Oh India...

Well....I don't even know where to begin. We took an overnight train
in india. This adventure began when we arrived at the goa train
station. There were lots of police casually standing around with fully
automatic weapons...they were just kind of throwing them around and
holding them so that they were pointed at civilians. In order to
escape these obviously undertrained "soldiers" and the nostalgic smell
of urine at a train station, we decided to pay the fifty cents and to
sit in the lounge for people with air conditioned sleeper car tickets.
We were able to lose the urine smell but traded it in for the musty
B.O. odor of the a/c lounge. As we were sitting there, one of those
officers came in and literally started unloading and reloading his
automatic weapon. He just put his weapon in the lounge chair and fed
it bullets one by one ... there was zero regard for the safety of the
civilians in the room.

I thought we were done with the worst of the trip but boy was I wrong.
We got on the train, which arrived an hour late, and I was brutally
shocked. The train was so outdated that it looked like it was built in
the fifties. The beds were actually benches covered in cheap, blue
leather, and the windows, floors, and sheets were just gross. To our
surprise, there were some squatters using wenjun and eugene's beds.
You see, the trains in india have many sections. We were in 2AC, which
was the best one for that train. I shudder to think what the non AC
sitting cars look and smell like. Anyway, these squatters were from
the non AC sitting car and were just looking for a place to sleep. We
had to kick them out and get new gross sheets.

So, I naturally started freaking out. Let me just paint this picture
for you ... Its dark, it smells, and everyone on the train is asleep.
I start with my "what the f..." speech, and
poor david is desperately trying to calm me down and get me into the
top barrack to ensure that I cause minimal trouble. I got up into my
cage and david took one look at me and ¡started laughing maniacally.
It wasn't a normal david laugh ... It was this insane nervous
ridiculous I can't believe this is happening laugh. Eugene and wenjun
took one look at david and also started laughing. So there we
were...me cursing in my upper cage and eugene, wenjun, and david
laughing uncontrollably. We finally calmed down, and wenjun decided
to use the bathroom in the hopes that she could just go to sleep and
not have to use it again for the rest of our sixteen hour trip.
Unfortunately, the conductor was asleep in the washroom....so you
couldn't really come in. The rest of the ride continued in this
manner...eugene found a brillo pad in his food.

Needless to say, we were thrilled to arrive in westernized, quaint
Kochi. We thought...what better way to erase the memory of the train
ride than a nice, relaxing ayurvedic massage (specialty of the kerala
region). Oh boy were we mistaken. We got back to back appointments
(separate for men and women), and I went after wenjun. So, she was in
the washroom when I came in. They made me remove all of my clothes and
placed around my waist what can only be described as cheesecloth
string underwear. The place was totally unsanitary, with seeing walls
and a giant oily wooden table. The two women masseuses made me sit on
an oily wooden box and dumped a vat of smelly oil on my head and
started rubbing it in in strange patting motions. Then, they made me
slip onto the oily wooden table and ladled even smellier oil on my
whole body. At that moment, wenjun was ready to come out of thw
washroom. The only way out was through my "massage" room. I covered
all the relevant parts and she darted out. Then, the "massage"
continued. The two women made grand, simultaneous movements that
covered my ENTIRE body. It is not like massages in america. The
objective was not to sort out tense muscles but instead to create
friction with your skin and produce heat in a synchronous way on both
sides of your body. Anyway it was absolutely disgusting...I felt like
I was sliding around in a nasty vat of oil. This went on for an hour.
They then tried to dit me in what looked like a wooden torture
chamber. This tiny box with smelly steam coming into it was their
herbal steam room. I sat there for a total of three seconds and then
darted (as fast as I could since I was totally oiled) into what i
thought was a shower. Instead, they brought me this bucket of boiling
water and a bucket of cold water. I had to mix the hot and cold water
in another bucket and try to wash the oil of my skin. A wood sander
would have been more useful than the soap I had. My towel
was...surprise...another cheesecloth. Two-ply this time. I washed
myself...kinda. I was still mostly oily but I didn't care...I put my
clothes on, threw money at them, and ran out of there. I was
traumatized for quite some time after that. Oy.

-mayor of negative town

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