I first traveled to India in December of 2004. It was a two-week trip where I got to see New Delhi, Agra (Taj Mahal), Baroda and Bombay. Had a great time and participated in a lot of wedding shopping.

Fast forward to last Sunday when we (Father-in-law or “FIL", sister-in-law/"SIL", wife and me) flew out of Atlanta. Our flight left around 5pm Sunday and arrived in Amsterdamn around 7am Monday (6 hour time change). We then had a flight out of Amsterdam at 10am (Note: security at Amsterdam was a pain) and arrived in Bombay at around 11pm (3.5 hour time change). Both of those flights were roughly nine hour dinkers. In Bombay, we had a huge layover with our flight to Baroda (Vadodara) which departed around 6am and brought us to our final destination at 7am Tuesday. Yeah, quite a travelling experience! I managed it all by reading the first couple
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, watching airplane movies (quite a selection these days!), fasting, entertaining other travelers and Bombay airport employees by wearing my Vibram Five Fingers (With new Injinji socks!), and attempting to sleep.

Okay, here is a map of India to help you follow along:

View Larger Map

Note: You can switch to the “map” view and you’ll see more cities, but the Terrain view is somewhat helpful for discussion and lack of map clutter. Baroda is a bit south of Ahmadabad (a two hour drive) and though the politically accepted name for Bombay is now Mumbai, I’ve found that most people here still refer to it as Bombay.

Here in Baroda we’ve spent the week shopping as well as taking care of some familial obligations. My FIL and I have shopped less than my wife and SIL. One of the first things I set out to do upon arrive was attempt to get wireless for my Asus eee 900 as well as set up my Blackberry 8320 with a local sim card for data/EDGE. This required my FIL and our friend Malay as a resident to go to a local mobile provider, Airtel. Unfortunately, what we failed to realize at the time (And the Airtel employees didn’t know) was that the prepaid cards won’t get data working on your blackberry. D’oh! And getting set up on a plan requird committing to a year long contract.

We figured all of that out about 24 hours later upon our second trip to Airtel. This set in motion trips to Reliance (they can’t provide) and finally Vodafone. Vodafone was a near bust until we convinced them that we didn’t care about losing the 500 rupee (Rs) deposit if we cancelled after three months (or was it six?). 500 rupees is only about $10, which I’ve decided is way too low a deposit to affect any Americans behavior. But that is not an insignificant sum to locals, it seems.

Anyway, even after getting a Vodafone card, the instructions we were provided on how to activate the blackberry data on it were out of date. Calling customer service was fruitless. Another day passes.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon (day 3 of trying to get my blackberry up and running), we went back to Vodafone, explained that the instructions were wrong, and then were provided the new instructions that worked within five minutes. Yay! Emails started piling in (Boo!) and I could get onto google maps (triangulation works here!), Jivetalk/beejive, opera, gmail, everything – same as BIS in the states.

Fortunately, throughout all of this I had been hooked up with a TATA wireless modem that an uncle-in-law had set up on a previous trip and left here. That thing, in combination with my eee, has been a godsend, bridging the gap on not having my blackberry working for a few days, enabling me to still keep up with work (Implode business). My only gripe on it is that it is huge in relation to the eee (which is tiny). See here for what I mean. Otherwise, even at max speeds of like 10kbs, it is getting the job done like a champ. And god bless the linux community for ease of setup of a random wireless usb modem on a random wireless provider in India on ubuntu. Works like a charm.

So having completed a good deal of shopping, which meant getting some pimp Indian dress shoes plus some dhoti ("Indian hammer pants") and a couple new kurta tops, dodging cow patties on Baroda sidewalks (SIL was hilariously unsuccessful in this regard), being stared at, observing the amazing anarchy that is driving/biking/rickshawings/carting/ox’ing/cow-dodging/walking on the streets of India (no traffic lights and lanes are entirely ignored) and eating Papa Johns and Subway (and ate some great Indian food, of course), we are moving on to the South for a week.

We fly out of Ahmadabad down to Bangalore and then drive to Mysore. This is a mountainous region that is apparently beautiful. And our stay will involve being in some sort of rain forest for a couple of days. Should be awesome.

There are a lot of thoughts I have on this trip. They range from observations about people, business, food, overpopulation, anarchy to the bizarre mix of modern times (mobile phones and computers) and age-old tech (you should see how they build stuff here – women carrying bricks on their heads, latticing at construction sites made out of rope-tied sticks) to abundant religious iconography to the omnipresence of cows. India is an amazing place on this planet.

In the meantime, I have to get ready to leave Baroda. If you want, please follow along on my mobog. This is where I’ve been posting pictures from my blackberry live of sites I’m seeing here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep that up, but a quick review of my mobog will give you a good sense of some of the things I’ve alluded to above.

Anyway, hope to write more when I get a chance. After out trip down south, we’ll be coming back to Baroda in time for Diwali!

Welcome! Looking for everything related to Vibram Five Fingers? Let me point you to the hub of all things VFF: birthdayShoes.com. Also, due to the steep learning curve on getting a pair of “foot gloves,” I’ve created a [beginner’s guide] to Five Fingers. It’s a free PDF e-book that covers the basics and will help you get you going. Anyway, enjoy the review!

“What are you wearing? Some kind of aqua shoes?”

That’s a common reaction I get to my Vibram Five Fingers. Others include, “Hey can you run in those?” (Yes). Or, “Do they feel weird? Is it hard to adjust to them?” (Not really and No — its like being barefoot!). And of course, “What are those? And where can I get them?”

