You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave

Hello again!

Long time since i wrote and now there are a lot of things to tell in a short time (because in 30 minutes i'm gona meet Martin at the chai corner near the main ghat). So.. Martin came here almost three weeks ago and i went to Delhi to pick him up. After like two days in Delhi in a cheap and not so cosy hotelroom we went out of the polluted city and headed for Pushkar. A small little city 10 hours by bus from Delhi. Both of us feeling a strange pain in our troaths because of the dirty air and pollutions of Indias capital. (The most polluted city in the world i read somewhere). The busride was quite an adventure in itself. First we went to a small little ticketoffice in Delhi and bought two tickets for the bus that was gonna leave the day after. The man we talked to told us to be at the office at 8 o' clock at night the day after and the buss was gonna leave 8.30. We was luckily misstaked by the time and arrived to the office way to early. (if we would have come at the time the man told us we wuold probably have missed the bus) At the office some men put our luggage in a car and started driving towards what was supposed to be the busstop. After 15 minutes we arrived to a place where we went out. The driver stopped a cykelrikshew and told the rikshewdriver where to drop us. Then they asked 20 rupies from us to give to the rikshewman (and this was apart from the money that we already had paid for the busticket). The rikshew dropped us on a not so well lighted street, that seemed to be some kind of busstop. We where the only foreiners and as usual everybody looked very curiously at us. We had no idea exactly where the bus would come and eventhough we had been given a busnumber it would not help so much as one never sees numbers on the buses in India. However, after having asked a couple of persons we managed to find the right bus (or at least it seemed like the right bus and we could not do so much else in that moment than hoping that we would not end up in the wrong place).

I had tryed not to drink so much before the trip because those buses never have toilets and i did'nt know wheater they would stop during the ride or not. But despite my effort not to drink I started to need a toilet very much somewhere between pushkar and Delhi (we still had some hours left of our ride). We where the only foreigners on the bus as well and if i would have asked them to stop the bus i think they would just have laughed at me. But suddenly the bus stoped and no one was more happy than me. I almost run towards the enterance and asked one of the small men standing outside the bus where i could find a toilet. They almost didn't look at me and said "i don't know". Then i tryed to say it in Hindi to make them take my request more seriously. Then they answered "there is no toilet". I started to get more and more desperate and angry at the same time so a continued to ask. I mean, now that we finally had stopped and my bladder was more or less about to explode i could of course not accept a: "there is no toilet". Then one of the small mens told me there where only "outside toilet" and he pointed at some men that was standing near a wall urinating. I decided to try my luck down the road. I was so angry and frustrated from the situation that i didnt care if anybody saw me. (I found a spot behind a car where everybody who passed by could see me, but luckily nobody passed by!) When this nightmare finally was over i was "arg som ett bi" and went back to the bus where i cursed al those small men that where so unkeen to help me. The rest of the trip went well and in the morning we reached a tranquil and clean Pushkar.

After a couple of days in Pushkar we became sick. Martins fever reached 39 degrees and upon all our hotel was pretty horrible. When we because fof the sickness had to cancel our traintickets to varanasi it felt like we where in the song 'hotel california': "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave". One of our sick nights they where playing a mantra on repeat on really high volym for 5 hours. We where so happy when we became better and could leave pushkar. Even though it acctually was a really nice city in itself we where happy when we could continue our trip.

Now we are in Varanasi (have you heard this city beeing mentioned before in this blog?) Here we'll stay only a few days more and then we go back to Delhi to catch our flight home to Sweden. The India trip is almost over and i will in a couple of days probably start to feel melancolic about it. I'm gona miss India. For sure. Even though the noise sometimes drives me crazy and even though my lungs are longing for Swedish air i'm gonna miss things. I'm gonna miss the small chaicorners where one can take a small glass of chai for 3 rupies (50 swedish cents), i'm gonna miss the cows outside of the hotel that i say hi to every day. In all im gonna miss the feeling of being in a world that is not really real. Because thats how India sometimes feels like.

So long and see you soon..