Jaipur I - My beard wins friends and influences people, sorta

Having arrived in Jaipur in the late afternoon and unable to find my hotel due to bad directions on the website, I ended up walking around and asking where the joint was.  I finally figured out what the directions had meant which led me down the engine repair alley part of town.  I was getting near when I was approached by a guy who looked a little older than I who, of course, asked "where are you from?"  US.  "I like your beard."  Uhh, thanks.  "How long it take to grow?"  Uhh, about a month. At this point, another guy who spoke better English and looked more western entered the equation and introduced himself as Ram.  He said he was a "social worker" who worked with poor kids, not rich kids, teaching them music and he was playing a show that night.  Would I like to come?  Uhh, well, uhh, maybe.  Where is it?  "Here, I'll give you my number and you call me and I tell you where it is." Uhh, ok.  I took down his number and he all-to-conveniently whipped out a tattered 4x6 photo album from his backpack of his travels and his stay in Arizona.  This was a major red flag for one D. Sloan III; The ol, hey here's proof I'm cool and not out to scam you scam.  His pal was hanging out while we had this convo and I wasn't sure what he wanted or if they had followed me into the alley or were just bisecting the block.  Ram said he was interested in chilling with an American and sharing cultures etc., but unfortunately  I wasn't buying it, not so much because I thought he was full of shit, which he probably was, but because I had been warned of many scams played on dumb tourists like myself.  I bid him adieu and went down the street to my nice little hotel where I had a room on the roof where I could watch the kids fly their kites and watch the sun set.

I got situated and headed out to the main road to find some dinner.  I happened upon a hole in the wall with one other customer, a Korean gal who was sitting by herself, who asked if I wanted to eat together.  Sure!  We ordered and got our food and as we were chatting I noticed at the table next to us was my good pal Ram sipping a lassi in a terracotta conical cup.  He joined/some would say, forced his way into our conversation and talked about his travels and once again whipped out his photo album and showed us his travels to Europe and him next to a cactus.  In one photo or a bunch of people dressed in orange garb and playing what looked like some sort of traditional India music, my Korean pal asked which was he in the photo.  He hesitated and pointed to a guy with a potbelly and explained that he had gained weight at the time which explained the potbelly.  The strange thing was that he was in a good shape and about my age and not one to have a temporary middle aged potbelly.

Ram again asked about the show that evening and I said I was going to rest my aching foot (which was true) and that I would have to pass.  Then he asked if I wanted to go with him to the Amber fort the next day on his moto and hang out and I was all, uhh, that sounds nice, but I have other plans.  He persisted and I finally said, thanks, but I'm really not interested.  I got up to leave and noticed Ram's homie who liked my beard had sat down next to him and was smiling.  I also realized I was leaving this nice Korean gal with the two dudes I didn't trust, but she got up too...and went over and sat chummily with the dude who so liked my beard.  I guess they had hung out before or something.  

New Delhi III- "This is no time for tricks; This is a hired car!"

The next day Maurice told me he had scheduled a guided tour around the city with a driver and said I could come along.  $25 for 8hrs! We met the driver outside at 10am as he was wiping down his very-mini-van with a damp rag that he washed out under a spigot in the facade of the building.  He was a short fellow dressed in a gray sweater with those shoulder button flaps that you see on military uniforms, gray pants, and black KEDS style shoes.  He chewed something that stained dark his lower teeth and gums and colored his hair with heena (henna) so that he had orangish streaks in his otherwise black hair.

We hopped in and were off as our driver, who's name I can't recall (let's call him Arif) sped through traffic like a fucking madman trying to get his laboring wife to the hospital to bare their first son, into oncoming traffic, around slow-moving buses despite oncoming immovable objects.  I leaned forward and was all, hey man, you can drive slower.  Thanks!  And he obliged and I lived to tell.  First stop on our whirlwind tour of New Delhi was the Kutb Minar with is a 72m tall tower surrounded by a bunch of ruins.  It was mighty impressive.  Even more impressive was the aborted stump of a tower across the complex that had been started by an ambitious successor of the guy who had the first one built.  the young gun, I think he was a thoughtful 13 or 14 decided to build a Minar twice as tall as his pop's with a base of the same dimensions.  Didn't really seem possible to me, but, hey, I am no mathemagician and, at 19, I dropped out of physics 101 because I was too dumb/ill equipped to score better than a 50% on the tests (and, you may find this shocking to believe, but I REALLY tried).  I decided to never try again.  JK.  Anyhow, all there was of this mega-minar was an unfinished stump about 20 ft tall.

