Welcome to Gujarat!

Gujarat is a prosperous state and it shows as soon as you disembark into the glamourous Ahmedabad airport. Everything is clean, modern and stylish with nods to traditional local design. The front is an open air shopping area with public art. 

As soon as you leave the airport, the real Ahmedabad sets in with the brown air and dust of a large Indian city. The trees are all sporting plastic bag barrettes in their leaves. From the sky they had looked like iridescent decorations.

We grabbed an auto rickshaw to our posh hotel to discover that K had booked the right dates in the wrong month. Noooooo! They offered us fresh lime sodas to assuage our angst that they had no more rooms available, despite what the booking site claimed. They recommended the 5 star hotel next door but it had no rooms with twin beds either, and the suite available was so far outside our budget they didn’t even bother to tell us the price. We got back on the booking site and found a room in the old Muslim part of town. 

Our new hotel was perfectly fine, not as fancy as the one we though we were staying in, and with an elevator from the turn of the previous century (imagine a sliding gate), but the one pooper was that the original hotel was posh enough to house a liquor store. Gujarat is a dry state, so no alcohol in public at all. And they are serious about it, unlike other dry states we have visited. To drink privately in Gujarat you need to apply for a liquor permit, which is an onerous process that I undertook immediately. Once you get the temporary license, you have to go to one of the very few liquor stores across the state to be verified and to get your allotment of alcohol. Each person with a license is permitted every 7 days to buy 1 bottle of liquor, or 3 bottles of wine, or 10 bottles of beer and a license lasts a month. So the state tracks your alcohol consumption. So far I have not managed to track down a liquor shop during its meagre open hours. With dusty days in the mid-30s, a nice cold beer would go down nice.

We settled into our new place and wandered to a fancy place to try some Gujarati food. We learned to assemble our own pani puri, which is usually street food in the form of little puffed crispy balls that get filled with spicy potato, chutneys and mint water immediately before you pop them in your mouth and crunch down. I’ve always wanted to try them but something about street side mint water made my sphincter clench. I also had gulab sharbat, which is a rose drink and khichdi, a Gujarati rice and lentil preparation I had with spinach. K had a potato-based preparation. Both were dishes were sweet, as we have learned most Gujarati food is, and both increased in heat level as you ate them. They were delicious, though. I have been back to that place for rose lassi made with buttermilk instead of yogourt. Yum!

Ahmedabad has loads and loads of markets and night markets. We hit a local one that was massive in size and mainly had halal food and dollar store quality household goods. We haven’t found adults here begging much but the two children who attached to us that night were monsters. The boy was the worst. “Buy me toy, buy food!” the boy commanded me while trying to trip, slap and grab at me over the course of probably a km. Adult men tried to stop him but he just gave them the slip. He finally jumped up and shouted at me and I had it. I fixed him with a glare, “Naa! Chalo!” at high volume with a firm wave of the hand that would have looked like a slap had he been standing closer. He got the message and wandered off after a last half-hearted go at K.

The market was interesting sociologically, but there was nothing of interest for us at the stalls. We wandered over to the Bhadra Fort, which now houses government offices on a very loud active Kali temple. We checked it out and tottered on home through our neighbourhood to our haunted elevator hotel.