新年快乐

I'm really not trying to look smart/cool by using the Chinese characters for "happy new year." I just wanted to see if my Mandarin Chinese skills have completely disappeared yet. Surprisingly, I was able to remember those four characters, but I still had to double check in my Chinese textbook. (OK, so maybe I am trying to look a tiny bit smart/cool. So what?)

Happy year of the dog!

(Photo taken Saturday, Jan. 28, near the LRT Recto stop in Quiapo, Manila.)

Travel Journal: Wedding Video

Here's a brief video of the groom's procession to meet the bride. Thanks, Anu, for the video clip.

Travel Journal: One wedding, four days, five chocolate fountains

Can a girl really stand to live a lifestyle that allows her to have access to a room full of desserts every single day? The answer is yes. Especially when the dessert room also includes a chocolate fountain. Every. Single. Day.

This isn't something I dreamed up during a lull at work; it's not something out of a fairy tale; and it certainly isn't something I read about in a women's magazine. This was Simi and Amit's wedding.

The location: The Leela Palace, Bangalore. (The only five-star hotel I've ever, or probably will ever, stay in.)

Simi, as I mentioned before, was one of my roommates at NYU. Amit is now her husband. I hadn't met him until the wedding. They're both Americans, of Indian heritage. They both grew up in New Jersey, and, as if this whole story were some sort of movie, their families have known each other for years. And no, it wasn't an arranged marriage. These are two throughly "modern" people. My best memories of Simi are of the crazy boyfriends she would introduce us (the unsuspecting roommates) to, her addiction to television dramas aimed squarely at the teenage set (i.e. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Gilmore Girls), and the seemingly neverending stream of designer jeans that would rotate through her tiny, Manhattan-apartment closet.

Even a year and a half of living together in close quarters, I'm certain Simi's wedding now tops the list of best Simi memories. Four days of eating, dancing, eating, drinking, and dancing some more.

The first night, the welcome dinner, was really just an excuse to party. It's hard not to dance at an event like this. Everyone, including the grandparents, is dancing. I hobbled to the hotel room I was sharing with Anu, Judy and Mike (one of Amit's friends) at about 2 a.m., hoping to rest up for the next night's event -- the Sangeet. I had been warned before the events started that the wedding would be a non-stop party and that I should rest up while it was still possible. Little did I know how true that statement was. When I left early the first night, I couldn't help but feel that I was missing out on something because very few people were calling it quits. A handful of men and women in their 70s stayed up much later than I did.

The Sangeet, though, was really when the party started. Simi and Amit's friend performed a skit and a dance.



Besides the usual room of desserts, chocolate fountain, endless array of food, and dancing, the night included a performance by Pubjabi singer Sukhbir. Being the clueless American, I had no idea who this guy was -- his music was great, but who was he? It turns out he's huge not only in India, but apparently also in London.

I was totally rested and ready to stay up all night. But then the cops shut down the party at around 2 a.m. A government official was staying at the Leela that night and the music was annoying him.

The next day was the Mehendi for the women -- the henna ceremony. It was a nice low key event after another night of over-drinking and over-eating. We sat and got our hands decorated with henna. The woman who did mine finished in about 45-seconds, making me feel like she did a somewhat sloppy job. And then when I compared it to Simi's henna (below), I realized she definitely did a sloppy job. After about an hour, I started getting impatient. I couldn't do anything with the sticky concoction of drying henna and lemon juice dribbled on to make the design "stick." I didn't care anymore if the design wasn't dark enough. There was another buffet waiting outside and I wanted to eat. So I went to the bathroom and scrapped the henna off -- and jumped in line for food.



The day of the wedding ceremony, we were still all feeling a bit tired. But the upbeat theme of the day definitely snapped me out of my slightly hungover, only-had-four-hours-of-sleep fog. Amit, his family and friends, all met outside the Leela. Amit got on a white, bejeweled horse, and his family and friends danced around as the horse slowly made its way to the hotel gate where his side of the family would meet up with the bride's side of the family. Live music, clapping, dancing, and twirling, colorful clothes is enough to wake anyone up from a weeks worth of wedding events.



The bride, with her attendents, and groom met in the middle, under a canopy of jasmine and roses.



Although the actual ceremony seems like it should be the height of the wedding -- for the guests it definitely wasn't. The entire ceremony was performed in Sanskrit. Even the bride and groom couldn't understand what was being said, though I'm sure they had been briefed on what exactly they were promising each other. We later got a translation, which included some memorable lines, including the promise that "even in dreams, (the bride) will never think of any other image except (the groom)" and that "(the groom) shall keep (himself) away from bad company and gamblers."

