I Hate The Chinese

I hate the Chinese. I hate them. Right from their flat faces to their straight black hair to their cacophonic language to its horrible script, not to mention their food (the one we get in India is nowhere near what they themselves eat). Worst of all, I hate the fact that some of them can’t speak proper English even when living in the heart of New York.

Sample this. We are in a very posh downtown area of Manhattan, and suddenly two blocks down, we find ourselves lost. As we walk down into Chinatown, New York, for all practical purposes, disappears. For all you know, it’s as good as finding yourself in the heart of mainland China, and not just a small part of Manhattan.

We had gone to Chinatown to book the tickets for trip to the Niagara Falls and back. On the streets in Chinatown, each and every single sign on every shop was in that damned script of theirs. Even McDonalds was not spared, and only their iconic yellow M was there in English (possibly they mistook it for just an arch and not an actual letter, else even that would have been replaced by an ugly squiggle). The only things to reassure us that the US visa was sufficient to roam around here were the names of the streets and the occasional blacks and whites who were doing their cheap shopping around.

However, when we actually entered the office of the tour company, save for the large maps of the US plastered on the walls, there was no indication that we were in the US. All the office staff was composed of Chinese girls, who chattered away to each other in the most irritating voices in that dratted language that made me feel like flattening their already smooth faces. Even when they attended calls they spoke only Chinese (Mandarin, to be precise), with the only incidence of English being the pleasantries hello and thank you. Possibly, there might be a bit more English in use in China itself. All the files that lined the cabinets had bold lettering in Chinese and let’s not talk about the décor at all.

We did manage to book the tour tickets, but their limited vocabulary was a major hindrance. The tour guide who accompanied us on the tour was also a Chinese girl (cute in a short-haired Chinese sort of way), but mercifully spoke better English since she was a law school undergraduate working part-time. Imagine a foreigner showing us our own country back India; its unimaginable. Such a travesty would be downright shameful In India, but the Yankees don’t seem to mind it one bit. It’s a downside of cold capitalism that they have to live with.

My hatred for these flatfaces started on our trip to Australia when our hotel in Sydney was right in the middle of the Chinatown there (they have them in every city that they live in; they just don’t know how to blend in like us desis). Here as well, their populations are swelling like crazy and what once used to be Little Italy and Chinatown alongside each other is now two blocks of Little Italy surrounded by vast expanses of Chinatown. Let me tell you Australia with their tiny population is soon going to be overrun by them and here as well they have made themselves indispensable to the American economy. They are pretty much on the verge of taking over the tourism travel industry around New York by offering unbeatable prices so that it’s impossible to get rid of them now. Quite possibly they might spread their ugly talons all over the US right under the noses of the unsuspecting local pink pigs.

The actual trip to Niagara was decent, though the falls themselves underwhelmed me. I expected them to be in the heart of the wilderness but the area around is very much urbanized. They are really massive and are more deafening than the Ensiferum concert of Moodi ’08, but I expected something of gargantuan proportions. The wind and the mist, though, are something to behold. The biggest positive to come out of the trip was getting the tour guide (I refer to her as such because I really did not get her name despite her repeated attempts to spell it out) to admit she found me quite handsome, which probably means I could have got further had I not been under the constant unwavering surveillance of my parents.

Currently I am already on the west coast which puts me way behind schedule as I have already done D.C., Chicago and Vegas. So you could expect a few quick posts sooner rather than later with all the latest scoops of my trip.

The Big Apple

If New York were to be described in a word, I would say, the most appropriate for me at least, would be overwhelming. I used to ridicule Karan Johar and his fixation with the city, but after having been there and experienced the vibe of the place first hand, it’s easy to see why anyone would fall in love with it so easily.

The very evening we reached NYC, we decided to go for a stroll around our Holiday Inn, without having ever taken one look at map, virtual or otherwise, and completely by accident stumbled upon the iconic landmark that is the Times Square. We had no idea which direction we were walking in, for the proper ‘Say Cheese’-type sightseeing we had planned for the next two days, so we realized we had picked a most strategically positioned hotel only when we walked right into the brilliantly lit crossroads.