Then we hopped back in the van and were whisked off to a "textile center" which, we found out, means a big sari and fabric and knick knack shop where pushy dudes try to sell you crap.  We figured out the deal pretty quick and were all, thanks, but no thanks and hopped back in the van.  Drivers of all sorts get commissions for bringing their fares to certain places their pals own/run and so hopefully our driver got his even though we bought nothing.  We were sorta bummed that Arif stooped to taking us to a place to sell us garbage.  We thought we were getting a BS free tour, but alas, I think those are rare.

He then took us to Hanuman's tomb which was, if I understand correctly, a prototype of sorts for the Taj Mahal, which I have zero plans to visit.  It was pretty huge and had many hectares of nice lawns n stuff.  We walked around for a while and took photos and then returned to the van and asked to be taken to a good place for lunch.  We found ourselves in yet another sari shop being led by a fancily attired waiter to a mirrored elevator, which we thought seemed quite unnecessary for such a building.  We were let out in yet another fancy restaurant with many eager waiters ready eager to seat us.  I asked for a menu and we checked it over and decided that the joint was too rich for our blood.  $6 for any entree is a lot when you can normally get it for $1.75.  So, again we left and hopped back in the van, our driver seemingly peeved at our disinterest in his get-rich slow schemes.  It's not like we're a couple of Teva+sock wearing $4000 camera toting Germans.  We wanted authenticity- again!

So off we went, instead of finding another more humble place to eat, to a Baha'i temple which was no biggie since I grew up in a town where there was a much nicer, less touristy Baha'i temple that involved less BS and chaos.  Finally, our driver pal took us to a little strip mall that was recessed in a back alley where there were several restaurants.  We found a place that, while still really expensive, was more austere and the food was fantastic.

In New Delhi there are, in several places, large cement 2 car garage-like structures that are used as garbage dumps where cows will just chill atop a mound of trash and chow down.  Just thought you should know.

Then we went to Gandhi's last place of residence, the jam-packed Red Fort.  When we came out of the fort to find our driver under the tree he said he'd be at, he was chilling with a 11 year old kid who had a little fire going in a coffee can and was printing out tourist photos from memory cards on little portable color printers.  I don't know where he got the electricity, but I think he was making a bunch of money especially for a kid his age.  We hung out for a minute warming our hands in the fire and when we left, Maurice gave the kid 10 rupees "for the fire" which I thought was interesting in how unnecessary it was;  It's ok to give middle class/working class people money, but not ok to give to beggars who are seriously destitute. I think "we" feel like we have more in common with the working folk than the beggars who we have literally nothing in common with. 10 rupees will not bridge that gap so why bother.

We also hit up Parliament which seemed empty but for the security guards with ancient machine guns who ignored the beeping metal detectors that we walked through.  The place was full of pigeons roosting high above and shitting all over the place.  Is this REALLY the head of government?  It seemed like the kind of government building I imagined to exist in Azerbaijan or Georgia, 30 years ago.  Bleak!

The next day I tagged along, yet again with Maurice in a chauffeured trip to Jaipur with a friendly driver named Raj who spoke decent English.  We saw all kinds of poverty and 3rd worldness on the 6 hour trip and ate at a little roadside shack that served decent dal and chipatti on semi clean steel dishes.  The bathroom was a field around the side and we hung out for a bit, enjoying the sunshine.  Back on the road, we finally arrived in Jaipur, driving through the old city which is in large part, painted a lightly burnt-orange which I suppose is where it gets its name, the Pink City.  Chaotic, loud, polluted, but a lot less so than New Delhi!

