I’m baaaack!
Guess who’s back -
Back again!
Yes, kiddies, ‘tis I. Back from my lovely, LOVELY vacation. I did pretty well with my “at-least-one-entry-a-week” while I was gone. I think I only managed to skip one week. Otherwise, there was even a week or two in there were I got in three or four entries a week! Aren’t you proud??
So…let’s see what I can tell you about my vacation. Overall, it went really well. There were, of course, little bumps along the way. Although, if you ask my husband, he’ll say that every step of the way while we were traveling, something or another went wrong through our trip. At least on the flight portions. First, while we were going to Chennai, our JFK – Hong Kong flight got delayed so missed our Hong Kong – Singapore connection. They ended up putting us on a Singapore Airlines flight to Chennai via Singapore. Then when we left Chennai for Taiwan, they wouldn’t check our bags all the way to Kaohsiung, so we went through immigration in Taipei, got our bags, then went to the transfer desk where they said we never should have come through immigration. So we had to go back, have them take care of our bags, then go to Kaohsiung and go through immigration again. Then coming back from Taiwan to JFK, our Hong Kong – JFK flight was delayed by about two hours. Little things, and minor inconveniences, when you look at it in the big picture, but it really all worked out in the end.
The trip itself was wonderful. We went to India first for two weeks. Landed on the night of November 1. We were quite exhausted, but it was wonderful to see his family again. They fed us well, as usual. His mom is a great cook, and always insists that we eat well – breakfast included. My husband’s not used to eating breakfast in the first place, but she made him eat! (So of course, we’ve both put on weight!) India’s really changed a lot though. There’s so much more traffic – but that’s modern traffic, and in addition to your usual auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, animals, bicycles, motorcycles, etc. The streets are unbelieveably crowded. Pollution is terrible. Not just the exhaust fumes, but noise as well – horns are always blaring. A couple really brief observations:
1) People never use their turning signals. Rarely when they’re actually turning, and never when they’re passing. To pass, you use your horn. You honk, scoot over, peal forward, and zip back into place in front of the car you were trying to pass.
2) Stop lights while obeyed, offer a means for drivers to cheat. What I mean is, there’s a counter next to the light that tells you essentially how many seconds remain before it will change. So when there’s five seconds left to a red light, everyone has already started going, anyway. Kind of amusing, really (unless you’re a pedestrian in the middle of crossing the street at the time!)
3) There’s no such thing as a “motorcycle lane”. They weave in and out of cars. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’ll go. If there’s a way that they can get past you to get where they’re going faster, they’ll take it.
4) Tied with #3, there’s no such thing as a safe following distance. The lanes are narrower, and half the time drivers straddle them anyway, and they follow very closely behind cars. You frequently brake – it’s very similar to driving in NYC. Stop and go a lot of the time.
We were there for Deepavali, the Indian festival of lights. It was my first Deepavali in India, so definitely a different experience. I’ve never heard so many firecrackers in my life, even during Chinese New Year in Taiwan! And they were SO loud!! There was one called The Red Fort that’s basically a long strip of firecrackers – about 1000 of them all in a row – and you light them and they just start popping – you have to be careful, because they’ll go all over the place! My husband lit one and wasn’t paying attention – we were all wearing the new clothes that we’d bought for the special day and my husband ran back after lighting the crackers, turned around to watch, then realized one of the crackers had flown by and burnt a hole in the brand new shirt he was wearing. Luckily he wasn’t hurt or anything. But people were setting off “crackers” (as they called them) day in and day out. It started at around 11 or 12 the night before, continued on almost non-stop until 10 or 11 the next night. And they had these ones called Atom Bombs – which I hated – that lived up to their name. They literally sounded like Atom Bombs were going off right beside you. I wrote in my journal that it sounded like there was a war going off around me – literally every 15 seconds there were explosions all over the place. I lit a few – just the pretty ones – at night. I stayed away from the loud ones. Fun to watch, but hard on the ears…
Part 2 of ?? to follow….I think that’s enough for one entry.
Back again!
