It's slideshow time

Well, this is my 178th post.

What a momentous occasion. I think I will celebrate by letting you know I’ve uploaded around a hundred (power permitting) new photos of me and my friends, and a bunch of Indian people and places it seemed appropriate to take pictures of at the time.

Click the link on the right hand side.

As I am too lazy/sane to write captions for the photos, I’ll let you know who the important people are. Chen and Rotem, in Hampi, make up the first couple of pictures I think. Tal, the one I described as looking like Dave Grohl, is probably fairly obvious as I used his camera for the previous set of photos, and he looks a bit like Dave Grohl. He is tall and bearded and in quite a few pictures. One girl, Shani, I think I previously described as being the sexiest thing to have allowed me to kiss her appears early on in the photos, and for your viewing pleasure most of the pictures she appears in are from a day when we all took a swim in the Hampi lake and are naturally wearing bikinis. She has long dark hair, dark skin, and is gorgeous. Merav, who I travelled to Sri Lanka with is pictured at one point holding some puppies. Stav, the most recent girl to have taken my heart on a train to Rajasthan, is pictured later on in Varanasi, looking lovely and heartbreaking and occasionally rather close to me. Look, she’s smiling. Is she happy?…oh and there’s a couple of her doing poi too, she’s not just fighting with the air.

Passover was spent in a restaurant with Europeans. I turned down numerous invitations to join in the ‘fun’ given that I spend enough time with these people who refuse to communicate to me in a language I can understand, especially on an evening when they have the most legitimate excuse to speak in their own tongue.

I ended up having a very pleasant jam with a middle-aged Dutch guy who likes to sing traditional Indian Bhajans but with acoustic guitar accompaniment (think Kula Shaker meets, umm, an acoustic guitar and an old guy, oh and did I mention his young wife?). It was splendid. Another very stoned middle aged European guy tried to join us, but ended up, what I call, ‘shitting all over songs’ – i.e. trying to play along by watching the lightning speed fingers of someone who actually knows how to play the guitar, but gets everything wrong and just making the whole thing sound, well, shit. But it was fun.

In a mild form of tribute to the absent Jewish masses, I ate an Israeli dish, Shakshuka. It is a bizarre dish comprising of a tomato-based sauce with some hardboiled eggs kinda haphazardly dropped into the middle and mushed up a bit. Oh, and it comes with some bread. Israelis keep telling me their food is ‘best in the world’. Come on, pipe down. Though having said that they will say anything is ‘best in the world’ if it suits their hyperbolic argument. To make some more tepid generalizations about Israelis (come on, I’m on a roll) it’s a bad habit of theirs. “Ahh, but the Coke in Israel is best in the world.” Oh come on, it’s the same sugary shit all over the world. “No, it’s best in the world.” Etc.

Having said that, the other day, an Israeli guy, after I was making this rather piss-takey point, said “ok, so what is traditional English food? Before European and Asian cuisine appeared, what did you used to eat?”

Er…

I couldn’t even say fish and chips. I ummed and ahhed for a bit and then kind of guessed: “Stew? You know, casserole. Like curry but really bland.”

That shut him up. For a bit.

So, I tried to read Conversations with God Part Two. I got about half way before having to throw the book at a wall. But there were no walls around so it kind of floated off down a hill, towards a cloud. Remembering that I’d put a 150 rupee deposit down for it, I quickly recovered it, cellotaped the missing pages back together and swapped it for The War Against Cliché by Amis. It’s like the anti-God. And damn refreshing it is too.

This second installment by Walsch, got a bit too much. The first book, dealing with personal struggles and our relationship with God was interesting, inspiring and despite an occasionally irritating style, I’m glad I read it. The second one attempts to save the world. It became a kind of vague, blasphemous pseudo-Marxist rant delivered as the ‘Word of God’. I skipped through it and discovered it wasn’t changing so I gave up.

What to do. I think I would still recommend you read the first one, but I think I’d rather recommend you save a grand and come lark about India first.