wonderlust: Udaipur, just quickly

Best city yet.

This is what greeted me when I arrived at my guesthouse and the manager took me upstairs to take a look at the restaurant. In my almost-three days in Udaipur, I spent a good amount of time up here, having a meal on the terrace or reading up on the rooftop while looking over the Lake Palace and Jagmandir Island.

I was close enough to the Lake Palace that I was picking up its wi-fi signal. I could, of course, only access the log-on website for guests, which tauntingly displayed all the amenities non-guests were missing out on.

Met another two young students yesterday at this ghat that was the closest point you could get to the Lake Palace. They were less genuine, but still harmless, and also not trying to sell me anything. One kid was more talkative, and he introduced himself to me first. They were both commerce students, but the quieter kid was like about eight times smarter. Not long after the conversation began, I told the talkative kid that my flight out of India would take me first to Kuala Lumpur. As he asked me what country that was in, the smart kid muttered, "Petronas Towers," the first sounds out of his mouth. The smart kid knew about the Kospi and the Hang Seng and the one-child policy and exactly what NASDAQ stands for, while the talkative kid would just say things like, “China’s population is the biggest!” and “Hong Kong is good for electronics!” I wonder who was copying who’s homework in that friendship.

Stopped by a store (not the store above) the other day because they were selling postcards for five rupees, half the usual price. Then the guy (not the guy above) showed me boxes and boxes of really crappy postcards. They were just really crappy. And it reminded me of when Joe Krystofik and I took all the basketball cards we didn’t want anymore, all our doubles and triples and crap players like John Battle or Jon Koncak, repackaged them in pieces of printer paper stapled together, and sold them for HK$10 to unwitting younger kids in the mezzanine passageway at the Manhattan.

Speaking of selling things, I don't think anyone should have to be anyong-haseyo-ed this much. I genuinely don’t have anything against being mistaken as Korean, but I feel like even if I was Korean, I’d be tired of it by now. It's happened from the day I arrived in India, but it reached its full identity crisis peak in Udaipur, where I honestly got two or three anyong-haseyos every minute I walked the streets.

I got so tired of it that not only did I start telling the salesguys I was from the U.S., but I would embellish the lie by telling them so were my parents and grandparents, and that it was my ancestors over a hundred years ago that came over from China. All I got were confused looks, which I guess is only fair when you're trying to prove a point that isn’t true. I wonder if an actual fourth or fifth-generation Chinese American would feel more or less frustrated than me.

And I haven't passed just for the usual Korean or Japanese; try Bhutanese, as well as Brazilian (as remarked by Brazilians, no less).