January 14 – 8:40AM – Baroda.

Today is our first complete day to see sights in India. After crazy amounts of travel and crazy amounts of tiredness, I slept like a rock for about 11 hours in a real bed. Kevin is showering up now and I am sitting on the curb in front of our hotel, the Ambassador Hotel, in the hazy morning sun enjoying the sunlight casting a golden amber color on the streets. It seems to be especially smoky and hazy in the mornings because the poorer people in town burn small sticks to cook their breakfast and warm there morning chai. It is common to see small piles of burning garbage in front of homes and shops. All of this, the golden light, the honking motorcycle horns whizzing by, the cows strolling down the streets, is an unreal experience for me, but real life for those who live here.


As I have observed many times in our yet brief time here, India is dirty. The streets and sidewalks all have a layer of dirt and dust covering them. There is smoke in the air, garbage is mostly everywhere and everything looks old. And even though you see slums with makeshift tents and homemade housing, the majority of neighborhoods aren’t slummy or ghetto, they just look really lived-in, well used. It’s authentic life going on, people making do with what is available.

Last night, despite being so tired, we went to grab some food. Kevin was literally falling asleep at the table. We got some vegetable shish kebabs, was it tandori?, don’t remember, and some vegetable curry and naan bread. I wish I could say it was fantastic, but it was just average, everything seemed to have that “just spicy” flavor that is common is some of the not-so-great Indian restaurants in the states. Hopefully that hotness doesn’t catch up with me later in other forms. I'm sure the food will get better as we do a little more research and investigation into where the good places to eat in the towns are.

As I am sitting here on the curb a new sound has just been added to the layers of Indian morning noises. Bells and drums have broken out a few buildings down the street. It is rhythmic and repetitive, possibly religious sounding from the cadence, for meditation possibly? I wonder what it is.

Anyways, after dinner last night we strolled around town and went through a very crowded street market. Such markets are very common in all of the countries I have traveled in besides the US. This was like a really huge, blocks-long, crowded farmers market, but I guess they go on all day every day. Thousands of people were packed onto the narrow streets shopping for brightly colored and beautiful fruits and vegetables from vendors lining the street. Men repetitively chanted what goods they had for sale, scooters drove by, honking all the way down the way-too-crowded-to-be-driving-a-scooter-down streets, cows walked briskly through the mobs not moving for people, running you over or pushing you into a pile of vegetables if you didn’t move, it’s pretty intense. One quick observation: cars have the right of way over pedestrians here in India. If you don’t move, well, I don’t know what happens because I have been close to getting run over with no sign from the driver that they were going to stop. Parked cars pull directly into your path of travel. Crossing the street is an adventure and it is fully one-hundred percent up to you not to get hit. With the intense amount of traffic (tuk tuks, motorcycles, etc.) you always have to be on guard, sort of like a small scared animal always with their head on a swivel so that you don’t meet a quick and unexpected demise. In India, size determines who has the right of way, the smaller traveler, such as people or motorcycles, are expected to move for the larger automobiles. Scary.

After walking through the Baroda streets we went back to the hotel and instantly passed out.

So Baroda is a small, somewhat backwater feeling town. We came here to see the kite festival and have Kevin’s friend of a friend show us around here and hopefully it is worth it. I do have to admit that a kite festival seems pretty, mmm, nerdy or lame but I have a feeling that the common, just like everything else in India, will be very interesting to us cultural outsiders. We’ll see how it goes. The bell ringing I mentioned earlier just stopped and some soldiers walking down the street with some old looking guns just shouted, “Hello, how are you!?” to me. That’s cool. Alright, that’s it for now, I’ll update more later.