Week 17, Pune

Our last stop in India before flying back to the UK was Pune. It was nice to visit ‘home’ one more time. We stayed with Susan and Caroline in our flat, so my mom got to see where I lived for the past 4 months. Then on Saturday we went to Shelter Associates. They got us a Maharashtrian thali for lunch from my favorite all you can eat thali restaurant. Here are Sandhya and Shoba explaining all the food to my mom. We spent the afternoon in the office because I had some work to finish, and my mom just caught up on all her emails and online games.


On Sunday morning we went on a day trip with Caroline to a village near Pune. The landscape was beautiful and I think my mom was happy to see a bit more of rural India, because most of what we saw was big cities. We did some shopping in Pune that afternoon and in the evening we completed the trip with a bollywood movie, Aladdin. Then on Monday morning we packed up and took a taxi to Mumbai. My mom flew out in the evening, and I flew the next morning.


Bye India!

Week 17, Varanasi the River Ganges

I think Varanasi was the most Indian place we went to on our trip. Meredith, a girl I met in Belize in May, said that Varanasi was her favorite place in India and that it was “raw” India. I totally agree with her about the raw India comment. My favorite part of being in Varanasi was the two boat trips we went on, on the river Ganges. First we went on a boat trip at dawn. My mom and I each put two candles on the river Ganges. Here they are floating down river with the ghats (and our hotel) in the background.


A boat trip is the best way to see all the ghats along the river, and the see the raw India Meredith was talking about. Ghats are just steps leading down to the river and some have special purposes. The people in Varanasi use the river for everything: they do laundry, they hold pujas or prayer rituals, they cremate bodies at funerals, and they bathe. Varanasi and the river Ganges are holy places for Hindus, so they are supposed to take a ritual bath in the river every morning. Here is a photo I took at one of the many bathing ghats on our sunrise boat tour.


That same evening we went on a second boat tour just after sundown. First we went to the second burning ghat, Harishchandra Ghat, where we saw a funeral in progress. As we arrived they lifted a body onto a funeral pyre, big pile of wood, and performed a ritual that involved pouring oils and flowers on the body. They then stacked more logs on top and said more prayers. The whole ritual was performed by the oldest son the man who died; the son has to shave his head and wear white for 13 days after the funeral. When they were finished, a second group of people lit a pile of logs to the left, which has obviously been prepared before we arrived. It quickly grew into a large fire. We were told it would burn for another three to four hours before the last of the ashes were cooled by pouring Ganges water over them and then thrown in the river. We saw this final part of the funeral later in the evening when we went to the main burning ghat, Manikarnika Ghat. At the second burning ghat there were only the two funerals going on that I described, but at the main burning ghat there were at least 12 going on at one time and there was a queue of bodies waiting to be cremated next.

Between the two burning ghats we stopped for a while at the main ghat, Dashaswamedh Ghat, where they were performing the evening puja. A number of Brahmin priests were doing a ritual with some fire, and there were bells ringing and prayer music playing in the background. The puja itself got a bit repetitive after a few minutes, but it was impressive because of the number of people who came to watch. The river was full of boats, and the ghats above the river were packed with people.


When we got back to our hotel another typically Indian thing happened: there was a cow sleeping outside the entrance to our room. Before my mom came to visit me in India she asked me if there were cows everywhere, and there are, just like you would expect.


We only spent two nights in Varanasi and the only part of Varanasi we really saw was the river Ganges; we also went on two day trips with guides from the hotel to Sarnath and Chunnar Fort. Sarnath is where the Buddha gave his first lecture, and at
Chunnar Fort we got an amazing view over the river Ganges.

Week 17, Delhi

After a nice day in Agra and visiting the Taj Mahal, we took an evening train from Agra to Delhi. It was supposed to be 3.5 hours, but ended up being more like 5 because we left late and then got more delayed on the way. Euan was feeling really sick and my mom and I were kept busy watching the small cockroaches crawl around on the floor and into/out of the seat in front us.

Since our hotel reservation in Agra did not work out, I decided to call ahead to the hotel in Delhi to make sure that was all set. It turned out that that reservation didn’t get made properly either, so before we left Agra my mom went on hotels.com and booked us a really fancy hotel with a western price to match. It was nice though, because Euan was able to spend his last day in India in bed in a nice hotel; I think he was very thankful for that.

