Sorry for no updates: I wrote this a week ago but forgot to put it up.
The tempo of India is very odd.
One side of it is the mania of the city. Cars go stupidly fast through small spaces. Autorickshaws crowd onto the pavement. English itself is spoken at a rapid, often unintelligible pace.
Yet at the same time, many aspects of life are very slow. Sorting things out takes forever. People have an enormous bureaucratic self importance, going into great complex length where brevity will do. An example from today; 'awards' became 'prize awardance ceremony'.
Service in bars and restaurants is glacial. It's not rudeness or incompetence - just a complete difference of expectations. It is slightly reminsicient of Corsica in the sense that the service economy has not yet really arrived, although this is less to do with how they treat foreigners and more to do with how they treat everyone. On that note, there are basically zero tourists here. I have seen literally one white person not from the school walking the streets.
Here's a photo.
Keep em coming, we're reading.
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