Saalam Baalak Trust

I can't believe it's already November!!! 

Friday I volunteered with Salaam Baalak Trust for the first time and had so much fun. It's an organization that serves street children in Delhi. They run four group homes where they provide shelter, food, medical care, education etc. and then they have a few contact points where they give medical care and informal education to kids who do not want to move into the shelters. I was at one of the contact points, which was basically a hut with three walls and some mats on the floor. There were about 12 boys there of all ages and two teachers. In the morning one teacher worked on English with the older boys and the other did math with the younger boys. The English lesson was focused mostly on spelling, which is really not my strong point, so I wound up working on multiplication and division with the younger boys. Each kid has a notebook but there's no chalk board so the teacher would write a problem in each kid's book and then when the kid finished it, the teacher would check that one and write another. There started to be a line of kids waiting to have their work checked so I offered to help with that. Within about 15 minutes I was sitting on the floor in the middle with all of the kids, making up math problems, teaching some how to multiply and divide decimals and trying to converse with the older kids to help them with their English. After lunch I played chess with the older kids for a while and then left. Starting next week I am going to go 1 or 2 days a week for the rest of the time I'm here.

Diwali

Today is Diwali. It's the biggest holiday in North India. Everyone decorates their houses with lights and flowers and has pujas (prayer ceremonies) and eats lots of good food and sets off fireworks. This morning IES brought a "pundit" to the residence to do a puja with us. It's a pretty elaborate ceremony that involves a lot of chanting and symbolically feeding various gods and building a small fire in a dish of sand. Lata got me all dressed up in one of her saris and all the other girls wore saris, too. I had done a puja once before with my homestay family but it was right when I first got here and there were a lot of things I didn't understand. This time I could ask Cate and Reeta questions as it was going on and take pictures. Tonight my host family is going to do a similar ceremony and then have way better food and set off fireworks. Lata asked me to invite a few of my IES friends to come over for that, so that should be fun. They were allexcited to get to celebrate with a real family.

Varanasi

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted last. Sorry about that. I've been so busy! I just got back from a weekend in Varanasi. Hindus consider Varanasi the holiest place to die because they cremate bodies right on the banks of the Ganges and then pour the ashes into the river. It's a pretty intense place. Every so often as you're walking through the narrow, windy streets, a procession of 6 or 8 men will walk by chanting and carry a body covered in fabric on a stretcher-type-thing toward the "burning gatt". You can go out in a boat and see the whole scene from the water, too, which was pretty cool. We went out at sunrise on Friday morning and again in the evening to watch this ceremonial offering the priests give to the river every night. 

The other big thing they do in Varanasi is manufacture silk. There is a big Muslim population living in the areas set back from the river a bit and they are famous for their silk factories. A lot of them give tours of their "factories" which are basically all of of houses in the few blocks around their shops where they have divided all the production tasks among the people living there. It is mostly a gimmick to get you to buy silk from them, but a few things about it were really interesting. For example, they weave the patterns into the silk by first sketching a design on graph paper and then making cards with holes punched in certain patterns to feed into the loom to get it to weave in those patterns. It's basically just like old fashioned computer programming and they have been weaving fabrics like that for centuries. In one of the houses on display there were three little boys sewing sequins onto fabrics. It obviously had not even occurred to our guide that he might not want to show off where he employs little kids. The truth of the matter is that most kids here need to make some money by that age and as working conditions go, sewing at home is not so bad.

Saturday we went to Sarnath, a nearby town where Buddha apparently gave his first sermon. There was a park and a monument commemorating that and a few Buddhist temples in the area. 

