During World War 2, my grandma sang this song while working on a farm in upstate NY for the summer. As far as I know, this is the first time the full lyrics have been published on the internet.
Farming for Freedom
(to the tune of the Caisson Song)
Up in trees, on our knees,
Picking beans and strawberries,
We are farming for freedom today.
Bit by bees, stung by fleas,
We are working just with ease [?],
We are farming for freedom today.
With our flag in sight
We are working day and night,
Feeding the men in the air and on the sea.
So it’s off we go
To meet the common foe,
Yes we are farming for freedom today.
(Cheer) Keep 'em eating, keep 'em eating!
I Googled exact phrases from the song and only found one hit, on page 59 of the autobiography Madame W by Leila Israel Weisberg. The related section is quoted below. Note the slight differences in the lyrics.
Due to labor shortages, New York State had a program which organized volunteers to harvest farm crops. I signed up for the two-week program.
The group of volunteers gathered on Sunday morning for the trip to Poughkeepsie, New York on the Hudson River Day Line. When we arrived in Poughkeepsie we were loaded onto buses and taken to various camps in the area where we would be housed for two weeks. My group was taken to the training camp used by Tony Canizzaro, the prizefighter. The accommodations seemed rustic to me, a city girl, but quite adequate. After a good supper, we all went to bed early because we had to get up the next morning at 5:30 am. Breakfast was at 6 and the area farmers started picking us up at 7. Each of us was given a bag lunch and we were loaded onto the backs of trucks and taken to the farms. We picked cherries, currants, and strawberries and weeded tomatoes. We were paid for our work by the bushel or pint or by the hour when we did weeding. The farmers kept track of what we earned.
As we worked, we sang a song to the tune of “As Those Caissons Go Rolling Along.” I only remember the first verse. It went like this:
“On our knees
Up in trees
Picking peas and strawberries
We are farming for freedom today.”
It was the hardest work I had ever done and I came back to camp each evening so tired I could barely eat and flop into bed. We had to pay for our room and board and after two weeks, my earnings covered all but $3 of the cost.
So there you go, historians.
If you’re enjoying life, you might be one of the millions of Americans suffering from hypoanxiety. Beware — this condition can spoil your well-educated urban existence.
Symptoms include: Building campfires, riding elevators, committing to relationships, listening to people crunching and slurping without flying into a rage, using public restrooms, allowing your children to play outdoors, eating canned food and consuming less than nine cups of coffee a day.
But don’t worry — The Big City Times can help. A daily dose of the Big City Times with breakfast can reverse the symptoms of hypoanxiety in college graduates. Visit our website — behind the paywall — and join the lonely crowd.
Side effects may include brunch, jaywalking, seasonal wardrobes, eyebrow grooming, sinus headaches and taxes.
Guided by Shadows: A Westward Walk on Spain’s Camino de Santiago
I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2005. Eight years later, the experience is transformed into a little book for your armchair travel pleasure. Enjoy. Ultreia!
Or, as the blurb says:
Guided by Shadows puts you on the path to Santiago. It reveals not only the joys and pains of the route, but also the mysteries, frustrations and absurdity of a 500-mile walking pilgrimage.
14,830 words // ~49 Kindle pages
The frustrations, impatience, exhaustion, and fed-upness of culture shock exist because a place is flirting with you. It’s teasing you. This is the first stage of the courtship ritual. It doesn’t need you and there’s no way it’s going to bend to your whim. But secretly, deep down, it’s aching for a relationship.
This blog’s tagline is, “The road is where you are.” But what does that mean?
It means that you are always traveling. It is a response to travelers or travel bloggers who complain about being “home” and wish to return to “the road.” It is an admonition to lifelong journeyers to embrace their current location, wherever that might be, with the spirit of travel. It is a dare to make an existential leap — from seeing your life as punctuated by periodic travel, to seeing your life as perpetual travel.
These ideas mesh with Ribbonfarm’s “The Stream Map of the World” post, which proposes the construct of streams and stream citizens. If you’ve filled a passport (or two or three +) with stamps, and made friends from all over the world in the process, you might feel a tension between your weird roving lifestyle and rooted Western culture. The Ribbonfarm post might help you understand the path you’ve taken, and encourage you to continue on your way despite growing cultural/family pressure to pick a spot and stay there.
