Traditional Pronunciation

I'm heavily entrenched in an embarrassing tradition: mispronouncing street and town names to locals.

Chicago

It all started with the original move to Chicago. My former roommate and I were looking for places in the pouring-down rain when we stumbled into a hotel looking for Wabash Ave.

"Which way is Wah-bahsh?"
"Wah-bahsh? What? Oooh, Wah-bash! you guys aren't from around here are you?"

Little Rock

In Little Rock, Arkansas, one of the biggest roads you'll encounter is Cantrell Rd. It's not pronounced how certain Steve's might expect, either.

"So I just take Can-trell all the way to Rodney Par-ham?"
"First, it's Cantrll...and second, it's Rodney Parm"

Toronto

In Toronto, the road that divides the city into east and west is Yonge St. Naturally, this went just as well.

Yonge St., NYC by Loozrboy on flickr

"Are we at Yong-gey Street yet?"
"I don't think that's how you say it, Steven. I think it's just Yong."
... *later, while talking to someone who knows"
"So you'll want to take Eglinton all the way down to Young and turn right."


We get it right, eventually.

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note that's the only licensed picture I could find, and it was from a movie shoot where they were pretending Toronto was New York.

The Highly Anticipated Indian Street Dog Exposé

Street Dogs are a well-known problem within India. As an outsider, I had no idea they existed and certainly didn't expect so many. The stray dog population is terrifying, saddening, and far too prevalent.

A few days ago, we found ourselves in a park for the previously mentioned TWU Amazing Race games. A street dog was present for those as well. It's odd how quickly the below goes from absolutely shocking to expected.

On my first day here, I went out with a few people to explore the surroundings. We headed to 100 ft road and started to explore the shops. This, like I imagine much of the country, is a fairly dense area.

View Larger Map

Perhaps a bit off topic, but important nonetheless -- there aren't very many crosswalks here. I haven't seen any lights on the few crosswalks that do exist. This certainly is a giant difference from being in the West. The receipe for a successful journey to the other side of the street essentially boils down to this scientific process:

1. Wait for a break
2. Run like your life depends on it...because it does

After we miraculously crossed the street, we met an unbelievably scary pack of street dogs. Thank goodness they stayed away from us all. Another dog was not so lucky, as they chased him into traffic. Yikes.

Most of the time they do seem fairly harmless. The common saying is present here as well: "they're more scared of you than you are of them." I did see one dog jump on a guy during our 100 ft road outing, however. I snapped this rather dark and terrible picture as the dog was running away. It took two people to kick the dog off the person.

Again, yikes.

MG Road

The MG in MG Road stands for Mahatma Ghandi, as per Wikipedia. This is one of the busiest roads in the city and a big part of the TWU Amazing Race held on Sunday, August 15. It features tons of shops, restaurants, pushy street salesmen, and street dogs.

To say the road is bustling is a vast understatement. It reminds me of Chicago during the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup Parade. Today was India's Independence Day, but the word from locals is the area generally looks like this:

Shops are compact here. Moving to Chicago was a shock because of how much less space existed for stores than in Michigan and suburbs generally. Coming here is just as much of a shock. You'll find rows with more stores than I ever thought could comfortably exist:

Unsurprising are the stores that feel right at home in India:

The list of surprising in much longer though. The American presence can be felt in every corner of the world. It sometimes shows up in odd places, as in jeans companies (Wrangler, Lee, Levi's) having their own stores -- a rarity in the States if it even exists. The short version of what I was surprised, and slightly disappointed, to see:

Now, of course it isn't all clothes here. The restaurant you'd expect to be here definitely is -- and even does home delivery

But also so is one that I didn't expect at all.

Bonus: it appears to be the cleanest KFC I've ever seen. Could it be I'm looking forward to eating at KFC for the first time ever?