Making fools of ourselves

I'm sorry the font sizes randomly change back and forth and to different sizes. Blogger is being really weird and I can't figure out what's going on.

Today, a blonde haired blue eyed American enlisted the help of an elephant headed god by feeding him small balls of sugar and butter to help her boyfriend with his data structures exam: globalization at its best. Although it seems as though my early morning feeding session with Ganesha did little to improve the outcome of Nathan’s test, the experience was actually really quite breath taking, albeit very strange from a western perspective. Our local Ganesha is awoken from his slumber around 6:45 am everyday. His sleeping blanket is removed; he is bathed, fed, offered flowers, and then dressed in his finest before being presentable for the thousands of people who daily flock to the temple 200 feet outside of my doorstep. I left my house around 6:50 and waited with 30 or so other worshipers for the curtain stopping our prying eyes from seeing the bathing Ganesha to be removed. The small crowd continued to grow as the temple priests brought out a hat and cape for Ganesha’s mount the rat (all Hindu deities have an animal “mount” or “vehicle” which they ride around on), and they pushed forward with their flowers and balls of sugar, Ganesha’s favorite treat, waving madly above their heads. The crowd was completely silent when the priest started pulling away the curtain. As the glistening red elephant god slowly came into view, everyone around me erupted into various songs of praise in numerous different keys. Some people fell to the ground, others raised their hands, some closed their eyes while others stared awe-inspired into their beloved God’s own eyes. I waited my turn to give my little bag of Laddhu to the priest who broke off a small portion of one of them, showed Ganesha my offering, symbolically fed him, and then returned them back to me turning my Laddhu into holy Prasad. I looked one last time into his oversized eyes before walking back through the metal detectors found at the doors of the temple in order to frantically put my shoes back on before losing them in the crowd. All in all, the experience was enjoyable, the fatty balls of sugar were surprisingly delicious, and I gained additional respect from my host parents who loved the idea I went to temple to pray for Nathan (“good wife be you”… ugh).

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, school has been growing increasingly more hectic as we near the end of our classroom session. We have multiple reports and tests on top of daily Hindi lessons and surprising culture shocks outside of school that seem to never cease. So yes, please accept my apologies for the lack of good posts with pictures lately. Lots and lots to recap so we shall jump right in, yes? Yes!

Last week Friday, our class took one of its weekly adventures to experience some of the wonders of Jaipur. This trip landed us in a large governmental sponsored artist village that could probably be classified as a slum. A vast majority of the people in this neighborhood have Indian passports to allow for their international musical endeavors; however, within India they are seen as nothing more than petty street musicians who can barely survive through begging and through following people with large parade like escapades until they pay out of embarrassment. It’s kind of a strange dichotomy as they are prized around the world for their musical abilities that capture what is “truly Indian” for Westerners but within India their music is seen as merely an annoyance. Both perspective aside, the neighborhood was colorful, packed with cheerful children all begging to be spoken to, and basically what I had stereotyped India to be.

Upon arrival, we were greeted with at least 70 laughing/singing/running/smiling/yelling/happy children as well as an entire Indian marching band and a man in a giant horse shaped suit.

Yes, it was a little awkward at first as I felt like we were being made fun of. Yet as they kept encouraging us to dance around and throw our hands in the air I came to realize that even if they were, it was still pretty fun to make fools of ourselves and really, when is the next time I will be able to dance to a private marching band surrounded by children in India? Probably not for a while.

Our class was divided into little groups and taken to various families who practiced specific arts to learn a little about their trade. We got to don the wonderful horse suit and jump around to tabla music.

We learned the art of puppets and how to do a typical Rajasthani dance.

And to try our best at sewing on the intricate handmade blankets that are sold around the various markets.

The children were gorgeous and overly excited to talk with us which made me really happy.

After school, another girl from my class, Alex, and I headed off to the magical hippy city of Pushkar. Because of our field trip, class ended a little later than normal, but we easily caught a rickshaw that brought us to the local bus station. This being our first bus experience, we were happy, or so we thought at the time, to be greeted by a man selling bus tickets to that went straight to Ajmer, the large city outside of Pushkar from which we could take a connecting city bus over the small mountain rage into Pushkar. Our happiness turned into a tiny bit of worrying as we sat on the bus and watched two hours tick by past the time the bus was supposed to depart, but being India, we assumed it would all work out. The bus pulled out of the station around 9:00pm and we settled in for the ride. After a two and a half hour ride, our worrying increased a little more as we were informed that the bus we were traveling on was not a governmental bus and therefore couldn’t actually enter Ajmer and would be dropping us off just outside of the city. Puskkar is only 10 km away from Ajmer and we thought we could easily pay for a rickshaw to drive us to the bus station or even all the way into town. As I hopped down the bus stairs, we were greeted with a completely dark night (it was around 11:45-midnightish), a small food stand full of rowdy truckers, and one rickshaw driver. I tried to keep calm as the realization that we were in the middle of nowhere with a large group of men in the middle of the night completely by ourselves started to sink in. I made sure I exaggerated my Hindi skills and we acted as confidently as possible as we were informed that the next bus for Pushkar was leaving 7:30am the following day and that rickshaws were not allowed to travel through the mountain pass. To cut a long and uncomfortable story short, we were badly ripped off by the rickshaw driver who mega-overcharged us to drive us to his cockroach infested friend’s guesthouse where they charged us triple the price they should have, tried to repeatedly flirt with us in very over the top manners, laugh at us, and then ask for a kiss before we slammed our hotel door in their face. Definitely not a night I had planned, but nothing too terrible happened. Although we felt that we were completely ripped off, it translated to only around $10 in American currency so we kept reminding ourselves of that fact and woke up to get on the earliest bus out of that messed up city.