Fellow Millennials, I’m looking at you.
Here are a few selections from the post, bold mine:
A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.
Stream citizens are not global citizens (a vacuous high-modernist concept that is as culturally anemic as the UN). Their social identities are far narrower and richer. They are (undeclared) stream citizens, whose identities derive from their slow journey across the world.
Selected features of stream citizenship (from a list of 12):
3. Voluntary slowness: A stream is a pattern of movement where individual movements take place over years or decades, spanning entire development life stages. Unlike a decade-long limbo state imposed by (say) waiting for an American green card, which has individuals impatient to get the process over with and “settle down” in either a new home, or return to an old one, stream citizens don’t experience their state as a limbo state. They are always “home.” Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are no streams that are life-encompassing as yet. But I believe those will emerge — distinctive cradle-t0-grave geographic journeys.
10. High adaptability: Nostalgia is weak for stream citizens, as is the faraway-home/near-exotic sense of alienation from surrounding. Stream citizens are both home and abroad at the same time.
12. Lack of an arrival dynamic: This is perhaps the most important feature. There is no sense of anticipation of an “arrival” event such as getting an American green card, after which “real” life can begin. There is a wherever you go, there you are indifference to rootedness. This psychological shift is the central individual act. By abandoning arrival-based frames, stream citizens free themselves from yearning for geographically rooted forms of social identity.
Note: After reading the Ribbonfarm comments and Googling a few phrases, it seems that this meme hasn’t been discussed by the Rolf Potts-inspired Vagabonding blog network, the RTW scene or the Matador Mafia. If it has been and you can link to threads of interest, please do so in the comments.
Try this: The next time you extract yourself from a dream, write it down. I don’t mean the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, but rather the next time you lucidly decide to leave a dream.
The next day, observe how your half-asleep brain uses words. You might find what I did: There’s an effortless economy that’s enviable, but there are also some weird wordings and mistakes. Fun!
The unedited exhibit:
Scary protest dream, set in Emmaus. There with Mel outside a building when cops pepper sprayed from the roof. We ran, putting bandanas around our mouth/nose. Ran through streets chased by fire ladder truck spraying pepper from hose at top of extended letter. Chased into a park. The mob found an abandoned youth hostel and crowded in out of the rain for bathroom and shower. I said, someone should keep watch. I went to a nook by the door and saw cops near. Yelled officers approaching! and ran back across the meadow. A cop caught me by the back of my rain jacket. I’d lost Mel. While the cop was cuffing three people up against the back of his car, I sprinted off toward a stand of pine trees. Got away for now.
Notes:
1. “Our mouth/nose” — it works.
2. Fire ladder truck, an interesting compound noun.
3. Letter instead of ladder.
4. Lack of quotation marks.
5. After “scary,” only essential adjectives. Extended, abandoned and three. Counting “rain jacket” and “pine trees” as nouns.
6. “Got away for now.” Still participating in the episode, even though I’m arguably awake.
After the hipsters will come the fogeys: youth who affect elderly ways.
We’ve already seen the trend’s roots in hipsterdom. Dyed-gray hair, button-up sweaters, knitting, and so on. But the fogeys will go further. Motorized scooters, Centrum Silver, medicinal lotions, compression socks. It’ll be golf, crosswords, and bingo all day. Live-well communities will pop up in Brooklyn to meet the fogeys’ demand.
Fogeys will fight Craigslist bidding wars over Buick LeSabres. Weekday golf will be instant street cred. SXSW will introduce the masses to Welkcore. Promiscuity will reach new milestones. Fogeys will pinch pennies and pay by check, or else openly acknowledge, finally, their comfy fixed incomes.
