Showers

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People in India shower about two times a day.  And by shower I mean bathe.

 

Anyway, Chennai is seriously pretty damn dirty.  I wore shorts the first day and socks and shoes.  I walked to and from the port about three times total, which was an industrial port and probably the dirtiest part of the city. And the part just outside the port was also very poor and very dirty, so we got pretty covered every time we went out.

 

When I came back to the ship that night and took my socks and shoes off, there was an amazingly stark line between the area that had been exposed all day and the area that was covered by my sock.  I’m talking pretty much black and white here.  When I got into the shower, the stuff just rolled off my skin and made the shower water brown for like a minute, and then I had to scrub the rest off.

 

I was talking to a local guy about it, and he said that he would bathe like twice a day.  I said that was a lot, and that I usually only shower like every other day, if that.  Then we realized that he lives in India where it is INCREDIBLY HOT AND SWEATY all the time, plus there’s a lot more dirt floating around, so they need to get clean a lot more often.  The ironic thing is that they need to get clean way more often, but have way less access to methods of actually doing so.