So my mom and I did all the touristy things in Delhi. First we visited New Delhi: Connaught Place, India Gate, Qutb Minar, Lotus Temple, Hayuman’s Tomb. After Amber Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, the historical sites in Delhi were not that impressive. I think my favorite was the Lotus Temple. It’s the only really nice piece of modern architecture I saw in India. It was built in the 1980s and is one of seven Bahá'í Houses of Worship. Even though it belongs to the Bahá'í Faith, it is open to anyone of any religion for worship. It is really peaceful inside.


On our last day we went to Old Delhi to see the Red Fort. By this point a lot of the Mugal architecture was looking the same with the red stone carvings and the white marble with colorful inlays, but it’s still impressive to see these buildings that are almost 500 years old. They were built around the time of Henry VIII when a lot of Cambridge was being built, and before Bath or anything in the USA.



The funny thing about our time in Delhi is that we didn’t eat any Indian food. My mom was getting a little sick of it by this point, and there wasn’t anything near our hotel so I couldn’t drag her out to a restaurant. We ate mostly at the hotel, but also at McDonalds and the Hard Rock Café.

Week 16, Agra the Taj Mahal

After Jaipur we hired a car and driver to take us to Agra via Fatehpur Sikri. Susan, who was another volunteer at Shelter Associates, recommended we go the Fatehpur Sikri. It was amazing. It was constructed in 1570 and then they only lived there for about 15 years and then abandoned the place. I don’t really know how it’s been kept so well maintained, but it’s just like a ghost town now. We spent a few hours walking around (including a big mosque, Jami Masjid, that is still in use right next door). Many of the buildings had really detailed carvings all over.



Then we drove to Agra. We stayed at the Taj Plaza hotel, which is really close to the east gate of the Taj Mahal. They messed up our reservation, so we ended up in the best (most expensive) room in the hotel with a view of the Taj Mahal from both bedrooms and the toilet! So we saw it at sundown the night we arrived, and then we got up a dawn to visit it the next morning.



The Taj Mahal is hard to describe. I was expecting it to be one of those places that you’ve seen in photos and on TV so many times that you feel like you’ve been there already. But it really wasn’t. It is even more beautiful than I could have imagined. The marble inlay work is so detailed, and it’s all over the place. We took the required photos from the end of the water as you enter the complex, and then walked all around to get a closer look. We spent a couple hours there, but I could have sat there and stared at it all day. It’s so white and shiny you just don’t want to take your eyes off it.

Later that afternoon Euan was not feeling well, so he went back to the hotel to rest. My mom and I tried to go to Agra Fort, but our rickshaw driver talked us out of it saying it was quite expensive and really small. We just took a picture outside and instead we went to see some more handicrafts. In Jaipur we saw textiles being block printed and embroidered by hand, in Varanasi we saw silk being woven by hand, and here in Agra we saw people inlaying marble by hand. It’s really neat to see these things being done, but on the other hand it’s sad because they are showing you exactly what we would call a sweat-shop in the West. They work sitting hunched over on the floor with very little light, 7 days a week, and get paid next to nothing. And we benefit from this by being able to buy cheap stuff. It makes you not want to buy anything because then you are supporting it, but if you don’t buy anything then these people become unemployed and have no money at all. So we bought a little bit of stuff.

Week 16, Jaipur the Pink City

We arrived in Jaipur at 6am on 20 October. I slept pretty well on the overnight train, but I was still tired getting up so early in the morning. We checked into the hotel (the Umaid Mahal Hotel) and since our room was ready we ended up sleeping till noon.

The highlight of our time in Jaipur was our trip to Amber Fort. It was built up on a hill near Jaipur in the 1590s, and the view is beautiful. Some of the surrounding hills have a wall along the crest, and it looks a little like the Great Wall of China, which is funny. It’s really hard to describe these places. You’ll have to go there too see for yourself ;-).



There are lots of other things to see in Jaipur too. Jaipur is known as the pink city because the buildings in the walled city are painted pink. We went to the Jantar Mantar; it’s an astronomical observatory built around 1730 with 18 huge stone instruments. It was fun to figure out what they all measured, and one looked very similar to Stonehenge.


