Friday, November 12, 2010

Free time?—Nope.

After the long travel day, and 4 full days of tourism, day 6 made me a little eager for some free time.

I had noticed amidst the Vodafone stores and the chewing tabacco stands stood out a Pepe Jeans! Pepe works very well for me, and are common enough in Europe, but have not had a presence in the US marketplace for a decade or more.

So I was really looking forward to the bit of free time I had in the afternoon. I planned out how to get to the store and how to get back. Sadly, as with most days, the traffic congestion ate into our free time, leaving us with lots of time on the tour bus, and just enough to run into the hotel and grab a snack before getting back on the tour bus. It was frustrating, but not excessively so...after all, my main purpose on the trip was for work and not for myself.

The next page illustrates the trend—which I knew of in middle eastern countries, but I hadn't thought of it in India—of straight men to show PDA for their good friends. It was quite common to see young men walking hand in hand or arm & arm, or one arm around the other, etc. These men, by and large, I did not believe to be gay. I did see plenty of gays though, as evidenced by their flirtations with me, or their physical reactions to their best friend (managed to get an interesting photo or two on THAT subject...).

2 comments:

Greg McElhatton said...

I cannot stop laughing (in a good way) at your drawing of yourself reaching for the Pepe Jeans store... love it.

Aman Chaudhary said...

The guy/guy non-sexual PDA has been brought up on Outsourced. (And the swastika too.)