Put that in your cheaply-!hired SkullBong and smoke it.

New Delhi II - Hindus do Disney

Maurice and I rode the train whilst able to see the slums form the window, transferred twice, and finally got off at the stop for the temple and were only barely able to see it in the distance through the smog.  When we arrived we had to check out cameras, bags, guns, etc and then go through a metal detector that beeped like crazy yet they didn't do anything (turns out in India there are lots of metal detectors like at Parliament, all train stations, Museums, Palaces, Temples, etc. and they all sound the alarm when you walk through with all your metal and occasionally there's an uninterested looking person sitting in a folding chair next to it staring off into space.  Occasionally there's no one nearby at all.  I guess it's some kind of formality left over from a time when metal meant danger.  Apparently a plastic water bottle was fine to bring in, but the man who frisked me didn't allow me to take in a book or my steel waterbottle.

We headed first to the temple cafeteria to get some lunch which was merely OK and then set about checking out the temple in all its gilded glory.  Ashkardam is a fairly new temple with lots of ornate carvings and gardens and it is dedicated to (we found out while watching the IMAX movie about him) some mystical kid named Neelkant who left home at age10 in like 1700 something and walked the border of India being all present and people flocked to him and worshipped him, but he was all, chill brah, I'm just being chill and you don't need to get on your knees or anything.  So there's this...you know, you can just read the Wikipedia page on this biz. Anyhow, after circumambulating the insides of the temple we went over to the epcot center part of the temple where we skipped the animatronic storytelling of something relating to the Swamis or Neelkant and went straight to the IMAX part (that wasn't that IMAXy at all) and then skipped the, I shit you not, 12 minute boat ride through a celebration of the history and culture of India.  There's also a musical fountain that we did not see do anything musical.  Sounds a lot like Disneyland, no?

We got our fill of weird 2K era Hindu bizness and headed back to the metro.  Locals insisted that one of us take the empty seat but we were all, no, you guys take it, but they were very insistent and I sat down.  The sun was setting as we rode home and the nice thing about India, I found out, is that the air pollution is SO BAD that when the sun sets you can look straight at it and then it disappears well before hitting the horizon behind a billion autorickshaw's exhaust. Far fuckin' out indeed.

We decided to get some dinner upon our return and wandered down a nightmarket street that had all kinds of crazy crap and such and I got my first of many prolonged doses of deafening by moto horn blast.  We found one restaurant that was on the second floor of a building and when we got to the top of the stairs saw that there was no one in it and there were 5 eager waiters and the prices were high.  We looked at each other and left, looking for something a little more plebeian and found a place called Wah Ji Wah that was quite reasonable and tasty.  I paid $2.50 and was full. And not freaked out.

Put that in your ascetic SkullBong and smoke it

New Delhi I - Fresh Off the Airplane

I arrived in New Delhi with 2 hours of sleep as we were fed dinner and breakfast  5 hours apart.  Were were told repeatedly of the foggy conditions in Delhi and that it might affect our ability to land.  When time came for landing the flight attendant made a very nervous sounding announcement that we should be in our seats with belts buckled tightly and aware of the location of the nearest exit.  Holy shit! this is not good, I though and sweated like a pro as we landed without incident.

 I was expecting chaos at the airport exit with touts dragging me to their taxis, but only one met me at the door and I waved him off, but he followed me to the taxi stand where you get a legit driver.  He tried undercutting both estimates for the cost of my trip to my hostel in N. Delhi.  I went with the second taxi stand,  hopped in a TATA (India's equivalent of Ford, and just as shitty) cab and was on my way into the wilds of New Delhi. 

