138 Monday Oct 18

Monday Oct 18 Day 138

Yesterday afternoon I had an enlightening moment. I was hauling around my photographic equipment to the field test. Wearing all this stuff causes people to give me curious looks. An older couple stopped me and we struck up a conversation. He was Indian and his wife was American (I could tell from the accent). A car stopped and a woman asked for some directions. The gentleman responded I could understand 90% of what he was saying. I mentioned that it was so nice to hear Hindi I could comprehend. It turns out that the language spoken by the hill people is NOT Hindi but a dialect. No wonder I have not been able to communicate with the servants here or understand anything that the people are saying to each other. Most of the servants we had during my 10 year stay in India had not been hill people. If they were hill people they worked for missionaries who had or were studying the language. Therefore they did not speak a dialect but correct Hindi. We kids got a lot of our language help from the cook who had travelled all over India during the British Raj.

There are at least 2 of me here or maybe 3. I found some mangos in the bazaar and some custard-apples. I am beside myself with excitement. I just got my pickings out of the bag and the mangos smell delicious. I had one of the custard-apples after lunch. They are an indescribable fruit with an apple shape and a hard lumpy green outer skin. Like so many fruits in the tropics there are seeds covered with a thin layer of fruit. A mango has a large seed and not much fruit for it’s size. The inside of this fruit has the color and texture of a rubbery custard, hence its name. A lot of effort for a little sweetness. I ended up dropping the opened fruit on the ground and that ended my snack. In India foreigners only eat fruit that has an outer skin like a bananas. Once any part of the pealed fruit touches anything other than the eater’s fingers, it is no longer safe to eat.

The tapes of the road between Dehradun (the rail head for Mussoorie) Mussoorie were very good. I now have plenty of material of the roads to give the viewer some idea of the roads and their condition. I also taped through the Landour bazaar, up the Mullingar hill and on to the Woodstock gate. By car this took 8 minutes whereas it takes 35 minutes on foot. The road through the bazaar is very rough and it looks like I shall have to walk the road tapping with my Glidecam. That is a project for mid November.