We also went to the Hawa Mahal, which was built so that women could watch what was going on in the street from behind screens without being seen.


A couple of times we let the rickshaw drivers talk us into going to places that we hadn’t heard of before. One of the places we went was called the monkey temple. We walked up a big hill to the temple and when we got to the top there were monkeys all over the place. Some Indian people fed them bags of food; we had some peanuts to feed them too. My mom went first and they took the nuts out of her hand very gently. I’m not sure how I feel about feeding wild animals, but I did it in the end and it was really cute.


While we were in Jaipur we also felt my second earthquake this year. The first was when I was in Belize in May; we felt a 7.1 earthquake in Honduras. Then in the early morning on 23 October we felt a 6.2 earthquake in Afghanistan.

Week 15, Udaipur the Lake City

I’m sitting in Mumbai after my 2.5 week journey through India, finally catching up on my blog entries. I met my mom at the Mumbai airport on 15 October as planned. She had a 16 hour flight from Atlanta to Mumbai, but she wasn’t too tired. On the 16th we flew to Udaipur.

The highlight of our stay in Udaipur was Diwali on the 17th. Diwali is the big Hindu festival, like Christmas for the Christians. The whole town was decorated with lights, and streamers, and everyone lit little oil lamps outside their homes and shops. The main square outside the Jagdish Temple was especially decorated and there we load of fireworks all night long.


I hadn’t been feeling well since my last day in the office, so I spent most of Diwali in bed at the hotel, the Mahendra Prakash Hotel. The hotel was nice and had a pool. Our room was at the far right on the first floor. The hotel also had 3 turtles that crawled around in the grass by the pool.


Then after Diwali Euan joined us, and we had one more day in Udaipur. Udaipur is known as the lake city. It’s a really beautiful little town on the shore of a big lake. There is a big palace (the City Palace) on a little hill overlooking the town, and two palaces built on islands in the lake. On our last day we went on a boat cruise on the lake. One of the island palaces (Jag Niwas) is a hotel that only guests can go to, but the cruise stopped on at the other palace (Jag Mandir). Here is a view of the City Palace from Jag Mandir.


On the 19th we took an overnight train to Jaipur. This time we took the 2AC class, which is one better than the 3AC we took back from Goa. Here Euan and I are on our top bunks.

Week 15, India Trip

Yesterday was my last day of work at Shelter Associates, and today I leave on my big India trip. I’m took a taxi to the Mumbai airport to meet my mom tonight at 9:30. Here’s our itinerary for the next two weeks:

• We’re now spending the first night at an airport hotel in Mumbai. On 16 October, we fly to Udaipur, where we spend three nights; Euan is joining us there on the 18th.
  
• On the 19th we take an overnight train to Jaipur, where we will spend 3 more nights.
  
• On the 23rd we’re hiring a driver to take us to Agra via Fatehpur Sikri and we’ll spend only one night in Agra right next to the Taj Mahal.
  
• Then it’s an evening train to Delhi on the 24th. Euan will leave us in Delhi on the 26th,
  
• and then my mom and I take an overnight train to Varanasi on the 27th. We will spend two nights there,
  
• then fly to Pune on the 30th, where we’ll spend 3 nights.
  
• Our last night, on 2 Nov, we’ll spend in Mumbai again. My mom flies out at about 1:00 on 3 Nov and I fly out at 11:00.
  

Since I’ve been working with Google Earth so much, I decided to map it all out.



I’ll try to post updates from each stop along the way; I think we have internet in all our hotels along the way.

Week 15, India is Colorful

When it’s not dirty, India is sooooo colorful, especially all the clothes that women wear. They dress head to toe in every color imaginable. When I was in Sangli shopping for a sari, we went into a material shop where they had petticoats is all colors to match any sari you can find. They also had an even bigger variety of materials for making the blouse for the sari. Here is the wall full of petticoats.


This is in our favorite material shop, called Lunkad Fabrics. We usually go upstairs where they sell sheets, blankets, pillow cases and dress material (for Punjabi suits that you get tailor made). Downstairs they just have loads of material in all different colors that you buy to get blouses and petticoats made for saris, or plain bottoms for the suits.


