Panaji, Goa I

Panaji, Goa I

When you go into any place new to you, there are always sights and sounds, smells and tactile sensations that takes getting used to and when I awoke the second morning, it was time to begin learning. I took a cold water (not very cold) shower and then asked Bosco, the hotel manager, where would be a good place for breakfast.

“Oh, the Hotel Venice. They serve everything you want.” And how do you get there? “Oh, just down this way. Five minutes. Just take the lane to the right.” And as he said that, he bent his hand down until his fingers nearly touched his wrist and then flipped hand and fingers in the general direction I needed to go as if he were liberating foreign matter from his fingertips. I hope that’s clear but do practice the gesture several times before incorporating into your conversation. It means almost nothing. Had Columbus got direction to India from an Indian using this wrist flip, the navigator would have surely discovered America.

I didn’t take the lane to the right. I walked off down the street for about three minutes and then asked directions again. “Hotel Venice?” they’d shake their heads. There were many restaurants but I wanted to find the one where I could order anything I wanted. Would they have an egg McMuffin with cheese? No, I didn’t hope for that but… I came to a street, road, alley turning off to the right. I would find that this was 31st January Street. I could find no one who knew what happened on 31st January but it made little difference because the street sign fell down many years ago. I suspect on following February 1st.

Down the way and on the left I saw a sign, “Hotel Venite.” I decided that that was Venice spelled in Portuguese. My Portuguese was better than I thought.

I climbed stairs to the “first” floor and took a table on one of the balconies. These were small extensions out from the wall. If I leaned back, one shoulder pushed against the wall while the other wedged against the railing. I don’t want you to get some idea of rampant luxury. It was after 9am, which means it was stand-still-and-sweat temperature. There might be more air moving along the outer wall of the building. Panaji is a very good place to play any sport that improves in still air. You can’t blame the wind on anything, including cooling off. The first thing I did was order the bottled water to see what happens next. While the waiter went to get the menu, I took a look around. Better to say, a feel around. Goa has the highest humidity that I can remember experiencing. In my twenties I went to sea, crossing the equator several times and tied up in back-water ports where nothing short of a typhoon would stir a breeze. But as I said, I can’t remember humidity like this. You can almost feel the weight of the water in the air. The water blocks your seeing a horizon. The gray air may be soaked with smoke but I vote for water. Probably a mixture of both but even swigging down bottled water, you don’t really cool. Goa is gaining fame as a tourist mecca. Why would anyone want to come to a place where it is this hot? North Americans go to Puerto Rico where along the coast the temperature probably rivals Goa but not the humidity. Stay home, buy a sunlamp, boil a pan of water, and turn the thermostat up to 100. But in Goa, the Office of Tourism points out that Goan beaches are some how different and that difference does not extend to downtown Panaji.

The menu said that they served cheese omelets. That sounded familiar, which when it comes to breakfast I appreciate, and so I ordered. One friend wrote asking me if I had tried any of the local dishes….this after two or three weeks of living in Goa. He travels on the other end of the visible spectrum from where I do. The stain glass would have intrigued him until he saw it and then he’d go looking for something more toward five star. And they would serve egg McMuffins with cheese.

The omelet arrived made of two eggs whipped, no milk, and a sprinkling of shredded cheese on the top. An egg by any other name… I dug in, downing water, and trying not to think about the sweat crawling like flies over my face and down my body. This became my standard breakfast, after having tried “sausage and eggs” at another café. I did add a couple of rolls on the side and I sprinkled sugar over the top of the eggs.

The eggs eaten I sipped the last of a liter of water and noticed across the street “Shruti Communications,” a cyber café. This became my “office”; the Venite, my second “house,” according to Funni, one of the waiters who needs an education. After breakfast each morning, I’d check and write emails at the office.

My office had a ceiling fan and intermittent 220. When the electricity would go off, I’d stand outside waiting for the power to return or for a breeze, which ever came first. The girl who was in charge for most of the time was small, dainty, and very careful not to “round off” the computer time to the house’s advantage. She wore saris and had quite a collection of them. She was always super clean and had a pleasant personality. I suspect that she was in her teens and should have been in school. It could be that academics didn’t interest her. She was the focus of interest of about a half-dozen young men who hung around the office. One of the advantages of my not knowing the local languages was that they never distracted me with their teasing her.

After emails I went back to the hotel, then set out to look over the town. The town backed up on a ridge to the south. One of the sixteenth century cathedrals topped this ridge. Somebody had to carry those building blocks to the top. I do hope it was winter. The stairs from the cathedral spill down to a long grassy place called Church Square. The square is level as is the town down by the water’s edge, perhaps a half mile away. Using the square as a starting point, my hotel was about two blocks east, the café another three blocks, then if you kept going you’d come to a creek which flows north into the Mandovi River (the northern boundary of Panaji.) Beyond the creek is the ticket office for the railway at the bus station. The town’s museum is also out there somewhere but one day I damn near cooked trying to find it. The near-death experience was made worthwhile by my meeting a very gregarious English teacher who told me that India was as much mine as his. And that we were all citizens of the world and that he wanted me to feel as much at home here as I would feel in my own country. With a billion plus people, I’m sure there are others like him here but I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to meet another.