About two minutes into the ceremony, a waiter starting tip-toeing up and down the aisles of guests. He approached Judy, Anu and I and whispered that "high tea" was served. Um, the wedding just started, I thought. Why would we leave? This is what all those events have been leading up to? But after about 15 minutes of squirming in our seats while listening to Sanskrit vows, I told Judy and Anu that I was getting hungry. They were too, so we eased out of our seats and bolted toward the buffet. We thought we were being rude, just up and leaving in the middle of the ceremony. What we didn't realize was that at least half of the wedding guests had already left and were hanging out at the buffet. Someone later told us that it's pretty common for guests to leave during the ceremony at an Indian wedding.

Lucky for us, there was another chocolate fountain waiting for us -- ready for us to dip pineapple, strawberries, cookies and marshmellows into its lucious stream of sweetness.

Days, even weeks, after the wedding, as I was traveling through India and then Laos, the image of the chocolate fountain would pop into my head. But alas, life with a chocolate fountain could not go on forever.

*****

More photos from the wedding.

Travel Journal: The Auto Rickshaw

Judy and I discovered the auto rickshaw, otherwise known simply as the "auto," on a day of exploration in Bangalore. We utilized the auto during our entire trip -- and had varying experiences with them. Most of the time you negotiate a price before getting in the auto -- a practice that usually leaves the unsuspecting traveler spending way more than he or she should. Bangalore was the only place we visited that had metered autos, which sort of surprised me (imagine having metered tricycles in Manila). Even then, there were a couple of auto trips where the driver simply went round and round in circles to run up the meter.

Two and a half weeks of auto rides and I had definitely developed a love-hate relationship with the vehicles and their drivers. Although the auto was convenient in cities where you have to call cabs, they're also not the most pleasant way to get around. When you step out of an auto, you usually feel like a layer of dirt has permanently embedded itself on your body.

Coup fatigue

I walked into work Friday afternoon, still not quite back in my work groove after a month of travel. I plopped down at a desk next to a desk editor. After a bit of small talk about my trip, I asked her what the big news has been lately.

"This whole coup thing," she said.

Uh. What coup thing? Since I got back Tuesday night, I had been doing my best to catch up on the tangle of political news I had missed while riding trains and buses in India. I had already been brought up to speed on a story about four soldiers involved in the 2003 Oakwood mutiny who had escaped from Fort Bonifacio. But I hadn't heard anything about a coup.

"Oh, you know, there's another rumor about another coup. It'll either happen tonight or tomorrow," she said, seeming a bit bored by the whole situation.

"The escaped soldiers? They're planning a coup?"

"Yeah, something like that. But I don't think they can do it. They're only lieutenants. You really have to have a colonel on your side to accomplish a coup," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I must have look dumbfounded at that point because she continued explaining her reasoning.

"Well, four lieutenants only have, what, two hundred soldiers under them? If you're a colonel, you command a larger number of people. You can't pull off a coup with only 200 people."

I was more surprised that the desk editor -- who I had previously suspected was more interested in hair styles and fashion than the inner workings of the armed forces -- pronounced her analysis with such a startling lack of emotion. She didn't have to say a word, I knew she was so used to coup rumors that this bit of news might as well have been someone announcing that Manila's traffic is bad.

In a place where one group or another attempts to overthrow the president about once a month, it's no wonder people have coup fatigue. Even I find myself with the beginning symptoms of coup fatigue. This is at least the second coup rumor since I arrived in August -- and even I was not rushing to check the news this morning to see if, in fact, the four lieutenants had staged a coup.

Gnomes and dwarves

I've never heard of the Filipino superstition of looking for mounds of dirt near a potential home. The mounds, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune, are the calling cards of gnomes and dwarves. I'm sure this is something I would learn if I ever bought property in the Philippines. The article -- which is really about foreigners buying property here -- also includes an interesting side note about feng shui. Apparently you can get a good deal on property if it has bad feng shui -- but watch out, you may not be able to resell it.

Travel Journal: Mysore, India

On Christmas Eve I arrived in Bangalore with my friend Judy. We had been planning the trip together for about two months, but I had been planning it in my head for about a year -- ever since I found out one of my college roommates was getting married in India. We arrived at night and quickly (and relatively easily) made our way to the hotel that would be our home base for the next week. The five-star Leela Palace -- a hotel I would never have been able to stay at without the help of a group discount and four people crammed into a double room -- would also be the location for four days of wedding events. (Let's just say the hotel lived up to the "palace" part of its name. I'll post photos in a future post.)