Navratri and Chawri Bazaar food walk

Yesterday was the end of Navratri, a week of fasting for Hindus. For the end  of the fast, my homestay mom prepared the typical special occasion meal of  channa (chickpeas), puri (fried bread),  halva (this dessert thing that isn't anything like Israeli halva), and  kir (amazing rice pudding stuff).  Before you end your fast you're supposed to feed some of this meal to 8 little girls, so people invite poorer kids in to have some  of the food. All morning, little girls, mostly the daughters of the women who work as maids in the neighborhood, were going from house to house being fed. The first group of four was so cute! When Lata (my homestay mom) put the food in front of them, they looked at it like they might burst if they ate another puri. She offered to pack it up for them so they could take it with them, which works out also because they are roaming around with boys, too,  and only the girls get invited in for the purpose of the holiday. When  they had eaten all they could, the leader of the group, who could not have been more than about 8 years old, took charge of packing everything up. Lata had given them each a bag but the girl collected all of their bags and plates and then devoted one bag to each food item. It was adorable. I was so impressed by her efficiency. I missed the second group of girls because I had to leave for class.

One of my IES professors keeps a blog about street food in Delhi. He and his friends go out once a week or so to sample street foods in different areas and then he reports on where the best places are for different types of food. Last night, they were all heading to Chawri Bazaar in Old  Delhi and he invited our class to come. I realize it was the only night of the year when it may have been inappropriate for me to go on a food walk, but I decided it was an opprtunity I didn't want to pass up. In retrospect, it was a great decision. So far I have not spent very much time in Old Delhi but it's amazing! I'm really excited to go back during the day and get some good pictures because  it's so cool looking. The shops are divided up by type, so the area where we were was all hardware stores. One entire street was filled with  stores selling only knobs and hooks. All of the roads are covered in a web of wires, which I think are power lines, mounted about a story and a half in the air. I have no idea why there are layers of power lines there. Tucked between the stores are all of these little tiny restaurants and then lining the roads are more carts and tables where people are selling all kinds of food. 

A few of us rode with Hemanshu (my professor) and got there a bit early so we headed into one of the more Muslim areas to taste what  is apparently the  world's best kir. I have not tasted that many kirs but it was excellent. Since its mostly Muslims in that  area, they also sell beef there. I did not expect to miss eating meat but I really do. After kir and some kabobs we went back to the metro stop to meet up with everyone else. It was a really cool group of people. We spent the next 3 hours or so walking from stand to stand, trying all different dishes, snacks and desserts, beginning and ending with dessert. At the outset we each put 200 rupees (about $5) into a common pot and then just shared everything. 200 rupees buys you a lot of street food! Our first stop was for this ice cream that they make by pouring milk flavored  with fruit on a spinning drum filled with dry ice.  Now that I think about it, I have no idea where they would get dry ice  and  I think they must just use regular ice but i guess it's possible. Either way I thought the process was brilliant and it tasted so good! 

Today is Dussehra, a holiday that involves burning giant paper mache demon heads. That should be pretty interesting. 

Update on my life

Ok so here's a quick summary of everything that's gone on since I posted last. Life has gotten pretty busy all of a sudden. Last night I went to another foreign students association party at JNU. It was hilarious but not particularly fun. They had set up this weird backwards tent with walls made of fabric and no roof on the lawn in front of one of the academic buildings. When I got there, several deans of various things were lined up in chairs on the dance floor, making speeches. Apparently there was some confusion among the members of the fsa board as to what is  supposed to go on at a party. After the speeches, they served chinese food and soda and then turned off all the lights and started playing "dance music". During this whole time, of course, guys are making awkward advances in halting English along the lines of, "I think I met you yesterday." "Nope." "Yea at that party." "No that wasn't me." "Yes it was." and so forth. 

This week was the beginning of the festival season for Hindus and the end of Ramadan so there are all of these fasts and festivals and such going on. Thursday was a holiday in honor of Gandhi's birthday. I went with Lata and Manu to visit one of their cousins who has a boutique and designs clothes in a suburb of Delhi. She's going to make me Indian clothes. I'm so excited! I also got to try on a sari  for the first time. They're so hard to wear! I need to practice so I don't make a fool of myself on Diwali when I'm supposed to actually wear one. Getting all wrapped up in it isn't that hard, although making it look neat is a challenge, but  getting it to stay in place is impossible! Even when I was just standing still the piece over my shoulder kept sliding off. Apparently it's ok to cheat and use safety pins to keep it all in place.

