That photo is the movie poster for the Amitabh Bachchan film I'm in! They seem to have forgotten my name in the cast list though... no idea why. I'm the next big thing. Watch for me in theatres everywhere. (Or at least in India... I can't imagine it getting a wide release in North America. Arghhhh.)
Anyway, I didn't really mean to go a month without posting. It just sort of happened that way. I didn't want to blog again until I got my photos uploaded, and that took a long time. Also, I'm lazy. Oops. I've been semi-busy for the last few weeks. I had a good time visiting everyone in Toronto and Ottawa, then came back home and got a job working at another Second Cup. So I am back in the coffee business. Which I like, but it's not nearly as exciting as traveling so it doesn't give me loads to write about. I've spent most of my free time in the last month just reading, watching Bollywood films, and working on my Hindi. I'm productive, but temporarily very boring.
But, as I said, I did upload the majority of my travel photos. So people can look at them if they feel like it. I've got them all organized by city or place that we visited. They can all be found here:
http://s302.photobucket.com/albums/nn102/choohi/
Going through them all was fun, I got to relive large chunks of my trip as I went along. The pictures don't do justice to anything... you really need to be there to get the whole idea of it, because you're missing the sounds and smells and everything which is a big part. But hey. Sort of on that topic, I decided I am going to relive, for the blog, the Top 3 Musical Moments of the trip, with Youtube video accompaniment! So basically I am just going to link to 3 Bollywood videos! Yeahhhh!!
But seriously, music is everywhere in India and Bangladesh. Mainly Hindi film music is everywhere, on buses and trains and in the streets. People walk around singing songs constantly. It's just part of the culture. Which obviously works for me since I listen to tons of Bollywood music anyway. But there are certain songs that almost made up a mini-soundtrack for the trip. Enjoy. :) (Or not, if you are like my brother who thinks Hindi music sounds like hamster singing.)
So, the first one... there was one day in Bangladesh where we were visiting some villages, and we went to one village in the evening to interview a woman there. We rode out to her house on a rickshaw type thingy... it was basically like a flat board on wheels, pulled by a bicycle in front. Four of us could fit on it comfortably. It was almost dark when we rode back, and we were just slowly rolling down this small, foggy dirt road through the village, past rice paddy fields where the only light you could see came from tiny lanterns in houses faraway on the fields. And Yunus, our translator, had his cell phone with a bunch of songs on it, and he was playing them as we went along. He played this song, and it was just so pretty and the tone fit the setting so nicely... it was just a really cool, peaceful moment. I can't describe it properly, but here's the song:
Secondly, here is the song that could easily stand alone as the soundtrack for the trip - this is basically the biggest song of the year from the biggest Hindi film of the year (maybe the highest grossing Bollywood film ever, not too sure of the numbers) and it played EVERYWHERE. It was the first song we heard when we landed in Bangladesh, in our car ride to the hotel, and we heard it constantly blaring all over Bangladesh and India for the next two months. (Jenn, I dedicate this one to you, of course.)
And lastly (for now), this song brings back memories of Amritsar, when we met some girls at the Golden Temple and ended up crashing a wedding with them. The girls were singing this song in the afternoon, then sang it again on the auto-rickshaw ride to the wedding. There were 8 of us crammed in the back, all singing along to this song. (Well, not Micah and I, obviously - but everyone else was!) Also, since I love the movie it's from, I made it my mission while we were in Delhi to visit every single location in this video, so it's extra special. I'm a nerd.
There are dozens more but that's probably enough. More photos to come though, if and when Micah ever gives me copies of his - he has good photos of us at the wedding and us on a motorcycle that I'm dying to see. Ooooh.
