New Year in the Mountains

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  Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
Thursday, January 1, 2009

I surprised myself by being social last night... I had made the decision to ditch the group and make up a phony excuse before going to Lunar for dinner and eating a brownie from Glenary's on the way back to my warm and cosy bed. I was all justified with it too, I'd made up some great reasons. But when I emerged from the intenet cafe I found two of the lovely travellers I had met earlier in the week had returned from Kalimpong to celebrate NYE here, plus another Australian girl Emma (who has just finished doing a grad program in Canberra) had decided to join us as well. We picked up another Australian couple on the way to dinner and ended up having a great time.

I had dressed up as much as circumstances allowed, and even took off my beanie for the night.
We ate at Glenary's (previous site of my cold malai kofta) and I ordered dhal makhani which, after Lunar's incredible effort, was very poor. We plied it with salt and ate it with some delicious pilau and delicous aloo ghobi and I was satisfied with my last meal for 2008. Well, it's not quite true that that was my last meal of 2008 as I had my heart set on having a hot brownie with ice-cream and chocolate sauce - but they had run out of brownies. I had to settle for ice-cream instead, which apparently was chocolate-flavoured by just tasted cold to me! Note for next time, order dessert before dinner.
Anyway, enough of food for the moment.

We had some great conversation, everybody except for me got stuck into the Kingfisher's and proceeded to get much happier. I stuck to fresh lime soda and water, and managed to survive a NYE without having one drink at all. I was lovly to wake up this morning fresh and clear (although the Nepalese music booming from the hotel next door tried it's best to give me a morning headache)
 The two Swedes in our group were surrounded by Australians and they asked us to teach them some Australian slang - we gave them 'fair dinkum' and discussed the knife scene in Crocodile Dundee at length. Christian (a banker who lives in Bangalore and plays classical guitar in a heavy metal band when back in Sweden) had asked me earlier if I was originally from Australia as I didn't sound anything like the Australians he had heard (namely Steve Irwin). I gave him an example of some fine ockerisms and he was confused, 'You don't all sound like that?' Thank you Steve Irwin, Paul Hogan, for the reputation you've given us!
But we got them to teach us some Swedish slang as well - 'Sh-uhr-rrrrr h-oarrrr-t' means 'go for it' or literally 'drive hard', and 'sha-pu-lan' means 'hello friend'.

Christian and Eva had already arranged for us to go to the Windemere after dinner for their big party. We wandered up and marvelled at how glamourous the hotel was - and how it was hardly travelling to stay somewhere like that. But the people in the Windermere were shocked to see us arrive and sent us straight back out the door, despite the assurances earlier that all of town was welcome. We walked past the oldies getting down to the Rolling Stones, eagerly watched on by the bemused hotel staff, and walked back to Chowrasta Square. The whole town closes down at 8.30 and as it was 9.30 by now we were resigning ourselves to sitting on the concrete composing tunes of our own when we ran into a couple from Birmingham, London, who had run into a couple from Dublin who had it on god knowledge that the Gymkhana club was having a do. So up up up we went to the Gymkhana Club which was aboslutely pumping with music and people. We thought we'd hit gold but were told 'No foreigners' at the door. This was slightly modified within minutes to 'Alright, just pay 600 rupees' before they finally grinned and let us all in the door for free.

Having been in India for a short while I've become pretty familiar with some of the big Indian hits - 'Singh is King', 'Hare Ram, Hare Krishna', 'Om Shanti Om' (it's old but it's still HUGE) and various others. As we are in the Mountains with a lot of Nepalese people there were also hits from Nepal, old and new. Before long we were all carving up the dancefloor, eagerly joined by a team of teenage boys, one of who - Sabar - adopted me as his own and spun me dangerously around the dancefloor. Sabar was very sauve indeed and I was pretty impressed with all of their friendliness. The British couple concurred that if this were an English or Australian party it was likely that the teenage boys would have stolen a bottle of run and would be out the front throwing rocks at people right about now.  I happily posed for about 6 dozen photos with each and every one of the teenage boys and was taught various Punjabi and Nepali dances, although I was bad at all of them. I never realised how incredible unco-ordinated I am when I try to dance in joggers. It shouldn't be done, it just wasn't pretty. One of our group won a prize for his dancing efforts (he was hilarious) and we watched the teenage boys edge gently away from Eva, who was wearing an orange silk salwar kameeze with sneakers and a blanket, holding a long neck of Kingfisher beer and busting out some jumping Egyptian moves. A beautiful Nepalese couple came up and did some wonderful belly/bollywood dancing with us and we all danced and shouted and joined in the words when we knew them, sometimes when we didn't.

Twelve o'clock came and I become the flavour of the month as I hugged and pecked a string of boys. I do hope that that's not some indication of how my year will end up.

Emma and I staggered home in the below 0 degree cold and I was home and very happy in bed by 1am. It was a good fun night!

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