Mango season is in full force now – vendors are parking their carts full of yellow and green and red fruits all over the city, and I have been trying hard to learn all the different varieties. Auntie occasionally makes a chilled mango soup that we eat for dessert at lunch time, and it is amazing.
This weekend, I stopped by one phulwala’s cart and bought one of each kind of mango he had – a total of four, though there are literally hundreds of varieties in India. At home Auntie chopped them up for me and laid them out of a big platter. The cheapest and least tasty mango was the one I recognized as the mangoes we get in the States. Not impressive. The other three were amazing and so different. I couldn’t decide which I liked best, and there I so many others I have to try this summer.
Salsa Dancing in India?
I attended a dance recital of one of my Indian friends here who decided to take up salsa dancing. Apparently, salsa in India really means doing lots of twirls and spins to upbeat Bollywood songs. It was barely recognizable. There was also a waltz number, but for all I know it was the cha-cha to techno music. Still it was amusing. I was especially surprised at one dance number a group of little girls did to the song “Smack That.” I assume in uber-conservative Rajasthan no one knows what the lyrics really mean.
Circus
This weekend my friends and I went to the circus. We were drawn to it by the very old-school colorful circus posters around town, advertising bearded ladies and other sideshow characters you would think just don’t exist anymore. Only in India.
The circus was awful, but also amazing. It was under one circular tent, where plastic chairs were set up around a stage that was literally a pile of shoveled dirt. The “stage” was hard to see sometimes because of all the poles and ropes holding up the tent. When we arrived, there were ten white fluffy dogs prancing around the stage doing unimpressive tricks – like walking on their hind legs, or standing on a ball. Later came two elephants who played cricket, then a strong woman who lifted a large dumbbell, then little girls who twirled plates on long poles. There was also a tightrope walker. During the whole performance there were several characters always onstage, including a very fat little man dressed in a red polkadot jumpsuit and a clown. At one point between acts, the little man took off his shirt and the clown started spanking him with the cricket bat. Fabulous!
In short, the whole show seemed like a dress rehearsal for a bad magic show for kindergarteners. There was no lighting at all, no transitioning between acts, and the music was mostly dance remixes of bad 80s and 90s songs, including Backstreet Boys and Shania Twain. Though the whole show was three hours, we left after one.
Bombings in Jaipur
About an hour after the bomb blasts shook Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan, someone turned on the news where I was sitting and we saw the Pink City in shock. I had just been to Jaipur about two months ago and recognized many of the places where the bombs were planted. Everyone here was so surprised that this happened in Jaipur, and though everyone feels safe in Udaipur still, the city was put on red alert the next day. I didn’t go to work the next day because all government institutions were closed (and apparently my NGO is part GO). I did take an auto through the city to meet up with some friends for lunch, and everyone was eerily deserted. Today, two days later, things seem back to normal.
Some pictures of the circus...
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