Hyderabad Day 3
Dec. 14th, 2019 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bethlakshmi…Fortunately, with 1 antibiotic in me, I felt much better. Not all better but enough better that I didn’t want to take more unprescribed meds…
Day 3 was another yoga day. Vidya and I were both in rough shape, but yoga certainly helped. I then ran about ½ my programme – just didn’t feel well enough to do the other (more energetic) half.
On Day 2, I figured out that Vidya’s guest bathroom shower is AWESOME. When you get a shower in India, there’s a real chance that it’s not working, and also w/out a shower door or curtain, the outcome will be very, very wet… in ways that no one planned for, as most times the real way to bathe is 1-2 buckets (hot & cold water) and a pitcher mix temperatures to pour over yourself. This is where I fail my Desi Test (Desi = person from India) – I can NOT really get my hair clean with a pitcher. I think I did it once…. It’s a myth I cling to that maybe it can happen again….
I really don’t know how every lady does it. Not many ladies have short hair, and Indian hair is usually very full and very thick. My Caucasian long hair is absolutely puny by example…
So with a shower running an American grade powerful stream of water at me, I washed my hair EVERYDAY. That’s probably not good, either… as I normally wash it twice a week, which keeps it pretty happy and not dry.
Vidya was still pretty sick, and so was her littlest son. Who was super cranky, and he’s right in his Terrible Twos, somewhat verbal, but not enough verbal. So she opted to stay home… sending me solo to the Salar Jung Museum after filling me up to the brim with dosa, idli and toast with strawberry preserves. She also had some really awesome spicy tomato chutney – so the ginger pickle + coconut chutney + tomato chutney (or was it pickle?) was a total evolving festival in my mouth.
Salar Jung Museum
Although I was sad to not see Vidya much that day... I must say, maybe it's merciful that she was saved from the utter history & art nerd geek out orgy that occurred at the museum.
It was definitely one of the best museums I've been to in India. Effort is made to keep artifacts safe and not decomposing. The rooms are clean and well lit (when they can be - the manuscript room, for example, was intentionally dim). The artifacts could be labeled a bit better... as you'll see in my pictures some are labeled "knives 1527-1835 AD" - ... um... kind of a broad swath, don't you think? But some are done really, really well. And it has a pretty good map.
It also has something I rarely see - a gift shop and food court! I enjoyed both at the end of my trip, getting water and ice cream and then doing a little bit of gift shopping (a book and some bangles).
For me, as a huge Indian history nut, it was wonderful to see a museum where the focus is Indian art history and "oh yeah, here's some stuff from other places". :)
I took over 200 pictures... I'll certainly be spending some time sorting these out!!
Highlights:
I finished up with an ice cream and water at the food court. Yes, ice cream for lunch. I'm on vacation.
And then a stroll through the gift shop. As per usual, my sense of costs is way off. Some things seem gift shop pricey, but the bangles seemed down right cheap for the quality (270 for a set of bangles, makes them basically $4). I ended up getting the best book on Hyderabad and 3 sets of really snazzy bangles that came with their own little bangle tupperware. I love that jewelery here comes with a bag or a plastic box quite often - at least if it's nice-ish. I snapped some pics of earring (also in the Salar Jung filter) - as they looked so very much like earrings friends in the SCA have made for themselves! Didn't want to buy the whole museum (for once), so didn't buy them.
Left the museum and got coffee with the driver - who is definitely a fan of coffee. By the time coffee (and cookies... cherry cookies were awesome, coconut cookie... real disappointment) were done, Vidya was calling to see where the hell we were. Not so much that we were late for anything as we'd been gone hours and hours.
Home Return Drama
The way home was fraught with drama. In the usual Hyderabad traffic, Prasad pulls over. I notice (having gone into coder-trance on the GBE site) and see that the driver's side visor is down and one side has pulled out of the roof. Now the visor, not being anchored at it's main point, won't go back up - it just hangs awkwardly blocking most of the driver's view. I can support trying to fix this, as I don't want to die because my driver couldn't see the road.