Yes, kiddies, ‘tis I. Back from my lovely, LOVELY vacation. I did pretty well with my “at-least-one-entry-a-week” while I was gone. I think I only managed to skip one week. Otherwise, there was even a week or two in there were I got in three or four entries a week! Aren’t you proud??
So…let’s see what I can tell you about my vacation. Overall, it went really well. There were, of course, little bumps along the way. Although, if you ask my husband, he’ll say that every step of the way while we were traveling, something or another went wrong through our trip. At least on the flight portions. First, while we were going to Chennai, our JFK – Hong Kong flight got delayed so missed our Hong Kong – Singapore connection. They ended up putting us on a Singapore Airlines flight to Chennai via Singapore. Then when we left Chennai for Taiwan, they wouldn’t check our bags all the way to Kaohsiung, so we went through immigration in Taipei, got our bags, then went to the transfer desk where they said we never should have come through immigration. So we had to go back, have them take care of our bags, then go to Kaohsiung and go through immigration again. Then coming back from Taiwan to JFK, our Hong Kong – JFK flight was delayed by about two hours. Little things, and minor inconveniences, when you look at it in the big picture, but it really all worked out in the end.
The trip itself was wonderful. We went to India first for two weeks. Landed on the night of November 1. We were quite exhausted, but it was wonderful to see his family again. They fed us well, as usual. His mom is a great cook, and always insists that we eat well – breakfast included. My husband’s not used to eating breakfast in the first place, but she made him eat! (So of course, we’ve both put on weight!) India’s really changed a lot though. There’s so much more traffic – but that’s modern traffic, and in addition to your usual auto-rickshaws, pedestrians, animals, bicycles, motorcycles, etc. The streets are unbelieveably crowded. Pollution is terrible. Not just the exhaust fumes, but noise as well – horns are always blaring. A couple really brief observations:
1) People never use their turning signals. Rarely when they’re actually turning, and never when they’re passing. To pass, you use your horn. You honk, scoot over, peal forward, and zip back into place in front of the car you were trying to pass.
2) Stop lights while obeyed, offer a means for drivers to cheat. What I mean is, there’s a counter next to the light that tells you essentially how many seconds remain before it will change. So when there’s five seconds left to a red light, everyone has already started going, anyway. Kind of amusing, really (unless you’re a pedestrian in the middle of crossing the street at the time!)
3) There’s no such thing as a “motorcycle lane”. They weave in and out of cars. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’ll go. If there’s a way that they can get past you to get where they’re going faster, they’ll take it.
4) Tied with #3, there’s no such thing as a safe following distance. The lanes are narrower, and half the time drivers straddle them anyway, and they follow very closely behind cars. You frequently brake – it’s very similar to driving in NYC. Stop and go a lot of the time.
We were there for Deepavali, the Indian festival of lights. It was my first Deepavali in India, so definitely a different experience. I’ve never heard so many firecrackers in my life, even during Chinese New Year in Taiwan! And they were SO loud!! There was one called The Red Fort that’s basically a long strip of firecrackers – about 1000 of them all in a row – and you light them and they just start popping – you have to be careful, because they’ll go all over the place! My husband lit one and wasn’t paying attention – we were all wearing the new clothes that we’d bought for the special day and my husband ran back after lighting the crackers, turned around to watch, then realized one of the crackers had flown by and burnt a hole in the brand new shirt he was wearing. Luckily he wasn’t hurt or anything. But people were setting off “crackers” (as they called them) day in and day out. It started at around 11 or 12 the night before, continued on almost non-stop until 10 or 11 the next night. And they had these ones called Atom Bombs – which I hated – that lived up to their name. They literally sounded like Atom Bombs were going off right beside you. I wrote in my journal that it sounded like there was a war going off around me – literally every 15 seconds there were explosions all over the place. I lit a few – just the pretty ones – at night. I stayed away from the loud ones. Fun to watch, but hard on the ears…
Part 2 of ?? to follow….I think that’s enough for one entry.
posted by lavender | 3:40 PM
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