India express

So we took our first Indian railroad ride last night. It's one of those things that you refer to as "quite an experience" later on in life. In fact, it was quite a lot like going to jail. OK, not prison, like where you have to join a gang and everything, it was more like spending a night in a holding cell in the county lock-up.
You're put in this chamber with grimy walls, dirty floors and greasy bunks and made to spend a night with a lot of people who you don't know and are all up in your space and possibly hostile. You have to keep an eye on your stuff at all times. Guards with rifles slung over their shoulders patrol intermittently, waving flashlights after "lights out". The latrine is just a hole in the floor and looks like is hasn't been cleaned. Ever. The temperature soars during the day, especially if you are in a top bunk just near the aluminum roof, which we were, and drops down at night, this is just a fact of life. Favor can be won from your fellow passengers by offering little treats- cigarettes, cookies, cups of tea. Old men hot-box shared cigarettes, holding them like a chillum to keep their lips off the filter. Time passes sloooowly. But it's all over in the morning and you are released out into the sunshine again, free to go.
OK, well, maybe the other passengers weren't "hostile"... maybe "aggressively friendly". Conversations with most Indian men go like this--
"You are country?" or "Where coming from?" or any other barely intelligible variation on that question which you wouldn't understand if you hadn't been asked it 20 times that day to mean "What country are you from?". Sometimes they ask "To what country do you belong?", which especially offends my anti-nationalist sensibilities.
"What's your goodname?", as opposed to the bad one.
"What is your profession?", which i find a bit hard to find an answer to.
If you can make it through this quiz (which most guys don't even really listen to the answers of) you may be considered a good friend and people may want to take pictures with you (or of themselves sitting with your girlfriend), attempt to do business with you, give recommendations of where to go in India, refer you to their guru, ask more and more personal questions, etc.
One guy I met on the train asked "Who is your favorite Hollywood actor?".
"Uh..", I tried to think of someone middle-of-the-road enough that he would know, "Robert De Niro?"
But alas, it was just a set-up, "Oh. My favorite is Mr. Arnold Schwartzenegger. What a beautiful body!"
Now this is only men that I'm talking about because the women don't speak to strangers. At most they will say that they want to meet Genevieve and then giggle and sit there while their Father or Husband holds forth on some subject. All the while I'm wondering what the women think, but they aren't even supposed to meet my eyes, as that may be misconstrued as a come-on.
Anyway I guess we forget how posh we were living with our private driver, speedy car and personal space. Traveling India by the highway is also hot and dusty, but with different scenery. The big rigs that make up the majority of traffic out there are brightly painted, with the back highly decorated and always bearing the motto "BLOW HORN", which we though was funny at first (I saw a tanker the other day which had "MILK NOT FOR SALE!" emblazoned on all sides, to be sure). These are all relatively slow moving and must be overtaken constantly, which can be dangerous on a two-lane highway. The back of their trailer obscures the drivers view, but he wings it and attempts to pass just before the car in the opposite lane blows past, not slowing a bit. Often our driver would attempt this maneuver and have to swerve back as quick as possible, not able to cover the distance in time. Along the way we saw many wrecks: an overturned truck bearing shallots that filled the air with an appetizing aroma, a jeep and a semi that had been in a head on collision and both sat mangled and abandoned on the road, a truck that had driven straight into a rock wall on a mountain pass, several more jackknifed trailers, and two matching sets of semis that had rammed straight into each other, one with a tanker trailer that read "HIGHLY FLAMMABLE", abandoned eerily on the blacktop. Here's to travel in India!