Prasad tries hard to get the thing snapped (smooshed?) back together, but a plastic part of it has definitely broken off in a not-put-back-able kind of way. Prasad gets a screwdriver from the bike repair shop. There are no screws on this thing, but he tries using it like a crowbar. No luck. Eventually he sort of pounds it back into place and then folds up the visor. I point out a little buttony thing is still on the seat next to him. He undoes the visor (it falls apart again) - he repeats the putting it back procedure, this time getting the button in there too. Folds the visor back up. We're good.
He returns the screw driver to the bike shop. I am surprised not a all that the bike shop would totally lend a screwdriver to a random driver... it's just how things roll in India. It's chaos, but people survive by helping each other.
We drive maybe another 500 yards. The visor falls down again with no provocation whatsoever.
At this point I can't help it, I burst into giggles. Joy in other people's suffering.... what can I say?
I stifle them, as it's really not nice. The poor guy. He runs across the street and gets a different tool from a different shop (electronics repair) and tries again. While he's running, I lean over the seat and get a look. I'm pretty mechanical and I've had to fix a lot of strange stuff on the fly, so what the heck. Nope, this thing is definitely broken in a way that is going to take new parts to fix. At this point, my instinct would be duct tape. But I'm pretty sure my and Prasad's shared linguistic options do not include - "dude this is a job for duct tape, the solution of champions".
He returns, tries tool, same result (we fold the visor back into place). Return tool by dodging 4 lanes of traffic. Again. Twice. And we're off!
This solution gets him all the way to the real highway. We were on a Rt. 9 sort of highway before - 2 lanes per direction, but lots of places to pull off, and stop and go type traffic. We get onto a REAL highway - like a 128 type thing. Hyderabad has a loop that runs totally around the city, which is one of the few traffic things that really works and keeps the city from loosing it's mind in a sea of gridlock. We're on that.
I don't notice until the driving gets erratic, that the visor has fallen again. Now it's really crazy. Most Indian cars (this one included) are stick shift. So there's a clutch, shift, steering... and now visor management. He doesn't have a 3rd arm. To top it off, he's now panicked that he's broken the car and he's trying to call Vidya to report the issue. It's a big deal, because the service they use will penalize the driver and repair any damage, if the driver breaks the car. So Prasad (who seems like a college student type person) definitely doesn't have the money to fix a car... Me? I am just thinking "this is when I finally die in Indian traffic" - as there is just no way that any human being can manage steering, shifting, using a mobile without voice rec, and keepig a visor up all at once.
I debate what to do -- I am really wondering if I will destroy Prasad's manhood if I reach out and hold up the visor for him... it seems like the safest thing to do. Just as I decide "yes. Not dying is worth trying to intervene in this visor situation", Prasad figures out that by pushing the visor all the way to the windshield, it will stay and still let him see.
Finally we arrive home. Vidya thinks my story is as hilarious as I do... and confesses that the car is her father's and I get the sense that it's OK if it gets a bit beaten up.
She feeds me - fish with bones this time, along with okra, spinach rice (or something else that is green), and maybe something else. It's very good!
The night
The plan is that Gautam has a work thing and then will be home a little late, at which point we will go out and eat in celebration of it being my last day here. When he gets home, we find that no one can do child care - normally Vidha's sister in law can help but she's out tonight.
So... we pick a kid-friendly restaurant and plan to go. But first the kids get fed, since then they are less rambunctious. This worked brilliantly. They were pooped and in a food coma.
And the car drama doesn't end. Prasad was clearly upset enough by the day that he parked the car outside instead of in the usual spot in the garage. And security - who are apparently uber vigilant BOOTED the car! But they don't actually have boot technology - they call a service. The service guy came and left and didn't give them the key. In fact... he's at dinner. So we end up waiting about 15-20 minutes to get the boot removed to drive to the restaurant at 9. Probably not our slickest moment - but the company was good.
