Discoveries and deals

Life is starting to settle. In good and in bad.

It just sucks that there are no Westerners anywhere. There's nothing wrong with Indians besides two things: 1) their accent/English is often quite ununderstandable 2) they live in a totally different world. Although I now live in the same different world aswell, but it's really hard to adjust to the Indian way of living. As I really do not understand what they do around here.

Or, well, I partially know what they do around here. Today I went for a walk around the neighbourhood to see what there is around me. What I noticed people doing: a) either masturbating or heavily scratching their balls openly while walking b) sitting, sitting, looking at me, doing nothing c) having a random meeting in a random place with random people d) begging e) driving different vehicles like lunatics. Actually I was told earlier that I live in a bar area and that's why I went for a walk, to assess the situation. Number of found bars: 0. I guess 'bar area' means that there might be a bar somewhere.

Today I also made one other important thing: I made a deal with a tuk-tuk driver about driving me to work every morning. I was earlier told that it's really not feasible or even possible because some kids need to be driven to school in the morning or something equally silly. Well, after only a few meetings at different days I agreed to have the same guy drive me to work (about 3km) every morning for 35 rupees. (Added the currency course at the right side of the blog). Colleagues at work thought it was a good price. So I think I'm happy, now I don't have to do the same stupid bargaining every morning.

My happy morning tuktuk driver


About bargaining.. Well, I don't think it surprises anyone that you need to bargain here. But luckily not of everything. But the one thing you usually need at least twice a day is ride to some place with motorized tuk-tuk or a leg-powered rickshaw. And for those it always takes a while and a few new drivers to bargain a feasible price. Colleagues at work told me that they pay about exactly the same price for the rides as I do, which kinda surprised me. Somehow that's hard to believe, surely there's a raised price for foreigners... But, in any case, I am happy that I don't now have to start my every day with bargaining for a ride to work. Still need to bargain for the ride back as I leave at random times. So some fun left still!(?)

Idex

And the Idex street from a little further away

It has been a bit hard for me to add pictures here. Because I haven't taken many pictures as I don't know what to take them of. Everything seems so 'normal' to me and kinda boring. But I guess I need to take some general pictures and add here at least. If something interesting happened, would be a lot easier to take pictures of that and add here :) But, let's see.