Udaipur

After saying our sad goodbyes in Baroda, I set off for the last leg of my Indian adventure: an extravaganza through Udaipur, Jaipur, Delhi, Goa and Mumbai. Me and Karan got on another overnight bus to Udaipur (Rachel wasn’t feeling well, so she came on a little bit later), and an uneventful 6 hours later we were in a rickshaw on the way to our hotel. Upon our arrival to, we were greeted by a giant palace complete with sprawling lawns, several pools and just general extravagance.

Let me just say, wow, after weeks and weeks of living in Baroda, I’m living like a king. In the picture above, Karan is sitting in our room’s foyer, and yes, that’s a throne. Our bathroom is complete with a real shower, (1 and a half foot wide shower head), real toilet (toilet paper included), and all the amenities of what one could expect from a 4 star hotel in the US. The actual bed room portion of the hotel room has 15 foot painted ceilings, coffee maker, TV, and the most comfortable beds I’ve encountered in months. For ~$40 a night, it is amazing the luxury that we’ve been living in over the past couple days in Udaipur.

Udaipur itself is a much different experience than Baroda, and you can tell that the city runs off of its tourism. There are palaces on every mountaintop, and alongside the entire lake (which has several more island-palaces), touristy shops line a good portion of the roads and there is much less trash on the ground. From views that I’ve seen it reminds me more of something out of the Swiss alps than the Rajasthan countryside. After three days here, I’ve been on a boat ride, seen several palaces/museums, visited garden after garden and just generally been as much of a tourist as possible. When not doing this, me Karan and Rachel are sprawled out on our beds just generally lounging in the much needed A/C.

On the last day before we catch a night train to Jaipur, we go to Monsoon Palace on top of one of the mountains, which was one of the coolest things that we’ve done yet. It had a 360 degree view of the entire countryside which was incredible. After visiting the palace we went on a cool walk on this path which took us up another mountain to see some more of the views the area had to offer.

Hopefully, our next stop in Jaipur will be as relaxing as this one has been, because I could get used to this.

Things I miss

In this blog post I will catalogue things that I took for granted/am looking forward to in the US. It is amazing to me how many of the things are small, but the little things really add up after a while:

· A/C. This is one of the biggest ones. I don’t know how our ancestors lived without this for as long as they did without losing their minds. I guess I am in one of the hotter places in the world, but wouldn’t you think that would mean there would be more air conditioning? The reason for its lack of prevalence here isn’t that A/C’s are expensive, but that the power to run them is expensive. My host family always tells me to turn off the fans when I leave a room, or the lights… I guess it’s a lot more than I realized.

· Warm showers. After a long hot day, you would think that a cold shower is the only cure to the overbearing heat, but stepping into an A/C house and getting in a hot shower is something that I’ve needed for a while now.

· Cars. I am in desperate need of comfort when it comes to transportation. The epitome of luxury for me this far has been traveling in a 6x4 block with another person in a sleeper bus. After rickshaws and motorbikes all day, every day, I can’t wait for my 4 runner.

· Traffic. Going off the last one, it will be a relief to go back to the US where sanity is the rule of the road, and not overall chaos. I have a few videos that people can watch of traffic here if you would like. You have to see it to believe it.

· Social order and rules. In this country, if you want something quick, then it is a genuine struggle to accomplish anything. From standing in lines, to ordering food, to navigating a rickshaw there will always be problems that seem like they would be alleviated by any resemblance of order. There are no rules or regulations: people cut to the front of lines regularly (yes like you have to push your way to the front if you don’t want to get cut), listed prices are only suggestions, the food you eat it like playing Russian roulette with your stomach. Just in general nothing here happens on a regular time scale, largely due to the lack of any discernable rules. It’s hard to explain, just the general social infrastructure here seems like it needs a good dose of Westernization.

· Trashcans. There are none of these anywhere in India. Trash goes on the ground here, not in trashcans.

· Space. There isn’t a spare plot of land in this whole city. If there is an empty lot, then it’s a temporary landfill. There are people everywhere at all hours of the day doing God knows what, it’s astounding still that Baroda is bigger than Raleigh and they call it a small city

· Burgers. I would pay a hefty sum for a nice burger right now. Don’t know what else needs to be described about this, but wow I want a burger.

· White people. This doesn’t mean that I’m tired of Indian people, it’s just that I can’t wait until I won’t be stared at, or asked for autographs (yep, 3 times now I’ve given out my autograph), or have to shake people’s hands on the street every 300 yards, or take pictures with groups of people (wow I lost count of how many times I’ve done this within the first week). The list goes on and on.