I went to erev Rosh Hashanah services at the synagogue here. It was hilarious and chaotic with three men leading the whole thing, each with his own pace and tunes, and no one else having any idea what was going on. They managed to wrap the whole thing up in under 45 minutes, though, which was impressive. Tuesday night I went to a dinner hosted by a lady from the synagogue who is here working for the UN Development Programme. It was cool to meet Jewish people from all over the world  who are in India  for all different really interesting reasons. They also had challah there, which was glorious!

I also bought a bike this week. I have to remember to say "cycle" not  "bike", though, because here they call motorcycles "bikes" and people get very concerned when they think I plan to drive around the city on a motorcycle. I've been having a great time riding back and forth to JNU and around the neighborhood. I'm so sick of being driven around and it's nice to get to explore a little bit without deciding on a destination ahead of time. It turns out there are all these gender and class issues tied to riding cycles and people definitely look at me funny when I'm out riding but I'm not willing to let that restrict  me to  being driven around. 

Vacation

We had last week off from IES classes, so I went to the south of India with 3 of my friends from the program. We spent the first weekend in Goa, and then took an overnight train to Kerala and spent the rest of the week there. The first night in Goa we met up with a friend of Alex and Sean's. He had arranged for a place for us to stay near Mapusa and took us for delicious authentic street food for dinner. On Friday we headed north to Arambol, a great little beach town, and spent the rest of the weekend there, hanging out on the beach and browsing the little shops. From about October to February, tourists flock to Goa from around the world for the party scene there. It was cool to see the area but there was not a whole lot going on in the off season.

The overnight train between Goa and Kerala was an experience. To begin with, I did not get a confirmed seat when I bought my ticket, and I didn't realize I was on the waitlist for a seat until right before I left Delhi. At the train station I asked at the ticket counter if I had a seat and he told me he had no way of knowing if there were available seats and I would have to get on the train and ask the conductor. I had visions of being thrown off the train in the midddle of nowhere when they realized I was riding without a real ticket, but I had to get on the train to talk to the conductor, and of course it left the station long before I could find him. My three travel buddies all had seats, but we had a powwow on our way to the train station and agreed that if I got thrown off the train they would come too. It turned out there were plenty of seats. I don't think I ever officially got assigned to one, but we all had a place to sleep and no one got chucked out in the middle of the night. 

You can get anywhere in India by train. Our trip was about 16 hours, but it's possible to take that train all the way from Delhi to Kerala. It takes 50 hours! Most of the trains have 5 classes, 3 air conditioned classes with varying densities of beds, one non-airconditioned section with beds and one non-airconditioned section just with seats. In the lowest class, they don't assign people seats or limit the number of tickets they sell so most people just stand. I'm not sure they have that on the long distance trains, though. We went 3 A/C class, which means the beds are stacked 3 high. There are no rooms, just a big car with 6-bed cubbies coming off perpendicular to the aisle and then 2 beds on the other side going lengthwise down the aisle.I should have taken pictures, because I don't think I'm succeeding in explaining how it's laid out. The point is they fit a huge number of beds in a train car.  The beds are set up so you can fold up the middle ones and all 6 of you can sit on the lower beds and chat, read, play loud music from your cell phone, enjoy an elaborate picnic, etc. They also sell dinner and breakfast and pass out sheets and blankets and pillows, which is nice of them.

We arrived in Eranakulam in the morning and walked about 1 km to the main jetty, where we got the ferry to Fort Cochin. It was a nice walk; I swear the entire city smells like coconut. The ferry was cool and costs a little less than 7 cents for a 20 minute ride across the bay. Fort Cochin is completely aimed at tourists, but they have some cool things there. They have these enormous Chinese fishing nets on display by the waterfront. 