I am somewhat astounded that there is enough active enforcement of any rule for someone's car to get booted. The rules are so lax here - it just seems un-Indian somehow. You can sit with your kids on your lap in the front seat, not seat belts -- but you can't park your car outside for 4 hours?
We went to "the Penalty Box" - a sports themed restaurant that is an adjunct to sporting space. I don't honestly know what sports... It was an eclectic mix - we had 2 pizzas, fried rice (like as in Chinese fried rice), chicken drum sticks (I believe it's a Indo-Chinese variant called Birds of Paradise - chicken mixed with spices and maybe even breading and reformed onto the bone), and a chicken curry. I think the curry was my favorite.
I should mention that Indian pizza is generally a white pizza. Tomato sauce is not a default ingredient. Which means my favorite type of pizza here is tomato cheese - which comes with slices of tomato on top. I'm a red sauce kinda girl. Also the crust is different - doughier. It's generally a thin crust format, but not all that thin.
Vidya and I each had 1 Sangria. It's been 2 weeks since my body has seen alcohol - which has done it a world of good. It also meant that 1 glass of wine was just fine.
We took the two very pooped kids home (although it wasn't wildly past bed time) and Vidya and I spent another hour talking. It was very lovely to have some quiet time just talking.
Day 3 was another yoga day. Vidya and I were both in rough shape, but yoga certainly helped. I then ran about ½ my programme – just didn’t feel well enough to do the other (more energetic) half.
On Day 2, I figured out that Vidya’s guest bathroom shower is AWESOME. When you get a shower in India, there’s a real chance that it’s not working, and also w/out a shower door or curtain, the outcome will be very, very wet… in ways that no one planned for, as most times the real way to bathe is 1-2 buckets (hot & cold water) and a pitcher mix temperatures to pour over yourself. This is where I fail my Desi Test (Desi = person from India) – I can NOT really get my hair clean with a pitcher. I think I did it once…. It’s a myth I cling to that maybe it can happen again….
I really don’t know how every lady does it. Not many ladies have short hair, and Indian hair is usually very full and very thick. My Caucasian long hair is absolutely puny by example…
So with a shower running an American grade powerful stream of water at me, I washed my hair EVERYDAY. That’s probably not good, either… as I normally wash it twice a week, which keeps it pretty happy and not dry.
Vidya was still pretty sick, and so was her littlest son. Who was super cranky, and he’s right in his Terrible Twos, somewhat verbal, but not enough verbal. So she opted to stay home… sending me solo to the Salar Jung Museum after filling me up to the brim with dosa, idli and toast with strawberry preserves. She also had some really awesome spicy tomato chutney – so the ginger pickle + coconut chutney + tomato chutney (or was it pickle?) was a total evolving festival in my mouth.
Salar Jung Museum
Although I was sad to not see Vidya much that day... I must say, maybe it's merciful that she was saved from the utter history & art nerd geek out orgy that occurred at the museum.
It was definitely one of the best museums I've been to in India. Effort is made to keep artifacts safe and not decomposing. The rooms are clean and well lit (when they can be - the manuscript room, for example, was intentionally dim). The artifacts could be labeled a bit better... as you'll see in my pictures some are labeled "knives 1527-1835 AD" - ... um... kind of a broad swath, don't you think? But some are done really, really well. And it has a pretty good map.
It also has something I rarely see - a gift shop and food court! I enjoyed both at the end of my trip, getting water and ice cream and then doing a little bit of gift shopping (a book and some bangles).
For me, as a huge Indian history nut, it was wonderful to see a museum where the focus is Indian art history and "oh yeah, here's some stuff from other places". :)
I took over 200 pictures... I'll certainly be spending some time sorting these out!!
Highlights:
- There was a fabric room showing many of the techniques of Indian fabric decoration. The one 16th century Kashmi shawl was so dimly lit that I really couldn't get a great picture. But I did get some really nice samples of a 19th century embriodered Sari that uses a technique that I believe is historic, and the execution was really sublime! (see pic above)
- The South Indian stone sculptures were a representative example, but the Hoysala temples have spoiled me - it wasn't jaw dropping and many pieces were in tough shape. I did find a Vijayanagara sculpture so I grabbed some pics.
