scooterpigs

scooterpigs, originally uploaded by seamonkeylifeboat.

i didn't add a counter to this site until we got back - our connection speed was so bad we just got our business done, tried to keep this updated and reread emails from home 5 or 10 times each... i'm pretty suprised to find so many hits when we've been back so long and never even added most of our final stories and pics. so... i'm adding some here and there now that we're readjusted (mostly) to our lives in SF. it's almost easy to feel as though India was a dream though i know that we're both changed by our trip.
this picture was taken in Bundi. every day we'd leave our hotel and step around a pile of little piggies and puppies napping together, playing, snuffling, and drinking the incredibly foul black water constantly running through the ditch. they get much bigger and less pretty - grown up they are astoundingly ugly, all coarse black hair and jutting hipbones, generally missing an ear and eating garbage or highly suspicious piles from the pavement. supposedly their ears are clipped to varying degrees by the very low caste people who claim them as their own to identify them. in another town a hotelier with a powerful voice and personality told us that their meals were vegetarian but if we asked ahead of time he'd have his cooks prepare us chicken if we wanted. we said that vegetarian was fine but he kept insisting, sure that americans needed meat and even offered pork. it was late and we'd been on trains for hours and i didn't really think when i said something, trying to reassure him lightheartedly that we were fine without meat, about having seen some pigs out on the street that i'd prefer not to eat anyway. i honestly was just trying to joke our way out of the conversation and into our beds and was so sorry when, offended, he drew himself up and responded that those street pigs were not for eating, that indians ate 'pretty pink shiny pigs just like americans.' i felt pretty bad about that until later when i realized that other indians had told me that they WERE eaten - and anyway, i'm pretty sure most of the pigs i've seen in america aren't exactly pink and shiny, either. oh well.