They are still operational and there are vendors all along the shore selling fish they just pulled out of the nets. If you are there at the right time, you can buy a fresh fish or lobster or shrimp and take it across the road to another set of vendors who will cook it for you. It's a great system. There's also a very very old Synagogue near Fort Cochin in an area called "Jewtown". 

We left early the next morning. Sean and Alex went to Munnar to trek in the tea plantations and Ashley and I headed to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. On the way, we met a couple of guys who were headed to one of the famous Keralan boat races and decided to go with them instead. When we agreed to go we thought it was just 40 minutes more on the bus we were already on, but it turned out we had to switch buses and then take an autorickshaw and then walk for a while. Once we made it to the race, it was pretty cool. It's part of a religious festival called Onam. Different villages race against each other, competing for the honor of presenting food to one of the gods. This time I did take pictures, so I will not even try to describe the sight. 

After the race we took two more buses to get to Kollam. We spent the night there and walked around for a couple of hours in the morning to confirm that it was a strange city with nothing we particularly wanted to see and then left for Varkala. Varkala was beautiful and relaxed and we spent Wednesday afternoon through Saturday morning there hanging out on the beach and eating delicious seafood. Saturday morning we went back to Kollam to take a houseboat tour of the backwaters. The houseboat had two beadrooms, this nice outside sitting area, a kitchen, a cook, an engineer and a driver. We took the boat to Monroe Island, where we stopped for an authentic meal served on a banana leaf and then got into a smaller canoe for a tour of the canals that weave through the villages of the island. After that we drove back toward Kollam and docked in front of these people's house, which was weird. It was cool though because it was the native town of the cook, so he took us on a walking tour and we even got to crash a wedding for a little while. We got up early te next morning to get back to Kollam to catch our train to Eranakulam and our flight back to Delhi. 

My Bollywood debut

I'm going to be in a Bollywood movie! One of my classmates at JNU has a friend who also goes to JNU whose cousin is directing a movie about cricket. He needs a bunch of white people to be the British cricket team and their cheerleaders (I'm pretty sure there aren't actually British cricket cheerleaders but whatever). This morning I had coffee with the guy who is responsible for recruiting cheerleaders and he gave me all the details. I also got to ride on a motorcycle today; I've never been on one before. It was like a 5 minute ride, mostly within the JNU campus, but it was still pretty fun. 

Riding the city bus

I learned to ride the bus. This doesn't sound like such an accomplishment but there is no route map or timetable. You basically just have to get on a bus and see where it goes. I live on one side of the city, near JNU, and my classes through IES (my abroad program) are held on the other side of the city. Yesterday I had some extra time between classes in the two locations and decided to get on the bus at JNU. I figured I would ride it until it wasn't heading toward the IES center anymore and then would get out and take an auto (rickshaw). This worked fabulously well and I got almost the whole way on that one bus. 

Today I rode it again and and soon after leaving JNU, an exceedingly dirty, very old homeless man sat down next to me. Most of the other people on the bus are school kids or reasonably well dressed adults who seem to be on their way somewhere. This guy sat down next to me and the fare collector (there's a guy on every bus whose job is to collect money from people as they get on and occasionally stick his head out the door to help the driver around tight turns) came over to ask where he's going. The old man told him he's only going a couple of stops and asked does he really have to pay? The fare collector was pretty insistent and started to get mad, motioning that the guy needed to get off the bus if he wasn't going to pay. At that point the old man untied a bandanna from around his leg, pulled out a box of matches and opened it to reveal a couple of empty wrappers, a piece of thread, and a half rupee coin, making it clear that this was the extent of his worldly possessions. Apparently that demonstration gets you a free ride on the bus. After carefully wrapping everything back up and tying it around his leg again, he moved in favor of a window seat that opened up a few rows forward. 

Wherever you go...

