Namaste!

man, i don't know where to start. I've only been here since yesterday morning, but it feels like a week. This is possibly to do with the fact that I went to sleep and got up twice during the day yesterday due to severe jetlag! The flight was pretty good except for one huge catastrophe: I lost the squishy bit off of on of my sony headphones!! Now this may not seem like a catastrophe to most of you, but you have to understand that these headphones are my way of blocking out the world when necessary, like on hellish bus journey, and without them I am completely exposed to the harsh realities of Indian travel! However, i have a plan invlving an earplug, a swiss army knife, and a tube of superglue, which may yet resolve this catastrophic situation...

So anyway, I arrived in bombay in one piece, as did my guitar (thank god!), and we both made our way to the luggge claim, where I met some nice girls who wanted to share a taxi. After driving for 45 mins past some of the worst slums in the world, we finally arrived in coloba, and set about finding a hotel. By now it was 7am, and i hadn't slept since leaving england at 2pm the previous day. It would have been so nice to just sleep for 8 hours, but this would have been disastrous, as I would have woken up in the evening and been jetlagged for days, so after a quick nap, me and sarah (who i'm sharing a room with) headed out to meet the other guys from the cab ride, and set of into bombay. blah blah blah... sorry guys, I hate telling stories as a sequence of events like this... it's so boring and forced and qute frankly, it's just not flowing, so I'll just write radom things as and when they pop into my head. :)

Last night was the last night of Divali, which is an indian festival kinda like bonfire night crossed with xmas. We had heard that marine drive was the place to be so we jumped in a cab and headed there. We arrived to find an enormous long promenade packed with families setting off fireworks. The first thing I noticed was the shocking disregard for health and safety! In england, dad sets up the fireworks in a bucket full of sand, and then the kids stand back at a safe distance while he lights them. Here, dad hands his 8 year old kids a handful of fireworks and a burning wad of newspaper and tells them to go and light them by the main road while he sits on the wall of the promenade and watches at a safe distance! Even more reckless were the yound teens who would try to outdo each other with acts of stupidity. My favourites were: holding fountains in your hand, trying to light a group of fireworks after the first few are already going off and recieveing a face full of hot sparks, letting bangers go off in your hand whilst hlding them next to your ear, and my favourite of all, lighting random mentalist fireworks (ones that explode about 50 times and leap around the place shooting fire in all directions) whilst standing 3 inches away from them.

What was most fascinating of all about this display of apparant bravery/stupidity was how blase everyone seemed about it. A kid would light a firework, stick his face in it, very nearly lose and eye, and then laugh hysterically and do it again. Absolutely no one jumped when an explosion happened right beside them except us, the wimpy foreigners! In the midst of all this madness we made friends with some yound indian guys. One guy came ad started talking to me. He told me he was in the Indian Navy and was on shore leave. I asked his name. "Niel Ikshalamalam Pandit" he said (probably). "Ah, ok, I'm Billy Rowan Salisbury" I replied. "You can call me Billy for short if you like. What's your short name?". I was, of course, assuming he would say Niel. "Een Kee Pandit", he replied, ruining my hope for an easy to remember name. I decided the only way to remember this was to find an english sounding equivalent with an image to go with it, and finally settled on the Inky Bandit, fastest fountain pen in the west. :)

After the police had been by a few times in their jeep telling everyone over a large megaphone that the the 10pm firework curfew had just been declared, we headed of with the young Indian guys to have a drink. They said they knew a great little place to have a beer, which turned out to be the very Indian "Paulos Italian Pizzeria".

right, times up. lots more to tell but no time. heading to pushkar tomorrow night to the camel fair...

seeya! :)