Floating Towards the Sea (Or Maybe Away from it, I'm not Entirely Sure)

The water looks like mercury from where I'm sitting. The currents of the Arabian Sea don't make it far enough into the Keralan backwaters to jolt anything, so this silver water moves slowly. Our houseboat glides across the water, passing rice paddies and farms and goats and the occasional couple on their honeymoon. 

"What a polite afternoon," I say, having just read that word about four times on my current page of Bill Bryson's adventures in England, entitled Notes From a Small Island. He had just talked about polite ticket collectors who thanked you on trains, and how there wasn't any pushing or shoving while people boarded or exited the platform on his way to Wiltshire.

"What polite air," I say, still savoring the word. The air is just dewy enough to let you feel like you're near water, but it's nowhere as imposing as ocean-air.

Our next hours become instinctive, not a calculated move on what's the best use of our time while we're here. Kendon chooses to fish--first with dough, then with live bait. Bianca chooses to take photos and admire the local fauna. And I choose to find out how Bryson felt returning to his old town in England years after he had moved away.

Hyderabad Traffic: A Lesson for Beginners

Hyderabad traffic, like most other things in this city, appears chaotic when you're first introduced to it. But it has an organic flow, and once you see that, it becomes easy to maneuver through it. At this point, it seems silly that I was ever startled by the traffic here.

And that's because with Hyderabad traffic, like most other things in this city, you have to carry yourself purposefully. Here's a fundamental truth about Indian drivers--they are all defensive drivers, just not courteous ones. And once you figure that out, nothing they can do on the road will seem intimidating anymore.

Don't jump. Don't be startled. Don't wince. Stare at the driver and walk across. What are they going to do? Run you over? Oh, they're in a car? Carry yourself like you're driving a tank. They will stop.

And they'll honk, sure. They're in a rush, but so are you. They can wait, because you certainly aren't going to stand here all day. You just have to remember that they're not honking because they're angry at you, like in the United States. No one is going to pull out a shotgun and shoot you if you honk at them, like in the United States (it's kind of delightfully ironic that Indian traffic seems much less likely to injure you than American traffic). An Indian driver honks to let you know he's there, as if he's in an existential crisis and needs to remind himself that he exists. He honks, therefore he is.

Existential crises breed emotional vulnerability, and there's no room for pansies on your schedule. 

Keralan Typography

If you ever want to simulate being on an alien planet, the closest thing you can do is go to a place with a language you don't understand, as long as the language doesn't use the roman alphabet. Those languages make you feel tremendously more foreign, no matter how similar you actually are to the local culture. Take Poland--I couldn't read or understand any of the writing, but it felt less foreign to me than Kerala. At least I could read Polish (while butchering words with my "You speak Polish like a Russian" accent), even if I didn't understand what it meant. But everytime I look at Malayalam, I don't even know where to begin.

While driving around Cochin, a lively city in this otherwise relaxed state, we stopped inches away from a bus at a red light. When I looked over at the bus, I noticed something peculiar. Brushstrokes. The labels and numbers on this bus were hand painted.

I can see the brushstrokes when I'm inches away from them. Stop signs, speed limit signs, license plate numbers on autos and buses... they're all painted by hand! I hadn't been this excited about finding out that something is actually painted since I was in Rome. They were painted precisely and neatly, and I only noticed the subtle differences between identical signs when I was looking for them.

Look at the impeccable Arial on this bus:

And this, the seal of the state of Kerala. Is that Impact? I can't tell:

The tricky thing about painting things, I imagine, comes when you're advertising. Logos and brands must stay precise and identical, but I don't think Vodafone will be disappointed at these:

Because the actual logo of Vodafone looks like this: