huevos con vino

After a hiatus of sorts, I am back to writing about wine again!  It’s good to be back.  I have some things to report, in fact.

First, the Seattle Wine Outlet (cleverly located in Seattle) is selling magnums of 2003 Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir Classique for $85 each.  That’s about $5 less than the winery’s price, and about $5 more than one online retailer, so that’s not bad at all.  I wish I had about $95 (with tax included, it’s more than $85 and even more than the $90 from the winery, but the lack of shipping charges help the Wine Outlet here).

That said, I do have my 1998 Laurène magnum still…I’m considering a Thanksgiving uncorking for that bad boy.  I’ve also got a 2003 Louise magnum, which I intend to keep for about 10 years or until we’re about to move out of the country someday and, therefore, must consume to protect the investment, so to speak.  No plans to do anything of the sort, you understand, but I want to think ahead.

Second, I received my 3 bottles of 1998 Laurène from an excellent seller on Winecommune.com.  The bottles are in perfect external shape with perfect fill levels, so let’s hope the wine inside is as perfect!  I’m going to rest those bottles for at least a couple of months first, though.  From what I recall of last Thanksgiving, the ‘98 is extremely Burgundian: Very focused on earthy, dusty, even barnyard aromas and flavors.  Incredible stuff.

I’m very excited to have 3 bottles of ‘98 Laurène all of a sudden.  I thought that one was gone for good!  The best part was the price: About $46/bottle with shipping.  That’s less than the original winery price and only a couple dollars more than the best street price upon release in 2001.  Very, very cool.

Finally, I am waiting for my next Odisea club shipment of wine.  They sent it to me once, but it got returned to them unfortunately.  So, they sent the same box again and it never made it to my place…UPS is completely worthless these days for some reason.  My favorite part of not receiving a UPS shipment is when I need to go visit UPS to get the box personally.  Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a shipping agent?

Ahh well, I’ll get the Odisea wine in good time…later this week for sure.  And, it looks like this Friday will include a few winery visits in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon!  Should be fun…and then on Sunday, it sounds like I’ll be trying some Opus One.  More on that after the holiday.

Before I return to wine blogging, and I do have a few things to mention (like my 3 bottles of 1998 Laurène!), I wanted to write just a quick look back at my trip.

India, as a country, is way too large to hope to see in one week, particularly when you only visit one city.  My situation there reminded me of a Japanese man I once met.  We were at a conference together in Florida.  He had never left Japan and his first trip to the US so far (he was about 25 years old) was to Orlando, Florida, to stay at the DisneyWorld hotel where the conference was being held. 

Imagine coming to the US for the first time (from Japan, of all places), for one week, for a conference…and you stay at Mickey Mouse’s house.  In some ways, I think that guy had the most American experience he could possibly get, but it certainly wasn’t representative of the US as an entire country.  He was able to see the rampant consumerism, the wasteful mindset, and the absurdities that are a part of the general American experience, but that doesn’t mean what he saw reflected the “true” US, whatever that might be.

I had the same problem in India, much as I had when I visited Paris about 13 years ago.  I only saw Paris and Giverny, but not France, so I can’t really say I have visited “France” per se (although I know far more about the culture there through reading and experience).

At least I did get to see something of India, and in many ways Hyderabad reflects some general Indian culture elements, such as the way traffic works in the big cities there, or the way that cows can roam free, or the squalor in which some people live.  If you go to certain parts of the US, though, you’ll see the same sorts of squalor…but probably not the traffic and cows.

Overall, I think my previous posts speak for themselves with regard to my trip as a total experience.  All I can really say in summation is I look forward to returning someday, but after the 24 hours of travel to get home I don’t want to go back too soon.

My apologies for the horrible James Brown/Indian food pun there…but puns are everywhere in India so I thought I’d have a go.  Sorry! 

Of all the places I have visited on this trip, I think the airport ranks the place that I would have liked to have photographed most.  This place is insane.  It’s like every scene from every Hollywood movie of an airport in  any country other than the US. 

No photography is allowed in here, although given my stature as a white tourist I could probably get away with a few pictures.

I say that because quite clearly my race has allowed me to bend the rules that every single Indian person has been ordered to follow.  But first a little background.

When you get to the airport, you see this massive wall of people all along the drive leading past the terminal.  About 98% of these people are not passengers; they aren’t actually traveling anywhere at all.  Some of them come to see people off or meet arriving people.  Many of them seem to show up for the spectacle of it all, and I can see why.

Munawar told me to circle around these people and he was quite right.  The actual line is about 8 people long, and there are several tough men with submachine guns waiting to check your passport.  In my case, the main guard gave my passport a cursory glance and then he stepped cautiously aside to let me wheel all of my luggage through, smiling politely at me as I went.

I got inside and was instantly confused.  There are no signs for anything except a drinking water station, essentially.  After a minute, I figured out that I needed to put my checked bags through a dedicated scanning machine that seemed good only for major, obvious scanning issues.  Once through there, the guys manning the machine put a solid strap around each bag and melted each strap shut with a special hot conveyer belt.  At that point, it becomes your responsibility to grab your bag in less than 8 seconds before it vanishes somewhere.

Once you get your bags, you have to take them to the check-in area for your flight and airline.  In my case (KLM Business Class), the process was simple.  I stepped forward and the very nice lady checked me in while the baggage handler put my address label on the bag that already had one, leaving my other bag without any personal ID on it at all.  Luckily it’s just dirty laundry in that one.

At this point, after your bags have been “screened” once, you notice the sign saying you can only bring one carry-on bag including laptops, as per the local security setup.  This is a problem for me as I have a laptop-only bag with laptop-related gear as well as my actual carry-on bag. 

Both bags received “Approved Cabin Baggage” stickers, though, so off I went to immigration.  After a 10-minute wait in the slowest line, I handed the gentleman two of the three things he needed to let me through.  I had to fill out an immigration form that was previously unmentioned, but it only took a minute and I was able to stand right there and fill it out.

After getting past the immigration officer and receiving about 8 stamps on every piece of paper I presented the man, I got into the next security checkpoint line.  This checkpoint also had guards, but unarmed this time.  The whole point seemed to revolve around making sure each passenger had only one carry-on bag.

I had two.  So, I pulled out my Port Lounge invitation card and my business card and held them facing toward the man who was stopping literally every Indian person in front of me and forcing them to check highly personal bags as luggage.

It worked.  The guard waved me through very quickly and I stepped on into the final security checkpoint line.  In this line, which became segregated by gender so the women could be searched in a more private manner by other women, I plunked down my two bags and set off the metal detector, which like the metal detector at Golkonda Fort seemed simply to detect tourists.

I walked on and stood on a platform as a gentleman frisked and wanded me.  Everything checked out, so I walked over to get my bags.  They had just come through and a guard looked up at me.

“Which bag is yours, sir?”

“Those two right there,” I said, pointing at the two black bags at the end of the conveyer belt.

“Those TWO?” responded the guard, absolutely incredulous.

“Yep!”  And so he handed me both bags and I got the hell out of there and into the exclusive Port Lounge Restaurant, which looks to be a Long Island luncheonette from 1979 somehow transplanted into the Hyderabad airport, coffee-stained tables and paper placemats and all.  Amazing!

So now I’m sitting here in a corner watching the Scooby-Doo movie, which I had never seen, and trying not to get too bored before I even get on the plane.  I think I’ll call my wife….

Tonight is Corporate Night at the Ahala Drama Lounge and Electronic Discotheque.  Drinks are 50% off until 10 PM if you work for a corporation.  I was invited to attend, but since I’m leaving the hotel at 11:45 PM it seemed a bit too late for all that.  I really need to come back here again, but with my wife.  I wish I could bring about 8 friends here, actually…that would be ideal.

I had a weird feeling during dinner tonight, a meal that was terrific as always by the way.  I thought that the room in which I was sitting was at one corner of a flat Earth and I had my back to the back of that flat plane, with the entire planet stretching out in front of me.  At the other end, near another edge of the Earth, is where my wife sleeps.  The effort to get from here to there will largely be undertaken by other people: pilots, drivers, and so on.  All I need to do is stand in lines, answer a few questions, sit in some chairs, and then arrive in Seattle.  All it will take is 24 hours, if everything goes smoothly, and I will travel like a rook in chess from one edge of the board to the other.

I think I am beginning to understand the culture of service here.  I believe that in order to be a good waiter, or guard, or concierge, or whatever, you need to fetishize the act of service itself to the point where you believe the world rests on your shoulders.  It’s all up to you.  Does that guest receive his coffee in a timely manner?  Only you can make it happen.  And if you don’t get that pot of coffee to that guest in time, it is quite likely that the world will end in a tragic apocalypse caused solely by your shoddy service skills.

At least, that’s how I tried to make myself feel when I worked in the retail business.  I lasted about 3 weeks that way before I lapsed into simply standing around playing video games and occasionally helping customers.  I sold and rented video games for a living, the constant presence of which serves up quite a distraction when you are making minimum wage and it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have nothing else to do for the next 4 hours and you’re thinking about spending nearly half of your day’s wages on a single teriyaki chicken dinner.

Speaking of dinner again, here’s what I ate tonight:

• Crispy prawns in butter chili garlic sauce (again)
• Double mushrooms in spicy gravy
• Singapore-style noodles (very thin, long rice noodles)
• Black bean spicy chicken in a clay pot (delicious!)
• Sweet red bean paste in crispy pancakes with vanilla ice cream (also delicious)

Man, I can hardly move.  I am stuffed.  So I will type my way until 11:30 PM when I must reckon with the final massive bill for this stay.

I was chuckling during dinner because there was a table with 4 Americans who were trying to make sense of the game of cricket.  For an average American who has grown up playing baseball, cricket is about as foreign as Burkina Faso.  You can’t understand what is going on, guys seem to stand around in white sweaters until some dude throws a small ball in a really weird way at some other dude who holds something akin to a big flattened banana with a handle.  Every fourth time the ball is bounced at the batsman, everyone in the outfield and the infield screams bloody murder and dances around until some other guy, ostensibly a referee or umpire of some sort, makes an almost undetectable motion at the ground, or at himself, or at the sky, and then either the team who bounced the ball gets together and hugs each other or else everyone goes silent very quickly as the batsman adjusts his helmet and Mickey Mouse-sized white gloves.

That’s what the game of cricket looks like to someone who didn’t grow up playing it.  I can only imagine how absurd baseball looks to the British.  Actually, I don’t need to imagine it.  I had the absurdity of baseball pointed out to me day after day when I went to school in England.

In fact, I was seen as a sort of gaijin there, a kid who didn’t even know what a wicket was, let alone overs and tests and all that.  So when we started playing cricket in gym class, I was the last one assigned to a team.  We used to field hockey pitch as a makeshift cricket pitch; it wasn’t quite the right size to the sides and rear, but it had plenty of distance straight ahead from the batsman’s perspective.

When it came time for me to bat, I did the natural thing you would do if you had played baseball and not cricket for your entire life: I swung the bat backwards, thus knocking my own wicket down. 

Everyone laughed uproariously.  I use that word “uproariously” specifically because the gym teacher himself pointed and laughed at me.  Not only had I committed a heretofore impossibly stupid error, I had also done something that was the result of a lifetime of baseball training, which was also impossibly stupid compared to cricket. 

I got mad.  Once I knew I had to swing forward only, I figured out the entire offensive strategy. 

The kid bowled the ball to me and I clobbered the snot out of it for a clear six.  The other students quit laughing.

Ultimately, once time ran out during that session of gym class and I had yet to stop batting, I gained some respect.  I gained a lot more respect when I put my pitching arm to work as a bowler; every third ball creamed the batsman in the ankle or the stomach somehow, which made everyone start to bail out of the way as soon as I bowled.  A lifetime of backyard Whiffle ball games, sandlot and alleyway play, and streetball had made my arm much more powerful than anyone my age.  In the remarks section of my year’s end report card, the gym teacher (Mr. Beard) simply said, “Remarkable bowler!”

Anyway, I could relate to those 4 American dudes who were eating dinner and trying to sort out how runs are scored, or how many people get to bat, or how many people are actually playing on a team and why they’re all sort of sitting around a lot.  And that’s without televising the tea and lunch breaks; I can’t imagine what we Americans would make of Barry Bonds sipping tea between innings.

As I’m about to leave behind my Internet access for a while, I think I’ll simply end this post here and say that I am grateful to my hosts here in India for their extreme hospitality.  When someone sprints to your dinner table to stop you from serving your own food, that’s extreme hospitality.  I will miss it, but I’ll feel a lot less guilty back in Seattle.

I am going to miss India.  I know I have said that before but I really mean it.  Of course, as I have said, “my” India is nothing like the India that others know.  In fact, I think this country is unlike any other, and each city within India is unlike any other Indian city.  That makes it impossible to “know” India unless you spend the time to learn at least a few languages and so on. 

A Kashmiri man sold me some things today, a couple of nice gifts including one or two things that I really liked (although I found marginally better quality elsewhere, but for a higher cost).  He told me that you must spend 2 to 3 years in India to get to know the country.  I think he is mostly right.  I would say you should spend at least 8 to 10 years in India if you want to know more than just the surface-level stuff, which alone would take 2 to 3 years.

Today was mostly just a shopping day.  All of the museums are closed on Friday, which I somehow only noticed this morning.  Smart.  But, this gives me a great reason to come back: I missed out on all of the museums, including the Public Health Museum, which was the one I really wanted to see.  Ahh well, next time!

…

I’m back in Sessions Lounge now after all that shopping.  Wow, a real British donut!  I love these things…they are thicker and more buttery and dense than American round donuts.  Very simple things, too: just some granular sugar over the dough after frying in oil.  They are extremely good with Sidamo coffee.

When I was a kid in a British boarding school, if as a group we were very good for a certain length of time, the old female cook would make a batch of jelly donuts.  I still remember running in from outside, back near the chicken coop, and circling around to the metal shutters.  Behind those shutters, which were closed at all times except during the designated meal hours, resided the cook and her staff.  As we ran inside, we would hope to see the shutters open and a big metal tray of jelly donuts cooling on the counter in front of the kitchen.  The taste remains with me today.  Luckily, much of the other food, which was horribly disgusting, does not remain quite so fresh in my mind.

I can see a lot of the British colonial influence in India, but only in certain areas.  Much of the culture seems to have residual British affectations in minor areas, but on the whole I think the little of India that I have seen reflects its unique social and cultural background.  The predominance of the technology industry has certainly changed India in a way that I can only speculate about as I didn’t get to see India before Microsoft, Apple, and the PC changed this part of the world.  It seems to me, though, that many young people aspire to belong to one of the massive international technology companies that have offices here.  The sense I get from US young people is different: a sense of entitlement does not predominate here when it comes to getting jobs in the tech industry.

…

I knew before I came here that I would need to be able to trust my driver.  Munawar turned out to be fantastic, exceeding all of my expectations.  I watched him rebuke another driver who was not going to show his passengers around the Qutb Shahi Tombs in person.  As Munawar put it, I am his responsibility and, therefore, he must watch out for me in such places.  I am glad he did.

I settled up with Munawar and his boss this afternoon.  The total cost was quite reasonable given the length of time he spent with me and the number of extra things he did to make sure I had a good experience here.  Each time I went into a store, he either followed me in briefly and then waited outside, or else he worked with me and the store owners directly to negotiate the best price.

