Goa Day 2 Narration and Reflection

I’m feeling rather tired from my huge journeys today and my two evening Kingfisher beers. (Kinfisher bottles by the way are almost twice as big as 12oz beers. Kingfishers are .65 liters. Wine is .75 liters.) My hotel, the Panjim Inn, is almost too charming, and it’s definitely too charming for a single man. It’s a restored mansion, and each room has four poster beds. The desk and armoire are either antiques or made to look like antiques. There is trellised wood decoration on them and wood shapes inlaid on the surfaces. There’s a restaurant on the second story terrace overlooking a front courtyard. This could be a bed and breakfast in Savannah, Georgia. And these owners must be doing well because they’ve already opened two more restored buildings as hotels on this same block, and with the restoration in progress next door, the Panjim Inn looks like it’s about ready to double in size. It is the low season here, and my hotel is under $23 a night, and I think I’ll get the price knocked down further.

There’s also an art gallery. Contemporary Indian art so far hasn’t been overly to my liking. Mostly it looks like something Gaugin would have painted in Tahiti – small headed people, big limbs, simplified shapes, tribal-inspired, scenes of people in nature – or Picasso’s cubist people. That being said, I’ve seen a few pieces in Goa and Mumbai that I’ve considered buying. This is also where I considered my imaginary money. The prices are low but not low enough.

I stumbled into someplace much cooler this morning, but first I had a vegetable sandwich for breakfast. It was the best meal I’ve had in a few weeks. It was very simple: toast and mayonnaise were the main ingredients. American-like food such as this is sounding pretty good anymore. I also had black coffee. This was exciting until I tasted it, and it tasted like the acid coffee that’s been sitting on the burner for two hours. And please remember this is the monsoon, and I’m on the coast of the Arabian Sea south of the Tropic of Cancer. After the rain dumped for about 20 minutes, I set off on my huge day’s journey but was delayed before I even got off the block. In the building next to my hotel was an art gallery called Velha Goa where I then spent the next 45 minutes.

It’s tradition for me to buy my mom painted tiles. Painted tiles aren’t necessarily Goan, but they are Portuguese, and Goa is a former Portuguese enclave. So I bought some fabulous tile works for my mom and aunts. Don’t worry, Grandma, I’ll get you something somewhere else. The tiles are manufactured in Goa but the paints are imported from Portugal, the art gallery wallahs told me. The prices were low, and they were also selling imported Portuguese wine. I’ve always found Portuguese wine to be cheap and delicious. Prices ranged from about $10 to $20, which is much more expensive than it would be in the States. They were also selling vinho verde, which is a variety of green wine unique to Portugal. I’ve never tasted it, and I thought it would be very Portuguese of me to try (like last night when I had some pathetic Port), but buying a bottle of wine would involve me drinking a whole bottle, alone, in my hotel room. Plus, I don’t really trust wine in India anymore because unless it’s coming from a luxury hotel, there’s no way to know how long that bottle has been sitting in a hot room. I mean wine here hasn’t been very delicious.

So my journey was delayed nearly an hour while I purchased some large packages of goods. I don’t like looking like a tourist (which is stupid because my white ass will always look like a tourist in India), so I don’t very often pull out my guidebook or look at maps. I also don’t like turning around when I’m going the wrong direction. By sheer skill, I walked directly to the bus terminal with only a memorized map in my head. At the bus terminal I strolled around looking lost for a while before I asked where the busses to Old Goa were. I asked again, and I ended up on the right bus, and I went to Old Goa.

Old Goa
This is the former Portuguese capital. Supposedly back in the day the city rivaled Lisbon in splendor. This is difficult to believe because all that’s left now of the city are the churches. Yes, these churches are giant, but the rest of the city is gone. There are 7 or 8 of these huge churches. One is in ruins. The Portuguese came in 1510, and construction of the biggest church left today, Se Cathedral, began in 1562. The city’s decline was accelerated by the Inquisition, and an epidemic devastated the city in 1635. In 1843 the capital was shifted to Panaji. Indians today call Panaji, Panjim, so I do too. Panjim is 9km east down the huge wide Mandovi River. This is the town where my hotel is.

Panjim sits about three km up from the mouth of the River Mandovi. Walking down by the river today, I was trying to picture these Portuguese schooners sailing up the river. This river is huge wide, like wider than the Mississippi in New Orleans. I was also trying to picture what it must’ve been like for a European to sail all this way and then settle in the hot, humid jungle, so far from the comforts of home. I guess it’s not so bad if you’re rich from the spice trade and you can get Indians to build your house, but not all the Portuguese were rich. Sailors were usually pretty low, middle class. I’m missing the comforts of home after a month and a half, so I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like back in the day.

Happily there were some art galleries in these ancient churches. Only one was any good. I asked to buy a painting, and no one knew how or when I could go about doing this. Booming business it must be, I’m sure. I also went to some Goan history museum. In the museum were paintings of the long line of Portuguese governors from 1510 to 1961. I also saw many old paintings still hanging in churches. All were very dark in color and usually cracked on the surface because none of these have ever seen any of the fine preservation or restoration work that the paintings at le Louvre have.

There’s no Portuguese waterfront promenade or piers left in Old Goa. There is, however, a ship salvaging operation. I’ve heard about these. These out of commission ships are sent to poorer countries where companies undertake the very dangerous job of tearing apart ships to sell the metals for scrap. Something to fall back on, I guess, if the art gallery business isn’t working.

Only part of the day was spent walking in the rain. The biggest storms passed in the morning. In Old Goa, again relying on my impressive skill at navigating blindly, I managed to catch a bus to Ponda where I was going to visit a spice plantation. The plantation was supposed to be open, but after I’d ridden for an hour in a bus and taken a rickshaw out of town to the plantation, I got there to be told that it was closed for the day because there had been too much rain. They said I should come back tomorrow, and I will, but I’m skeptical.

So I got a bus back to Panjim and then a bus to Calangute. It can’t be said that all Indians are short. Some are very tall, especially Sikhs it seems. (interesting note: I always think of Sikhs as being very tough and manly. They’re a warrior group, carry swords, and luxury hotels employ them as guards. They wear turbans because, I think, they don’t cut their hair because wasting time on hair care could interfere with battle-readiness. And in Old Goa today, I saw a Sikh man carrying his wife’s purse.) Most Indians are short. I’m guessing that a lack of meat helps, but Goans tend to be very short, and they usually eat meat. (No dietary restrictions for Catholics except that you gotta eat fish on Friday!) Today I was sitting in the back of a bus, and I noticed I was taller than everyone else on the bus. Not just taller, but towering over the whole bus. A unique experience in Eric’s Life Journey. Also on the bus, the radio played the Baha Men masterpiece “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and other generic top-40 classics.

After the bus and after my time on the beach with the Kingfishers I walked down a narrow dark jungle lane to search for Kaya, my Indian-Japanese restaurant. The dark lane was kind of sketchy, but I really don’t think there’s much petty street crime in India, so I wasn’t scared. Plus I was in the early stages of being drunk, and you know how everyone is better at ass kicking when they’re drunk. This restaurant may still exist on this lane, but it wasn’t open tonight. It is, again, the low-tourist season (monsoon season). I was walking way off the beaten path, and when people saw me in car lights, they must’ve thought, “This dude’s lost.” (the lane was too dark to seem my skin except when cars passed)

So back to the main road I went. Street sellers and shop wallahs everywhere usually try to get my attention because I’m white. They talk real fast and bark out all they’re selling like auctioneers. One guy was barking all his various wares, and surreptitiously thrown in there I heard hashish, marijuana. Goa is famous as the one and only place in India to get drugs, and I’m curious about this seedy side, but not so curious that I want to explore the Indian prison system as a real life prisoner. That would be keeping it just too real. Plus I don’t like getting high anyway.

I bypassed the drug dealer and stopped at the first Mexican restaurant I saw. Surprisingly, this was the second Mexican restaurant I saw today. I ordered a mushroom burrito, and it’s the closest approximation to Mexican food I’ve eaten since being in the States. This is the third time I’ve attempted Mexican food. But it was still an approximation, and my burrito was made like a Mexican pizza and was very bland. There was no imported Mexican beer, and I’ve had about enough Kingfisher, so I dined without a beverage. And my stomach two hours later still feels like I’ve swallowed bricks. I hope this is just because of my lunch (chocolate bars) and evening snack (beer on an empty stomach).

Some good news I heard while on the beach was that the last bus to Panjim runs at 7:30. I heard this at 8:30. Don’t worry, I was told, you can take a taxi or hitch a ride on a motorcycle. And I got on the first motorcycle to offer me a ride. It was 15km (9.3mi) back to Panjim, and riding on the back of a motorcycle feels pretty cool.

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