There's nothing wrong with sleeping in a five star hotel but it feels good to sleep on a familiar matress that leans to one side and creaks when you lay down. Living out of a suitcase is an adventure but it gets old washing your drawers in the tub and sending your shirts to the laundry. I'm happy to be home where I can wake up in the middle of the night and stumble into the kitchen for a late night snack, though I gotta say I do like room service. It feels great to pick up the phone and have a cheesburger and cold beer arrive at your door delivered by a guy in a starched uniform. After being in India for 10 days I was craving the most American of foods. I love spicy food but Indians have a way of spicing up everything, including breakfast food. It wasn't long before meatloaf, mashed potatoes and apple pie were sounding real good. Indians are some of the most good natured people I've met, at least the staff at the hotels. They're polite almost to a fault. I was called "sir" so many times in India I started to think I was in the military. Before long I was wishing for some New York attitude. Once after ordering room service I started to nod out with that relaxing post meal full stomach feeling. The phone rang and I thought maybe it was one of the guys with news of a happy hour special or a change in flight plans. "Good evening sir." Did you recieve your room service okay sir"? "Uh, yes". "Was the food satisfactory sir"? "Yes, it was until you called me and fucked up my nap." I didn't say that last line but I sure thought about it. My housekeeper in Kolkata was a young kid with a great smile that went about his duties with the intensity of a doctor preparing for brain surgery. Once I called down for an iron and ironing board and he appeared at my door huffing and puffing like he'd taken the stairs instead of the elevator. This was probably just for dramatic effect so I tipped  him more for his acting ability than his timeliness. The next day I decided to lighten up my suitcase since you almost always bring more stuff than you actually need. I pulled out a pair of jeans and two T-shirts and gave them to my thespian/housekeeper and he looked at me like I'd just handed him bars of gold or a winning lottery ticket. He thanked me and shook his head in the way we know as "no" but sort of in a semi circle and the way Indians do it, it can't be mistaken for anything less than the purest of affirmations. It's become one of my favorite human mannerisms.
 
In Chennai we did a workshop at the Unwind Center, a community outreach center/music school.  It's run by a beautiful cat named Saroop that's the kind of guy we need in American schools, passionate, dedicated and fun loving. It's here we meet a young percussionist named Allwyn. He sits in during our workshop and damn near gives me a lesson with all his skill and enthusiasm. One thing you can say about India is there's no shortage of bad ass drummers. Later that evening we do a concert with a local band called Yodhaka. The leader is a percussionist kind of like Trilok Gurtu. He plays a hybrid kit that's one third Latin, one third Indian and one third drum set. If Chennai wasn't so hot I think I'd move there.

I covered Bangladesh and the Phillipines in my other blogs so here's a few words on Taiwan: Here I had the greatest Chinese meal of my life and there wasn't a single grain of rice to be found. Apparently, the Chinese don't eat much rice it's more an American phenonmenon, like fries with a burger. If you don't have any chops with chop sticks you'll be up a creek since a fork is about as common as a menu in English. You sit at a round table with a lazy susan in the middle and you spin it around to sample all the different dishes. The only problem is the plates are about the size of a saucer for a coffee cup. The upside is the dumplings are handmade by a crew of guys who fold them while you watch behind the glass at the front of the restaurant. The local beer only comes in a 24 ounce bottle and that's just fine with the Duende Quartet. Most of the Taiwanese are either Taoist or Buddhist and they have their own cable channels which I'd much rather watch that American Idol even if it is in Mandarin Chinese. The media is way hipper overseas. I got almost all of my news from the BBC and it was refreshing to get a different perspective from the usual American pablum.

The trip home was another odyssey. Three hours to Tokyo then a three hour layover, then twelve hours to Dulles...fun, fun, fun. I think that's why I'm up at 4am writing this blog. While in line for the flight me and Sam are eyeballing a family with a two year old kid. As fate would have it I had the middle seat in a five seat row and the two year old sat right in front of me! He was cool for most of the trip but he seemed to let out a bloodcurdling scream everytime I was about to nod off. Fire up the iPod. The fun really began once we got to Dulles. I had been up for probably twenty hours at this point and was lucky enough to get  singled out by immigration for a random search. I told the officer I was out on a State Department tour and wipped out my intinerary. This was in a binder, about 50 pages long that listed everything I did while abroad damn near down to the minute. He was reading a letter of welcome from the amabassador of the Phillipines when he decided to search my bags. I guess going to Bangladesh and India is an immediate red flag. It's sad that a few knucleheads ruin it for everyone else because everyone I've met in my travels are regular folks...sweethearts. A few idiots try to wipe out a cricket team in Pakistan and every trip to the airport has a black cloud of suspicion hanging over it. So here's a guy with rubber gloves going through  a plastic bag of my dirty laundry. I'm hoping he'll find some skid marks on my boxers. He pulls out a pocket knife and starts slicing into my souveniers and I ask him to be careful since he's about to slice into a Buddhist wall hanging I bought in India. He takes this as an affront and proceeds to go through every piece of luggage I have from top to bottom. Welcome home! He goes through my shaving kit like a detective at a murder scene...maybe he thinks I can make a bomb out of toothpaste, dental floss and hemorrhoid creme. I'm all for homeland security but I thought for the last month I was a government employee. Guess when you're a musician all bets are off. I really felt sorry for the guy behind me named Sanchez. They probably had him pegged for a Mexican drug lord. 

It's good to be back and the ride on the Beltway from Dulles seemed suprisingly mellow after our adventures with South Asain driving. I'll leave you with a couple of qoutes I got from a book I bought in Chennai about the influence of Indian music on Western culture called "Bhairavi":

Shujaat Khan: It's very natural for two people who are musicians to sit down and play together without concerns about where they came from or what religion they practice...I think music could go along way toward promoting the idea of harmony between different people whether they are Hindu or Muslim or whatever.

Ravi Shankar: I believe in Nada Brahma (sound is God). Nada Brahma is just a word but that's what it means to me when the raga comes to life. It's absolutley true that Hindus and Muslims work together in creating this music. Our music is our religion, our spiritual path. So in this way, I feel it is an example of how people can work together without thinking about religion. All we can do is play our music and share it with the rest of the world.

AMEN.