New Delhi is covered in  an unrelenting haze that limits visibility to less than 1 km, most of the time, often much less, that leaves a gray-brown dust on everything and give the city a serious post-apocalyptic, if not 3rd world feel, like Blade Runner, but during the day and without rain or as many robots.  On the main road away from the airport I saw a kid without pants chilling among the filth and cattle with his dick out and about.  Trash everywhere.  That's how you know it's the 3rd world!  No municipal trash service, or infrastructure.  I was elated to be in the midst of all the chaos and to see that lanes serve no purpose for drivers.  No traffic cops, no tickets, no rules.  It's not unusual to see 3 cars in 2 lanes of traffic with motor bikes darting in and out without apparent fear.  My cab driver had no problem driving with the the lane splitting the cab in two for no apparent reason. This all made me smile: The polar opposite of Portland that I'd been looking for. 

We arrived at my hostel which was on the second floor of a building in what I guess would be consiered a middle class neighborhood.  It was run by a former urologist who specialized in kidney stones and was blind in one eye (the explanation I didn't understand and didn't think important enough/polite to ask for clarification).  He showed me to the dorm which was a few bunk beds with a 34 yo American guy, a 27yo Austrailian guy, and an American 22 year old gal.  The Austrailian was all business and was trying to figure out his plans for getting south as quickly as possible and anyone who wanted was welcome to go with.  He was glad to talk over people especially Molly, the American.  I read somewhere that when a man talks over women that it's a sign of misogyny or at least disrespect.  Makes sense to me!   Molly and I smiled at each other as he so obviously disrespected her.  The other American turned out to be pretty boring and kept talking even though I wasn't responsive and all I wanted to do was sleep!

I was feeling kinda nervous about going out into the world that seemed so chaotic, noisy, and disheveled, and possibly unsafe, but the Doc assured me that it was a totes safe hood the stroll.  Finally the bros left for town and Molly and I headed out to find a bite to eat so I could nap on a full stomach. All the anxiety I had about eating food in India (stemming from the stories that pretty much every traveller tells about how they were puking and shitting at the same time while on a 14 hour bus ride over a mountain pass at 15,000 feet) came right up to the front of my mind.  I decided that it was really stupid to be worried about that garbage since I"d be eating food in India for a month and couldn't freak out every time I ate, and besides, it wasn't like I'd be eating 5 day old pork or room temperature dal. We found a roadside fast food joint and I ordered something with peas.  The English speaking cat who ran the place tried to make convo with me (not Molly) but there wasn't much to talk about, I guess.  A smiling, filthy little kid came up to us and asked for money with his hand out tapping me and I groaned knowing that it was best to just ignore the kid.  Finally he gave up after what seemed like a long time (long enough to melt some tourists, I suppose, but this one's made of a very special kind of ICE!) and we got our food, blazing hot, packed in plastic to go containers.  Well, if I'm not gonna get food poisoning, I might as well get plastic poisoning, I thought.  THAT I know I can handle. 

We got back to the hostel and dug in and found there was tofu in the curry which, like a spoiled American, I picked out.  Molly said she wanted to go into town tomorrow and asked if I wanted to go and I was all sure, better to have company, right, though the idea of hanging out with her for an extended period of time didn't appeal to me. I finished up and went to sleep and did my best to sleep through the afternoon and night.  Fortunately when I woke up the two bros were gone and apparently Molly had gotten a ride with some Russians to Agra so I was on my own.  I went upstairs for breakfast and found a nice Dutch guy named Maurice having breakfast with the Dr. and asked what he was doing.  He said he was going into town and the Doc suggested he go to some weird new Hindu temple.  I asked if I could go with him and he said sure.  Off we went to find the metro station that the Doc said was 1 km away, but we kept walking and walking and asking directions thinking we'd gone too far or in the wrong direction, but apparently the Doc is not much of a walker because it was about 3km to the Kohat Enclave (I like all things "Enclave") station.

