Window Seats on Bullet Trains Smear Land Into Sky

Chaaii! Chaaii! Chicken Biriani! Chicken Biriani!
The vendors are always coming through the carriage, selling little bits of something or another. Tea, dinner, water, green coconuts, soap, shoe shine, or repair. They all come through. They are interspersed with beggars with broken limbs or babies, gypsy children in circus outfits, and untouchable's who sweep out the carriage...all looking for a few rupees. There are also hizra's - unshaven transvestites dressed in saris and jewelry- they clap loudly in each carriage, demanding money. I think giving money is supposed to be good luck, or else it avoids a curse. The men in our carriage laugh at the hizras. After being polite for a while, Annabel started clapping back at them and then putting out her hand for a few rupees. This confused the hizra, What is this crazy foreigner doing?

For many of the hours of train travel we read our books and listened to music. Just before the trip I replaced my ancient discman with a new CD/MP3 player. It is a beautiful machine whose AA batteries last 23 hours. A disk of MP3s holds 11 albums and, except for the music I got from Annabel, all my favorite music was already backed up on disk. All in all, an affordable and thoroughly satisfactory answer to iPod Envy. Since it supports 2 sets of headphones we both listened to heaps of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and other assorted albums Jake's given me; Iron & Wine or Nick Drake put us to sleep almost every night.

When we got bored of our books we picked up playing cards. Annabel has a vast repertoire of 2 person card games. We played for quite a while as our compartment-mates looked on in amusement, interested to learn new games they could play themselves. Annabel is merciless, very good at her games and has a winning complex besides. I lost a LOT of games. If she was my real sister, as opposed to "my sister" whenever I felt like being from New Zealand, I would have been annoyed. As it was, it was fun - I learned lots of new card games and when I play YOU I will win all the time!