We had seen nothing of Bangalore yet -- except our hotel room that had plates of brownies and bowls of fresh fruit laid out for our snacking pleasure -- but I wanted to get out of town before the wedding celebrations began. So Judy, Anu and I hired a car to drive us three hours to Mysore, a place I had been told I had to see if I was going to Bangalore.

I was lucky to have two friends with me in India. I knew I would be busy with wedding events, but I also wanted to travel, and India just seemed a little too daunting to explore alone. Judy is a former PIA fellow. Eventhough we both grew up in Nevada, living only about an hour away from each other, we didn't meet until both of us were living in China. Anu is a friend from NYU. She wrote to me about a month before I was planning to leave to tell me she was also going to be in India visiting her family. She wanted to see the wedding.

The car ride seemed particularly long, crammed into the back of a Tata, the ubiquitous car brand seen all over the country, rivaled only, it seemed, by the Ambassador. Our driver seemed to be trying to get in a head-on collision with almost every vehicle we passed. This didn't really surprise me -- enough travel in Asia and you start to wary of the crazy driving. It becomes normal. Our first stop on the highway: Cafe Coffee Day. The coffee shop seemed to appear out of nowhere on the road between Mysore and Bangalore. We were at first skeptical, hoping to go to places that we thought would be a little more "local." (By the time the trip was over, realizing it was India's version of Starbucks, we happily sipped their lattes and ate their chocolate covered espresso beans.) Instead, we found a place to sip fresh pineapple juice.

It was mid-afternoon when we reached Mysore and we went directly to the Mysore Palace, a stunning work of architecture surrounded by gardens. We were not the only ones there to appreciate it. After taking off our shoes, the three of us filed in slowly, corraled through hallways and rooms decorated in a distinctly European style with hundreds of other people. Halfway through we noticed a group of young men that went where ever we went. We would stop, they would stop. We would walk faster, they would walk faster. We finally lost them when we walked toward a separate part of the palace, and then quickly found a way out.

Our driver met us at the gate, and asked us where we wanted to go next: The market. He said it was closed, but dropped us off in a commercial district of the town. We wandered a bit and found an open air vegetable market. I, for one, was mesmerized by the colors. I didn't realize I would see many more markets like this one in two and a half weeks in India.

Back on the street I was unable to focus for very long on one thing: Motorscooters whized by, children sold armfulls of flowers, old women sat on the street selling fruit, people hurried down the sidewalk with bags of goods from the market.

Still somewhat mesmerized by the activity around me, we made our way back to the car. We started to drive back to Bangalore, but we stopped our driver in time to make a quick trip up Chamundi Hill. Monkeys wandered on the side of the road with the vendors. Cows lounged in the middle of the road.

Back at the Leela, we decided to relax. We had been warned that the wedding was going to be a non-stop four-day party. I wasn't so sure that was possible, but I took their advice and we all tried to go to sleep early. Good thing we listened. The next four days of dancing, eating, drinking -- did I already say eating? -- would test my abilitiy to get by on no sleep more than any time I've experienced since I wrote my honor's thesis my senior year in college.

Back in Manila

The plane had barely touched down on the runway at Ninoy Aquino International Airport late Tuesday afternoon when the buzzing and beeping of cell phone text messaging began. The sky was surprisingly clear and the weather not the skin-melting humidity I was bracing myself for. I walked toward immigration, passport in hand, passing both a live band and a sign welcoming visitors to the "bird flu free Philippines."

I made my way through immigration, got in a cab, and was immediately confronted with a staple of Manila life -- sitting in an idling car in the parking lot that is EDSA. When you buy a plane ticket to Manila, travel agents should just be honest when you ask how long it takes to get from your departure location to Manila. My flight from Bangkok to Manila was three hours, but there should be a disclosure stating that just because your flight is over, that doesn't mean you don't have another hour and a half travel time before you get to your destination, which could be only a mile from the airport.

Luckily I had a chatty cab driver who spoke excellent English. He informed me that the Philippines is the third most corrupt country in the world and that the country would never advance economically without an end to corruption. I tried to tell him that other countries also have plenty of corrupt politicians, but he wasn't convinced. He was exceptionally friendly. I believe he should be appointed as a designated tourist taxi driver by the Department of Tourism. I'm sure many visitors to Manila have been put off by some of the city's more questionable cab drivers.

The guards at my building welcomed me back. My apartment was still neat, just the way I left it a month ago, but I quickly pulled everything out of my suitcases to give it that rock-star-just-trashed-a-hotel-room look, minus the empty bottles of booze.

I have to admit it doesn't quite feel like home yet, but it is nice to be somewhere familiar, back in my old routines, back to the craziness at work, back to my apartment with the sounds of karaoke drifting through my window.

***

Photos and stories of my travels in Laos, India and Bangkok are on their way!