It also has a gift shop which is not just ridiculously priced -- they buy for 3 euros and sell for 36 -- and full of utter and total junk -- not a single item of any value at all - but it is also all wrong: the Asian outfits are not Asian, Burmese "laquerware" is plastic, the cabinet with tea-pots, helpfully inscribed "China" -- has not a single Chinese item in it and the tea implements are worse than useless. The museum does a good job popularizing some aspects of Asia; but its gift shop completely undoes it all. I am entertained -- i can't help laughing outloud at some of the shop items -- but also shocked. Is the really allowed to do this? Is this not a violation of some kind of principle?
While waiting for my show I saw a documentary on Goa -- with three acquaintances in it. Mario looked younger and healthier than I remember him; perhaps it predated my stay, it was somehow cleaner than I remember it.
The shindig was Bharatnatyam by Saju George, the Dancing Jesuit; not the greatest BN I have seen, Saju also tired towards the end of the first half and began to lose balance; still, for a priest -- I mean, an amateur -- he was really remarkably good, even excellent. For a moment I had a spell of aesthetic delight.
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Coming back by way of a fancy restaurant where overpriced vegetarian food is served in thalis, I noted that, it being Friday night, it was time for Oriental Dance; it wasn't Bharatnatyam, though, as the thali has always suggested to me, but North African belly dance; except it wasn't that either: it was a pretty lame ad lib by someone who has clearly not even taken lessons. That someone was pretty and was clearly having fun; she caught my glance through the window; she gave me was a pixish smirk; she was enjoying herself -- the fraud perhaps more than anything else. She was clearly English -- a tourist perhaps or a student -- it's such an English joke; and such a English smirk.
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