I went to Synagogue in India last night! There is one synagogue in Delhi and they hold one service a week. Rick and I have been meaning to check it out since we got here and finally went last night. It was so nice! We were sure we were never going to find it, especially when our autowallah revealed that he didn't even know where the road it's on is. We finally found it and as we were walking in, the man in charge of the whole place, Ezekiel, came outside to introduce himself and welcome us. There were about 35 Indian people there and then 7 or 8 Americans who are temporarily in Delhi for one reason or another. Pretty much everyone introduced themselves to us at some point. We were sitting between a woman from Westchester who is in Delhi fworking for the UN and a young Argentinian guy who is studying at Oxford. The New Yorker immediately asked if we are going to be in Delhi for the High Holidays and then invited us for Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner at her house. 

The Prayer Books were Sephardic but the service was surprisingly familiar. It was led by 3 men, but I don't think any of them is a Rabbi. That was unclear. They chanted and sang and did all of the usual things. Basically every time they started a tune I knew, I had this moment of "how do you guys know this song?" At the end of the service, Ezekiel announced that it was his wife's 60th birthday and it became apparent that many of the older women were there for that occasion. They invited everyone to stay for snacks, which included samosas, burfie (Indian cookies), and Manischewitz.  I'm going to be away a lot of Fridays but I definitely want to go back some time. It's nice to know there are Jews in India.

Homestay

So to backtrack a little bit, I decided after a week here to live with a family instead of staying in the group residence. The residence was surprisingly comfortable, with big double rooms, air conditioning, wireless internet, etc., but there are only 12 people on the program and it seemed like I would have a better experience living separately. I had initially wanted to live in a homestay when I filled out my housing forms in the spring, but the IES office in Chicago strongly suggested the residence instead, saying that girls who had lived with families in the past felt isolated in their houses and unsafe travelling around the city by themselves. The story once I arrived was the complete opposite, with the staff here raving about the families they had lined up to house students and the experiences of the students who had lived there in past semesters. I figured that the program was small enough that I wouldn't be excluded from socializing with the people when I wanted to, but I wasn't really experiencing life in India spending all my time with them. 

My family lives in a really nice suburb type area that's right near JNU, the university where I am taking some of my classes. The mother and father in the family are Lata and Vinod, but I call them Aunty and Uncle because in India you rarely call people who are older than you by their given names. Basically people call everyone of their parents' generation, except for teachers and people like that, aunty and uncle. They have a daughter, Manurut (Manu), who's 12, and a son, Vikrant, who is 17. Vikrant was here for the first week that I lived with them, but then left for school at SUNY Buffalo in New York. 

I'm really pleased with my decision to live with the family. I definitely don't have the freedom I have living on my own at school, but I don't think that option really exists for me in India. The truth of the matter is you need someone with some experience in the country helping you look out for your health and safety. The fact that my family is there to guide me in what is safe to eat and drink, places I can and can't go alone, sights I have to see, etc., makes me feel much more comfortable and actually gives me more freedom to explore the city than I would have if I attempted to figure that all out on my own. They also motivate me to learn Hindi, which is great! They all speak English very very well and we rarely have trouble communicating when they are speaking directly to me, but they almost always speak to each other in Hindi. Wanting to know what's going on is really encouraging me to learn the language. 

The first week I lived with the family was awesome because  Vikrant wanted to see a bunch of the sights again before leaving for school and took my along for a tour. I also met most of the extended family as they came to see him off and got to go with them on a brief religious pilgrimage to a temple in Rajasthan. I have not written anything about that trip yet, as I was really overwhelmed when I got back and then just never got around to it, but I will do that soon because it was pretty amazing.

Agra and Jaipur

This weekend IES organized a trip for us to Agra and Jaipur. It's a pretty sweet deal because they arrange for a bus and nice hotels and tours of the sights and all of our meals. We left early Friday morning to drive to Agra. The drive took about seven hours, including a stop for breakfast and a detour because of some sort of road block. The road block offered some brief excitement, because when traffic began to slow down on the divided highway in front of us, the driver turned the bus around, then made a u-turn at the first break in the median and tried driving up the opposite side of the highway. This sounds much more dangerous than it was, though, because pretty much everybody travelling in our direction tried the same thing. Unfortunately, that did not work and we wound up wedged into to the town square of some very small village in the process of creating our own detour.  

