They say you can make it with a dollar a day in India… I’ve never been big on experiments so I didn’t try. But in all fairness it’s still pretty darn cheap here.
The food
In overview, starting from the essentials – beer… A small one (0.33l) in a shop costs 30Rs and big one (0.65l no less!) is 60Rs. In a bar or restaurant or any plastic-table-filled shack it’s 60/100 rupees accordingly. Simply put that makes your big bottle of beer 1.4 USD at most expensive.
Meals can go anywhere from $0.9 for dumplings or soup to $3.1 for a huge portion of typical Indian cuisine. That’s the average you pay for a meal. A cup of Chai Masala goes for $0.4 and if you’re fast enough to catch the bread-bikers at the crack of dawn then they sell 3pcs of fresh-from-the-oven pastry poee’s (puff pastry breads) for 9Rs… I think you can get half a matchbox for that back home.
The transport
As I wanted to blend in to the two-wheel nation and feel and look less like a white tourist, I got a bicycle for my time here. I only crashed into one car and two vespas which in my books is a pretty good effort. And that was on my first week! After that I was golden.
Like a pro I stopped paying attention on the road and cut through cars and hundreds of mopeds on my way. My fear of dying faded fast, especially when I learned that only 130 people a year die in traffic in the whole of India! (The country holds a population of 1.2bn) I heard there’s a rule that you need to buy 3 vespas at once if you want to purchase it. But I mean I’ve seen 5 people driving on one, so that way you could fit all your immediate family, plus the in-laws and a few second cousins in one trip.
I even got used to all the honking! You just beep or ring your bell all the time and it’ll sound about right. Jokes aside, there are actually different honking codes for I’m passing/I’m coming/I’m entering a blind turn/etc… But I’m quite sure if you just beep every 4th second you’ll be as good as in the club.
The deities
There are around 35 000 Gods in India (and one of them is staring down and judging me on every wall in the flat). And then there are Puja’s (altars dedicated to a specific God) everywhere. Some are just in a form of a small shelf inside a bar but there are also big white pillars on the side of the roads. It’s made sure by the residents around that the Puja’s always have fresh flowers or some sort of food on them.
Conclusion
To finish up, I have shed 1 layer of my Snow White skin and gone 5 shades darker. I’m giving a run for their money to the familiar faces at our local beach shack as they rejoice on my last day, grabbing my hand and shouting “We can’t even see the veins anymore!!”. I have read 4 books and bought 14 kilos of goods and knick knacks, which I’m sure are going to cost me dearly at the airport…
