Loose Motions

I am overwhelmed, but probably in a good way. Probably being the key word. Jaipur is everything wonderful and even more than I had ever thought it would be. Everything I see feels so enveloped in some mystical story tale that you read about as a child. The roads are very narrow and twist amongst small shops which sell only jootis (pointed toed camel shoes) or puppets or large piles of spices or umbrellas or….. There are men in brightly colored turbans pushing carts loaded with vibrantly purple eggplants, piles of cauliflower, and crunchy cabbage. Others sit with small scales weighing out Indian street snacks or hawking fruit or chai. The city is alive in everyway possible. You can’t look anywhere without seeing someone doing something that involves some random thing that happens to be colored the most brilliant hue you’ve ever seen. Cows rule the road and decide to sprawl out wherever they haphazardly see fit. Painted camels bob their way around the roundabouts pulling carts piled high with fabric (I swear that camels have the best grins for an animal I’ve ever seen. They remind me of some completely humble, lovably awkward person out for a stroll who happens to be having the best day of their life. I know camels are supposedly stubborn and spit like there is no tomorrow, but all the ones I’ve seen are happy beyond belief. I love them!). There are swaying elephants with turbine clad drivers, wild pigs running in packs, stray dogs, cats, and oodles of curious monkeys strolling across rooftops.

My emotions this first week have been up and down, very high and very low, but sometimes it seems like I feel anything and everything all at once. We moved in with our host families last Friday afternoon. I live in the second story of a white apartment less than a block away from five different Hindu temples. My host family is a very modest middle class family of four. The father works selling furniture and the mom stays at home; however, has just recently finished her doctorate in Yoga studies so she is one of the leaders at a local Yoga center. We have two younger siblings, Akshay and Akshara. Akshay (male) is 16 and Aksara (girl) is 14. They are both amazingly bright children and understand and communicate in both English and Hindi almost fluently which is nice when the language barrier grows a little too much. Our Uncle-ji (father) speaks quite a lot of English but our mommi-ji (mother) only understands the important words and stumbles at other times. Shiveta (my roomie from Macalester college in Minnesota who is Punjabi but born and raised in the United States) and I share a room on the end of the apartment. It has a little balcony that over looks the dirt road outside our house. We can see the Moti Doongari fort and the tops of temples from the balcony as well as spy at least six cows at all times.

View from our balcony. Mooti Doongri fort is on the hill, the large white pointed building is the Ganesh Temple.

The small herd of cows when looking the other way off of the balcony

Beds in India are very hard, but that is probably a good thing for my back (which my herniated disk in my back hasn’t stopped me from doing anything yet! Hoorah for that!!) and Shiveta and I share a very wide bed that has separate blankets for each person. The bathroom is small and is much like the hostel in which there is no shower but does include a bucket and ladle for us to take “baths” with. We each have our own little closet that locks and a table for our random stuff. I think it’s wonderful.

The view out our window

The first day was overly awkward, especially, or at least I thought, for me. We lugged our stuff up a flight of curly white marble stairs and were greeted with a “traditional” Indian greeting where we had a bindi, or small red dot, painted on our forehead. We were given a small blessing and then a little piece of sesame cookie. I felt like Shiveta knew exactly what to do because of being raised in a Hindu family, although later I would come to find out that she felt as much, if not more awkward because she was not raised in a more traditional Indian family such as the our host family. In fact, she felt really stressed that she was being placed into a box of what an Indian girl should be, but not being seen as who she really is. We sat together with our family on our bed and looked at their family pictures. I brought out mine and they were really excited to see my family and asked lots of questions about the pictures. They had never heard of the Grand Canyon before and quite enjoyed looking at the pictures I brought with from my parent’s rafting trip down the Colorado River within the canyon. Apparently something got lost in the translation after I showed a couple pictures of Nathan and me together, but, sorry Nathan, I guess we are currently engaged. The word boyfriend doesn’t translate into Hindi very well.