- The ivory and the jade collections had some beautiful flywhisk bases. If I see even one of these in a Western museum, I feel lucky.
- There was a WHOLE ROOM on arms and armor!!! Much of it was out of period for the SCA, but there was enough 17th century for me to have a field day. I was psyched, because I could see how much of this could be SCA field safe with some modifications. Because of it's location, there is great mix of Deccani stuff and Mughal stuff here.
- The miniatures room (right) was a real standout - they did a lot of work to organize and lay it out carefully with great annotations. Very little of it was in period for the SCA, but again, enough was on the cusp. Also, I kept having dejavu moments as I saw so many book covers from my library. And I have nothing but respect for how tiny these paintings generally are! See my hand or my pinkie finger for a sense of scale. Note - I have normal people sized hands... not giant Amazon hands.
- The South Indian bronzes blew my mind. Really good quality. Well lit. And a bunch of late period stuff that I've never seen before. Two standouts here:
- A female temple guardian from the 16th or 17th centry, central India. It looks to me like she's got a patka, a choli of a shape I've never seen, and a skirt. Unusual for a bronze.
- A Tribunga Parvati (right) with a hair bun featuring the moon and sun. Dated to 13th century, Vijayanagara. I have never seen that hair ornament earlier than the 17th century!! Whahoo!
- The manuscript room probably would have made many a calligraher's socks roll up and down, but sadly, I'm not enough into Islamic texts to be too excited unless there are pictures.
I finished up with an ice cream and water at the food court. Yes, ice cream for lunch. I'm on vacation.
And then a stroll through the gift shop. As per usual, my sense of costs is way off. Some things seem gift shop pricey, but the bangles seemed down right cheap for the quality (270 for a set of bangles, makes them basically $4). I ended up getting the best book on Hyderabad and 3 sets of really snazzy bangles that came with their own little bangle tupperware. I love that jewelery here comes with a bag or a plastic box quite often - at least if it's nice-ish. I snapped some pics of earring (also in the Salar Jung filter) - as they looked so very much like earrings friends in the SCA have made for themselves! Didn't want to buy the whole museum (for once), so didn't buy them.
Left the museum and got coffee with the driver - who is definitely a fan of coffee. By the time coffee (and cookies... cherry cookies were awesome, coconut cookie... real disappointment) were done, Vidya was calling to see where the hell we were. Not so much that we were late for anything as we'd been gone hours and hours.
Home Return Drama
The way home was fraught with drama. In the usual Hyderabad traffic, Prasad pulls over. I notice (having gone into coder-trance on the GBE site) and see that the driver's side visor is down and one side has pulled out of the roof. Now the visor, not being anchored at it's main point, won't go back up - it just hangs awkwardly blocking most of the driver's view. I can support trying to fix this, as I don't want to die because my driver couldn't see the road.
Prasad tries hard to get the thing snapped (smooshed?) back together, but a plastic part of it has definitely broken off in a not-put-back-able kind of way. Prasad gets a screwdriver from the bike repair shop. There are no screws on this thing, but he tries using it like a crowbar. No luck. Eventually he sort of pounds it back into place and then folds up the visor. I point out a little buttony thing is still on the seat next to him. He undoes the visor (it falls apart again) - he repeats the putting it back procedure, this time getting the button in there too. Folds the visor back up. We're good.
He returns the screw driver to the bike shop. I am surprised not a all that the bike shop would totally lend a screwdriver to a random driver... it's just how things roll in India. It's chaos, but people survive by helping each other.
We drive maybe another 500 yards. The visor falls down again with no provocation whatsoever.
At this point I can't help it, I burst into giggles. Joy in other people's suffering.... what can I say?
I stifle them, as it's really not nice. The poor guy. He runs across the street and gets a different tool from a different shop (electronics repair) and tries again. While he's running, I lean over the seat and get a look. I'm pretty mechanical and I've had to fix a lot of strange stuff on the fly, so what the heck. Nope, this thing is definitely broken in a way that is going to take new parts to fix. At this point, my instinct would be duct tape. But I'm pretty sure my and Prasad's shared linguistic options do not include - "dude this is a job for duct tape, the solution of champions".
