We started on our own today, just Bartley, Beth, Jenny, Justin, Lili, Holly, and I. Holly’s with us for only a couple days until she heads back. The seven of us headed out in two Qualises (I rode with Beth and Bartley) to Jaipur. We’ll go through Jaipur, Pushkar, Jodhpur, and Udaipur before heading back to Mumbai.
On our way out we stopped nearby some snake charmers. Jenny said, “See, I got you your snake charmer.” The funniest thing about the snake charmers was watching them go “off duty”. They have, at least to a Westerner, a lot of mysticism surrounding them, and when they approach you there is some kind of other worldliness that attaches. But when we were pulling away, they just kind of shut down. They sat down, had a smoke, and just chatted. It was like the cartoon with Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog where the whistle blows and they get out their lunch pails and eat lunch together, letting go of their public personae.
As soon as we got to Jaipur we headed to the main shopping area of the city, which consists of a giant grid of streets behind these big gates. Jaipur is called the pink city, and everything is painted this color that sort of resembles pink. We entered through one of the gates and started walking straight back. After a while it started feeling like we were walking in circles. The shops seemed to be repeating the same pattern: a convenience store followed by an upscale clothing store followed by a car battery store followed by a pharmacy followed by a children’s clothing store followed by a bicycle store, and then we would start all over with a convenience store. It was really weird to see all these stores that looked exactly the same. (I learned later that certain areas have different types of stores. If you walk down another street you might see jewelry stores and women’s clothing stores over and over again.) Each store is less than half as wide as a store you might see in a mall, and about half as deep. For the most part, nobody seemed to be going into many of these stores. It seemed like given the amount of business most of these stores got, you could probably sustain only about a quarter the number of stores they have there.
There are a lot of things that continue to puzzle me about how to it’s possible to make money in India. I’ve seen a lot of people selling trinkets and getting very little business, and yet these vendors and stores are all over the place, all selling essentially the same things and all having a very hard time doing it. Another thing is the distribution of consumer goods. We’ve seen cola drinks and liters of water that sell in restaurants for 15 rupees, which is a third of what they would be in the United States, and along the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere you’ll see a bag of potato chips selling for really little as well. I don’t yet understand how any company can distribute to all these remote places and sell for so much less than in the States.
Tonight we went to a nice restaurant in Jaipur, near the shopping area. We rode on bicycle rickshaws, which we hadn’t seen in any other city. The price was supposed to be 20 rupees for a ride of a couple kilometers. We got in the rickshaws two at a time, and the drivers took us around on the strength of their own legs, which were pretty thin. I kept cheering our driver on as he drove past the other rickshaws (no small accomplishment since I was easily the heaviest person in any rickshaw) and as pedaled he looked like he was killing himself. When we got to our destination, I gave him a significant tip—I think I gave him 50 rupees total.
Did I give him a good tip? I tipped him less than a dollar for a significant amount of work. Still, it was easily more money than he was used to seeing. There seem to be two ways you can deal with the difference in the intrinsic value of money here. You can tip more, reasoning that it’s worth more to them than it is to you, so in a sense you’re creating value. Or you can tip less, figuring that any little amount you give them will be more than they usually get. I think we all vacillate between two extremes from time to time, but it’s really easy to forget about what money is worth here. I know that I’ve looked at a menu and thought that a 150 rupee bowl of fried rice is exorbitant, but it’s three bucks. Some people here think that tipping 20% on an autorickshaw ride is being generous, even though it’s 25 cents. Maybe it is generous, I don’t know.
On the way out of the restaurant we had probably our worst encounter of the trip. These children came up to us and were asking for money in the most obstructive way. They followed us around for several minutes, and they were hanging all over us. They were equal parts cute and annoying, which was entirely frustrating. We tried to talk to them, and at times they were all right, but most of the time they would just pester us. They would have been really fun if they weren’t aiming everything at us. I still don’t know what their intentions were. It seems like they wanted to get some money out of us, but when we kept refusing, I think they were content to entertain each other by getting in our way and driving us insane.
The food of the day was the fried rice I had for dinner.
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