The city of Allentown began with a decision to spin silk, followed by a swing to the opposite pursuit of making steel, and the lumbering steel industry forged transcontinental rail tracks and train wheels and who knows how many hobo shovels and skyscraper guts and World War II cannons before eventually collapsing under its own benefit-heavy, slow-to-adapt-to-world-competition density, leaving the Lehigh Valley teetering on the brink of destruction for a number of years — 10? 15? — long enough for Billy Joel to write a song about it , which often serves as the primary point of reference when the subject of hometowns comes up while an Allentown resident is on the road, and which proved apt but only for a while, because somehow the underlying German work ethic — as people round here like to believe — prevailed against the burnt-out industrial past, and turkey farmers sold their holdings to big businesses seeking the perfect point for efficient distribution, close to New York and Philadelphia and D.C., outside of the tax shackles of New York and New Jersey, on the interstate, with a large and ready and well-trained workforce, and medical device manufacturing crept west, out of Jersey and the Philly suburbs, and the universities grew and pulled in students and professors and janitors and librarians and lab techs and the retiring parents of the students, who could spot a good lifestyle and saw the sea of bluehairs as an advantage rather than an annoyance or burden, and charitable interests sought to preserve the health of the population, transmuting chemical fortunes into medical megaplexes, healing all who knocked and presented a valid, too-rare health insurance card, especially the aforementioned elderly (many beyond the point of healing), sputtering to their exits while their grandchildren stuck around and pieced together artistic ventures centered around rockabilly hair, skateboards, hula hoops, Twitter and used books, accepting that they had enough parks and alcohol and willing romantic partners in the Lehigh Valley and didn’t need to move to Philly or New York after all, but could live a slow, content life with a solid soundtrack right here in little old traffic-choked Allentown, PA.
Allow me to join this discussion two years too late.
Don’t write off routines. The word routine, meaning “usual course of action”, comes from route — “a traveled way”, “a means of access” or “a line of travel”, according to Webster. In other words, a road.
“But that’s a metaphorical road!” you might say.
True, although “hitting the road” — i.e. travel — is a metaphor itself. It’s not easy to drive from New York to Bangkok. And even for the classic Interstate road trip, being on the road connotes both pavement underfoot and personal development, advancement or achievement — the Kerouac-style Journey of Self-Discovery.
However, a JoSDy doesn’t require an actual, physical journey. Not everyone is down with the barbarian lifestyle. Instead, people choose to have a home base because it helps them pursue long-term relationships and goals. It facilitates sedentary accumulation. (English translation: It helps them hoard stuff.) Their base upholds the sculpture of their life. No big deal. More room to stretch out on the Bengaluru to Kolkata train for everyone else.
A military base supports a field of operations, and some people like this strategy. Again, it’s not always the best. The base itself is not the end, not the goal. It’s the foundation — from the Latin fundus, or bottom — that allows the buildup of funds, or capital: Financial, physical (tangible assets), social (relationships), human (education), or however else you might define it. Robbers stage hold ups for funds because funds uphold existence.
And even nomads have a base: Tight stitching around the bottom of the backpack.
Happy to show you around…
You don’t have to be a star athlete to experience the thrills of competition on the world stage. Some of my best travel memories have been made at the foosball table.
The endorphin rush of sports in combination with the similar neurostimulation of travel is delicious.
You don’t need a uniform, contract, nor sponsor. Pickup soccer on the beach or in the plaza, cricket on the banks of the Ganges, or even chess in a Budapest bath. Competition becomes the common language. Your skill and focus matched against a foreign adversary.
It goes without saying to keep it civil and watch who you’re dealing with. No need to add Pool Hall Shootout to your itinerary. Though, to be fair, the most likely place to find a gunfight might be home.
Have any stories of competition on the road? Let’s hear…
Originally published on Rolf Potts’ Vagablogging
Independent travelers often have a love/hate relationship with the travel industry.
The love: Transportation networks make things easy. Beds of all calibers are usually easy to find. Information about places we’ve never been to has been collected and bound into books.
The hate: The industry’s ability to funnel large numbers of people into a single place. Over-marketing. Price gouging.
The love and hate aren’t always on equal footing: It’s easy to be more conscious of the negatives than the benefits received. But no matter its shortcomings, it’s important to be fluent in the workings of the multibillion dollar per year travel industry.
-You have to know when the high season is to know when it’s off-season.
-It’s good to keep abreast of niche products that just might work for you, like the multi-stop tickets Jessica recently posted here.
-There are needs within the industry that you might be able to fill, in exchange for cash or free travel.
-Knowing what’s on offer in a given city — hotels, travel services, guides, etc. — gives you at least a backup plan.
Though we often travel outside of it, why else should vagabonds have a working knowledge of the travel industry? Interested to hear your thoughts…
Originally published on Rolf Potts’ Vagablogging
Who draws the line between “corporate travel” and “leisure travel”?
