Hello Foreigner!: My Trip to Patna

Bowing to the inevitability of me never actually finishing my entry about my trip to Kolkata, partially since I have forgotten a lot of what happened, I’ll just skip to the next stage of my trip, which I had already mostly written about.

After leaving Kolkata, I went to visit friends in Patna, Bihar. What can one expect of a city where one of the most posh/happening areas is along Boring Road (seriously not making this up, it’s where JM and VT live)? I was a tad apprehensive, especially in a state that has a reputation as the Mississippi of India; I’ve heard people joke that they didn’t have to worry about crime when in Bihar because anyone with even the modicum of entrepreneurship to attempt theft would have gotten out already. But I knew that even if I’d have to eat the Indian version of gumbo the whole time, it would be worth it to see them. And indeed, it was a wonderful vacation: I only worked from 9:30-5:30ish* and was just doing coding in Stata, which I find extremely relaxing. Furthermore, I got to be with two of my favorite people and enjoy their very nice company, home, and dog. But let’s be honest, the most important part is that we had mostly legitimate burritos. TWICE. Sorry friendship, but there is really no higher value than Mexican food.

Patna is very different from Delhi: practically no Westerners live there, and thus the presence of one is quite an experience for some Biharis. My friends there are constantly being featured in local news (they have had real newspaper articles about them walking their dog), and everyone in the neighborhood, even those they have never met, talk about them, down to the name of their dog***. As I learned, being an obvious foreigner means that you are frequently approached by people on the streets who want to use their canned English phrases. It usually goes like this:

Random Person on the street: Hello! How are YOU? OR Welcome to Patna!
Me: Hello
Random Person: Where you from?
Me: United States. Where are you from?
Random Person: Patna. How you like Patna?
Me: Very good, it is nice .
Random Person: Oooooooooook. Bye bye.
This was repeated over and over again, but not enough that I stopped enjoying it.
Patna also has even more street dogs than Delhi, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, sometimes this results in adorable puppy piles, so it isn’t all a bad thing.

But more of the time the oversupply of dog results in puppies getting hit by cars, and other dogs eating their faces. Sadly, I saw far more dead dogs than puppy piles, but for some reason took more pictures of the puppy piles.



Other fun stuff we did:

1. Falling asleep while watching a movie before midnight on New Years eve… and then waking up five minutes before to watch fireworks off of their roof. I guess people had a lot left over after Diwali. Or, as one Delhi walla snootily hypothesized when I told them, it’s not like there’s a heck of a lot else to do in Patna on New Years!

2. What to do about all those annoying mosquitoes? How about get electrified tennis rackets and then smash them like the Hulk? JM/VT bought some while I was there, and for a while, we were tearing around the apartment in a hunting frenzy. Of course, the morning after that, I woke up to their revenge of about 20 mosquito bites on my face. Which, of course, transformed me again into any angry mosquito-hunting beast of a man. JEFF (on the left) SMASH!!! Other Jeff appears to be rocking more of a Bruce Banner: we clearly got very different memos.



3. The ZOO! Which will be discussed in a later post.

4. Baskin Robbins: When trying to hype up Patna as a genuine big city, JM/VT prominently featured the existence of a Baskin Robbins. Of course, I started laughing when we got there, because I had been led to believe it was a full on, 32 flavors establishment, when, in fact, the attached picture demonstrates that it was not.


5. All of Patna’s other sites. It took…. about 45 minutes to take in all of them. Sorry, Patna friends, I kid because I love. And because I’m a genuinely bad person. But in general, I liked Patna, perhaps even more than Delhi, and it seems like a great….. ok, well, good….. ok, well, pretty good place to live. After all, it has a Dominoes, whose tomato sauce is the lifeblood that pumps through my veins.



Here's me and JM on a bike rickshaw. Please leave comments about how they are exploitative, and I am a disgusting bloodsucker for being part of a practice that helps these hardworking Biharis with a way to make ends meet, k, thx.

*Ok, and sometimes later in the evenings too… but only sometimes. Which is awesome.
**To be fair, their dog has an interesting name… Lalu Prasad Yadav Jr., named after the infamously corrupt and controversial Bihari politician. The name is fairly appropriate: he is always trying to get bribes for carrying out tasks that he should do anyway (such as “sit” or “roll over”), and often fails to execute them to the specifications of those asking. Here’s hoping he never gets sent to jail (puppy prison?) like his namesake…