After getting to India and getting a good night's sleep, Grace wants to go shopping so we hire a taxi to drive us around for the day. We go to a Sari store and spend hours getting shown every imaginable style, color, and pattern. After picking out several, we depart for our next destination which is a snake park. So our driver drops us off and we go inside… the only problem is that he has dropped us off at a rug store. WTF! Clearly he gets a commission if the people he drops off buy stuff. So anyways, I chase down the driver and get him to pick up Grace, who is having a hard enough time getting around without the extraneous stops.
We eventually make it to the snake park. The cost is 15 rupees for Grace, 15 rupees for me, and another 10 rupees for my camera. For those of you who have not traded in rupees recently, right now the exchange rate is about 44.5 INR = $1 USD, so total we spent about $0.90 for our visit. I would say money well spent. It was actually more of a reptile park than it was a snake park, but who’s splitting hairs, or scales. While the snakes were quite interesting, the crocodiles were much more interesting. By far the most impressive was the Saltwater Crocodile. At 15’-23’ long, it’s crazy looking at an animal that can literally eat you. The snakes were just as frightening though. There are allot more species of venomous snakes in India (60 venomous of 270 total) than there are in the US (19 venomous of 250 total). I also ran across this little tidbit online:
"Snakebites cause an estimated 50,000 fatalities annually in India but just a dozen or fewer per year in the US,” said Ian Simpson, a member of the WHO Snakebite Treatment Group.
Yikes! I think I’m going to try and avoid running around in the tall grass here in India.
We eventually make it to the snake park. The cost is 15 rupees for Grace, 15 rupees for me, and another 10 rupees for my camera. For those of you who have not traded in rupees recently, right now the exchange rate is about 44.5 INR = $1 USD, so total we spent about $0.90 for our visit. I would say money well spent. It was actually more of a reptile park than it was a snake park, but who’s splitting hairs, or scales. While the snakes were quite interesting, the crocodiles were much more interesting. By far the most impressive was the Saltwater Crocodile. At 15’-23’ long, it’s crazy looking at an animal that can literally eat you. The snakes were just as frightening though. There are allot more species of venomous snakes in India (60 venomous of 270 total) than there are in the US (19 venomous of 250 total). I also ran across this little tidbit online:
"Snakebites cause an estimated 50,000 fatalities annually in India but just a dozen or fewer per year in the US,” said Ian Simpson, a member of the WHO Snakebite Treatment Group.
Yikes! I think I’m going to try and avoid running around in the tall grass here in India.
When we were leaving the snake park, I was approached by a young Indian guy who asked if he could have his picture taken with me, to which I agree. Then one of his friends asked if he could be in the picture too… and then another, and another, and another, and soon I had an entire bus load of Indian teenagers rushing over to be in the picture. Sure, why not. I felt like a bit of a celebrity. It’s kind of amazing to me that they see westerners that infrequently. I got one of them to take a picture with my camera too, so it worked out pretty well. 
We left the snake park and headed for a place I could buy a calculator. I must say that if you are in a place with a language you don’t speak and a different currency, a calculator is a definite necessity. You might not be able to understand the person, but you can both read numbers, which makes negotiation much easier. So our driver ends up taking us to a mall… no problem, I only need a calculator. The driver drops us at the mall and we go in. I see a store that might have them so I go in while Grace walks into another store to look at clothes. I walk in, ask for a calculator, buy it, and I am out of there in 2 minutes flat. I go to the other store and Grace is already upstairs, sitting down at a counter, being shown one Salwar kameez after another. We already spent hours at another store looking at Saris, so I am settling in for the long haul. She tries one on, THEN suddenly decides she does not really want to shop, asks me to get her out of it, and retreats to the dressing room. Great! Now I am stuck in a room full of high pressure sales people trying to explain that for some inexplicable reason we are not interested after all, and I can’t leave until Grace gets out… but she is taking freaking forever. Talk about feeding me to the wolves. Ten minutes later, Grace FINALLY gets out of the dressing room and we can leave.
We head back to the hotel and pay and tip the driver (who did a pretty bad job). Apparently we did not tip enough because he kept holding out his hand in expectation with a funny look on his face. Apparently we did not tip enough, but after talking to people later, there is really no expectation or guideline for if/when/how much a person should tip, so it would seem that the guy just wanted more money out of the stupid Americans.
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