can i smell your gasoline

I managed to sleep until noon today; I woke up around 8am and thought, 'I'll sleep for another fifteen minutes,' and the next time I woke up, it was time for lunch. So, after showering, having lunch, and taking the half-hour car-ride from the hotel to the office, I didn't make it to work until 2:30. Not that I really have that much to do yet, which is a good thing, since by five p.m. the jetlag was really getting to me.

The terrain in Hyderabad is surprisingly, overwhelmingly rocky. There are rocks *everywhere*, especially around Hitech City where the office is. The head driver picked me up this afternoon and speaks really good English, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the scenery on the way to the office, but the driver tonight didn't really encourage conversation. Instead, he put in a tape of Red Hot Chili Peppers' 'By the Way', which I found to be an almost surreal experience. Granted, I was desperately fighting off sleep on the drive back, but given that I listened to that album obsessively back in the day, the contrasts between my current surroundings and California were heightened by the familiar lyrics. As some of you may know, my favorite lyrics from that whole album are 'can I smell your gasoline, can I pet your wolverine', and I can assure you that it's completely different listening to your favorite songs from a tape deck in the middle of Indian rush hour than it is from your CD player on a drive to a California beach.

For one thing, Indian rush hour is a slightly harrowing experience. Once again, my experience in Ukraine is paying off, so I'm slightly accustomed to drivers not following any real lanes or traffic rules. However, it's much worse here; there's a ton of traffic, a lot of it is motorcycles with four people on them or small autorickshaws (who seem to care even less about traffic rules than car drivers), and everyone uses the horn rather than the turn signal. It doesn't help that they drive on the left side of the road, so I get confused in my tired state and think that we're going to die when we're really somewhat fine. There were less than five traffic lights all the way from the office to the hotel, and they weren't even really obeyed; this is in a city of over five million people, so you can imagine the chaos.

I could continue to discuss traffic patterns, but I think it's time for bed!