Not Memsahib July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Airlines, Beach Resorts, Cars, Destination, Europe, Flight Schedule, Hotels, India, Lodges, London, Motel, Museum, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , 3commentsEvery time I heard the word memsahib I wanted to take an ice-pick to the user. I’d gone on the Hindu trail clutching my libertarianism to my bosom, a cosy cocoon from which I could rationalise and contain the INDIAshrieks from the inferno — not that Dante, I’m sure, ever went to Calcutta. Very right-on. Very arm’s-length. But keep your liberal sensibilities Gandhi-pure? Emerge unscathed? Forget it.
Sympathy, empathy, had long since given way to simmering hysteria, cringing shame and a seething, at times uncontrollable rage which was generalised in its target but oh so localised in its pain. It wasn’t even a consolingly righteous anger at the pulverising poverty, the callousness of caste or the stalinisation of women — more a deep-seated disgust and hatred welling up from deep down and spewing out over all humanity, most of all myself . . . Well, OK, you try and make sense of the matchstick people of Madhya Pradesh, the execrable excrement of Bombay and Dehli, the obscene opulence of Jaipur jewellers, the blinding, vivid hues of Rajasthani women’s skirts — and all of it sinking in one great ubiquitous quicksand of suffocating, strangulating bureaucracy. (more…)
Springtime for Czechoslovakia July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Czech Republic, Europe, Hotels, Insurance, Moscow, Museum, Prague, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip, Vietnam , 5commentsIrena lived in a late-Seventies block of flats on the edge of town, half a mile from the Russian barracks, part of an ugly outer-urban sprawl. After buying me lunch in a new concrete hotel called, romantically, The Interflora, she drove me back at high Skoda speed through the centre of town — choke full out, engine howling in second gear as we skidded across wet cobblestones, clipping kerbs and narrowly avoiding the numerous potholes and dug-up sections where slow attempts were being made to repair the water mains, shattered by the minus-twenty-five February temperatures. The only vehicles Irena took any notice of were the thin double trams, locked inscrutably into their own system, clanging their way up and down the narrow streets making unmistakable tram noises. Saturday afternoon shoppers shared the pavements with soldiers in iron-grey overcoats wandering about in twos and threes.
“You can tell the difference by their boots,” Irena told me before I’d had a chance to ask the question. Some of the Russian soldiers (pull-on boots, no laces) looked Mongolian and very young. (more…)
