. Mark had to push by
someone who stopped him to find out if he was Mr. Sakajima. Mark realizes
he looks like a foreigner here, he didn't think even in India did he look
like a Sakajima.
We threw our stuff in the taxi and left the airport. As soon as we
were out of the airport, the taxi stopped and the driver said he had to pick
up his boss. This did not sound good. We had been hearing stories that in
Agra taxi drivers actually kidnap passengers once they are in the taxi and
take them to shops rather than the requested destination.
No, this was not a kidnapping, but the boss was coming to give us a
sales pitch for hiring a private car. Only Rs5 more than the tourist agency
tour and we have the car all day. He didn't mention that the tourist agency
tour had a guide and his tour only a driver. But we had to hurry and say
yes before all the cars were taken. And this was the same guy, who in the
airport had claimed to be from the tourist agency! Now the taxi driver was
calling him his boss and he was selling private tours in competition with
the tourist agency tours. The price he quoted for the tourist agency tour
was a lot more than what we had heard, so we said we would not decide right
then. That was when he said that we must hurry because all the cars would
be taken. We asked for his phone number so that we could call him if we
decided to take his tour. No phone number, but he would come around to the
hotel. This whole deal smelled like a three-day-old fish.
We got to the hotel, checked in, and came back downstairs, and then we
ran into Moona. We were looking forward to meeting Moona. Richard and
Karen told us about him. He is supposedly very colorful and a drinking
buddy to all comers. |
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