We boarded the train which, at the front has a "ladies only" car so that women can ride the train and not have horrible things happen to them, in theory.  As an aside, every time I pick up an India Times I read about yet ANOTHER gang rape and brutal murder of some poor woman who was riding some bus somewhere.  I was watching cricket in my hotel room for a bit today trying to understand how the fuck that game works (nope.) and there was an AXE body spray ad with a "hot" lady teaching an ESL class to a bunch of brown people with big flash cards: Cat, and the class repeats "cat." Fish, and the class repeats "fish" and then this handsome young guy walks in and she says, I shit you not, "Bom  Chicka Wow Wow," ( I always thought it was "BOW," not "bom") you know that ultra dated porno music interpretation that some 12 year old American boys use to intimate fucking or fucking related things.  And then the class repeats her and it cuts to the can of NEW ULTRA AXE whatever and the voice says, "makes ladies say Bom  Chicka Wow Wow...when they see you" or something.  HOLY FUCK!  No wonder there are so many rapes in this country!  The notion that women are so ridiculously easily compelled to want to fuck you and if she doesn't then...uhh, she damn well should!  I don't think this sort of advertising exists in the US, does it? I know there's tons of super sexist and mysogynistic advertising, but this is on another level.  I think.  I don't watch TV in the US so maybe this kinda shit is the norm.   Besides, I don't think 1 tv commercial is a valid representation on which to write a SkullBong tm dissertation.  

Also, last night I saw this ad for something called Step Up  (you gotta click the link) that's supposed to make you taller.  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?  And it's only $100, no, $50!  I wish I had brought a trunk full of crap to sell to suckers here.  Wait, no I don't.

Put that in your hot plastic SkullBong and smoke 'er.  Oy!

Pushkar II

I didn't realize how quickly I'd tire of an uber touristy hippie haven.  Aside from the fact that there's really nothing to do here other than buy crap and eat falafel, It's a real bummer to see an entire town dependent on a bunch of tourists to survive; pushing cheap and slave-made crap on the foreigners instead of pursuing trades and vocations of substance, like shoe making or HVAC repair or whatever people do when they don't have football and beer to distract them.  It seems like 85% of the people here are oriented towards selling something to tourists. It robs them of what I perceive as their dignity, forced to beg, cajole, pressure, and invite ignoring (ignorance?) of the privileged Israeli, German, British, Australian, and American fools who wander into this town. It's like reverse imperialism, where the invading hordes are welcomed and fleeced, instead of the hordes fleecing the indigenous.  I realize the irony of someone who makes a living off of tourism himself pointing all this out, but I don't think I've ever annoyed the hell out of someone until they rented a bike from me just to get me off their case.  Not yet anyway.  

On the street you'll see silver jewelry, bracelets, those MC Hammer pants (which I learned reading Lonely Planet that dressing Indian is a good way to deflect the stares of menfolk.  However wearing a tank top in conjunction them pantaloons sorta defeats that purpose, eh?),  black tapestries with the face of Bob Marley, mushrooms, and other hippie oriented logos painted on only semi convincingly in neon colors, occasionally with the "trippy" sounds of hippie techno pumping out of the darkened store.  In the bookshops which sell lots of English books, I found the same books over and over in every shop (malcolm gladwell, irvine Welsh, Bill Bryson, etc,) which I theorize means that tourists read the same books and trade them in and pick up another book that fits into the hippie India tourist canon.  

I actually bought a hat to keep the sun out of my eyes that is possibly the poorest made hat ever but it's the same pattern as the bike hat I lost, but with a giant bill a la the main character's original hat in the Sandlot.  Hopefully I don't lose it and can bring to Portland the newest hippest hat fashion.  "This hat is so fucking obscure that you will never own one," I'll say. It also has a Porsche logo on it, like many things in India that have brand names and logos of western brands that are in no way affiliated with said products.

All the British accents I've heard here have been that upper crust Queen's English that makes me cringe.  Where are the bootblacks and chimneysweeps???  Maybe they go to Thailand. 

I ordered Porridge of Heaven that sounded really great this morning at a hippie tourist/vegan centered place and upon receiving it found that it was laced with soymilk and gave it to a nice german guy and told him it was on me.  I am very generous.   The owner was all, "If you had told me you don't drink soymilk I wouldn't have put it in there" and I was all "I had no Idea you could even GET soymilk in India!"  I thought I was safe from the dreaded soy in this country!   From now on I'll specify that I want no soya milk in my porridges.

