around the world in 180 days

My brother Matthew has been asking us to buy him a sitar while we are on the Indian Subcontinent for as long as he’s known we’d be traveling here. We told him that we’d look, but that it was unlikely.

But we looked. We looked in Delhi two separate times, both times when the temperature was over 45 celsius (110 F). I’m not a hot weather person and Lord knows that Anna’s not, but I don’t know how anyone is supposed to function in Delhi when it is that hot. As you walk down the street, you’re choked by the smell of human filth, automotive exhaust and incense, as if that might make a difference. To make our search more difficult, both times we were sick.

We went into a music shop one of the times and were attacked by a salesperson. I think we were the first potential customers they’d seen since December, when Delhi is actually tolerable. We told him we were looking for a sitar and he kindly showed us an instrument that Ravi Shankar might have been honored to play, with a price tag to match. See, we were in the wrong part of Delhi. Connaught Place is centerally located, with lots of shopping and hotels, but for bargains you need to go elsewhere. We tried to leave and the salesman blocked the door. Indian salesmen are either the best in the world or the worst, depending on your point of view.

So we decided to look in Kathmandu. Our first time here, we had more than enough to do getting ready for our trek and we only went into one shop. We got serious about finding one yesterday, visiting 3 shops and settling on a particular sitar in a particular shop. After a few calls home, we secured the funding and got the green light to go ahead with the purchase.

It took about an hour to get all the extra strings wrapped up at the music shop–it came with a complete set, which for a sitar means 18 strings. Next we had to ship it.

The sitar came in a hard case, which will be nice for Matthew (who is about the luckiest 17 year old in the whole wide world) once the sitar is back in the states, but which meant big bucks for shipping. All told, the shipping was more than the instrument itself. We sent it via Aramax, an internationally known shipping company I’d never heard of before. We watched the workers pack the awkwardly-shaped instrument for shipping for almost 2 hours. They wrapped everything in bubble wrap, wrapped the bubble wrap in cardboard and wrapped the cardboard in plastic, upon which they slapped “fragile” stickers and wrote the tracking number about 10 times. It was quite an operation. Anna went out to get snacks for everyone.

It is done now. Matthew gets a sitar, partially as a birthday gift from my parents and partially by his own funding and we spent all day getting it for him. I’m jealous. The instrument is an undecorated model, but it is still an absolutely breathtaking piece of craftsmanship. It is worth far more than we paid, even with the shipping. Matthew, you are not allowed to sell that instrument to anyone but me. Ever. No matter what.

Tags: Kathmandu, Nepal, Thamel, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 6:09 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.