I’m often asked how I plan out the days I spend abroad, and increasingly, my answer to that question has been that I don’t. Some of my favorite travel experiences were those where I aimlessly wandered my surroundings, avoiding any and all tourist traps. I’ve found it difficult to live in and appreciate the present moment when your focus is limited by a rigid itinerary. This belief was strongly reinforced by the Sunday I spent in Pune, which surprised me when it became one of the most meaningful days of my entire Asia trip.

I initially booked two and a half days in Pune (pronounced “POO-nay”) before my flight out to the beaches of Goa, to allow for ample flexibility to arrange a meeting with my former co-workers. Having met with them on my first day, I now had a full day and a half remaining to entertain myself in a city that I knew very little about. So I started it off the best way I knew how, with a meal. The hostel served in an Indian breakfast that morning, idlis (small, soft, white rice and fermented lentil cakes) served with sambar (a lentil-based stew) and steamy chai (milk tea). Breakfast was the hardest meal to adjust to in India - starting the day off with a truly foreign palate of flavors/textures (while still waking up) felt less natural than eating a lunch or dinner made up of items I had past experiences with at Indian restaurants in the states (have any of you had breakfast at an Indian restaurant in the states?).

After breakfast, I threw my camera, notebook, and laptop into my day pack and began to wander the streets of Koregaon Park, the district where my hostel was located. I was looking for a coffee shop where I could read, write, and people watch for a while, and I stumbled first upon a cafe called German Bakery, and went for it since I am always in the mood for European coffee and pastries. German Bakery is a popular chain in India, which made the fact that I couldn’t seem to find an entrance to it very frustrating. It was an open air cafe situated on a street corner, but it was surrounded by a wall, with one of those walk-through metal detectors you find at TSA, which I thought couldn’t possibly be the entrance to a coffee shop. After walking the perimeter for a minute, I tried the security station, and sure enough, was able to enter the cafe after being patted down by a security guard and passing through the metal detector. I soon turned my attention to the menu, determining what mouth-watering pastry I was going to order, but later learned the reason for the high security in a conversation with Shrey. It turns out, the restaurant I had stumbled upon had been the site of a major terrorist attack that killed 18 and injured 50; and this attack happened almost exactly 9 years prior to the date of my visit: February 13th, 2010 (I visited on the 10th of February, 2019). And I had been completely oblivious to the meaning behind where I sat that morning, blissfully reading with a slice of cake and a mocha.

The restaurant was pretty popular, so I left to find another cafe so that others could have my table, and made my way to the nearby Yogi Tree, which had been recommended by Shrey the day before. Yogi Tree is a cozy, hip cafe with another walled outdoor patio filled with all sorts of vegetation bursting from pots or stretching up along the outer walls. From here, I ate lunch as I sat and wrote, seated near an old German woman with long, white hair. I watched her share some milk with a stray cat that I assume frequented the place, and thought it was a sweet gesture. Although, after starting to chat with her, I became a bit concerned, as I had a hard time understanding her thick accent, but I was pretty sure she was saying something along the lines of me personally being the cause of a coming apocalypse because of my use of technology. She kept gesturing towards the laptop at my table, and pointing with both hands to her ears (a reference to my use of headphones as I worked), her wrinkled face making these off putting facial expressions whilst muttering gibberish, and it was all very uncomfortable to be a part of. I couldn’t tell if she was actually out of her mind, or if I was just doing the most piss-poor job of comprehending a foreign speaker of my own language, but I was definitely leaning towards the former. On she rambled, and the minutes of me trying to listen and not look concerned were starting to pile up, so I had to just straight-up bail on the conversation.

The rest of the afternoon was pretty uneventful, as I sat at Yogi Tree for a few hours and continued to try to avoid making eye contact with the German lady as I worked. After returning to the hostel that evening, I decided that I’d spend my last night in Pune discovering more live music. While at High Spirits with Shrey the prior night, we had heard that a Linkin Park tribute band called ‘Anthracite’ would be playing the following night, so I decided to check it out, as this might be the closest I’ll ever come to seeing a Linkin Park show. Shrey was stuck in training for work in the evening, so I went to the show with a recent college grad from Delhi named Mohit, whom I had met in the dorm the night before. Like most of the other hostel guests, Mohit had been in Pune to interview for grad schools. Tall, slender, and with a complexion so light that he almost didn’t look Indian, Mohit had lived all over his native country growing up, as his father had served in the air force, keeping the family on the move regularly. He and I had become fast friends.

We arrived by Uber to High Spirits later that night, and Mohit offered to cover half of the fare, which I told him not to worry about, seeing as how the charge to account was for roughly eighty cents (Uber was unbelievably cheap in India). Even on a Sunday night, the venue was packed, and actually hit capacity soon after our arrival, which meant that Chet, and another couple of gents we had met at the hostel were unable to meet us like we had planned. So Mohit and I took turns ordering rounds of Kingfisher (India’s Budweiser equivalent) at the bar, as we experienced India’s premiere Linkin Park tribute band. The band put on an impressive show - complete with lasers and fog, solid backing tracks, and guitar and bass tones dialed in to the signature LP sound. They played fan favorites up and down the band’s catalog starting with “Numb,” and closing with “In the End,” to a crowd that was singing along to every tune. The lead singer had a clean-cut look, rocking a slick haircut and chinstrap; with a button-down checked shirt and jeans topped off with a sport jacket, and he kept doing the funniest thing: His pants must not have fit very well, because every so often between vocal lines, he would leap off of the ground and hoist his jeans higher up his waist with both hands behind his back. This good-looking lead singer was doing perhaps the dweebiest thing anyone could do in public, but on stage in front of a sold out crowd, and my guess is that he was doing it non-consciously, but it really made the show for me. The band had a photographer with them, as they were on a tour of India at the time, and at the end of the show, they posed for one of those photos that bands always do from backstage with the crowd behind them. If you’re itching for a good Facebook stalking session, you can find this photo on the band’s February 11th post to their FB page, and if you look close enough, can see me in the back-middle portion of the crowd. I don’t know how many rounds of Kingfisher Mohit and I had had, but once the show ended, I really wanted to show him Shisha, the bar Shrey had taken me to the night before, so we made our way over there.

