Patna
Patna, Sunday March 23rd - Unfortunately, due to it being Easter Sunday and the day after Holi, CRS couldn't arrange any meetings for me today. I'm off to Muzaffarpur at 6:30am tomorrow and should be meeting with some of CRS's partners who are working on the water supply in the villages. Luckily I typed up the water sanitation survey in XForms before I left so I don't have too much work to do to make a useful demo to show them. I'm hoping to meet the AirTel engineers on Thursday - I should be back here early in the morning and my flight's not until 7:30pm.
I spent this morning before it got too hot having a look around Patna. I went to the gurudwara (Sikh temple) - the tenth Sikh Guru was born here - and
wandered around the city centre a bit. I'd resolved not to take any pictures of funny signs: firstly there are far too many of them, and secondly that's the
sort of behaviour that rightly gets 'crazy foreigner' looks. But this poster for 'MIIT' I just couldn't resist. [Photo coming once I'm on a higher-bandwidth connection]
This is just the right season for sugar cane juice. It's squeezed right off the cane by a scary-looking contraption powered by an internal combustion engine.
For an extra rupee they'll run it over ice as it's squeezed so it's cool when you drink it, which is nice when the weather is in the high nineties!
One of the few stores open today in Patna was a mobile phone shop, where I got a Nokia 2610 USB cable for Rs. 250, which is just over $6 - a bit better than
the $30 they retail for in the states. This means I won't have go through the ridiculous process of downloading my updated JAR files off the web on the phone in order to install them (which would be particularly tricky right now as there's no wireless here and the phone won't work on the Indian GSM network
anyway!).
Finally: I think the drivers here are even crazier than in Delhi. Don't get me wrong, driving through Delhi is a pretty hair-raising experience, but there are
a few rules that everyone follows. For example, if you're flagged down by a police officer - particularly if you're driving a vehicle with out-of-state plates - it's usually a good idea to pull over. My autorickshaw* driver decided instead to put his foot down (twist his handlebar...whatever) and embark on a white-knuckle journey through downtown Patna, at times reaching 40 km/h.
One of the passengers in the back freaked out and started shouting that there was a motorcycle following us and that we should stop before we got into any
more trouble. Somebody else in the front replied that it was too late for that now, our best chance was to run for it. While they bickered in rapid-fire
Bihari-Hindi, the driver was totally silent and drove - sorry - like a driven man. He pushed the poor two-stroke engine to its very limits as we zoomed
through Gaighat - I'm sure we hit 50 km/h at one point. I decided against asking him to stop - I didn't want to go there that badly and he seemed to be going in the general direction of the central interchange.
Which he was, and which we reached a remarkably short time later after leaving the pursuing policeman quite literally in the dust.
* If you've travelled in Asia you might know these as tuk-tuks - they're basically three-wheelers built on a motorcycle chassis which look like they could take two passengers - but normally contain 5 or 6!
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