In contrast to the stressful night in Ajmer, Pushkar is gorgeous, completely relaxing, and really a magical city. The government bus from Ajmer to Pushkar wound through terrifyingly high hill tops and mist filled valleys as we slowly worked our way through the small mountain range that separates the more vegetation filled eastern half of Rajasthan from the arid desert land of the west.


After descending into the small desert town, we walked it’s sleepy streets to the Pink Floyd hotel which our trusty Lonely Planet Guide book (which is also a complete “look at me I’m a stupid tourist” marker) informed us had breathtaking rooftop views of the city and delicious food for the homesick traveler. We gorged ourselves on banana pancakes and mango lassies while watching the sun rise above the mountains in complete peace and happiness.

Pushkar is known for two things: its abundance of over 400 temples including the only Brahma temple in the world, and its crazy appeal to the western dreadlocked hippie seeking enlightenment. For some strange reason, this small town has one of the highest concentrations of western tourists in Rajasthan, and all of them are clad in indo-hippie clothing, totting their corduroy saddle bags and nalgene bottles decorated with Bob Marley and pot leaf stickers. Because of being surrounded with a lot of ignorant tourists, we were not stared at, not haggled, not followed or pointed at, and in fact, because we were studying in India and could speak Hindi, we were really respected by the locals and treated even better. For the treatment alone, I would love to spend longer in the area. The shops are filled with more western influenced clothing and the restaurants carry food like hummus and avocadoes. It felt amazing to put my guard down and just relax for a few days.

After our breakfast at the Pink Floyd Hotel (really, the name alone portrays how over the top hippie influenced this little town is), we set up arrangements for our over night camel safari and then did some shopping before embarking into the desert. I love camels. I completely and probably irrationally love camels. I was unaware of this immense passion towards them before I arrived in India; however, after daily watching them plod down my street with their ridiculous grins, I have completely fallen for them. The camel safari is another one of those lifetime moments I will cherish for many years to come. We were first driven by jeep to a small camel farm on the outskirts of the town to be introduced to our camels and camel drivers.

Sedar, on the left, is my camel, Krishna is on the right

Sedar, my camel, is a young, ornery, opinionated, spunky camel who makes a lot of noise and definitely informs you when you aren’t making him happy. Although he does grin sometimes, and when he does, it’s completely awesome and made me overly happy.

Camel love

Krishna

Sedar

The desert of Rajasthan isn’t really the rolling sand dunes seen in Disney’s Aladdin, yet there are a few and lots of little hills and valleys worn away by intense monsoon rains and then long periods of drought. The camel drivers sat behind us making jokes and enjoying my ability to communicate back with them.

After trekking through the desert for 6 hours – basically a 6 hour private Hindi lesson, we joined with a vacationing Korean family of four and discovered that our humble camel drivers who have never set foot outside of Rajasthan, speak very good Korean (as well as French, German, Japanese, English, and a smattering of Indian dialects) simply because of conducting safaris. We rode a little further before stopping on a hill top to watch the sunset and settle down for a night of camping under the stars.
The camel drivers cooked up dahl (a lentil dish), a mixed vegetable curry mash, rice, and traditional Rajasthani roti over the camp fire. Instead of the normal flat roti I have grown accustomed to eating every day, these were in the shape of a ball. To cook, they were left in a pile of ashes buried below the desert sand to become crunchy on the outside while remaining delicious and soft inside.
We ate our food sitting on top of thick blankets next to the fire while listening to the playful joking of the camel drivers and soft tinkling of the bells on the camels’ feet. The piercing stars were breathtaking and I battled with my camel riding tired self as long as I could in order to see them for just a little long.
We were greeted with hot chai and biscuits in the morning and then headed on our way back through the desert in to Pushkar.

I thought this was too ridiculous not to post... check out the pom pom plus the scarf!

I do believe I love camels even more now. It was an amazing experience.

The rest of our time in Pushkar was spent temple hopping, shopping, eating, and doing a short lesson with Tibetan monks on meditation. Before leaving on Monday morning (Monday was a holiday here so no school for us!) Alex and I woke up early to climb up to a hilltop temple.

Wanting to be as authentic as possible, we removed our shoes and picked our way barefoot up the side of the hill for an hour before reaching the top. The views were beyond description.


Large panoramas of desert, city, and mountain range lay out before us and we sat for a good hour resting and taking it all in. Unlike the trip to Pushkar, we had learned our lesson and took government buses back home which were surprisingly fast and cheap. It was an utterly wonderful weekend. Completely wonderful and exactly the break I needed from the hectic life of Jaipur

Our family attended two additional weddings this week but I’m going to be doing another blog post to describe those sometime soon as we’re heading off to see a bollywood in five minutes or so. Thanks so much for your patience with my posts and all the lovely lovely comments. They make really happy! You really have no idea how much it means to me to hear from you all. I hope your weeks have been wonderful and I miss you dearly!

Much love!!

Okay one sari photo because I want to be vain….