· Internet. This is another of the biggest ones. I rely so much on the Internet, it’s amazing. I’ve had to change how I entertain myself here, because I would usually be able to spend countless hours on the Internet every day… no really I can entertain myself on the Internet better than anyone else I know. I can’t wait until I can get wireless whenever I want it again.

· English. I didn’t really take this for granted in the US, but being able to speak the same language as everyone else back home will be a huge relief. Can’t wait.

It’s not that I don’t like it here, don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing. It’s just that, man I will be loving life when I get back to the USA. The little things add up over weeks and weeks. I’ll do a blog on things I’ll miss in the next week or so to counter this.

Taj Mahal

Brace yourself. This will be a long post.

Trip to Agra

My trip to Agra, the city that the Taj Mahal is in, was one of the worst experiences of my life. The entire day leading up to leaving, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go or not, because I was extremely sick… again. Something I had eaten the previous day wasn’t agreeing with me at all, and I had been bed ridden the whole day, only getting up to go to the doctor to get doped up on some meds and a shot of some concoction (the doctor’s office here is another story I’ll write about later, very strange encounter). I decided that I might as well brave out the trip, sick or not because hey, when will I get to see one of the Wonders of the World again?

Karan and I arrive at the Baroda train station at around 9pm, meeting up with the 7 other foreigners who are coming along and we hop on the train. This was an interesting experience by itself, as our tickets weren’t “confirmed” (I still don’t know what this means), so we were moving around the train for some time before we found the right seats. It’s a good thing we found them when we did, because I immediately had to explore the extents of Indian transportation’s public restroom service. Faced only with squatting toilets on a bouncing train in less-than-ideal sanitation standards, I unfortunately had few options. Over the next 10 hours on the overnight train, I became very familiar with this portion of the train (needless to say this was probably the worst experience I have had thus far in India), but luckily, once I was off the train it was a 2 hour drive to comfort like I have not known in weeks.

Agra

Once we arrived in Agra it was about 10 or 11 in the morning and I took some much deserved and needed rest. This wasn’t normal Indian rest, however, I fell asleep in an A/C room, with a queen sized bed, full blankets and an English movie channel in the background. I might have well have been living in a 7 star hotel. After 2 of the best hours of sleep I can remember, we went to the mall, and I had the first meal (McDonalds Chicken McGrill for $0.60) that I could keep down in over 24 hours, so at this point things were definitely on the mend. I was feeling better, and our group set off via rickshaw to the Taj Mahal!

When we arrived our rickshaw drivers told us not to get a guide, and not to buy anything from the people around us, and we agreed, but once we got there a government tour guide (he even showed us his ID) offered to take us around and we can tip him if we like, or not, afterwards. He brought all of us white (and Asian) people to a special foreigner line in which we paid around 750 rupees ($15) and took us on inside. I should mention that Karan, being the only Indian, got in for 20 rupees. Once we went inside, I was awestruck. Ive seen a lot of the classic touristy things in my life (a la Big Ben, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty etc.) and can easily say that the Taj was the only one that truly lives up to the hype. Its entrance is guarded by another opulent gate, and, once you are through that it is right there, in your face and absolutely amazing. Our guide was telling us some stuff about how they built it but I wasn’t really listening because it was too hot, and then we walked up to it and got in line to go inside. The inside was a let-down, just because all it was, was a bunch of empty rooms and a tomb, but that still didn’t detract from the cool-ness of the outside. Now it was late afternoon, we were all hot and tired, and we wanted to head back to the hotel, but unfortunately we couldn’t do this just yet. Once we stepped outside of the Taj, we were accosted in an unprecedented fashion by the locals. They tried to sell us food, water, snow globes, coasters, post cards, even whips. It took a legitimate effort to wade through the throngs of annoying hawkers to get back to the rickshaw and once we did he tried to take us to some other shops. He explained that he gets a kick back from the shops if he brings white people there. Since he had done a good job we agreed to go to one of the shops, some people bought some trinkets, and then we went to eat. After that it was back to the hotel and some desperately needed rest.

Back to Baroda

We woke up and got out of the hotel at around 11am, and let me preface the next section of the blog by saying, we did not arrive back in Baroda until 6pm… the following day.

