Jan 06

Some services in India are ridiculously cheap for someone from the western world. I was able to get a haircut for 78 cents in one of the top barbershops in the area. Starbucks quality coffee drinks were about 60 to 70 cents. That's not black coffee, I'm talking about latte and espresso drinks. I went to a cybercafe where they served dozens of types of tea. I had one that cost about 70 cents. When I told this to someone whom I knew they looked at me like I was crazy for paying so much. He told me the people whom I paid must have thought I was such a sucker for paying so much. On the other hand, I was feeling a bit guilty for paying so little. So I tipped well everywhere I went. Tipping is not very common in India and no one tips 15% to 20%.

I had to rent a vehicle for getting around the town. I also needed a driver since I did not want to and could not drive there. There must be traffic laws but most people don't know what they are. Some rules I can figure out were: The bigger vehicle has the right of the way, if you're a pedestrian you're out of luck. If you have an accident you better not stop, if you do stop be prepared to fight. We saw several fights on the roads; they were not unlike fights in the hockey matches. So I rented a small (a little bigger than a Geo Metro) vehicle. I am told that it's the best way to get around the city since bigger vehicles won't go everywhere. It was a TATA Indica. I think it had about 1.4 liter, 4 cylinder diesel engine that produced 60 HP. The vehicle, driver, fuel, and tips cost me $18 a day.

Someone I know was travelling in south India and became ill, they couldn't locate a doctor in the middle of the night, so they went to the next town where there was a hospital. Cost of taxi - $2 dollars. Cost of the doctor at the hospital - $1 dollar. Cost of prescription medication - $2 dollars.

This is one of the better intersections in the city.

Recent telecom boom has created antenna farms everywhere. This was across from a major shopping area in one of the best neighborhoods. Zoning must not be a problem here.

McDonalds booth in the mall lobby

Pizza anyone? It's not cheap according to the locals. Dominos and Pizza Hut are considered high end pizza restaurants.

We arrived here on Saturday afternoon. The next day I wanted to fire up my computer and access the internet. There were two phone lines in the house; the landline and the Wireless local loop (WiLL) phone. The landline had the outgoing calls disabled and the WiLL phone was used to make outgoing calls. Wireless Local Loop is a CDMA based technology that enables developing countries to quickly get phones in the homes where landline infrastructure is not available or is in bad shape. The WiLL phone provided better reception than the landline even though it was a wireless connection.

The WiLL phone also had acted as a modem (similar speeds to 1XRTT CDMA); it connected to the computer using the serial port but the phone end had the RJ45 port. It was the weirdest configuration I had ever seen. I wonder why they don't use USB. It seemed like a very old version of WiLL phone, after connecting the service provider webpage opened up which did not exist. It provided average speeds of 88kbps on the downlink. That is a little faster than the modem speeds. I couldn't make it work on my laptop; I kept getting frame errors. I tinkered around with my laptop, changed the MTU, RWIN settings but it never worked. I ended up using the computer at home for browsing the net.

I needed my computer to connect to the internet so I can use VPN, outlook, etc. I googled for cybercafes in the city and found a small list of cybercafe. One of them was 'Cafe Mint'. They had wifi connection, for free! First day I was there I spent nearly three hours there. There were a few other people there. It was a cafe with a huge menu. I ordered a latte (67 cents) and a sandwich ($1). Unfortunately their router was really old and could not support VPN. They had the highest speed I would receive while in India, 128 kbps.

One of the new thing I saw this time was that there were buses and rickshaws running not on gasoline but on compressed natural gas. This helped quiet a bit with the pollution. Afterall I was in the worse polluted city in India. Usually my eyes burn in the traffic but it didn't happen this time. They still have a long way to go but this is a good start.

Noise pollution and dust still remains a problem. No matter what they build or make in India; it looks old in a few months because of the dust and other stuff in the air. I left my black notebook on the table for a couple of days and I could not even recognize it as it was covered with dust.

Indians are finally building better expressways. I went to Baroda (about 75 miles away). It used to take over two hours. With the new National Expressway-1, it took a little over an hour. It was a four lane expressway with two tolls of about $1.50 each. The tolls were set to odd numbers like 61 ruppes. It's like having a toll for $1.46 in US. Why can't they make it 60 or 65?

