The past few days...

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The laptop decided to fix itself! Even though I poured possibly the most corrosive substance known to man into the keyboard of my computer which caused it to stop working, I took the battery out, dried it off for a couple of days and now, pretty much back to new! I am so lucky and I am very very grateful to whoever/whatever was responsible for this as I can now type my blog with ease as I was before I was an idiot! The R key sometimes sticks though and the ipod's lost all its music in the process although still appears to be there... I just can't get to it!!

So, to catch up on the last few days, here's what I've been up to...

Wednesday - day 7
Kelly and I had arranged to go to Anjuna market. A big, what they call 'flea' market which is absolutely massive and which is where you can find pretty much everything you're looking for on a holiday to Goa. We parked our bikes out of the way of the main car park so we could escape at the end easily, and walked towards the market which is situated in the middle of a field and goes all the way up onto the cliff tops. There were hundreds of people getting in, leaving and wandering around. There were hundreds of stalls - you could see them in the distance, stretching as far as the eye could see! I had a few things in mind that I wanted to get and had been told here was the place to get them. So, in we went, into the 'come see my shop', 'madam, buy something please', '100 rupees anyting' and tried to look past the people into their shops to see if there was anything worth having a look at. Basically, if you look at anything, the pressure's on. If you touch anything, the pressure's on even more. So, we just glanced and kept saying 'just looking, not buying'. Oh my god, there was so much stuff. Stalls under cover selling silver by the tonne load, trousers in every single colour and pattern you could possibly imagine, dresses, belts, bags by the thousands, jewellery, 'designer' shoes, ornaments, lampshades, bottles, telescopes, games, scarves, notebooks, dvds, cds, smoking paraphernalia, drinks, food, toys, and more...
After a few practice haggles, we realised what the going price for things were and got stuck in to bartering with the locals, which earned us massive discounts on our purchases. In total, I spent around £20 and got three pairs of trousers, a silver chain, a big leatherbound notebook, a cute ashtray, a cool necklace and some food. bargains!!

After that, we retrireved our bikes, went to a bar on the beach and sat with a rum and coke to watch the sun go down follwed by a tasty prawn curry. This is the life.
It's possible that someone tried tampering with our bikes, possibly due to where we'd parked, as my front tyre was slightly flat and kelly's speedometer had stopped working. We may have been slightly paranoid but it was a rather strange coincidence that a man appeard from nowhere as we were returning to our bikes, only to notice the flat tyre and offer to show us a place to get it fixed. I personally think he was just being nice, as he would have been more pursuasive if he was after something. I said I'd get it fixed tomorrow and we drove off in the other direction.
We'd had a text from Rasha and Tomguin (the tom and penguin duo) who said they'd be in a bar in Anjuna if we wanted to join them, so we did. they were just about to leave so we all took a walk back to their hotel where we said goodbye and promised to meet up in the future. Hopefully, I'll be in the California area in 2012 and then I'll go to the Burning man festival with them and then continue on a journey to New York by road!


Thursday - day 8

The next day was about going to IAR. I walked a few dogs, played with some kittens and then went to play with the puppies in the outdoor pen - a different set now. I took one look at them and it was absolutely and devastatingly obvious that they were completely riddled with fleas. This made my skin crawl so I have no idea how their's felt. They were twitching and flinching as the hundreds of fleas covered their cute little faces, so I took matters into my own hands and armed myself with a bottle of flea powder, went in and one by one, de-flead the poor little things. there was a PILE of hundreds, possibly thousands of fleas on the floor of the pen, so i swept them up and down a drain. The puppies, after a while, seemed much better so I went back to check them. There were a few more fleas on them, but nothing compared to what they'd had an hour or so ago. I powdered them again and removed every single last flea from them by hand. They were so happy and could at last, lie in peace on the ground for a little nap.
The other big bit of 'help' I provided was to a puppy from another litter in the next pen along. I had heard this screeching noise when I was having a cigarette outside the centre and had thought nothing of it... the sounds of dogs and cats is unescapable and so, so loud... and when i went back to check on the puppies again, there was a little pup caught on the gate to the pen with his TEETH! having seen Ladyboots get her teeth caught in sticks at home, I had no fear about getting into the pen, sticking my fingers in the puppy's mouth and prizing it gently away from the gate. Poor little thing stopped screeching immediately and was absolutely fine with all teeth in tact.