Our host mom is best friends with another host mom from the MSID program so we got together later in the afternoon with two of the other girls, both our moms and siblings, and then walked to the Laksmi temple about 3 blocks from our house. The temple is only around 15 years old but is carved completely out of white stone and marble.

(L-R) Anna, Rita, their host mom, our host brother, host mom, and Anna and Rita's host brother in front of Lakshmi temple

We took darshan, where you walk in front of the statute of the God or Goddess (in this case Goddess) and stare into his or her eyes. Then we circumnavigated the area where the Goddess is kept, finally ending back near the front where we were offered Prasad. Prasad is a small serving of food that has been offered to the deity and therefore is blessed. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is the body and blood of Christ within the Christian faith, except that this Prasad is sweet and comes in all different forms depending on which deity one is performing darshan for. More about this later, but I swear I’m going to get fat solely off of eating the food blessed by the deities! So much more tasty than any Host wafer I’ve consumed!

Host mom and her best friend leaving the temple (Moti Doongri fort in background)

The rest of the weekend was a little stressful. I felt like it was really hard for me to get to know the family while Shiveta was having a really easy time. There were a few times when I felt like my host mom was completely ignoring me and only wanting to know about Shiveta which was making me sad and homesick. I got really sick on Saturday night and stayed up all night throwing up and having “loose motions” (as my host mom would say) which only added to me feeling really sad, homesick, and doubting my choice to ever come here. After telling my host mom that I wasn’t feeling very well, she started worrying about me nonstop. She prepared a special milk curd drink for me which was supposed to help my stomach settle down. It tasted terrible but really helped a lot. It was kind of like half curdled milky yogurt liquid with some peppery spice mixed in. It was sour and salty all at once but worked really well. My host mom also sent out our brother right away to buy plain bread and bananas so I could have something in my stomach and then feel better. She made special food for me for lunch and when it got really bad around dinner, wouldn’t leave my side until I fell asleep. In India, women comfort their children and other people by patting each others heads. This is definitely not just a normal light pat, it’s pretty hard and then they press down on your head until you fall asleep. “sleep child” WHACK WHACK “sleep child” WHACK press press WHACK. I thought she was nuts at the time but later Shiveta and my teachers confirmed what she was doing was normal. I totally did fall asleep though so I guess it works. She even offered to sleep on the floor next to me to make sure I was okay during the night. After that, she started to be a lot more open to me. I think she didn’t know how much affection to show me, where as she “knew” (by stereotyping Shiveta) how Shiveta would act. She gives me hugs and jokes with me now. I’ve really been enjoying them a lot more now.

School started on Tuesday morning (Monday was National Republic Day, kind of like our Fourth of July) and our host mom walked us to class after making us amazing breakfast. Oh yeah, the food is wonderful here. The only problem is there is so much of it. It’s almost nonstop. Our host mom has started to understand that we mean stop when we tell her we’ve had enough, but it’s hard sometimes (oh yeah, I have it SOOO hard here, getting stuffed with delicious food all the time). Breakfast always starts out with chai. Because of my aversion to caffeine, I can’t drink chai which is black tea with milk and sugar so she makes me warm dhood, or warm milk with sugar and cardamom. So amazingly good. You have no idea. The milk here is amazing, and coming from Wisconsin, I should know good milk! It’s rich and creamy and lot more sweet tasting, even without the sugar, than what we have back home, which is probably because it is so fresh. Our host mom goes to the government dairy down the street with her little milk pail every day to buy dairy products like milk, yogurt, and cheese.

Class is held on the top floor of a two story apartment building. Books and learning within India is sacred so you always remove your shoes before entering into a class room. The school has a lovely balcony, multiple small classrooms, a seating area, a small computer lab, and lots of color everywhere. We take Hindi classes in the morning broken up with a break for chai around 11. Our host mom makes us lunch everyday and packs it into a small little container with separate compartments called a Tiffin. Usually it contains a few pieces of roti (think Lefse only not quite as potato-y), some vegetable curry or dhal (lentils), and then fresh fruit. We eat out on the school’s balcony on top of little mats rolled out on the ground. In the afternoon we have country analysis classes and classes more focused on international development.

