Reversal

Last time on Quester/Questing/Quested: I had 2 main problems - dodging beach hawkers and finding good local food - and one minor issue - slight loneliness.

Well in the few days since I last wrote, the landscape has changed completely. In fact, I have to say I'm starting to understand why so many of the people who gave me advice about this trip suggested I spend longer in a few areas rather than spend a few days here, a few days there. It takes more than a couple of days to figure out how to deal with a new place. And it's hard to get a real impression without having the time to really figure things out.

On the food front - after a little chatting with Ashu, the hut owner, and his cousins visiting from Panjim for a long weekend, I found my real Goan breakfast. You can only get bhaji pao from a few little shops in the village, corner stores that look like they'd never in a million years serve hot meals. Bhaji pao is a cousin of the Mumbai street snack Pav Bhaji. Bhaji is vegetables, here in Agonda it's dal and spicy potatoes. Pao/Pav is a very European dinner roll (the word comes from whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'pan', 'pain', etc is). Also, the cousins, who have sort of adopted me (more on that later) commandeered Ashu's kitchen to make me a big Goan lunch - fish curry, brown rice, and vegetables (in this case something that looked and tasted a lot like swiss chard though it got lost in translation and I could never figure out whether it really was or not). They even taught me how to de-bone the little fish which are common here, and I got to practice eating with my hands. I also had my first straight-up coconut. They just hack a hole in them so you can drink the water, then chop them in half with a machete so you can get at the meat. Sitting there munching on the coconut meat, chin dripping with juice, I had one of those "Oh, wow, I'm really in India!" moments.

On the sarong-wallah front - I found a solution so obvious I can't believe I ever had this problem in the first place. The way the beach is shaped, you have visibility of about a quarter-mile in each direction. You can see the sellers coming from a long way off, and they're always stopping to hook more customers, so they move slowly. When I see someone coming, I just head into the water. They're not going to follow me into the sea (and, yes, Ranbir, this time it really is a sea, so you can say that). Once I can't see them anymore, I can come back. It takes them hours to make their way all the way up and back, so this is pretty much foolproof.

On the companionship front - as I said above, Ashu's cousins have pretty much adopted me. This is nice, but I have to be careful, because they're all guys and it's obvious that they all have huge crushes on me and don't see me as a little sister or anything like that. I'm a little afraid one of them will get the wrong idea (they were SHOCKED when I said I preferred to stay in and read rather than go out partying; I think there are lots of stereotypes here about white girls being crazy drunken shagfests). They're really nice, though, and have been very sweet. I just have to keep reminding myself that they're from a culture where men and women are very rarely "just friends". They go back to Panjim, tomorrow, though, so as long as I can keep it very casual for the next day or so I'm not really worried.

I've also started to make friends a little with some of the other backpackers. Through trying practically every restaurant in town, I've zeroed in on where the fun people hang out. There's one place, run by Nepalese hippies (yeah, seriously!), where people go to while away the hot part of the afternoon, and I've met a bunch of people there. It's a good place to escape to when Ashu's boys start getting intense, though to be honest the backpacker dudes are almost as bad.

One more thing -- After almost two weeks without talking to another American, I think I'm starting to lose my accent. I don't know what I sound like, but some guy thought I was Scandinavian yesterday... Weird. I wonder what I'm going to come home sounding like?