William, My New Entrepreneur Friend

I saw my new friends the next morning. ...Afternoon. All this time I'd been eating outside of the hostel, but they told me the food here was amazing so I decided to try it out. I was not disappointed. In fact, this was probably the best food I'd had yet in all of India. Chicken tikka masala for the win. I can't believe I'd been missing out on this the last couple days! After breakfast, I headed out to find a travel agent. My next destination is the southern state of Kerala and I need to figure out how to make that happen. Oh, and it's a holiday here today. Again. Because that's how things are in India.

Holiday festivities. Of some sort. I think this celebration
involved sinking one of the gods into the sea.
Is that offensive? Is it offensive to ask if that's offensive?
I need to become more worldly.

So... here's how that went. I walked into the first travel agent's office. It was a woman working by herself. She did not seem happy. I walk in with my usual smile and she snaps at me "what do you want?" So I tell her I want to go to Kerala. Without saying anything to me, she gets on her cell phone. So I ask her her name. She doesn't respond. I ask again. No response. I ask again in Hindi (which, whoops, isn't the local language here). This time she turns to me and snaps again "you don't want to know my name, you want to book a ticket." At that point I smiled back at her, said thank you, and walked out. About 200 feet down the road I found another travel agent who, I kid you not, was smoking a blunt, out in the open, while he was helping two other clients. The other clients were Canadians, a super nice, young couple. When dude saw us giving each other glances he was like "what, do you guys want some?" I asked him about my travels, he quoted some absolutely ridiculous prices, and at that point I decided I'm just going to do this on my own.

William's shop is down the road to the right. Apparently
close to the "Razor N Scissors" which I assume is where
he gets his hair cut. After all it is the "Stylist Salon in Town".

Near my hostel, there's a little snack stand run by a guy named William. William is awesome. He's probably in his sixties, skinny, maybe 5"10, standard brown-skinned Indian but with no discernible Indian accent. He spent a lot of time abroad before coming back to India. I've purchased water from William a few times now and chatted with him briefly each time. He's been really nice and helpful whenever I've needed to find something in the area. On my way back, he invited to me to sit down with him at his stand. It's on somewhat of a back road so there's basically zero car traffic and very little foot traffic. I was curious about William's business so I asked him about it. He started with a shop half it's current size, but with his success he was able to expand. That success was driven primarily by the money he made from his phone booth. I think you can see where this story is headed. Over time, the phone book earning took a dive. He wants to invest money into giving his place a facelift, but he doesn't see that being a profitable use of money. I concur. The shop could definitely use an upgrade, but it's just not located in the right place and it's not differentiated enough to draw people to it. Shops like his are all over the place, which makes location the big key to success. He'd have to branch out into a new line of business if he really want to make that investment in his business worthwhile. So for the time being, he's getting by just fine. He owns his property, which from the looks of it on the outside is pretty big, relatively speaking. I asked William about microfinance and he was really familiar with the concept. It would seem that access to capital wasn't the issue here, but rather the core business itself.

I really wanted to be able to help him. Maybe someday.

This Doesn't Happen At Home

Cape Town Cafe: No, not that Cape Town.
And no, not even really a cafe.
Photo courtesy of TripAdvisor

So here's the scene: I'm at a place called Cape Town Cafe. It's an outdoor bar with a bumpin' nightclub on the inside and almost exclusively patronized by expats. It also happens to be one of the few places where a handful of people are still out at midnight on a Wednesday night. Which is where I've been for the last hour. Sitting with the beautiful, Swedish 20-something I met earlier today and talking about our world travels.

I'm definitely not in America anymore.

Nothing too crazy happened today until the evening time. I hung out on my own most of the day. Around 7pm as I was heading back up to my room, I saw a guy on his laptop in courtyard. He seemed normal enough so I invited him to play a game of pool with me. I found out that SE is from Germany and has been traveling for a while. He does something technical sales-y that I didn't really understand but that I'm sure is very important and that let's him travel a lot. He also claims to have mastered the Indian head nod (also referred to as the Indian head bob, bobble, wobble, or shake). For those of you unfamiliar with the Indian head nod, it's a sort of side-to-side movement of the head that sometimes means yes, sometimes means no, sometimes means "I don't want to say no," sometimes is a sign of acknowledgement, and sometimes means something else entirely. It's sort of like the Swiss Army knife of gestures, you can use it in any number of situations depending on your needs at the time. Unfortunately for SE, he doesn't actually have it as mastered as he thinks he does. Sorry, buddy.

