Jamie Barr's Blog (6)

The day before I left Mumbai, we did a tour of the Dharavi slums which is as about as obnoxious 

feeling as a bunch of middle class people gawking at poor people would be.  

The same ones feature in Slumdog Millionaire and cover 500 football fields. The whole place has been turned

 into a recycling mecca, doing the shitty jobs for companies who in turn reuse materials and make even more money.

 Every concievable material has its own tin shed that…

I just haven't had time to post anything since Israel, but as I say about my period, better late than never.



If I was to read directions to my hotel in downtown Delhi, in which ive just arrived at 6am, it would read: 

Drive recklessly for twenty minutes, take a right at the skeletal cow, go straight past the family of 24 sleeping on the pavement, carry on until you meet a dog with twelve huge tits, go left at the corner with the street that is made up entirely of rubbish, piss…

Lack of appetite! Nausea! Vomiting! Fatigue or weakness! Dizziness or lightheadedness! Insomnia! Pins and needles! Shortness of breath! Nosebleed! Drowsiness! General malaise! Peripheral edema! Diarrhea!



To which my reply is usually, "Ok, then can we cuddle instead?"



Coincidentally it turns out, these are all symptoms of altitude sickness. Delhi was seventeen hours behind me and the first thing you notice is doing the smallest bit of exercise takes so much more effort than…

Im now nothing more than a defeated fleshy husk for a nightmarish jobbie helterskelter ride. I had been eating alot of fruit in Jordan to save money and its come back to haunt me. It turns out my digestive system is frighteningly efficient when it wants to be.



Anyway, before I left Jordan, I had the following exchange with a guy in a shop:



"Where are you from?"

"Scotland."

"Ah, Scotlanda! Like the Mel Gibson, eh?"

"Um..."

"Mel Gibson good, he hate the…

The journey from Beirut was on a particuarly small plane and as a result, the in flight entertainment wasn't Chronicles of Narnia, but the worst turbulence ive ever experienced. I wasn't concerned about crashing as we jolted violently back and forth, dropped suddenly and enjoyed the sweet sound of engine lag because I was quite sure I was going to shit myself lifeless, like a stepped on toothpaste tube, before we got anywhere near the ground.

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So here I go then. My job for the last seven years was basically to provide kids in Scotland with an alternative form of exercise in place of kicking pedestrians to sleep. As fulfilling as it was and even having known so many good people, I wanted to try other things. And besides, time was ticking: As a man, there comes an age in your life when you can't travel to places on your own without looking like a sex tourist.

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