The last few nights I’ve been spending time catching up on writing and uploading pictures for my post about Sunday’s trip out with the guys here. To be honest there hasn’t been much more that I’ve been doing. Monday to Wednesday I finished off my Adobe Premiere “Training” – I’ll come back to the training thing in a later post – and started on Adobe After Effects today, which I’m loving!
The Internet connection I have is a flaky wireless connection shared amongst 10-12 people, which in turn is connected to a slow and flaky broadband connection. This makes it hard work to update the blog as inevitably the connection drops whilst I’m trying to select and upload photos and so I have to start on that edit again – it’s also why I post a blog and then continue to edit it. At least I’m now editing in a word document, just adding to it as I go along, and then copy & paste from there into the blog editing pages. I haven’t been putting the pictures into the base document, perhaps I should and then I’d have a complete offline version I could save for posterity?
Yesterday though instead of taking the 5 O’clock taxi back to TCH (The Country House), I joined Rick on a ride to one of the hotels in the town/city of Dehradun that Koenig use to put up students. You can also elect to “upgrade” your accommodation to some of these hotels - the idea was to do a spot of “needs” shopping and then make our way back to TCH. The ride from the Koenig training centre, which is out on the edge of town, to the hotels in town took about half as long as the ride to TCH and it got much much busier and of course noisier. We dropped our school bags in the hotel room of another Koenig student – whose name I didn’t catch – and headed to “Kumar Stores”, one of the supermarkets that carries a good selection of local & Western goods.
After a battle with an ATM to read my card – the instruction “To use this ATM please insert your card” omitted to say “ and remove it again or I won’t work!” – I withdrew the grand sum of 1000 rupees (about £15) and we headed off to find a suitable point to cross the road, if such a thing existed! An endless stream of bikes, tuk tuks, cars, trucks, buses all doing their usual criss-crossing, horn beeping, not stopping, weaving across the zebra crossing lines we stood at. The crossing though was at a three-way light “controlled” junction, which should have bought us a little time but after three light changes and no progress we spotted a slight lull and dashed for the middle of the road where we stood waiting for another slight lull and weaved our way across the stream of bikes & tuk tuks. All those years of practice ignoring crossing lights & sights and just crossing roads on your own initiative in UK towns & cities (as you’re perfectly entitled – and in my opinion should – do) certainly primed me for a successful crossing. This other guy, whose name I didn’t catch and shall call Doug for want of another name – that’s one of the features of the training here in Koenig, there’s so many different courses and people attending them, many of them starting at different times, that new people come and go – remarked that “they wouldn’t hit you anyway, they’re not allowed.” And whilst he was probably right and make no mistake riders and drivers here have immense practice at weaving past obstacles in and out of the path of other vehicles all the time, it’s constant, nonetheless I’m not taking that chance!
We wandered down broken pavements, on & off the road, stepping over holes down into the netherworld, past various shops and street food stalls, the air thick with fumes, dust & smoke from the food stalls and burning rubbish piles in equal measure until we reached the supermarket. I say supermarket, it was about the size of a small Spar/large corner shop/slightly larger than Natalka – the better Polish shop in Hereford. Despite the size there were still between 10 & 15 people working there and an assortment of customers, all Indian except for the three of us.
Rick has only been there once before but the manager welcomed him back, asking if there was anything specific he could get him, “No, no, I’m OK”.
I bought some oaty flake cereal and some UHT – for those late night snacky moments – some gum, fruit & nut chocolate, local biscuits & some roasted peanuts with local seasoning – which although in a sealed, in-date, foil pack, when I got them home they were black & mouldy looking. It might’ve been the seasoning but like I said earlier, I’m not taking that chance! I went to the checkout where one guy picked stuff out of my basket and said the item code to the guy operating the till – he knew every item code without looking at the sticker, which was quite impressive – then when it was all totalled up, I was given a sales invoice to take to another till at the other side of the shop to pay. A bit weird! 590 rupees of which 300 was the oaty cereal, so cheap. The gum – 6 pieces of Orbit – was a mere 5 rupees (7p).
Across the street I bought a couple of apples from a fruit stall, Red Delicious from the US, which were 10 times nicer than the same variety in the UK – we always get such crap fruit now in our supermarkets – mind you these apples weren’t cheap by Indian standards, 70 ruppees for the two (50p each). Just round the corner I spotted some yummy looking cakes in a cake shop and hopped in. There being a bit of a queue, Rick called in “Alan. Alan. Alan” of course I wasn’t responding to my new name which turned Rick into a ground squirrel! I twigged and looked round. “Go next door there’s no queues”. I didn’t, I liked the look of the Rum Balls, the last of which is sitting in my fridge, but only until I’ve published this!
Walking back through town I opened my packet of biscuits, plain with a slight edge of savoury. We passed a kid, no more than ten years old, who motioned at me putting his hand to his mouth repeatedly. I grabbed a handful of the biscuits and filling his cupped hands he smiled. This makes me very uncomfortable and whilst the authorities are trying to clamp down on begging and insist people don’t give to beggars as they’re usually a self-propagating racquet, a request for food is different. I realise that this is life, that there’s almost nothing I can do to change it, beyond a token gesture from one person to another. It was like that for centuries before I got here and will be like it after I leave. I don’t care if this is a stereotypical reaction, if it’s something countless people before me have experienced and written far more eloquently & coherently than I am here, it really is not nice to encounter.
Back at the hotel, to pick up our bags and then we hailed a “private tuk tuk”. There’s two kinds of tuk tuks – well three if you count the tuk tuk trucks – the blue ones, which are the bigger ones with two rows of seats and a front seat so will take seven “comfortably” but at a squeeze will take twelve! They go up & down the roads on a sort of fixed route and stop to pick up & drop off and are like a small highly frequent and very cheap bus service. Then there’s the smaller black and yellow tuk tuks with one rear seat for two big Westerners, or a family of four to five Indians, with “open” climb-in sides. They’re private in the sense that like mini-cabs they’ll take you where you want to go, but are more expensive – we negotiated 150 rupees instead of the 20-30 or so we’d have paid on the regular tuk tuks. Being so low down, close to the road and fairly open to the passing traffic – they’re only slow, 1 cylinder small engine diesels, which is why they go tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk – was thrilling, noisy and fumey as trucks, buses and bikes edged past us, struggling up the hill. In the 2 miles or so from town up to TCH the temperature had dropped from a sweaty “why on earth had I taken my coat with me today, oh yeah a forecast of rain that’s why” to a cooler “glad I brought this coat with me”.
Later, after dinner, I watched an old BBC programme on an Australian channel I get about some young people from the UK going to find out 1.) where their high street fashion clothes are made and 2.) where some of our supermarket food comes from. It was called “Blood, Sweat and..” 1.) “T-Shirts” 2.) “Takeaways” . They had to work alongside the workers for a few days, getting paid what they get and trying to buy stuff in the local shops with what they got paid. They visited India for the clothes and Thailand for prawns, chickens and tuna. They’re now mostly FairTrade “champions” and one of the girls from the clothing trip then became a BBC reporter on those issues and now helps run several charities promoting fair trade and “rescuing” kids from child labour. It was a very powerful couple of documentaries and having experienced some of India I can understand much of what they saw and I suspect it’s going to change my attitude as well.
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