Jaipur Explosion - Delhi Smog

I found out why Delhi was so smoggy over the weekend (thankfully it wasn't normal).  Over 1.5 weeks ago there was a massive explosion at an oil depot here, with 11 storage tanks exploding and burning for days (one of them is still burning today).  We were at a meeting today in an office less than half a mile away.  They were only allowed to return to the office yesterday, and today they were still cleaning up the aftermath.  The explosion had blown out all of the windows (even severely warping and snapping one of steel reinforcement grids over a large-pane window), all of the hanging ceiling tiles, created cracks in some of the doorways and walls, and blowing a lot of paint off the walls.  There were over 10 employees in the office at the time of the explosion, and only one was injured by some of the flying glass.

As you can see in the videos, the fires were massive... so massive that they were the source of the smog in Delhi, which is over 160 miles away.  In looking for a video of the explosion, I found the second video from a different explosion that happened over a year ago in Jaipur... while it's totally irrelevant, the reaction from the woman filming it is hilarious and I had to share.

From the Pink City

Tonight I flew into Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan and known as the "Pink City".  Ironically enough, it received that nickname because it's pink.  In preparation for a visit from the Prince of Wales in 1853, the city was painted pink to give the impression of red sandstone Mughal architecture (the Persian Mughals ruled most of what is currently India for about four hundred years prior to the British).

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This is the palace my hotel is part of.

 

Founded in the eighteenth century, Jaipur was India's first planned city.  As you can see in the map, it is laid out much more orderly and logically than most European cities.

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I think Paris makes for a good comparison.

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Jaipur has been named as the seventh best city to visit in Asia and has much better infrastructure than the rest of India.  The airport is shiny and new, in stark comparison to the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi (Indira Gandhi was an assassinated female Prime Minister, not the assassinated bald guy who led India to independence from the British Empire... she was assassinated by Sikhs after she sent troops into the holiest Sikh shrine to remove armed separatists who were amassing weapons there... the operation killed as many as 5,000 Sikhs).  The city has become a hub for education in India, sort of like Boston.

As visible in the photos, the city is famous for it's palaces and is known for it's hospitality.  The hotels and resorts are known for replicating the hospitality once reserved for royalty.  One of the coolest options is the Palace on Wheels, which runs throughout Rajasthan (pronounced closer to Rah-jah-stan).

We are in Jaipur because Rajasthan is India's largest (by land area) state, while also being one of the most populated and poor.  Outside of Jaipur, the state's economy is primarily agriculture and crafts, e.g. textiles, with high levels of malnutrition (about half the children) and child mortality rates (1 in 10 will die before age 5), with poor access to water (28% of households have running water, compared with nearly 90% for the entire nation) and sanitation.

We are mostly meeting with state government officials before heading to Hyderabad on Thursday, so unfortunately I don't think I am going to get to see much of the state beyond Jaipur.  If I do have time for an excursion, I'm going to head to the border with Pakistan to watch the daily flag ceremony.  I joked with some of my Indian friends that I should throw some quarters at the Pakistanis to see if I could provoke a border skirmish (don't worry, Mom, I won't... though I bet I could get an amazing book / movie deal out of it).

Non-Toxic Insecticide

I think my favorite airline experience so far has to have been the flight from Abu Dhabi to Delhi.  As we were preparing to take off, the flight attendants announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, per legal requirements, we must now spray the plane with a non-toxic insecticide."

Non-toxic insecticide?  That sounds like a pretty useless insecticide.

"The insecticide is not harmful, but if you would like to cover your mouth and nose, you may."

I'm pretty sure covering my mouth and nose is not going to be an effective approach for avoiding insecticide inhalation given that I will be breathing the same recirculating air for three hours.

One of the flight attendants proceeded to walk down the aisle with three misting aerosol cans, squinting her eyes and covering her nose and mouth.

Namaste

First thoughts on India - it too is a lot like China, only more chaotic (in a good way... unless you're into Soviet planning) and friendlier. Very smoggy this morning though. Even the airport was hazy. Unlike China and Nairobi, the haze seemed mostly to be woodfire smoke, not diesel pollution. It may be because I landed at around 3am local time, so later on in the day may be a different story.

One of the first things I noticed was how diverse India is.  Yes most of the people are Indian, but there are so many different racial, ethnic, and religious varieties that you don't see much of in the US (I think probably only because the very upper castes come to the US, giving us a much more homogenous perception of India than reality).  This was something I was intellectually aware of, but it really strikes you when you step off the plane.

I would also like to reiterate my opinion that Etihad Airways is horrible - their flight attendants are the slowest, most inept, and ill-trained I've ever encountered on international routes.  The only fathomable reason to ever fly them is price - it was only $500 for a one-way flight from Chicago to New Delhi, versus the $2k for my one-way flight from Geneva to Chicago on Tuesday.