After school a few of the other girls in the group, Shiveta, and I go with our host mom to her Yoga class. I will have to leave describing Indian yoga to you for a different time, but it is quite an experience (think loud burping, chanting, yelling vowel sounds, and horse hair mats) as I am getting really tired and have to still wake up for class tomorrow. I now have a more constant source of internet so I will hopefully be updating my blog a little more regularly. Thanks again to all of you! I love you!

Much love!

View from the balcony at sunset

Massive, Welcome to India Post!

The internet is really really slow right now because I am stealing it from some random person in the next building. I have lots of pictures which I will upload as soon as I have a more reliable internet source. I'm really sorry the post isn't as cool now that I can't upload the pictures. Trust me, India is surreal and out of this world!!

Success today is taking a “shower” with only one bucket of water and a pink ladle. Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but there is something inertly exhilarating about being able to stand over a drain that also sort of drains the leaky toilet (which is oddly named Slim Commander according to the engraving on the lid) after preheating the water heater a half hour before use, fill my 2 gallon bucket and proceed to lather, rinse, and not need to repeat. Much happiness. We’re currently staying in the YWCA of Delhi and will be until Wednesday.

The "Shower"

Me after my first "Shower"

The plane ride was an uneventful, joint stiffening experience. Because of the positioning of the jet stream, the pilot decided to reroute our flight plan to fly over Scotland, into Russia, down over Iran, part of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally descend into Delhi. Although we all traveled in the lowest class of flight possible, each seat back included a personal touch-screen television which gave each passenger the option to fry their brain a little with some trashy television (or not so trashy, just not in any way stimulating which is probably a good thing for that long of a flight) or watch the flight play by play which was a small map charting our transcontinental journey and giving up to the minute stats on flight elevation, outside temperature, and a countdown for arrival. The map had numerous layers of zoom which would display the topography of the landscape we were flying over as well as the major cities and landforms. Prague, Tehran, and Kabul are three cities I had never thought I would be flying over in my life, but there is a first for everything.

I passed the long journey watching a season of “The Office”, playing Tetris with the little videogame controller built into the arm rest, and trying really hard to watch something quasi-educational so as to not rot (ie. Rick Steve’s travel videos about Venice, okay not that educational) but fell asleep in the middle of it. Besides the bad television watching and an occasional nap, I spent a good portion of my time eating the seemingly endless amount of food the airline shoved at us. Yes, you read that correctly, “seemingly endless”. They provided two full meals plus something called a snack pack, all totally vegetarian and also pretty darn delicious. Dinner included paneer, yogurt, those fried ball things you get from India buffets that are covered in sugary syrup goodness, a dessert bar, dinner roll, lentil bean salad thing, and bottled water. The snack pack looked more like a gift bag but included a vegetarian tortilla roll up sandwich, bottled water, cookies, chips, and fruit. Breakfast was this weird but totally delicious potato thing with paneer cheese and a rice mixture, fruit, yogurt, and a bar of some sorts.

As far as arrival goes, my bags arrived totally undamaged and customs in India is basically a joke. We proceeded through customs before picking up any of our baggage meaning there was no possible way they would check what was actually inside your checked luggage. The man at the desk spoke very minimal English yet managed to ask what I would be studying in India before he would stamp my passport. Apparently I answered correctly and could pass (much like that wizard thing in Holy Grail right? WHAT is your name? WHAT is your favorite color….)

