Goa Day 2

14/06/2013

I’ve noticed that all women in India have long hair.  I’ve not seen one woman with even medium length hair let alone short hair. 

I also can’t believe how many whitening creams are advertised on TV.  At home it’s all about anti-wrinkle cream and then the odd tinted moisturiser with a tenner lady thrown in for good measure.  Here, every 4^th advert is a whitening cream, I’ve not seen any promoting anti-wrinkle.  I guess with the natural resilience to sun wrinkles aren’t as much of a problem as they are to us Caucasians.  At home Garnier gives you a wrinkle chart to map your progress, here they give you a shade chart to map the ‘4 shades lighter’ that they promise you to be in a week.  I’ve noticed that all the people on adverts are all very fair skinned too, I’ve not even seen a medium toned Indian on TV.  It’s so funny when you see the east/west divide like that.  All the adverts are in spoken in English too, some with a token amount of Indian but not a lot.

Today was an extremely lazy day.  We walked down to the beach (after walking in completely the wrong direction first) and watched the big waves crashing in (they even litter their beaches here too, for a people with so much respect for animal life and harmony they don’t give a toss about the environment and cleanliness).  Although it was overcast (and not raining, yey!) it was so humid.  By the time we’d walked back to the hotel we were dripping with sweat so went back for a shower and ended up having a nap too.

  

I was reading Indian Grazia and where it’s Monsoon season all the fashion is angled towards that.  If they made rain a bit more fashionable at home it might make it a bit more tolerable!  (Might, but probably not).  Hunter willies are the festival fashion but that’s where it seems to stop.  What about umbrella hats and waders? That would make the 8 months a year of rain a bit more tolerable even just for the entertainment value.

They have HBO as one of their standard channels here (we had feared the worst when there was no set top box in the room, not that we’re the type to waste time in a room but it’s nice to chill out with a bit of TV before bed) it plays films all days long and has English subtitles aswell as the speech still being in English, I guess with the American accents it’s easier for people to translate the text.  It’s funny to watch the substitutions they make for words; they don’t seem to have ‘sh*t’ in their vocabulary as this is always left in in both speech and text no matter what time of the day whereas ‘ass’ will be bleeped in speech and asterix’d in the text and they swap ‘hell’ for ‘heck’ in the text and ‘damn’ for ‘darn’ but let them say both words so I guess they have no meaning here.

They have the Discovery channel here too showing all American shows.  Now I know the yanks like a bit of drama but the over dramatics in everything just borders on ridiculous.  You can’t watch a show without there being some impending disaster they have to try and avoid.  It’s getting really tiresome now and we’ve hardly had these shows on, there’s no way I could handle that being the style of TV all the time.  Maybe Americans need to all take up base jumping or paragliding to give them more thrills in their daily life and then they can just enjoy a simple TV show without the dire need to get their pulses racing as to whether bakers bread is going to rise or whether the driver is going to get a flat when he has a delivery to make on a time limit.  (Admittedly these weren’t the shows I watched but I think that’s due to them being too tense for the American public, clearly post-watershed viewing).

Every episode of Deadliest Catch is the same, luckily it’s not been on here but it’s the worst one for over dramatics and Will always watches it at home.  They always make their catch every episode so the rotation through different camera angles, the dramatic music and the deep voiced commentator are so unnecessary.  “Out in the deadly seas of Dutch Harbour the skipper fears if he doesn’t make a catch soon they....” they will what?  Just try again the next day?  Oh my heart is in my mouth.  They’re at sea for weeks on end, they’re never going to catch nothing!  Once you’ve seen one episode you’ve seen them all. 

Delhi belly has officially hit Will in Goa, I’m on/off too which is weird as I’m not doing anything different here than I was in the other places.  We headed to the pub for some food and to use the wifi and Will had to dash back to the hotel only just making it in time.  I had to make a dash to the toilet in the pub praying there was toilet roll.  If there wasn’t then I wasn’t sure what I was going to do!  Wait around until Will came looking for me thinking I’d got stuck, or gently wimper for help when I heard another customer come into the toilet?  Luckily there was toilet roll, a bonus for being in the main tourist area.  A couple of young Indian girls had followed me into the toilet and hung around outside the cubicle for no apparent reason, I bet they quickly regretted that!

We popped into a tourist information office to see what there was to do nearby and they said everything is shut for monsoon season.  The other Tourist Information office (that we also checked with as we didn’t trust the others) had 3 tours on offer but the only one that really interested us was the elephant trip but as we’re going to Sri Lanka which to elephants is what Spain is to cats or what India is to cows we didn’t go ahead with booking. 

When we came out we saw a cake shop and popped in for some chocolate cake.  I wasn’t expecting much to be honest but their fudge cake was incredible!  It was so moist and rich, Will ended up buying another 2 slices to take with us. 

As I previously mentioned the men in India hold hands as a sign of friendship and not in any kind of gay way.  It just seems strange to me for 2 heterosexual men to want to hold hands.  I guess it’s because I’ve only ever linked it to an affection thing (or for children)  and for them it’s only seen as a friendship thing (I don’t think I’ve seen couples holding hands here) but it does still look a bit strange.  I managed to get a photo this time:

We had some food in the bar and looked up things to see in Sri Lanka.  Had I known the weather was going to be so bad we’d have stayed here a day or 2 less and had longer over there.  At least we’re getting to relax and recuperate as it looks like it’s going to be a hectic trip to Sri Lanka to fit everything in. 

It was Karaoke night in the bar which was a mix of Western and local songs.  Some Indian boys had guitars with them and they got up and played ‘Tears Don’t Fall’ by Bullet For My Valentine then ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd.  I was impressed they knew Bullet For My Valentine, not many British people I know know Bullet For My Valentine!  I was chatting to one of them and he said there is interest in Rock and Metal music in India but they tend to lean more towards the classic bands like Metallica and other classic groups. 

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a pharmacy for more anti-diarrhoea tablets.  We were about to rock/paper/scissor to see who was going to have to act out diarrhoea this time but luckily the guy knew exactly what we needed.  What a relief!

Back at the hotel I thought I’d back up my photos onto my new pen drive and try out my £1.80 memory card reader which I’m happy to say works perfectly!  Thank you Mumbai.