On the way to Shisha, Mohit stopped at a street vendor to buy a cigarette. After a two-minute interchange, Mohit came back with his smoke, and a frustrated expression on his face as he told me, “I couldn’t understand that man.” These were two Indian nationals that didn’t speak the same language. I was completely floored to learn that here in their home country, two grown Indian men could experience difficulty in completing such a simple transaction. The vendor only spoke his mother tongue, Marathi, which is spoken all throughout the states of Maharashtra and Goa, Western India (which my friend Hemant also claims as his mother tongue), but Mohit is unable to speak the language, as he hails from Delhi. India has 22 official languages, which is a small number considering there are thousands of languages and dialects spoken in India, with some estimates placing the count as high as 19,500. India is so unbelievably diverse, that I was constantly reminded by locals that traveling a distance even as small as 10 kilometers likely meant you would encounter a different dialect or language spoken by the majority of locals.

As Mohit and I climbed the stairs to the upper floor of Shisha, I suddenly remembered that it was belly dancing night (which Shrey and I had learned the night before), as we watched women dancing provocatively around the packed restaurant to colorful, Eastern music with a driving beat. We found a table and ordered more beers as a fair, dark haired woman performed among the crowd, pulling patrons out of their seats to join the dance. Wearing a revealing, two-piece sari of sorts, the dancer’s facial features were magnetic, and left no hint as to her nationality. Mohit thought she might have been Russian, and urged me to join her, but he didn’t really need to, because soon she was right at our table gesturing for me to join her, which I somehow found myself doing (I blame Kingfisher for this). Without missing a step, the woman had pulled me to the center of the commotion to dance with her, and our eyes locked as the audience watched. I don’t often dance to Western music, much less Eastern, but I did my best to match her rhythm, close enough now to see the beads of sweat on her brow, as blinding stage lights shone down upon us. Her dancing had some sort of hypnotic effect, as I can’t remember how long the song lasted. Her name was Sonia, and in talking to her afterwards, I learned that she was from LA, and that she had even performed in my own hometown over her years of touring.

Mohit and I laughed about the encounter as I joined him at our table afterward, and then I was suddenly surprised to see Shrey materializing out of the crowd to greet me with a laugh and a smile. He was at Shisha with his love interest, Tanvi, and had watched earlier as Sonia pulled me out of the crowd, so he had ventured over to find me. Even though we had been there together the night before, it seemed so surreal to run into someone I knew in this city of 3 million people without having made prior plans. Shrey led Mohit and I over to his table, where we sat down and met Tanvi, and spent the rest of the night talking and drinking as the belly dancing carried on. I filled Shrey in on my visits to German Bakery and Yogi Tree that day, and as I described the old German lady, a knowing smile started to spread across his face. Shrey was familiar with the woman, and admitted that he himself made efforts to avoid her (I now felt like less of a dick for ditching the German lady). My new friends also shared some suggestions for the final leg of my India journey, Goa, for which I was leaving on the morrow. I was so thankful both to have met Mohit, and then to have had the chance encounter of meeting Shrey and Tanvi while they were out together, spending my last night in Pune connecting with these wonderful people that I realistically may never see again. It was bittersweet as we parted ways after bar close, as Shrey shared that he hoped I would see him next on the day of his and Tanvi’s wedding, a sentiment that I was genuinely excited to share. Mohit and I called an Uber back to the hostel, but this time, it was not a car that answered the call, but an auto-rickshaw. The eccentric driver was jonesing for a cigarette, so on the way to the hostel, he would whip the vehicle around to stop at different street vendors, where Mohit would jump out and try to find him a cigarette. We seemed to have gone all over town before finally making it back, but we didn’t mind, as we were buzzing something fierce after all of the Kingfisher from the night.

Mohit and I returned late to our dark dorm to find the other Mohit we shared the room with (Indian from Jodhpur staying in Pune for job interviews) awake still as well. With my flight out of Pune not until 2 PM, the three of us sneaked up to the roof of the hostel to consume a substance that one of the Mohits had recently acquired, which he was very excited to share with us. I’m being so vague mainly for the sake of my loving parents; so all I will say is that this certain substance may have been legal, but I cannot confirm or deny this. As Mohit and Mohit and I talked, smoked, and looked out across the city from the hostel rooftop in the chill of night, we didn’t notice a small tent that sat to the left of the stairway. A man silently emerged from it, and came over to confront us. It turns out that this man was the owner of the hostel. Close in age to to the three of us, he mentioned that he usually slept in one of the hostel dorms, but on nights when all of the beds are all full, he sleeps in this tent, of whose existence we were now painfully aware. Slightly alarmed at this situation, all worry vanished immediately when the owner asked to partake, and we eagerly invited him into the circle. I was starting to realize that I had fallen hopelessly in love with India.

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(If you had creeped on Anthracite’s Facebook page earlier, that’s awesome. But in case you didn’t, here is a link to the image I was referring to earlier).

Thanks for reading, as always

-Nels