We arrived here on Uttarayan which is a day of the kite festival. In short, people get on their roofs and fly colorful kites and try to cut each other’s kite. I went to the roof soon after getting to my Wife’s parents’ home. They had taken their stereo upstairs and had Bollywood music blaring. I caught a few kites while I was up there and also flew a couple of kites. It was a lot of fun. It was first time in 17 years I was in India on this day. My son came up on the roof and heard the music and started dancing. Roofs in India are flat and accessible by stairs. There must have been hundreds of kites at the same time in the sky, everyone in the neighborhood was on their roofs flying kites, listening to music and having a good time. I found flying kite was easier than I remember. When I was a kid it was a bit more difficult. Indians don't run and fly kites; that would be silly. There is no where to run on the roof; The wind must be about 5 mph to 10 mph which is nothing if you're from Chicago but everyone I talked to couldn't believe the awesome the wind was that day and how lucky they were to have it just for that day. It was middle of winter there but for me it was really hot, 85 to 90 degrees!

I had slept only four a few hours in last 48 hours so I decided to call it a day around 6pm and tried to get some sleep.

From Wikipedia:
Uttarayan, also known as Makarsakranti, is a kite-flying festival celebrated annually on January 14 in western India; it is a public holiday in Gujarat and Rajasthan. According to the Indian astronomy, Uttrayan is the day when the Sun moves to the northern hemisphere ("Uttar" means north, and "-ayan" means to go). This day also is celebrated as Pongal in southern India.

In the state of Gujarat, kite flying is considered an art. Kite fighting is a traditional Uttrayan activity: the kite flyer must keep his kite aloft while others to sever his thread using their own kites. When someone wins the kite fight, his group celerates with cheerful shouts of "Kade" and drum beatings. It is a common scene to see people dance and socialize freely.

Here is one of my son's picture on the roof on the first day. I'm making this blog pretty anonymous so you won't find any names or other personal pictures.

After about 12 hours of delays we finally landed in Ahmedabad; the weather was really hot; it must have been about 85 to 90 degrees. I finally managed to wake up my son as we were exiting the aircraft. We got on another bus and we were driven to the arrivals which is no larger than 100 feet by 100 feet, may be smaller. There is one small luggage belt; we found our bags and loaded them on to the carts. We walked 20 feet and we were outside. There were a bunch of people gathered outside. We were greeted by about a dozen people from my wife's family and I handed them all the luggage which disappeared in various vehicles and I didn’t see it until I got home.

The rental car I had asked for had showed up with the driver. I don’t remember trip home because I was extremely tired. I remember talking about the hassle we went through in Bombay.

I was looking forward to getting some sleep because in the last 48 hours I had slept only about 4-5 hours.

We were provided with transportation to get to domestic airport; it was only 5 minutes away. The transportation was a mid size SUV for the driver and 5 passengers. This SUV was better than what we were picked up in; earlier the SUV didn't have a dashboard; it was missing the radio, the temprature controls, etc.

The domestic airport seemed a little better than the international dump we were in for several hours. Jet Airways had a lot of counters; we had several hours so I made sure we would get on the flight. We couldn’t find any place to sit before the security check-in so we sat on a ledge along some plants. I found a STD (long distance) phone booth and made a call, browsed through a few small stores which were no bigger than 10 feet by 10 feet.

I noticed a TATA Indicom booth advertising wifi access. I was curious so I asked the lady about it. She said she didn’t know anything about it and the guy who really knew about it will be back in 10 minutes. I came back in 10 minutes; the guy was busy talking to someone on his mobile phone, it seemed like a personal call. After a few minutes he hung up and explained to me that they have a special promotion that will allow me to use wifi at the airport free for 30 minutes and each additional hour was about $1.25 and the signal was available everywhere in the airport (he pointed to the two ends of the airport; it wasn't a big airport). I took the free card. Right next to their kiosk, the signal strength was poor although I did not loose the connection. I thought that was odd. I checked my email and browsed a few websites and 30 minutes were almost up.

After the security check at we couldn’t find any seats again; there were a lot of people sitting on the floor; my son was sleeping so my wife decided to sit on the floor while she was holding him. I walked around and tried to find an empty seat; there were a bunch of people with luggage on the seats; they didn’t seem to care for woman and children having to stand or sit on the floor. Most Indian airports are not equipped with Jetways; you have to take a bus to the aircraft. When they started to board our plane I found out that we have to go through another security check by Jet Airways. Not sure why they have multiple security checks one right after the other; either Jet Airways doesn’t trust the government security checks since they compete with them or they’re afraid of someone getting in to secured areas by bribing the security guards. We had our luggage scanned and received the wand treatment and we boarded a bus and we were driven to our aircraft which was a small propeller type of plane.

While going up the stairs on the plane; I noticed our luggage being loaded in the back of the plane; it was a small plane and it didn't carry luggage in the belly. There was a guy at the bottom of the stairs who checked our boarding pass; another guy at the top did the same thing. I know there are a lot of people in India and they all need jobs but this was an overkill; there were a few othere guys near the plane watching the luggage being loaded. I didn't care how many people there were as long as I got my seat on the plane.