He returns, tries tool, same result (we fold the visor back into place). Return tool by dodging 4 lanes of traffic. Again. Twice. And we're off!
This solution gets him all the way to the real highway. We were on a Rt. 9 sort of highway before - 2 lanes per direction, but lots of places to pull off, and stop and go type traffic. We get onto a REAL highway - like a 128 type thing. Hyderabad has a loop that runs totally around the city, which is one of the few traffic things that really works and keeps the city from loosing it's mind in a sea of gridlock. We're on that.
I don't notice until the driving gets erratic, that the visor has fallen again. Now it's really crazy. Most Indian cars (this one included) are stick shift. So there's a clutch, shift, steering... and now visor management. He doesn't have a 3rd arm. To top it off, he's now panicked that he's broken the car and he's trying to call Vidya to report the issue. It's a big deal, because the service they use will penalize the driver and repair any damage, if the driver breaks the car. So Prasad (who seems like a college student type person) definitely doesn't have the money to fix a car... Me? I am just thinking "this is when I finally die in Indian traffic" - as there is just no way that any human being can manage steering, shifting, using a mobile without voice rec, and keepig a visor up all at once.
I debate what to do -- I am really wondering if I will destroy Prasad's manhood if I reach out and hold up the visor for him... it seems like the safest thing to do. Just as I decide "yes. Not dying is worth trying to intervene in this visor situation", Prasad figures out that by pushing the visor all the way to the windshield, it will stay and still let him see.
Finally we arrive home. Vidya thinks my story is as hilarious as I do... and confesses that the car is her father's and I get the sense that it's OK if it gets a bit beaten up.
She feeds me - fish with bones this time, along with okra, spinach rice (or something else that is green), and maybe something else. It's very good!
The night
The plan is that Gautam has a work thing and then will be home a little late, at which point we will go out and eat in celebration of it being my last day here. When he gets home, we find that no one can do child care - normally Vidha's sister in law can help but she's out tonight.
So... we pick a kid-friendly restaurant and plan to go. But first the kids get fed, since then they are less rambunctious. This worked brilliantly. They were pooped and in a food coma.
And the car drama doesn't end. Prasad was clearly upset enough by the day that he parked the car outside instead of in the usual spot in the garage. And security - who are apparently uber vigilant BOOTED the car! But they don't actually have boot technology - they call a service. The service guy came and left and didn't give them the key. In fact... he's at dinner. So we end up waiting about 15-20 minutes to get the boot removed to drive to the restaurant at 9. Probably not our slickest moment - but the company was good.
I am somewhat astounded that there is enough active enforcement of any rule for someone's car to get booted. The rules are so lax here - it just seems un-Indian somehow. You can sit with your kids on your lap in the front seat, not seat belts -- but you can't park your car outside for 4 hours?
We went to "the Penalty Box" - a sports themed restaurant that is an adjunct to sporting space. I don't honestly know what sports... It was an eclectic mix - we had 2 pizzas, fried rice (like as in Chinese fried rice), chicken drum sticks (I believe it's a Indo-Chinese variant called Birds of Paradise - chicken mixed with spices and maybe even breading and reformed onto the bone), and a chicken curry. I think the curry was my favorite.
I should mention that Indian pizza is generally a white pizza. Tomato sauce is not a default ingredient. Which means my favorite type of pizza here is tomato cheese - which comes with slices of tomato on top. I'm a red sauce kinda girl. Also the crust is different - doughier. It's generally a thin crust format, but not all that thin.
Vidya and I each had 1 Sangria. It's been 2 weeks since my body has seen alcohol - which has done it a world of good. It also meant that 1 glass of wine was just fine.
We took the two very pooped kids home (although it wasn't wildly past bed time) and Vidya and I spent another hour talking. It was very lovely to have some quiet time just talking.