Our next step was to drag our mountains of luggage through the rest of the terminal and enter out into a massive crowd of shouting people all waving signs about various chartered tours, taxis, hotels, and who they are supposed to be meeting. Luckily for us, the man who was supposed to pick us up was right near the door so we didn’t have to search very long. The group of students I’m with all sort of sat in the same areas on the plane so we were able to get to know each other a little better. We also had some time while waiting for our plane in Chicago to do the whole meet and greet thing (it was quite obvious who was on the trip. When Ben and I first found our boarding gate, I was the only blonde person in the entire area. It was probably a hint about what would be to come, AKA some awkwardness). The other students were nice and we starting forming those silly but necessary bonds.

After boarding a bus with the giant label TOURIST on each side that made us all feel even more ostracized, we traveled through Delhi, arriving at the YWCA around 1:00 am Indian time. The YWCA is a pretty good sized hostel that looks kind of like a mental institution, yet is clean and feels safe. Each room has a double bed like thing that shares the cover blanket but each side of the bed has its own set of sheets tucked into the space in the middle of the bed. The room also has a bathroom with a bucket “shower” a little balcony, and a small television. In India, all the electric outlets are controlled by a switch so if one wants to use something plugged into the outlet, he or she has to turn on the switch and then turn it off after use which apparently saves energy.

The Hostel includes a giant breakfast every morning. After attempting to sleep for a few hours, getting woken up from the little sleep we did get by loud chanting/singing starting at 3 am and onwards, my room mate and I gave up and headed downstairs for food. We had a very liquidy porridge/oatmeal like thing (okay that sounds pretty disgusting but it was quite delicious), a very spicy potato dish with a curry like sauce, a scrambled egg that was very very thin and almost like an omelet without the filling, fried roti, plantains, bread, and chai. Sadly I feel like I’m missing out on an important part of India with my lack of ability to drink the chai, but hopefully someone somewhere will have some herbal teas.

After breakfast we had a couple hours to spare before our classes started so a group of us decided to walk down the street to visit the nearby Sikh temple. Once we got closer, we realized the chanting that we heard all night long was coming from inside the massive temple grounds and being pumped into the Delhi air via a large PA system. Sikh is a type of very humanitarian and welcoming religion. Their temples are open to the public and many temples serve a communal, free meal to whoever wants to partake every single day. Once inside the gate, I experienced my first real sense that we were foreigners and therefore an oddity. A group of about 20 people were congregated on the side of the road leading to the main temple, and every single one of them stopped talking and just stared at us as we tried to be culturally sensitive and understand and follow the customs going on around us without any of us really knowing what to do. It was weird, but not completely uncomfortable, to be stared at by so many people. Somehow one of the guys in the group who speaks pretty fluent Hindi found the foreign visitor office. They told us to take off our shoes and cover our heads (they provided some orange/saffron colored bandanas for those of us without headscarves) and then proceed. The temple and grounds are completely made out of white marble. We washed our feat at a little station and then walked up the cold white marble stairs to see a massive temple, reflecting pool, and hundreds of people. It was amazingly beautiful. The chanting was soothing, the reverence for which all the people around us held for the temple, the stairs, the water, everything really, was inspiring, and sights, smells, sounds were almost overwhelming. It was a really wonderful way to start off the day.

The rest of the morning was spent in orientation. After lunch at the hostel, we all loaded up into jeeps for our first Indian driving experience. I will never quite be the same after that. All traffic laws within India are basically suggestions. We always joke about the damn FIBs or Illinois drivers back in Wisconsin but they would be completely lost in all the people and eventually run down and then run over because they were going too slowly. There are no lane lines and cars weave everywhere on both sides of the street (Indian drive on the left hand side). It is common for three cars to be crammed into the space of two American lanes plus a small auto rickshaw and a motor cycle while all going about 40 miles per hour. Everyone is always, ALWAYS blowing their horn. Instead of an insult, it is a way of letting people know that they are coming up on one of their sides. Although it looked like a complete mess, the traffic doesn’t really jam up or get stuck. If there isn’t a way through, the drivers are creative and make their own path. Kind of a frightening experience. Our leaders told us that the rules of who has the right of way on the road are as follows: whoever is larger and faster has the right of way, whoever has the least to lose has the right away (so a Mercedes should yield to a rickshaw simply because they don’t want to damage their car), but cows have the right of way over all. India is an odd place…..