Times Square is such a visited spot, its attraction is practically built around the advertisements that cover the surrounding buildings from top to bottom. Being probably the most expensive ad space in the world, none of the ads are hoardings; they are all massive LCD screens with the most vibrant of advertisements on everything ranging from sitcoms to fast food to movies to banks. There are, of course, entire screens devoted entirely to one company, such as the iconic Coca Cola ad screen that plays umpteen Coke ads round the clock, 365 days a year.

Since Times Square is actually a junction on Broadway, we also had a most enjoyable walk down one of the world’s most glamorous streets known to me since Mary Jane (Spiderman’s babe) is a singer/actor (I can’t remember which) on a Broadway show.

Such is the radiance of the place, it’s hard for a city slicker like me not to fall in love with the glittering and flashing psychedelic neon and LED signs all around. Despite the bomb scare just a week ago, the place was teeming with people, tourists mostly, although clearly NYPD had personnel working overtime in the area.

Another thing most likeable about NYC are the numerous cafés and pubs that line almost all the streets of middle and downtown Manhattan. These joints are all full at 5 or so, when the office-going public throng to them to unwind, and most boisterous scenes can be found at these places that invariably have about 4 televisions, one covering each of the 4 popular sports in the US, baseball, basketball, football (the armour-costumed one, not the beautiful game that is soccer to these idiots) and ice hockey. This roadside café culture was evident in Europe as well, and is one of the biggest things we miss in India.

The next two days were spent doing the most typical type of sightseeing, i.e. clicking photos of all the major tourist attractions, garnering a truckload of information that does not last the weekend et al. We saw all the major stuff, such as the Statue of Liberty (unimpressive), the view of Manhattan from atop the Empire State Building (impressive), Ground Zero, Wall Street amid other inconsequential places most of which I have forgotten by now. One memorable moment was when we visited the statue of the Wall Street Bull, a most imposing and aggressive-looking creature, whose privacy is violated daily by millions of tourists, who prefer their photos not catching it by its horns but by the poor creature’s privates.

To see all this stuff, we took a tour of the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus services, which has open top buses running a loop every half hour with encyclopedias for guides to do the commentary. If anyone is keen on visiting in the near or distant future, please not that as far as possible avoid buses with female tour guides and stick to the male ones as they present their stories in far more interesting ways. All the female (mind, you, they are all middle-aged or old, so the other incentive is absent as well) tour guides care about is the ornate architecture of the older buildings and nothing else. By the end of the day, they also coat their mikes with a shade of deep red with their lipstick. I admit the last detail is inconsequential but it is the sort of thing that one cannot help but notice. (This last line has been copied almost verbatim from a Chetan Bhagat novel; if you remember which one, like I can, good and if you remember exactly where, you are a genius, like me).

One interesting observation is that New York does not seem to be quite as fashionable as one would imagine. The people walking the streets range from the highly trendy to downright grungy. Importantly, not once did we look even a touch out of place in our cheap clothing, which is in stark contrast to some of the places in Europe that I have visited, where we felt downright shabby walking past the impeccably dressed locals.

This pretty much completes all that was worth mentioning about the Big Apple, the rest you can read about on Wiki. We spent the next couple of days going on a return trip to the Niagara Falls, but that’s for another blog. Ta da!!!

The Longest Thursday

Thursday the 6^th of May was by far the longest Thursday of my life, and probably the longest day as well. To be precise, it lasted exactly 34 hours and 30 minutes. That’s because the Eastern Standard Time in the US is 5 hours behind GMT and we are 5-and-a-half hours ahead. Actually, my day had started on the morning of the 5^th itself, when we had to demonstrate the damned electronic project, so you could say it stretched itself out over a good 50 hours or so, interspersed with intermittent sleep.

I thought there might be jet lag, especially since the US is pretty much on the other side of the globe from India, but no such problems faced. Considering the prided propensity for nightouts we IITians have (we almost live in the American time zone), I was sure I would have no jet lag issues, but what was surprising was that even the rest of my family had no problems adjusting to almost an inverted time zone.

