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.