Jan 20th: A random shopping trip.

Had a very entertaining visit to the shops today. My Indian cell phone is running out of credit so I went out to buy more for it. According to the manual it was dead easy and I could go to any number of locations and buy a top up card.

Well, thats not the way it worked out, the first place I went to the guys there couldn't speak english very well and my Tamil is still a bit ropey I know that a lakh is 100,000 and a Crore is 10,000,000 but thats about all and thats an awful lot of credit for the phone so I didn't use them.

The gist I was getting at some shops seemed to be that because I got the phone in Bangalore which is in Karnataka that I couldn't recharge it here. One shop was very keen to sell me a Tamil Nadu (the state that Madurai is in) Sim card but I could see that by the end of the trip I'd have about half a dozen sim cards from various states.

Surely I could buy a scratch card and charge the phone the way that vodafone told me I could. I eventually found a shop that sold the scratch cards but for some reason they didn't want to sell me them they had a much better way, or thats what they told me.

The better way was that one of them pulled out a phone and started texting to somewhere that sent a text to me that put credit on my phone. That seemed fine as credit was getting on the phone. It was taking ages though which I coudn't figure out until it became obvious that this was to give me time to see if there was anything else in the shop that I might like to buy.

Talk about an eclectic shop you name it they would have something to do with it there and would no doubt sell it to you an a special rate for a visitor.

While the phone was getting credited we started having a conversation about where I was from and other personal stuff. I was warned that in India its not uncommon to be asked what we would consider to be too personal to ask someone that was merely buying phone credits.

After my grilling they started looking concerned and talking to each other about my arms, it took a while but they were asking me about scars that I had all aver my arms. So we were lost again until a gentleman from the back of the shop came to translate. It turned out they thought my freckles were scars from some terrible injury I must have had, very funny.

Seeing how a small shop in India operates is entertaining. The shop wasn't much bigger than about four meters square. At first I thought that it was very busy as it was full but these were the shopkeepers and various hangers on. I was the only one in there who was buying anything.

Now the interpreter suddenly made know that he had an agenda that he was wanting to talk to me about and started pulling out pictures. It turns out his son had attempted a world record by naming all the countries and describing their neighbors. He had all sorts of certificates and proof. His son is only four.

The Guinness book of records told him they would consider it for inclusion. However he wants to get it onto wikipedia as well and wanted me to do it. So I'm waiting for him to track me down with all the stuff and I'll be adding that in when we get back to Scotland. Or as some of you know my wife has a slight addiction to wikipedia and google so maybe she will do it.

Eventually got back to the guest house and was going upstairs when I heard a shout up saying Mr. Paul tomorrow you go and watch surgery. Oh heck. So thats what tomorrow will be all about.

TTFN

p.s. Sitting happily at level 1 on the MurrAlfie scale. :-)