The workers at the animal centre are so busy and they rely on the volunteers to use their initiative when things like this happen. I am glad i was there to help all these puppies today.

After going to IAR, kelly and I had some errands to run - fixing my tyre, fixing her speedometer and beeper (as it sounded like a tiny mouse), going to the supermarket and buying some credit for my phone. This all took a very long time as people move so slowly in India. I was told three times to come back later to see the man about phone credit!
We took a journey to Baga with JP as he needed something from the chemist there. Baga is a tourist spot a few beaches south. It's horrible. Full of typical tourist types, lots of traffic, letchsome Indian men (who actually got really aggressive with us when we asken them to leave us alone), but the highlight of Baga was driving head on into a parade! It was quite a massive parade featuring male and female dancers, drummers, an Indian brass band, candles, lights, children, all sorts! We had to navigate our way through Baga alongside this huge parade, which was really quite treacherous at points, but the sounds and the sights made up for all of it - I wish I'd taken my ipod to catch a little video of it all.

We got back to Vagator quite late but, we'd had a nice day and we finished it off by wandering around on the cliff tops of Vagator and then spilling coca cola on my laptop.
This incident, regardless of how funny it may seem... for a computer technician to be stupid enough to have a drink of COKE (not just any old drink... the WORST possible kind)... was a little bit of a wake up call for me. I had been having a great time. i was so glad I'd met Kelly and she was showing me the 'ropes' of Goa which I really appreciated, plus we have soooo much in common. The thing is, I came to India for my own reasons, set up my travels alone and was quite quickly, spending a lot of time with another person. The drink on the laptop incident just reminded me that I need to have a bit more focus than i currently have on IAR and my own journey. I thought perhaps that I'd be working at IAR a little more than I have been, but there seems to be so many people around, that it's often hard to find much to do. Having said that, I'm planning on taking only three day weekends for my last couple of weeks and working at the centre, taking advantage of the free lunch on Mondays, tuesdays, wednesdays and thursdays.

Friday - day 9

Friday was a funny day. I was quite sleepy as i was woken up to the people outside building a road/driveway. This has been going on a for a few days now. A pick up truck with a caged back turns up at around 9am. Make no mistake, this is a SMALL pick up truck. About the size of a street sweeper and from this pick up, alights almost twenty people... YES! TWENTY people. Men, women and kids all get out to assist in the building of this road. The road is only small. It stretched around 100 metres at most and is around 8 feet wide. A bigger truck turned up on the first day and dumped tonnes of gravel, sand and massive red rocks onto the garden in big piles. The red rocks are smashed into smaller rocks by anyone who's willing to do it. I saw a small boy about ten years old doing it on the first day. The pile of gravel is moved to various points along the track in this method... a few men stand at the pile of gravel and the women go over to them with big metal bowls. The men fill the bowls up and the women put them on their heads and take them to the other side of the garden - this goes on until there is enough gravel at the second part of the track. Then other men saturate the gravel with water from a hosepipe and some other men shovel it all up to mix it together. Then, sand is introduced and possibly cement (I haven't sat around long enough to find out how they finish it off) which, when pasted out all flat, turns into a nice new road.

The women are incredible. They work all day in the sun, lifting, walking, singing and laughing, whilst tending to small children (babies too) and getting along with the job fine. The men are hard labourers. They dig and shovel and lift all day. This really is back-breaking work and something UK health and safety would never allow. I told the lady who owns the guest house I'm staying in, that in England, there is a machine and a few men who could do this job in a couple of days. I also told her that I thought these people were absolutely amazing and that we, in the west, generally are much lazier than this and most don't know the meaning of true hard work. I was impressed. not so much with the one guy who chose to sit around all day on a plastic chair. He was possibly the foreman but was not doing much at all. I had a good time taking photos of all their efforts too.

I decided today was an internet day and after trying in vain to use the Yellow House internet, I moved to an internet cafe where the connection was quicker to upload some more photos. I had a really nice time emailing people that I'd thought about over the past few days and though that had changed my mood a little bit, but actually, I was a bit narky and that came across when i spoke to my Auntie Jean on the phone. The line was quite bad and i got cut off a couple of times so it was a little bit frustrating as i just wanted to tell her I was OK and that I was having a nice time. I ended up getting a little frustrated and vowed to ring her again when in a slightly better mood.

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