Ok, first of all, India is no Nepal, it's a totally different beast altogether. Not only have we lost our ability to share shards of conversation with locals (there's like 20,000 different languages here and apparently you have to be able to read a person's dialect from their face to avoid insulting them) but we've lost our hold on what's culturally acceptable and expected. Nonetheless, we're having a great time our here and enjoying some pretty crazy adventures. After ten hours of travel from Pokhara to Gorakhpur, we hopped on a 30+ hour train to Bombay (only losers call it Mumbai) in a sleeper car. We had heard volumes of terrifying stories about the sleepers, from druggings and theft to crippled beggars crawling into bed with foreigners, but the whole thing was actually really easy and comfortable except for the duration.
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| Max Getting The Old Ear Cleaning Scam |
One problem we faced was being shaken awake by an adjacent passenger at 4:30 in the morning. "Bombay, Bombay, ten minutes!" he told us. Now, we thought we'd be arriving at 9AM or so and would be able to easily find a hotel room in the bright Indian sun, but alas, it was not to be. After a scamtastic taxi ride to the tourist district, Kolaba, we wandered through the wide, Parisian-esque streets (it's been very strange to find ourselves in a city that is so modern and distinctly European, we even have enjoyed Indian McDonalds a few times). Fortunately we found some Westerners huddled together on the street in front of the Taj Hotel (where Obama stayed last month and the site of the terrorist attacks of 2008) next to the Gateway of India who allowed us to rest our weary bodies near them. As we have learned during our months of travel, friends are plentiful even in unfamiliar places and so after starting the day alone, we ended our evening on a rooftop restaurant with 14 other people from Israel, Germany, South Africa, England, Singapore, France and the US. Just an awesome first day in Bombay.
And the fun only continued the next day. Joined by some of our friends from the hostel we hopped in a van at 8 in the morning to travel to a Bollywood set and work as extras for the forthcoming film "Ready" (there's actually a wikipedia article about this movie). Dressed in fashionable wardrobe, the Masala Ballas mulled around a giant set (apparently a wedding in Iran??) until they were needed. The scene was a big showdown between the good guys and the bad dudes which involved a lot of stage punches for the actors and repeated directions to looked "shocked" for the extras. We were involved in so many scenes and so prominently displayed (we took our job much more seriously than the other scrubs they pulled off the street) that one of the directors told us to "hide" ourselves in the background because we had been "established" in several locations within a few seconds. Eli even received kudos from multiple directors and there are whispers of a multi-movie deal in the works with Indian star Salaam Khan.
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| The Big Fight Scene in "Ready" the Next Big Hit (Don't Worry, We Were Much Better Than These Sour Faced Extras) [Not shown: the fork that becomes lodged in one of the actor's rears in this scene's culmination] |
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| Our Bollywood Debut! |
Tomorrow we leave for Goa, the region renowned for its miles of unbroken beaches. It's very strange to think that we were in the Himalayas less than two weeks ago and tomorrow we will be enjoying the hot hot sun in Goa. Yes, we have seen the weather reports from Chicago: we'll drink something tropical out of a coconut for all of you.