In another traffic jam, a monkey jumped up onto the window of the bus. He was on a leash, and before we could take too many pictures, his owner tugged for him to come down and gestured that for a fee he would have the monkey jump back up and allow us to continue taking pictures. 

We went to Sikandra, where Akbar is buried, and the Agra Fort on Friday and then woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to see the sun rise at the Taj Mahal, which was amazing. After some souvenir shopping, we left for Jaipur. 

We stopped on the way at another one of Akbar's palaces, called Fatehpur Sikri. The complex itself was interesting, but getting there involved transferring from our tour bus to smaller vans designed to ferry people up to the palace. The parking area for tour buses was surrounded by small shops and all of the shopkeepers came out to harass us to visit their stores. Overall the shopkeepers and individual souvenir vendors in Agra and Jaipur were extremely aggressive, but this was probably the worst of it. 

The rest of the ride from Agra to Jaipur was uneventful, except maybe for peeing on the side of the road. They don't really have rest stops on the highways, and though there are motels and restaurants set up for travelers along the road, they are infrequent. So, every hour or two, you pull over and the men head in one direction into the bushes a bit and the women head in another direction. An important detail perhaps is that there are no laws against public urination, so even in Delhi when people are driving and need to pee they just pull their car/bus/auto rickshaw over to the side of the road and take care of it. And by people I mean men. Women don't do that in the city, I don't think. I guess the other important detail is that many toilets are just a hole in the ground, which perhaps makes the bathroom seem less essential. I'm not really sure about the thought process there. 

Sunday started with an elephant ride up to Amber Fort. It was sort of like Splash Mountain where they take a picture of you on the ride and then try to sell it to you at the end, except all along the road up to the fort were guys with digital cameras and then on the walk back down there they were with the photos printed trying to sell them to you. It's pretty much impossible to take a picture of yourself riding an elephant, so they do a good business. I will have to scan the pictures and post them. Parts of the fort were beautiful, as were the views, and there was a snake charmer there! 

Jaipur is known for block printed fabric, so after the fort we went to a store that offered demonstrations of the printing techniques. I learned the origin of paisley, which is cooler than it sounds. Apparently when people first began printing fabrics, they used their hands as stamps. When they got bored with hand prints on their fabrics, they started using the bottoms of their fists, which makes paisley. 

In the afternoon we went to Jantar Mantar, which is called an observatory but was really just a park full of all different types of sun dials built in the 1700s. It was so cool! Then we went to the City Palace, which houses an unimpressive collection of textiles and weapons, and then spent a few minutes in the bazaar, where shopkeepers each pay several young guys to harass tourists into stopping into their shops. More than once I had to leave a shop because these people had begun to ask questions like was I travelling alone and where was I staying. It was very strange and generally discouraged shopping, which seemed counterproductive for the store owners.  I only made one purchase, which was sort of accidental. I was looking at scarves and picked out two that I liked. When I asked the price, the owner said 900 rupees for each one. At that moment I remembered that I only had 700 rupees with me. I told him I only had 500 rupees and would go to the ATM and then come back, both of us knowing full well that I probably would not return. As I was walking out he continued to call after me with lower and lower prices until he got down to 500 rupees (about $12) for the two together. I couldn't really turn that down.

Welcome

Hi! Welcome to my blog. I'm in New Delhi, India for a semester abroad and I figured I would set this up so I can tell you all about my life and adventures here. I've been here for about a month and a half and I'm loving it! I'm going to try to post every few days, starting with my trip to Agra and Jaipur this past weekend. I can't describe everything that's gone on since I got here all at once, but as I go I will try to fill in some of the highlights from the past 6 weeks. Thanks for reading and please feel free to post comments, questions, messages, etc.