The concept of haggling is extremely exciting to me.  I have absolutely no frame of reference for the cost of goods here, or the margins that merchants must make to turn what they consider to be a good profit.  I wish I knew, to be honest, as I love to make a deal, particularly when you are bargaining over something as inexpensive as a wooden box.  It’s a little different when you are trying to buy a car, for example: The stakes are much higher there.  But when it’s $20 vs. $30, it’s a lot more fun.

Because Munawar followed me into the smaller Kashmiri shops, I was able to procure a much lower price.  Essentially, the store owners were unable to charge the regular foreigner rate because Munawar knows what the costs should be, what other passengers in his care have paid, and where to go to deal with fairly honest people with fairly high-quality items.  As he told me, and as I suspected before he told me, if you walk into a store alone, as a white American, you’re going to pay double what you should. 

Smaller items, such as boxes, trinkets, and animal statues have price tags.  Those prices are negotiable up to 25% less than what they say on the tag, at least at an actual store; street vendor prices are probably even more negotiable, but the situation is difficult to manage when you’re exposed on the street flashing Rupee notes around.  Also, the shop owners typically accept credit cards, whereas the street merchants take only cash.

Larger items, such as scarves, wraps, and carpets generally have no price tags.  But that depends on the shop: One store I went to today had no price tags on those items, while the other store had price tags on everything (and the more expensive items had US dollar prices rather than Rupee prices).  Whenever possible, I avoided anything with US $ prices because those prices aren’t as negotiable as Rupees.  It is much easier to go from 10,000 Rupees to 7,500 Rupees because the numbers are large, there are rounding factors, and there are discounts upon discounts for corporate affiliation and bulk purchases.  US $ prices tend to be more fixed, with a single percentage discount only because they know that, if you’re okay with buying something that is priced in US $, you’re going to pay more anyway.

In the best store today, one that has been open for only one week yety, I spent about an hour looking at different scarves and shawls and wraps, all with different levels of quality and cost and finishing embroidery and detail.  I felt like one of the designers from the show Project Runway at the fabric store, trying to figure out which bolt and pattern would help them win their next challenge.  In my case, I felt like my challenge was to find something that my family and friends would like, without spending too much or too little.

There are many levels of quality when you are looking at pashmina wool products.  The ultimate level of pashmina is 100% pure wool spun only from the neck hair shed by the ibex.  A medium-sized shawl or wrap, which would be about 28 inches by 72 to 80 inches, should cost about 10,000 Rupees.  You can pass 3 of these through an average man’s wedding ring; they never wrinkle and they feel as soft as any material you will ever touch.  The smaller size, 12 inches by 60 inches or so, should cost about 7,500 Rupees.  These prices equate to about $175 and $240 for the smaller and larger sizes, but of course discounts are possible.  This type of material comes only in color and without any extra decoration as the material is far too fine to hold thread or other types of embroidery very well, although it is technically possible to embroider ibex fur.

Since I cannot afford pure ibex fur, nor would I want to give someone a $240 wrap that could get lost or stained so easily, I went for a fine blend of pashmina wool.  The lowest level of quality is 20% fine pashmina wool (either cashmere or actual pashmina) and 80% basic wool from other parts of the goats that are specially farmed for their wool.  The quality improves gradually as the blend of pashmina wool increases: 40/60, 60/40, and 80/20 are all common blends and they are all distinct from one another.  In addition, there are silk/pashmina blends, and those are highly sought after because they are nearly as light and smooth as the 100% ibex pashmina but for far less money.

The blended fabrics with the least amount of actual cashmere-quality wool are the best for embroidery, crotchet, and other forms of decoration as they are much thicker and sturdier.  They are also machine-washable and not quite as smooth to the touch as the better blends, but the cost difference is massive.  A basic 20/80, 28”x80” shawl costs about 350 Rupees at first (that’s about $7-$8).  That’s an incredibly good price for what you get; in the US, a similar scarf-sized blend of material would be $25-$50 depending on where you buy it. 