As-Salam Alaykum From Abu Dhabi

I'm currently in Abu Dhabi awaiting my connection to New Dehli.  Some thoughts and facts from this leg of the trip so far:

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• Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which are seven emirates that have banded together into a federation (of course, the British were involved).  Abu Dhabi occupies 80% of the total area of the UAE.  You're probably more familiar with Dubai - home of the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building - and another one of the emirates


• Our flightplan took us straight over Iraq, including Baghdad and Basra... thought that was pretty cool.  Can I claim I've been to Iraq now?  It looks like our flight plan to India will take us over part of Iran... I'm totally going to claim I've been there as well


• In the US I think it's pretty standard to refer to the gulf here as the Persian Gulf.  For the Arab countries, that's the equivalent of Americans referring to Canada as the 51st state, only way, way worse (more like Pakistan declaring the Indian Ocean's new name is the Pakistan Ocean, or Japan renaming the China Sea, Puerto Rico claiming the Gulf of Puerto Rico, etc.), so as an American it was strange to see all the flightplan maps refer to it as the Arab Gulf.  When you think about it, it's strange that we refer to it as the Persian Gulf in the first place since Iran has been an unofficial member of the Axis of Evil for a good three decades now, and most of the Arab countries are officially "allies"


• Apparently in Mideastern and Indian cultures, it's ok to let your kid scream (not cry, flat out scream) for the duration of a 14 hour flight.  I think I may have found a source of alternative energy that they've been keeping under wraps.  Initially the worst offender was sitting right next to me (the risk of a bulkhead exit row) - lucky for him, his family ended up swapping seats with another family... otherwise, only one of us was likely to survive the trip.  My new neighbor's worst offense was repeatedly grabbing me and elbowing my arm off the armrest in her sleep (she was a tough little toddler)


• Despite being ridiculously rich in oil and natural gas, the UAE's national airline is actually pretty poor.  Terrible service, the plane was not in the best state of repair, the in-flight entertainment system was buggy, etc.  The airport is pretty disappointing as well.  I don't know why I'm surprised since throwing money at problems is never the solution (the US government still has yet to learn this lesson as well).  Perhaps a takeaway is that eventually all of our oil money is likely to find it's way back to the US?


• It's hot and humid here... I expected the heat, but really, since when are deserts humid?


• What does the rest of the world have against Diet Coke / Coke Light?  Looking for one here is like looking for the Hidden Imam


• Security is surprisingly lax here.  I realize it's a relatively benign Mideast state, but by Al-Qa'ida's standards, it's pretty much a Western, infidel-ious country.  I guess they have much bigger fish to fry, like the Saudi royal family next door (I think they rank about #3 on bin Laden's hit list, behind the US and Israel)


• I was walking around the shopping area here and saw a suspicious conference going on with three UAE policemen (who of course are very militaristic) and the manager of a luxury watch shop.  I decided I was really interested in the Tag Heuer section they were standing in and parked out right next to them.  To my surprise, they were conducting a shakedown in English, with no effort to be discreet.  I'm not really sure exactly what was going on, but the shop manager was talking about how he and his family are poor and he was giving money and gifts to some woman but ran out and wasn't able to continue doing so.  The policemen were pretty agitated and telling him he just needed to pay now.  I thought this was particularly strange since UAE's rulers are actually pretty smart about how they're spending their carbon fuel windfall - attracting Western businesses and universities to become a Mideast hub.  Subsequently, they're pretty rigid about corruption (at least the kind conducted in sums with less than eight zeros) and perceptions among foreigners.  I would imagine a cop shaking down a shop owner in their international airport would be risking having his hand cut off or something

I think I had a couple of other things I wanted to share, but they escape me now.  I'm off to find a Diet Coke / the Hidden Imam.  If I find him, I'll let him know that Ahmadinejad has been trying to reach him.  Maybe that can be the breakthrough Obama has been looking for.

Corrected Hippo Video

I accidentally embedded the hippo yawn video twice instead of the second being this one.  This is when I decided it probably wasn't a good idea to provoke a herd of semi-submerged hippos.

Videos - Giant Giraffe Heads, Bloodthirsty Hippos, Snapping Crocs, and Klepto Monkeys

I am alive!  Thanks to all who were concerned I'd been kidnapped and consigned to forced labor in a Zimbabwe diamond mine.  I had to come back to Chicago to pick up my visa for India and file the paperwork to legally work in Geneva for the month I'll be there in January.

I am about to run out the door to catch my flight to New Delhi via Abu Dhabi, but wanted to get some videos up before I was relegated back to dial-up modem speeds.  I also have some potentially interesting insights from the past week, but that will be fodder for future posts.  Now, to the videos...

Here is me feeding a baby giraffe.

Our tour guide at the crocodile farm was certifiably insane... he was walking around poking crocs with a stick.  Note the absolutely horrifying, jurassic sounds the thing makes.  The guide cautioned us that, "If you're ever near a croc and you hear it making that sound, get away from it."  Clearly he was also an idiot.

And as if we needed some confirmation, he then did this.

Here we intercepted a rhino mom with her baby.  These things run incredibly fast for what looks like a two-ton animal bulldozer.

Here a monkey jumps into one of the tour vans and steals a carton of orange juice, with me pointing out the obvious (a habit I picked up from the croc guy).  He was in there for maybe five seconds max... I was impressed that he knew exactly what he was looking for.

Here I catch a hippo in the act of yawning, though that term really doesn't do the activity much justice.

As you're probably aware, hippos are responsible for more annual human deaths than any other animal in Africa.  For some reason, they have an innate hatred of humans and just like to kill us, according to our boat captain (though they and crocodiles have a treaty of sorts - they don't mess with each other).  I kept trying to get the captain to provoke them so I could see how fast these floating landmasses were in the water, but as we approached this family and the 100+ ton herd started staring us down, I decided that was probably a bad idea.

I thought this baby monkey was adorable, but Maggie thinks he looks like mutant baby born near Chernobyl.

Here's a really cool video of a huge giraffe getting right up in my face.  They really are the most beautiful, gentle animals.  At a different park we went to, I made friends with an orphaned giraffe and he started holding my hand with his tongue (which as you can see are like 1.5 feet long and very dexterous).  I don't have the video of that yet, but one of my colleagues does.

And the last one... you can appreciate here just how massive these animals are.  It makes sense given that their heads are usually like 30 feet off the ground, but it was still surprising.