The flight we took was Emirates, and I must say it has to be one of the world’s best, in stark contrast to the last time I flew, when it was Alitalia which is one of the worst. Admittedly, legroom will always be at a premium as long as we Indians fly economy, and I can’t wait until I’m close to the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. The major impressive factor about Emirates was that the food was clearly distinguishable from the containers that packed it, both in terms of looks as well as taste (No I did not taste the cardboard containers although I am very much capable of that as well, but imagine lukewarm soggy paper pulp; that’s Alitalia for you).

Another most useful thing about Emirates was their entertainment library. It had close to a hundred movies or so, and infinite songs, and I ended up watching The Informant, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Law Abiding Citizen and slept through most of Crazy Heart.

The third thing that’s great about the airline is the stopover at Dubai. I was impressed by the revamped CSIA, with its new duty-free area and stuff. Dubai put it to shame. The terminal at which we had to make our transit probably had more gates than all the airports all over India put together and then some.

We pride ourselves calling Mumbai a cosmopolitan. Let’s face it, it’s not; we’re only kidding ourselves. The sheer ethnic diversity visible in just about π/4 degrees of solid angle (I crave forgiveness here; after all we’re engineers) is simply overwhelming. To classify things broadly, there are 4 major races in the world that my family likes to put in Marathi as kale, gore, chapte aani aapan (translating to Blacks, Whites, Orientals and us) and each and every one of these was visible in ample measure. New York is no different, with the small exception that the proportion of Blacks shoots up and the Middle Easterns goes down. Mumbai is still only a metropolitan and has a long way to go.

Dubai airport is also where I caught the very first live sighting of what I strongly suspect were you-know-what implants. We’ve read about them in the papers, drooled over them on the net till we were sick of them but hadn’t seen them actually. Obviously, I cannot tell for certain when they are fully clothed and approximately 7.5 metres away, but suffice it to say that their obnoxious proportions in comparison to perfectly normal-sized other body parts, not to mention my expertise in these matters thanks to my fabled passion for pondiyaap is reason enough for them to be labeled implants.

That’s it for the journey here; hope to come up with something else soon…

Testing...

Howdy all!!! This is my first attempt at blogging so excuse me if I sound boring at first. I will take some time to get into the groove and keep you entertained; besides I’m not even sure how much time I’m going to be able to find to keep up this blog. For all you know, this may well be my last!

The first time I put up a USA trip-related status message, I got about 10 people pinging me to ask if I have cracked an intern here. I have not. This is merely a family trip, and I am accompanied by my parents and younger sister. As a result, you may find that this is a story of an aimless traveller tagging along with his family. Imagine going to Las Vegas and having your hands, legs, eyeballs and libido put on a tight leash by the presence of your family. I haven’t reached there yet, but will in a week’s time or so, and I’m quite sure it’s not going to be as enjoyable as initially imagined.

I will be trying my best not to make this a mere documentation of my travels; I’m sure nobody wants to read an information brochure on all the places we’ll be visiting – Wikipedia is more than enough for that. I hope to talk about stuff in a lighter vein.

There are two major downsides to our month-long trip here. The first is that I have been unable to apply for any internship as nobody offers one for just 5 weeks or so. The second, and the far more grave issue at that, is that I have been absolutely cut-off from what’s been happening at the World T20 in the Caribbean. All these stupid Americans care about is their baseball season; most of the sports pages in all newspapers are devoted entirely to how closely the Yankees lost to the Tigers, with the remainder of them covering basketball and a single column Tiger Woods. That’s it. It’s as if they couldn’t care less about what the rest of the world is up to; almost as if the rest of the world doesn’t even exist.

In retrospect, though, considering India’s pathetic showing at the World Cup, it’s just as well I did not get to see it. In any case, the real deal starts on June 11.

As a statutory warning, I must say I am liable to slip in gross and obscene information or opinions provided I am able to continue blogging. I will, of course, forewarn readers as and when aforesaid objectionable material comes along, so that you may back off if needed.

Our trip started 6 days ago, but today is the first time I got a decent amount of time to sit and type. So obviously the blog’s calendar will be running 6 days behind schedule. I hope to find lots of time tomorrow to keep abreast of my real schedule, so you may expect to read a couple of blog posts tomorrow, if you’re interested in reading, of course.

So till then, adios amigos!!!