At 11 we went via A/C car to Delhi, stopping at Akbar’s Tomb on the way. The tomb was really neat, similar to the Taj Mahal but just on a smaller scale. We hopped back in to the car, and I tried to get some sleep on the 4 hour drive to Delhi. We got to Delhi at around 5pm and were dropped off in the middle of the poor section; not the place 2 white people and a non-Hindi speaking Indian want to be, so we took a rickshaw to what we described to the driver as “a shopping center or mall”. He drops us off in a market full of little stalls, and we thought we would be resigned to wandering around in the heat until we left Delhi, but luckily the fast food gods smiled on us and there was a Subway nearby. After no proper food consumption for the past 48 hours due to my stomach ailment, having a Subway Club with REAL chicken, turkey and peperoni was phenomenal. We (Karan, Rachel and I) stayed here in the A/C for about an hour, lost and not feeling well in a completely foreign city and were just thinking… Man if we make it back to Baroda it will truly be a miracle.

We head back to the travel agent, and hop on the sleeper bus were taking to Udaipur. This is a blessing in disguise, as it is fully horizontal, with A/C, a plug for my computer and enough room to actually sleep. Unfortunately there’s no bathroom on this 13 hour bus so you have to rely on their bathroom stops that rely on no discernable schedule. After getting a fair amount of sleep we hop off and get on our other bus in Udaipur (another miracle, we took a rickshaw to another agent in a foreign city… looking back I don’t know how we made it home). This bus dropped us of in Ahmedabad after an additional 5 hours and we were faced with a decision: 2000 rupees for an A/C car, or 1000 for a rickshaw back to Baroda. At the time we had spent so much money getting back we thought it would be good to save, but looking back this was a bad idea. It was a 3 hour rickshaw ride back to Baroda and this leg of the journey was especially taxing but at least allowed us to see the Indian countryside, which is even more destitute than the slums I work in in Baroda.

At last we made it home safe and sound, I ate a big home-cooked meal and got 12+ hours of sleep. I had never thought that I would be glad to be back in Baroda, but I can safely say that after the escapades of the previous weekend I definitely was. The trip, though more stressful and taxing than anything else that I’ve done here, was WELL worth it. I got to know the other interns very well here, and had a blast at the Taj and beyond, a great experience all around.

Stories and Anecdotes v3

· The head bob, what does it mean?? Indian people have the nod and the headshake just like any other culture, but the head bob adds something extra into the equation. It resembles a nod, but from left to right as opposed to forward-back (don’t ask me to do it, I’ve tried and I can’t). The worst part is that Indians use it all the time and I still can’t figure out what it means. I think it represents a sort of affirmation, but yet it is different than a normal head bob. My best guess is that it means like, yes I hear what you are saying and I acknowledge it. Maybe by the time I leave I’ll be doing it myself.

· The difference in technology here is amazing. The Indian people as a whole are so much less dependent on technology than Americans that I almost can’t function here. The father of the family I’m staying with, for example, works on accounting all the time. How does he crunch these numbers, Excel? No… pencil and paper. He will sit there for hours just scribbling away at something that can probably be finished by excel in minutes. Another example is me and Karan’s complete inability to entertain ourselves when the power goes out (happened again this morning). We sit around, useless, while the rest of the Indians go about their day as if nothing is wrong. Also this is one of the first places in the world that I’ve been and there are no wireless networks, secure or un-secure, on my WiFi locator. That should be a testament in and of itself.

· Finally, I’ve found that several times during the day, as I’m riding or walking around the city I have to just stop and say, what in the world is this person/animal doing. It has happened several times a day, moments of sheer incredulity that only can be explained by the strangeness of India. Here are some examples:

o I walked out of a fair that I went to (story for another day) and there was a person there with a weighing scale on the ground, Christmas lights coming out of it up to a TV screen showing a Bollywood movie, and the person yelling Gujarat at everyone who walked by. I honestly wish I knew what he had been saying…

o A tiny motorcycle blasting down the center of a crowded road holding his horn down, which is playing the La Cucaracha.

o Walking down the street and seeing 3 small boys trying to wrestle a very disgruntled cow down the road.

o Riding a rickshaw at around 10 pm and a group of 5 kids come running down the middle of the road into oncoming traffic screaming and no one stops or even gives a second glance.

o A cow with his horn stuck in a fence and like 15 Indians all trying to get him out.

The worst part about all of this is that I’m having trouble even noticing them as strange any more, I’m just starting to accept them as the norm. That can’t be good.