Back to the west from Church Square is “the city,” their word. While where I lived to the east part of town, the buildings had either falling down or were preparing to, “the city” is more modern. They have air conditioning. There are more upscale hotels and restaurants serving local food. Furthermore I believe that there are more banks in the city than liquor stores and churches in Nome. I walked over there about 2 pm and punched in my Wells Fargo ATM card and found, and this is a generalization, that unless your card has a MasterCard or Visa logo, it may work fine in New York, which mine did, but not in India. Of course I went into the bank where some people behind the desks would understand my problem. Most where too busy. That’s most. Not all. Some suggested that I try another bank, which I did again and again. It was getting onto two thirty, three in the afternoon and I’m walking through a well lighted steam bath. Some ATM parlors are air conditioned, some not, and if the ones that were not cooled happened to face south, you were essentially standing inside a solar panel. Two uniformed high school girls came in and tried to help but it was the card, not the technique. At one point as I went from machine to machine, I misplaced the card and thinking I’d lost it, I ran back to the last machine. The customer hadn’t seen the card and I dug deeper in my pocket and found the card.

Then I happened on a very nice lady named Elizabeth. One of my strategies was to apply for an ATM card at her bank. She very patiently explained “the law of the land,” as she called it. Without a permanent address in India, one could not apply for an ATM card. She made a counter suggestion. Why not have money wired out to me by Western Union? Rachel and I had signed a joint account and while I knew nothing of the charges, Evan would bird dog the information in New York. I was surprised at the reasonable cost. I think about it was about fifteen dollars per one thousand. And when you are standing here in the heat and you learn that there is a way to get money, the advice is calming. At one bank, a bank manager who also managed English well, walked me down the street, showing me where I could find Western Union. No flip of the wrist this time. While many employees were embedded in their own problems and ignored mine, there were people who would walk blocks out of their way to help you.

One of my first mornings while at breakfast on a balcony at the Hotel Vinite, I saw a young man sitting a few balconies down from me. We struck up a conversation and I found that he was a cab driver named Tony. He wanted to know where I wanted to go. I was waiting for some information to come in an email and while having enough cash to tide me over, there was nothing to do be to wait until Rachel came back to New York from a conference she attended out of town.

I had heard about Old Goa. The Portuguese early on had decided that they would build a head quarters, I think, about 8 km. from where we sat. The town was a failure. There was epidemic after of epidemic of cholera. But before they made the move back here, they built a huge pair of churches with a convent, a bishop’s house, and other buildings. One of the great churches was the final resting place of St. Francis Xavier. This early Jesuit father came out to raise the moral level of the colony (no word on success or failure) and to establish churches. Off he went building churches all over Asia. The number of churches, I never heard, but this was not a stay-at-home saint. He worked and because of it, I found him interesting.

So off we went. Tony asked if I would mind stopping at a “few” gift shops. The situation worked this way. Every time Tony brought in a prospective customer, he got a “chit.” Ten chits and he got so many minutes on his cell phone; double the chits and he even got a bigger number of calls. Over the next few days, I saw many gift shops, which proved to be both an experience on their own as well as gaining me some valuable information.

Walking through those doors and into the shops you entered another world and while still very much India, it was a wonderful change which extended beyond the air conditioning. The shops are spotless. The stock is set up to be shown off to its best advantage to the customer. The sales people (all the ones I talked to were from Jammu-Kashmir) spoke good English and were both knowledgeable and experts at sales. Many shops had gardens on their grounds. Not only was there no garbage strewn among the bushes, the grass was cut and edged. Several things caught my eye, small white marble boxes inlaid with colored stones, which usually made up an arrangement of flowers. The technique is the same as the inlay that decorates the Taj Mahal. Ganesh, the elephant headed god who removes impediments to your progress, is a favorite of the Hindus of Goa. This may be a unconscious statement on the conditions of the roads and sidewalks in Goa. The artistic treatment at expressing his appearance is liberal. Sometime the likeness is shown with a few watercolor brush strokes; other times the god will be shown in high detail and the statue stands four feet high.

The show really started with the carpets, all of which were made in Jammu-Kashmir. The salesperson talked about the number of knots per square inch and the durability of both run and color. I looked at the marvelous designs. One man showed me the handwritten instructions as to how a section of rug was to be made. I can’t tell you much more. There is in all likelihood something on the net which shows the finished works.

Two things other than goods I learned was. one: Jammu-Kashmir was not the trouble spot it is portrayed in the media and popular imagination. There was trouble but that was years back. There are a fleet of houseboats on Lake Dal by Srinagar waiting to be hired at all price levels…including mine! The other thing I learned was that “Plus,” the ATM company who issued my card through Wells Fargo, is honored at the HDFC Bank!!! Tony got his chits; I got cash! I’m sure that this isn’t the last chapter in the ATM crisis but the wolf turned and loped off to someone else’s door. HDFC has branches in many cities and while this information was a godsend, the name to remember is VISA.
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