Before dinner, a small group of girls and I walked down to the market. Although we didn’t buy anything, it was really fun to look around at everything and get lost in the massive crowds. A group of us fought the jetlag and stayed awake for the presidential inauguration which we watched on BBC. It was fun experience to witness and brings hope to us all. I will be traveling again and without Internet for a few days as we make the trip over to Jaipur. I move in with my host family on the 23rd of January and actual classes start the Monday after that.

I apologize this is so long but thank you for weeding through my garble of words. I’m finishing writing this around 6 am Indian time (I still haven’t quite gotten over the time difference but was able to sleep for a good 5 hours tonight) so another apology for the eloquence I am currently lacking. I miss you all so much and think about you daily. I really appreciate all the little emails, facebook messages, and comments you’ve been leaving me, it really makes things easier and me oh so happy! Yes yes!

Much love to you all!

One Last American Road Trip

Happy happy belated 2009 to everyone! I trust the frigid, bone chilling, freeze your face Wisconsin weather currently outside my window is treating you all just as kindly. It's less than five days before the oh so wondrous India adventure begins and the current 75 degree weather of Jaipur never sounded so good. Even as I write this, I'm still in complete disbelief that I'm leaving the continent, my goodness even the hemisphere, on Sunday (although that may just be because a place that has 75 degree weather and sun every day in January sounds too good to be true!).

I welcomed in the New Year down in Milwaukee with the lovely boyfriend Nathan and other friends at the most eclectic, yet fully Wisconsin, concert I have ever been to. The program included a polka band comprised of 80 year old men in short pants and flowered shirts who played the "Chicken Dance" (which I have recently learned is not really as large of a phenomena around the rest of the country as those in Wisconsin make it out to be) and other sing-a-long masterpieces such as "Roll Out the Barrel" and the literary magnum opus of "She's Too Fat For Me", a lady who synchronize danced with her dog in a tutu, an Elvis impersonator, and, of course, the headline band Cake. All in all, it was a wonderful night where I was surrounded with people I love and people I don't really love but couldn't help but smile at as they waved their mock plastic beersteins and ate giant pretzels.

After recovering from being smacked in the face with a little too much only-in-Wisconsin culture, Nathan, Tom, and I embarked on our cross country journey ending in Austin, Texas. We did the drive in under 20 hours of straight, energy drink filled power driving and opened the car doors to 70 degree weather and beautiful blue skies.

Nathan and Tom

Nathan and I

Much like Wisconsin, Austin has a very distinct culture that is different from anything I've seen. It stands as a liberal oasis in the red sea of Texas and has a large, thriving music scene which includes a lot of alternative, indie, and pop rock. We soaked up the sunlight, toured the University of Texas campus, ate delicious food at outdoor cafes, enjoyed all the wonderful retro looking signs, buildings, and trailers (including a cupcake stand with AMAZING carrot cake cupcakes), went kayaking, and tested out guitar after guitar after guitar at all the vintage music shops and pawn stores.

One of the many wonderful music stores

We purchased used CDs and enjoyed outdoor picnics in short sleeves.

Nathan and I having a picnic in the park

Me in front of a Koi pond at the botanical gardens

And of course took in lots of great musical performances while dreaming of one day playing for that many people.

Texas sunset on our drive back to Wisconsin

The subletters have moved into my room in the Pink House and the last of my furniture has made its way down two flights of spiral stairs to the basement. I've said a lot of very tearful goodbyes and been given many hugs and encouragement. My life right now in Stevens Point is full of anticipation, sadness, joy, loneliness, and the gigantic feat of trying to fit my entire life into one bag of luggage. Thank you so much to all of those who've given me extra moral support this last week (and the rest of my life, my goodness!). I love you all dearly. Yes yes!