(My answer: The travel industry.)
Is this a good thing or a bad thing for travelers? Why?
Discuss.
Originally published on Rolf Potts’ Vagablogging
Varanasi, Bhadohi, Mirzapur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Sitapur… Makin' rugs.
Faces from the weaving towns…
For now, see the photos on Flickr.
Originally published on Rolf Potts’ Vagablogging
Being a practical nation, Americans turn to pilgrimage to seek salvation of their bodies. Freedom not from sin, but from antibiotics, pesticides, and the absurdity of the Industrial Diet. Instead of walking church to church, pilgrims walk from sustainable farm to farm.
In return for a donation, pilgrims receive a place to sleep or to stake their tent, a shower and toilet, a dinner and breakfast (either prepared or something they can cook themselves). For now, a small tent and camping stove are recommended.
It’s unclear whether the pilgrimage has an endpoint or not. Most often it’s self-defined by time constraints, often circular. The waypoints are non-linear, just a smattering of farms across the country. The route is formed by making 20 or 50 phone calls before heading out, asking and explaining. Bring your own map, leave markers if you’re so inclined. Where you choose to walk is up to you.
For now, pilgrims have to accept large stretches of road walking. The upside is raised awareness of the fact that you don’t need much.
At times, the pilgrimage has a work-trade element built in. Farmers budget tasks and funds for anticipated pilgrims — painting, cleaning, stacking, and so forth. It’s a good idea to ask in advance. The issues of work legality, taxes, and insurance coverage are beyond me — ideas?
Americans are always looking for the next best weight loss and/or fitness program. This is it, but it’s also so much more.
“Susan Block and her father had the conversation that we all need to have when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high-risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progressing, when we become unable to dress ourselves. I’ve heard Swedish doctors call it a “breakpoint discussion,” a systematic series of conversations to sort out when they need to switch from fighting for time to fighting for the other things that people value—being with family or traveling or enjoying chocolate ice cream.”
Palliative travel? The intersection of hospice and hospitality? Might be onto something here…
From “Letting Go” by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, 8/2/2010
Been thinking about how many Facebook status updates are location-based. Quick peeks into places, snapshots of travel big and small.
Here are a few from last week:
Walked a kilometer south to Lanka today, looking for a market. Found a market. Saw a big gate, turned left off the main road and under the gate’s arch. Walked 500m, saw nothing promising, turned around, and returned to the main road.
Found a sandal tent and bought a pair of sandals. Went into two photo studios and noted their capabilities and printing prices in my notebook. Found an underwear store and bought a 90cm-chest tank top after 15 minutes of looking at bewildering options.
Went into a technical bookshop. Bought Fractional-Horsepower Electrical Machines, printed by Mir Publishers, U.S.S.R. They thought I was a visiting professor at B.H.U.
Saw a shop across the street called FUNK and made the obligatory visit. Tried on three shirts, none fit. They tried to sell me a women’s Ed Hardy tee.
Priced the net cafe next door. Half the price of Assi Ghat.
Crossed the street and looked into a restaurant called Hot Spice. No toilet, walked out. Saw a sign for “Heritage Hospital Main Entrance”. Followed the arrow.
Went into Heritage Hospital. In the lobby, saw an old woman on a stretcher. Asked about the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine — no dice. Used the toilet.
Checked out another internet cafe. A treehouse-type spot on a roof, accessed by a narrow, no-railing staircase. Surprisingly jam packed like the first treehouse on the block. Left.
Bought a water from the pharmacy next door, considered buying fruit.
Walked onto the B.H.U. campus through the big B.H.U. gate. Studied a massive map in the massive sun. Tried to negotiate a rickshaw tour, failed. A B.H.U. student came over and helped me get a loop ride for twenty rupees.
Saw a fraction of the campus on the loop. Took some bad photos from the moving rickshaw. Back at the B.H.U. gate I paid twenty as agreed, despite protest for thirty.
Crossed the street to retrace my steps. Hit my head while ducking under a low sign.
Got used by the internet for an hour.
Rode a rickshaw back to Assi Ghat. Think I spotted a mall en route, might be a spot to bask in A/C.