All packaged foods available contain "edible vegetable oil"  which I think means rapeseed oil as there were nothing but yellow flowered fields on the drive from Delhi to Jaipur.  Pretty sure it's all heavily pesticided, chemicaled, and GMO'd.  Just how I like it.  

It's near fucking impossible to buy a train ticket on your own here.  I tried for several hours to set up an account and book a ticket through one website that seemed quite promising and when I finally got everything sorted, my purchase wasn't accepted via the site I was using, So I went over the the India Government Rail site to book the ticket and found that it's so fucking busy that you can't get through to book your ticket anyway!  So I overpaid in one of the two thousand "book your train, bus, airplane ticket" shops here in town and the dude made the purchase through some mysterious "Indians only" website in a matter of seconds.  Holy shit, this is India.  

Walking down the street is an odorous assault of urine, spices, and cow shit.  And moto horn blasts.  I don't think the concept of an "occupational safety hazard" exists here as I know for a fact that the dude who sits at his desk in his storefront right on the street will be completely deaf from the moto horn blasts that pierce my skull and send a wave of doom through my aching cochlea.  There are no street signs, addresses, health code regulations, helpful/watchful government suggestions.   This is a land lacking regulation that we 'Mericans  take for granted as obvious.  You can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want as long as you're not kissing your girlfriend/boyfriend in public.  

I have been wondering, do Indians ever get food poisoning?  

I saw a 30 something guy wearing a Che shirt that said Spirit of Cuba on it.  

I have read the India Times newspaper which is probably the most unabashed propaganda laden national publication I've ever seen, which is pretty amusing.  Additionally, in today's Sunday Times there's a wife/husband wanted section that goes by religion, caste, profession, and other classifications that I don't recognize. Lots of fair skinned h'some and b'ful younguns ready for the marrying.   I'm bringing it back with me for chuckles.

I am listening to oker.bandcamp.com which you should too.  

Tomorrow I go to Udaipur!!!

Put that in your cheaply-made knockoff-skullbong and smoke it.

Pushkar I

I had heard that Pushkar was a hippie town, but I had no idea what it meant to be IN a hippie town in India.  This place (pop. 14K) is really the first place I"ve been to that totally caters to westerners with its many multicuisine restaurants that serve Israeli, chinese, and pizza.  I just want to eat Indian food, damnit!  I can eat that other stuff at home.  There are more cattle here than Jaipur or Delhi and their lives seem just as tragic, eating garbage, eyes weeping, swatting flies with their tails, being pushed around by locals, some with bones sticking way the hell out.  I'm still not sure why there are so many male cattle since they aren't eaten.  I guess they can't kill them so they just let them eat the garbage that there is no infrastructure to haul away.  Do they actually milk the cows?  What does garbage milk taste like (the milk carton reads: ...fed only the finest fast-growing spring-garbage).  I thnk I'm gonna go into business making garbage infused vodka.  It'll be the hot new Portland hipster irony-based boutique beverage.  You with me on this, Davidson???  Therein lies our fortune.  

The nice thing about being in a place that totally caters to folks like myself is that the economy is based on selling me shit I have no use for.  However there are a bunch of English book stores that keep me happy enough on the reading end of things and there are functional internet cafes so that I can type this garbage out and send it along to you, the reader.  

Right now is the Kite festival where every kid flies a kite from his roof until the sun sets and they go inside and play SEGA.  JK. JK.  There's a small lake that the town surrounds where people bathe and I am led to believe that this is a place that Hindus gather for somethin or other. 

There's a cone shaped mountain nearyby that I'm gonna climb, right foot be damned, as there's some sorta temple atop it and nothing beats a mountaintop temple.  

When I went to mail a few postcards today at the mail place the dude asked me if I were a doctor.  I'm not sure if he thought I looked like a rich bearded doctor or just thought my handwriting was so sloppy that it was the only job I could get.  I told him I was a bicycle mechanic.  He asked it if was good, and I said yes.  