The thing is, if you want to buy a few scarves and shawls, you need to do it all at once at the same store to maximize your discounts.  What costs 350 Rupees at first can come down to 200 Rupees if you spend about 4,000 to 6,000 Rupees on other stuff too.  So you can end up getting a really nice shawl that will impress the hell out of whomever receives it as a gift, and you will pay about $4.50. 

As for carpets, well, the details there are even more complicated because of the pattern types and the wool and silk quality levels.  A good silk carpet will set you back about 20,000 Rupees, and that’s for a carpet about 3’x5’ in size.  Not very big for the money.  Wool carpets are more reasonable; they tend to start at about 4,000 Rupees for doormat-sized carpets and escalate quickly from there.

The better quality carpets appear to change color depending on the direction of the light.  Even the back of a good carpet looks amazing.  The tightness of the knots, the handweaving style, everything comes together an creates an incredible result.  And you pay for that quality too.

In terms of other items, such as handicrafts and furniture and jewelry, things are more complicated when you are looking for real quality.  It is easy to tell when a carpet or a scarf is good, superior, or total crap.  It is harder to tell whether silverwork is really well done, at least it’s hard to tell when you don’t know a whole lot about the craft.

I bought a few small things for myself today, a few things that I didn’t actually have.  I got a cool tie clip with matching cufflinks, all of which are black with silver inlaid in a tasteful design.  I also got an amazing silk tie that is a steel grey color that seems to shimmer a bit as you move it around.  It’s going to look terrific with the tie clip and cufflinks, if I ever even need cufflinks.  Plus, the clip will go with the only other tie that I own, a Louis Vuitton that I got on eBay for far less than retail.  I do love a good deal.

I also got myself a jewelry box that cannot be opened unless you know the secret.  The salesman offered to give me the box if I could get it open in 10 seconds or less.  I couldn’t do it.  Of course, I wasn’t really paying attention when he challenged me, and once I saw how to do it I felt stupid because it’s not all that hard.  The box itself is gorgeous: a maple leaf motif carved into walnut wood.  The salesman called the maple leaves by the Indian name for the maple tree, which I didn’t quite catch, but when I told him we called it “maple” he got excited and said he learned something from me.

The best part of that store, actually, was one of the adolescent boys who worked there.  He was wearing a shirt with some text and a red marijuana leaf motif over the left breast pocket.  I laughed when I saw it and said, “I like that leaf on your shirt.”  He smiled broadly and said, “Canada!”  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Canadian flag sports a red maple leaf rather than a red marijuana leaf.  Then again, I think certain parts of Canada might as well use the marijuana leaf on the flag, particularly in specific areas of Vancouver, BC.

…

I got another pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain, Wallenford Estate, as my goodbye present to myself.  As $12 per cup, it’s fairly expensive I would say.  I could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 3 days with that much money here, assuming I knew where to go.  JBM coffee smells like “coffee,” like the idea of coffee.  When you think of coffee and how its aroma should emanate from the cup, you are thinking of JBM coffee.

That’s some good coffee.  And now it’s on to my sweet fresh lime soda, which I really need to learn how to make in the US.

…

The weather has been incredibly good throughout my stay here.  It was sunny and about 80-85 degrees every day, and not too humid at all.  Perfect weather for shopping and sitting in traffic, I must say.  It sure beats the 100+ heat and then torrential rains that happen here for a few months each year.  It also beats the 45 degrees and torrential rain in Seattle right now.  I am looking forward to going home, but I wish I could bring some small amount of this weather with me.  Ahh well, at least I have a scarf to wear home!  It’s a deep blue and grey, very attractive and masculine, and it is an 80/20 blend of silk and pashmina.

So, tonight it’s back to the Golden Dragon, where (as Kimte, the waitress, and I agree) the music is boring.  The food is great, though, so I look forward to some more crispy prawns and possibly some chicken and Hakka-style noodles and more long lachew beans.  I will certainly miss the food here, although I have learned through experience not to eat udma for breakfast.  Ouch.