Back at Assi, picked up my sole button-down from the laundry. Went to my room to eat an orange, find out the tank top doesn’t fit, lie under the dust-collecting, electric-starved fan and sweat and record these details.
For now, see the photos on Flickr.
It’s noon on one of those double days created by an overnight train ride in sleeper class — a paranoid ride where the cop with the HK submachine gun calls you out the first time he sees you. “You — where is your luggage?” You point beneath the seat. “ALERT!”
He urges you to take it upstairs, so you press the pack to the top bunk and lock it to the support beam. You strap your money belt around your right upper thigh (and to do so, go pants around your ankles in the bathroom) and safety pin your wallet into your right pocket.
Return to the bunk through the darkened car and notice the officer has chosen to sleep on the bunk below you. No problem, no contraband here. You climb up and position your loafers atop the fan where suction can keep an eye on them.
Get fetal, clip your day pack — an overgrown purse, really — to your main pack, entwine your forearm in a shoulder strap and lay your head down to rest on an empty water bottle. Twist the cap to let out just enough air for the bottle to mold to the shape of your skull.
Bathroom breaks at 12, 2, and 4 — that’s what you get for playing Chug n’ Rehydrate — and wake at 4:57 a.m. to an empty car at Varanasi.
Paper-cup chai on the platform, a bit of energy because who knows what’s next. Find a rickshaw and don’t argue too hard, hotel arrival is the priority. Ride through the dark streets wearing your sunglasses as dust goggles, south to Assi Ghat.
The rickshaw drops you at Hotel Palace on Ganges, which, despite the French tourists coming down the stairs oohing and ahhing at the Ganges, is not Hotel Temple on Ganges. Find Hotel Temple by turning and looking directly behind you.
Give the rickshaw man 48 for a 40 rupee fare — a serious overpay — and inquire about a room. 350 and 550. 450 for the room with a view? Got it. Balcony, fan, and more mosquitoes than you’ve ever seen in your life.
Realize too late that the southeast window setup means you’re going to bake through the entire 104 degree day, that you’re going to call the place a hell station before you leave — but no matter. It’s simple enough and clean, ten bucks a day, and it has a desk, man, a desk!
A desk which now, at about 12:30 p.m., you’re neglecting in favor of lying naked on the bed, under the fan, with curtains drawn and lights off, the room lit Oz emerald by the sun through stained glass.
LATE-NIGHT LUCKNOW —
Ashish the Seatmate’s recommended Hotel Sharma (“with a huge sign on top”) never materialized, so I ended up booking a room at Hotel Samrat, whose rooftop sign I can see from my current address.
I didn’t choose it so much as walk into a decent-looking lobby on railroad flophouse row, find out there weren’t any rooms, ask about Hotel Sharma, get sloppy directions, and ask the burly checking-in Kerala man with the bright yellow Polo, “Could you just come point it out to me?” The linebacker and I walked twenty meters down the street and for once the touts stayed silent.
The hotel didn’t have a sign (in English), so I went in, said the token room melega?, followed the houseboy to the top floor up turret stairs, glanced at the room, dingy but with a big enough bed and a lock on the door, and went back down to try for a good price.
Took the room for a couple dollars, threw my stuff down, and only then noticed the crunched-up chips in the bed, the pan wrappers and cigarette butts behind the headboard, and the likely presence of bugs and seed throughout the mattress. In response, I hit the streets in search of Lucknow’s famous dried-fruit ice cream.
Found the ice cream — lassi, actually — and got force-fed further sweets by a curious sweet dealer.
Returned to Samrat to find a crowd in the lobby awaiting my arrival. “I don’t serve to foreigners,” the owner said. “You must leave.” Right now, fast. Half of the crowd seemed to be representatives of another hotel which had agreed to take me in.
Went upstairs with the houseboy who monitored the re-packing of the mosquito net and soap bar. I locked the door at one point which he immediately protested — he had more fear than I did, I guess.
The clerk returned my rent and tried to point me to the other hotel, but, “Nah, you guys are kicking me out. I’ll take it from here, thanks.”
Sought information from the cook at the thali joint across the street, who dispatched a 12 year-old boy to guide me to the originally intended Hotel Sharma. No luck — “This hotel not for you. You go to Mohan Hotel.”
The clerk drew a crude map and I set off via rickshaw, too tired to insist in Hindi that the ride would be worth only 11 cents, not 22.
