Goan paradise?

Well...we've been in goa for two days now. The beach really is
unbelievable. The water is so warm that even david and quack! went
swimming. So yes...it really is idyllic...perfect blue skies, warm
ocean water, and a bunch of indian men in their underwear taking
pictures of you. WHAT? That's right girls...if you're ever planning on
coming to goa, expect to be oggled and photographed by indian young
men in their underwear (instead of swimsuits). They just stand there
and stare...its unbelievably annoying but pretty harmless.

A peculiar nuance of this beach is that the lifeguards don't allow
indian people to swim in the 'non indian ' areas. So the layout of
our beach, which is called colva beach, is that you come onto the
beach and at the entrance there are literally hundreds of indian
people standing on the beach and in the water. To be more clear...no
one is sitting or swimming...everyone is just standing. The women are
fully clothed in the water. There's a bunch of shacks with yummy
seafood and beach chairs a bit to the left of the entrance. These are
basically foreign only areas, and the lifeguards spend all day shooing
away these groups of men in their underwear to the indian section.

Our waiter explained that this is done because these groups of men are
often rowdy and drunk and the lifeguards want to ensure that they are
all kept in the same area. Let's think about this for a moment...you
are in charge of managing several large groups of intoxicated young
men in their underwear. Do you
a. Force them all into a small area
b. Allow them to be separated
I dunno...the answer seems kind of intuitive to me, but perhaps our
russian readers can shed some light on this behavior...

Goa is definitely the most westernized of all of the cities that we've
been to. There seems to be much less poverty and the people coming up
to us and selling us anything from swimming with dolphins to bracelets
made out of fish bone are much less insistent and tend to leave you
alone after the third or fourth no (as opposed to the fifteenth no in
the north).

On another note...last night we were all so friggin tired of indian
food that we drove an hour to goa's little italy. The brick oven pizza
was truly like pizza in italy...yum. The bolognese was also yummy.

-ellen

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