Monsoon

Its official, the monsoon season has begun. Yesterday, after walking out of Seven Seas Mall with Karan, Brina and Rachel, it was probably about 110 degrees, and felt more like 120. We walked to the AIESEC office, and then set off to explore a nearby temple. About 5 minutes into our walk there were some ominous clouds rolling in, but it seemed as if we had enough time to go and look at the temple before any storm came, so we continued on. Only about 1 minute later a massive gust of wind blew in with dust flying everywhere, trees whipping around… it seemed like the apocalypse was coming. We realized our previous estimate of a few hours before the storm was horribly incorrect, and hustled into a rickshaw to go home. We were buffeted the whole way by stinging sand, I couldn’t even open my eyes. At one point a herd of cows ran in front of us (that’s how you know it’s bad, if the cows are actually running) and almost hit us.

At this point the temperature has probably dropped around 30 degrees to ~80 and the first fat drops of water are coming down. Me and Karan get back to the house just in time to close the windows and have the power go out on us (great no fans now). It starts a torrential downpour and we go up on the terrace and run around in the rain for a bit (feels great, the first time I hadn’t been hot in as long as I can remember). We look over and a whole family of monkeys has taken cover in another neighbor’s balcony, and there’s a crazy old lady throwing mangos at them to try and run them off.

Finally the rains start to slow down to a manageable patter… but its getting dark and still there’s no power, so our host family offers to drive us around the city some more. I cant stress how amazing it is to sit in a car with A/C, it makes me feel like a king. We drive all around the city to look at the flooding that’s happened, and the majority of the problems that we see are just the result of a lack of any identifiable drainage system. A half of every road is now designated to foot-deep puddles that cause even more traffic mayhem than usual.

When we get back to the house the power is still not on, so its up onto the roof we go to sleep. Because there’s no fan, and it’s now a good 85 and humid inside, the only sane option is to sleep on the terrace.

I can safely say this is the most I’ve felt like a true Indian here, sleeping on the roof after a long day of being battered by the first of the monsoons. Home sweet home.

My Job v2

I’ve been continuing my work in the slums with the kids, and it’s getting to be more and more entertaining each time. As I get to know the kids better, they become much more receptive and inquisitive, asking all sorts of questions that allows me to easily fill my 2 hour slot. What I’ve done with them this last week is teach them some spoken English that they can hopefully use in their everyday lives. I went through the room that we were in and had them learn the basic words around them, such as floor, water, door etc. After this we did body parts, and the basics of introducing. Concepts such as “Hi, how are you, what are you doing?” were a favorite, especially when I had the kids introduce other members of the room to me. They had some serious trouble with the “sh” part of words like shoes or shorts. Picture a room full of 15 indian boys all trying to say shoes like ‘thoose’ at the same time. After 5 minutes I gave up and moved on to something different. They almost had a fit when they heard that two of the fingers were called the thumb and the pinky, I’m not sure why but they found it hilarious. Soon things dissolved into the kids poking each other with their pinkies and yelling “Pinky! Pinky!”

I then took out my computer after about an hour of this, and played them some American music (they liked White Panda, they have good taste at least). I had downloaded the Waka Waka music video by Shakira earlier in the week for them and they really liked that. As I was packing up to leave, they started yelling because I hadn’t taken a picture of them yet, so of course I had to do that before I left.

Interestingly, one of the boys living in the slum Jalaramnagar (which is about 20 minutes away on the other side of the city from where I live) asked me, “You live on Hirni road, yes?”. I did a double take and was like.. yes, but how did this boy from the slums know that I lived 20 minutes by rickshaw away? Turns out his parents had been talking about a white person who lives over there, and there are so few of us here that he knew it was me. Strange, but it gets weirder. Someone else then said, “Yes, and he likes going to the gardens on the weekend”. This, oddly, was also true. There is a Garden of Baroda nearby the AIESEC office that I’ll go to with friends on the weekends, and apparently he knew that as well. In a 1.7 million person city, people somehow know what I do on the weekends and where I live. Just today, on my way to work, someone stopped me and gave me their phone number, telling me that they want to hang out soon (he asked me when I wake up so we can go on a morning walk). I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get used to this aspect of India.

On a different note, I can check another thing of my India bucket list: pet a cow. In front of the AIESEC office there was a white cow just standing there, and so me, Rachel, Karan and an Indian (Dinesh) all pet it, exciting I know. I’ll miss not seeing cows everywhere when I get back to the states, they’re starting to grow on me.