He had met another couple girls also staying in our hostel and invited me to go out with them later. We played a few games of pool and then the girls came out to hang out in the courtyard. They're both really friendly and the four of us played a card (and beverage-enhanced) game of Ring of Fire. I know the game as Kings, except some of the rules were a little different, which definitely threw me off (though to be fair, playing with water gives me a huge advantage). MT is the first girl I've ever met from Wales.

via Wikipedia

Side note: In this edition of Know Your Planet, we cover Wales. In case you were wondering, yes, Wales is in fact it's own country and not part of England. Though it is part of the United Kingdom. Which is not, I repeat not synonymous with England because England is part of and not the entirety of the UK. Sort of like how a square is a rectangle 100% of the time but a rectangle is not necessarily a square. Sort of. Not exactly.

My understanding of Welsh girls (N=1) is that every other sentence they say sounds like it should end in "and then we had tea and crumpets." The other girl is SR who is from Sweden. Is this the first girl I've met from Sweden on my travels? Maybe. I tend to mix up my Nordic countries.

Where all the cool Swedes go to live it up on a Saturday night

A few hours later around 10:45pm we head out toward what is apparently the only cool place that's open at this time of night at this time of year, Cape Town Cafe. It's fairly close to our hostel so it wasn't a big deal to get there. It was a cool scene, even if somewhat lacking of... people. We met up with dudes (read: bros) some people that SE knew and joined a table with them. Cool guys from... Australia and... maybe some other English-speaking places. Everyone scattered for a while and SR educated me on the Netherlands. According to her, the stereotype of people from Sweden is that they're all beautiful, blonde, spend all of their time at IKEA, and love meatballs. I confirmed that this is, indeed, the stereotype of Swedish people. And though she patently denied that this is true, I found out through the course of our conversation that she used to work at... drumroll please... IKEA! And, AND she happens to love meatballs. I'll chalk that one up as a win for this guy.

The girls got shwasteyfaced to a stupid degree and continued onto the next bar with the bros. SE and I called it a night around 2am and walked back to the hostel. There's something pretty special about walking through an unknown street in a foreign country in peacefulness of the middle of the night. Did we run into livestock roaming the streets on the way home? You betcha.

Go on to Goa Part 5: William, My New Entrepreneur Friend

Calangute Beach and Yes, It's Still Fully Clothed

This photo is from the website, so it looks particularly nice.
To be fair, it actually was a pretty nice place.

For a multitude of reasons, I decided to leave this particular hostel and head to a different part of Goa. I found a place a few minutes south near Calangute Beach. When I arrived, my room smelled like smoke. As with most things in India, it's just a matter of finding the right person to fix your problem. The first two people I talked to were like "what? No it's fine, don't worry about it" but the third guy I talked to was the manager and he moved me to a new room right away. This place was actually pretty nice. It has a pool (which apparently never gets used at this time of year) in the courtyard. Oh, and a courtyard.

97:1 - the ratio of people outside the water vs. in it

After getting settled, I walked down the road to Calangute Beach. I'm still kind of sick, so I wanted another relaxing day. I got down to the beach and there were a lot of fully-clothed Indian dudes and a handful of fully-clothed Indian ladies. I walked along the beach for about 45 minutes or so. I was only accosted to buy things about five times. Which is better than average. The weather wasn't ideal, which, again, my fault for coming here at this time of year. I walked down (technically up) to Baga Beach, which is connected to Calangute Beach. Once I reached the end, I found a spot to get some food and finally did what I planned on doing since I got to Goa: busted out the first book of Game of Thrones, which I bought waaaaay back in Bangladesh.

Yes, I read a book at a place called La Shack. In India.

While I was reading/eating, there was a band of kids walking up and down the beach performing various circus tricks. I've seen kids all over the place, but something struck me as particularly sad about this scene. I think it was the security guard at one of the restaurants shooing them away, but even him showing them some compassion by letting them perform for a few seconds so they could collect some money from the Asian tourists at the next restaurant over before he shooed them away.

I've also decided to open my own tattoo
parlor. You're welcome, world.

I saw a KFC on the way to the hostel so I decided to check it out. I wanted to explore a little more of the area on foot and was in the mood for some Western comfort, so this was perfect. The food was fine, but this KFC was actually really, really nice. I sat in a comfy, leather seat with Game of Thrones and read for a while before heading back. It started pouring rain on my way home. Of course. I spent the rest of the night relaxing back at my hostel. I'm really glad I came to this new place; I'm much happier here than I was at the last one.

Go on to Goa Part 4: This Doesn't Happen At Home