I found and skipped the Mohan — amenities overkill — and continued up the road on foot. Just beyond, found a hotel recommended by the sweet dealer — Hotel Indore Regency. A guard, a cramped but air conditioned lobby, a bed (also top floor, last door), a bathroom with a lightbulb — I’ll take it. Negotiated a 15% discount and filled out carbon copy forms.
Freddie Mercury carried my bag to the room. I tipped him five rupees, popped a heartburn pill, took a cold shower and collapsed.
Everything went so smoothly over the first month here in India until about 30 minutes ago. A combination of the heat, the heavy hot kathi roll in my stomach, and the sight of my train coach flying toward the other end of the platform conspired to put me on my intended train’s doppelganger, headed in the opposite direction of my destination.
It surprised me that I made such a simple mistake. What with the familiar north-south corridor between Bhadohi and Mirzapur and the ever-present Ganges, I thought I had myself oriented. Until I got onto the Kashi Vishwanath Express headed east for Varanasi instead of west for Lucknow.
Why did I choose to climb into the luggage car? Was that really the best place to ask about the location of the AC car? And if I really only wanted to ask one question, wouldn’t it have been better to confirm the destination?
When I asked about the AC car, a luggage man in an orange reflector vest pointed toward the back of the train. I made a run for it, and when the whistle blew, I jumped into the closest door, a random sleeper car. I remember seeing the time on the digital station clock just before jumping in the door: 2:25. A full, clear 12 minutes before the scheduled departure listed on my ticket, but somehow this slipped by.
It was lucky to have picked not only that sleeper car, but also a seat with two guys who spoke enough English to inform me that the train was bound for Varanasi. But not to worry: In two hours it would reverse course and head back to Lucknow.
Even more clutch, when the train I held a ticket for and the train I was riding stopped next to each other in some forsaken railroad wilderness, the guys urged me to put away my camera, hurry, and switch trains. Zipping my bag, whipping on the frame pack, and shaking hands like a politician, I ran to the door, down the steps (so much farther without a platform), across two sets of tracks (I think I looked both ways), and to the door of an AC car. Locked.
Devoted maybe five seconds to banging on it with a flat palm, then ran alongside the train, loafers having trouble with the fist-sized stones underfoot. Next car sleeper class, also locked. Found the door at the car’s far end locked as well. Started putting together contingency plans in case either train started moving. Which door on the Varanasi-bound could I get back to? Any?
The next car had an open door — phew — and a woman with a basket of carrots about to make the ascent. I decided I’d rather be rude than left on the tracks, so I gave a “Hey–” and cut in front.
This time I entered the car asking “Lucknow? Lucknow?” like I’m the one selling snacks. A few nods confirmed the destination, so I plopped down and chugged all of the water in my bottle.
That problem sorted out, it was time to start playing catch-up internally.
The Jaipur Vodafone store has a line like the Bronx DMV. And why am I here? Because my phone disappeared somehow — not on Holi, mind you, but innocently the day before. Just up and left. Pulled a Houdini.
I had it at the PJ Exports office, maybe in the car, not when I got home. Or did I? Did I absently misplace it? Will I find it somewhere in my accumulated junk when I pack up tonight at the Sneh Deep guesthouse? Doubtful, because I didn’t hear a vibration when I tried calling it with the houseboy’s loaned phone, lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.
After a last-ditch call to the guy whose office I thought I’d left it in didn’t yield success — “I’ve had my men looking all morning,” he said — I accepted the $22 Nokia as gone forever.
Talked with Manoj the guesthouse owner about options. He drew a map to the shop that would suspend the SIM card, maybe sell me a used phone. A buddy, apparently, who doesn’t speak much English.
Walked down, found the mobile man, and attempted to converse in Hindi. “Phone hoagie-yah.” His old-is-gold was far from bronze. He eventually revealed the Vodafone store in Raja Park. He explained the same to the autorickshaw driver, and we quickly agreed on half of his quoted transit price. Made our way down a crumbling road in the direction of the mobile man’s point.
Eventually a major intersection. Driver turned right, I glanced left and saw the Vodafone store.
And here I am, still waiting on a DMV line to get a new SIM card.
I’m a carpetman, people. Can’t be in India without a mobile.