Five Fingers are shoes. Or slippers. Or socks with flexible Vibram rubber soles on the bottom. They have five toe cutouts and absolutely no arch support or traditional foam padding in the soles. They come in a few varieties (some providing more foot coverage, one intended for aquatic uses, a couple with straps, or the simplest, the “classic", which has a bungie type operation that keeps them from falling off when used in more engaging activities (Update: Now there are 7 Five Fingers models available with an eighth VFF running shoe model on the way).

I’ve been using my Five Fingers for about three months now. So far, I’ve used them for:

• Kettlebell lifting (In action: Front Squats)
• All varieties of CrossFit workouts (In action: Burpees), which often include doing squats, cleans, jerks, pull-ups, dips, presses, etc.
• Rowing on an Ergometer (Concept 2)
• Getting around a dock and boat
• Going for walks
• Short jogs
• Hill sprints (pic)
• Frisbee throwing
• Grocery shopping!
• Lounging around in the house, grilling outside on the deck
• Hacky-sacking

Five Fingers have helped me be a kid again: as a kid, I never wore shoes, preferring always to be barefoot everywhere. Even today, I rarely wear shoes, preferring Birkenstock sandals in the summer or clogs in the winter (or just wearing flip-flops). Five Fingers are great in that they allow me to do all sorts of active things outside, no matter what the surface while still protecting my feet against wayward sharp objects on the ground.

Five Fingers take my feet back to basics. I wasn’t born with shoes on my feet. From an evolutionary perspective, human beings existed for countless millenia hunting and gathering, running from prey, lifting and carrying loads — all without the latest brand of Nike’s. It stands to reason that our feet evolved over time to withstand the freedoms (both good and bad) that result from going barefoot everywhere.

Our ancient ancestors likely had tough, calloused feet, ready to withstand sprints (or walking) across all sorts of terrain. Furthermore, they likely ran lightly on their feet (and almost certainly had little reason to ever “go for a jog"). Shoeless running would necessarily minimize contact between the foot and the ground. Just imagine a cat or dog sprinting and you get the idea. Contrast running on the balls of your feet with the pervasive long-stride, heel-striking (inherently inefficient), sneaker-clad foot-roll. This style is clumsy, and the by-product of the thick-soles of modern sneakers, which mute important feedback between foot and ground (See You Walk Wrong, referenced below).

Vibram Five Fingers minimize feedback-interference by having an almost insignifnicant rubber sole. When I wear my Five Fingers outside, I feel the curvature of the grass-covered ground. I feel rocks under my heels and get a real sense of the varying textures beneath me.

When I do olympic-lifts, I feel all the stabilizers in my feet activate (Like you might encounter in CrossFit). I feel reconnected to the ground, an empowering feeling when you’re trying to squat 250 pounds or stabilize whilst doing 1.5 pood kettlebell swings. When I do hill sprints in my Five Fingers, I am considerably less likely to roll my ankle upon hitting a dip in the ground.

Going about “virtually barefoot” may seem odd to our sneaker-crazed modern world, but why not take a break from restrictive, clunky shoes and sneakers and traverse the earth as evolution intended (Well, as close as you can get while still maintaining some protection!)? Plus, being active and “barefoot” will build stronger ankles and leg muscles and improve your agility.

Mind, the day after running “barefoot” for the first time (virtually so with Five Fingers), you’re bound to be sore in all sorts of previously forgotten ankle, foot and calve muscles. So be prepared. However, this general foot/ankle weakness should tell you something about how much your regular footwear has been subsidizing your strength.

The bottom line: if you like being active and barefoot, you’re almost certainly going to like Five Fingers.

Finally, there are a few other benefits of Five Fingers I thought I’d share:

• Five Fingers are incredibly light and compact. This makes them supremely packable for traveling.
• They are machine washable! Yeah, you can just throw them in the washing machine, then hang them out to dry.
• Wet sports. This goes hand in hand with their machine wash-ability. Doing something in wet grass? Regular sneakers will get soaking wet and could end up smelling of mold. With my Five Fingers, if they get wet, its okay! They’ll dry fast. If they get muddy? Just wash them off and throw them in the washing machine. Easy.

Okay, you’ve sold me. So what now?

If you’re interested in picking up a pair, I recommend checking out some style specifics at the official fivefingers website where you can figure out which style is right for you. I like my “classics” (which run about $70). All varieties of Vibram Five Fingers can be picked up with free shipping at kayakshed.com.

On style and sizing — I personally had no need or desire for a strap over the top of my feet (like in the “sprint” style — and I sprint in my classics all the time!) and didn’t want to risk rumored chafing. Sizing is always a question. My size happened to be the same as my Birkenstocks (European 43), but there’s some sizing info based on foot measurements available here. I actually ordered a 44 and 43 from kayakshed.com, and just returned the 44s for a refund.

Buyer beware: friends and family might chide your weird-looking footwear, but don’t be surprised when they order their own pair shortly thereafter (To date: I know two CrossFitters who are looking to buy them after seeing me use them, and one CrossFitter who has already taken the plunge).

If you have any questions about anything I didn’t cover, let me know!

Further reading:

• You Walk Wrong.

  Look, it?s not your fault. It?s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don?t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet?your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet?are getting trounced in a war that?s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

• POSE running and Vibram Five Fingers (POSE is a method of running that uses gravity to propel you forward, running on the balls of your feet, so it stands to reason that Five Fingers would be a natural complement). Note: I’m not a runner/jogger (just sprints and short-distance running for me, thanks)

Thanks for reading my review! If you want more information, hop on over to the fan site for Vibram Five Fingers — birthdayshoes.com Also, check out my [beginner’s guide] to Five Fingers. It should help you quickly ascend the learning curve for your first pair of VFFs!