I noticed on the cram jam of a  local bus ride over the mountain that serperates Ajmer from Pushkar,m as I tried to hold on to the hand holds for dear life that I'm super skinny and have lost all my bike mechanic muscle mass from 5 weeks of walking all day and eating too few croissants. I think it's like 5 croissants to one Dan Sloan sized portion of kale and they didn't have kale anywhere I looked.  So if anyone wants to challenge me to an arm wrestling competition in Feb, now's your chance to win. 

No one in India, no business, I mean has change to your big billz, like 100- rupee note or 500 rupee note.  That's like $2 or $10.  Even places where they sell things all day long in touristy parts, they will give you the hardest time for trying to pay for something that costs 250 rupees with a 500 note.  I guess you can't just go the the wells fargo around the corner and get change whenever you want.  Boy, oh boy are we privileged.  

When I arrived at my hotel, I made a beeline for the rooftop restaurant and chillzone as I was really hungry and needed to chillzone.  THere was a german couple in their 50s and the man was smoking a bee dee and he took a drag and didn't exhale, but continued breathing normally and I counted the smoky exhalations at 10.  That is dedication to nicotine and tar and flavor, sweet tobacco flavor.  The food was regrettable, but the view was not, golden sunset and kids with kites and stretching out to the mountain that reminds me of the volcano Santa Maria outside Xela in Guatemala, but smaller by several thousand feet. 

Put that in your sorta relaxing, yet sorta chaotic skullbong and smoke it.

Granada II - Katy and the fam

After a nap and my falafelling about, I walked up through the Albacin, a medeival neighborhood full of tiny, windy, undrivable streets that my guidbook warned me was kinda sketchy.  It turned out to be anything but.   I got up to a square that overlooked the city.  People were hanging out watching the sun slowly set, hippies were selling trinkets and crap, and after I spent as much time as I felt necessary overlooking the Alhambra, the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains and the city, I decided to continue on when I was followed by a friendly gitano dude wearing sweat pants who told me that the way I was going was closed.  Oh, really?  I asked.  Yeah, he said.  As so as I walked back towards him he asked me if I liked marijuana and I was all, no thanks, brah.  And walked back down the hill to the falafel row where another dude, this time looking more like your dad than a hippie gypsy. 

 Earlier that day, Pablo had asked me if I¨d be ok with a German gal couchsurfing the living room with me (there was a couch and a bed) and I said sure (obviously).  I met Pablo at his place after work and he went and picked her up at the hostel her mom, sis, and bro were staying at.  She wanted to get away for a minute and meet a local.  Katy, 25, kinda reminded me of a my wide eyed and curious French/Belgian/American cousin who looks like a certain Portland trumpet playing hottie (she kept her shirt on).  She was from my favourite, the Black Forest, real friendly and spoke very little English, but her Spanish was a good bit better than was mine.  So, we communicated, the three of us, in Spanish which was nice, because for someone of my level, It´s a lot easier to communicate with someone whose knowledge of Spanish is limited, and speaks more slowly than someone who´s been speaking it for 30 years.  She had a slight German accent when she spoke and claimed that I had no American accent, but I was all, yeah, I guess, but sometimes it slips out when I´m tired.  She was real curious about all kinds of shit and never left me feeling awkward as she usually had another question or comment.  We got along real well. 

We went to meet her mom and sis at the hostel and then go for tapas and a flamenco show.  Her mom spoke almost no English or Spanish so there was some translating going on.  Her lil sis, Andrea, was studying in Sevilla and was the most fluent of us foreigners, but had a fairly strong German accent which was pretty confusing for me at times, but we managed.  As was sat there eating patatas bravas, and some pork on top of mashed potatoes, we spoke completely in Spanish, yet it wasn´t tiring or draining for me, probably due to the level and the speed of communication being so much lower than in Barcelona with my Catalan and Galician homies.  

After the tapas we went to a bar where there was a flamenco show that was decent, I suppose and then headed back to our hood.  Katy decided to stay at the hostel, but said that we should meet up tomorrow for breakfast.
Put that in your gypsy-enchanted skull-bong and smoke it.