Before we came to India, Katie, the girl who went on the EWB placement last year, told us about ‘Bangle Alley’. It’s a little side street where all they sell are bangles in every color you can imagine. There are at least 15 little shops all selling the same thing. (It is a common occurrence in India to get all the shops selling a certain item in the same location: all the bangle shops together on one street, all the dress material shops together on one street, all the paper shops together on one street, etc.) I have a favorite bangle shop where they sell plane bangles for 20/- a dozen (that’s about 25p or $0.40). They also sell sparkly ones for 30/- a dozen and fancier ones with gold for about 80/- a dozen. Bangles are traditionally made of glass, but they also come in plastic and metal.

Week 15, Sweets

I’m not a big fan of sweet things and dessert back home, but one of the fun things about India is that all the food is different. We have a favorite sweet shop on MG Road here in Pune that we sometimes stop at on the way home form work. Here are Jenny and Susan buying our usual selection of chocolate and mango barfi, and kaju katri.


My favorite desert is gulab jamun (one of the things we learned to make at Pratima’s house the other weekend). The first time I had it was in my first week here, and I had no idea what it was. They are little fried dough balls made mostly out of milk powder that are soaked in a sugar water syrup… YUM! Here they are before and after cooking.


At home I don’t drink coffee at all, I only drink tea. I love the tea with milk that they drink in England, but I also like herbal tea, which they do better in the US. Here they drink another variety of tea called Chai. (I drink chai tea at the coffee shop formerly known as Beaners in Michigan, but it’s not quite the same.) Here they boil a kind of black tea in milk, and add spices like ginger, cardamom and cinnamon; it’s really good. We get it in the office in the morning and the afternoon, and they always offer it to you whenever you visit someone’s house or other offices. A few times I’ve been given coffee instead, and you have to drink it to be polite; it turns out to be more of a chai-coffee, which isn’t too bad. I could get used to drinking it.

And just to make it seem like we’re not eating only junk food, I decided to include sithaphal (a funny fruit). It looks a little like and artichoke on the outside and is quite gooy inside; it’s made of lots of little cells, each of which contains a black seed.

Week 14, India is Dirty!

One of the things I really don’t like about India is that everything is dirty and smells bad! People are generally clean and take pride in personal hygiene, but they don’t seem to feel the same about the places where they live and work, and they definitely don’t keep spaces outside clean at all. The interior and exterior of buildings are not maintained and look dirty and run down; this is in the Municipal Corporation in Sangli, and some houses in Mumbai.


It’s not uncommon to see piles of trash at the side of the road. There are occasionally skips/ dumpsters, but they are always overflowing, they smell from a long distance away, and they usually have some stray animal (pigs, dogs, cats, birds, etc) eating out of it. I think the only rubbish bin I’ve seen is one shaped like a penguin at a temple in Solapur. I think his stomach says something like ‘use me’, which we did because we had a small bag of trash that we had been carrying around not wanting to throw it in the street like everyone else does.


The most common smell in India is urine. I think one of the saddest things I experienced was at Ellora and Ajanta Caves, where many of the caves smelled like they were used as toilets; it’s really a shame since there were toilets available at both sites.

The fact that India is so dirty is ironic because everyone has a cleaner. Included in our rent is a cleaner, who is supposed to come in every day and clean the hall, the toilet and the bathroom. I think she sometimes comes in and sweeps the hall, she sometimes soaks the floor of the bathroom, but I don’t think she has ever cleaned the shower. I get the impression that having a cleaner is more of a status symbol than something functional.

We also have a cleaner at work, who smells terrible! She smells like a combination of body odor and the chemicals she uses to clean. She actually comes every day though. She starts by sweeping the whole office. Then she gets a bucket of water with some really bad smelling chemical in it and wipes the whole floor with a dirty rag; I think she just pushes the dirt around with that rag because the floor is no cleaner after she is finished. Then she soaks the floor of the toilet. I don’t understand what they think soaking the floor will accomplish, but both cleaners I’ve met do it. Everyone’s feet are dirty from walking around barefoot, so as soon as we go into the toilet the wet floor becomes a muddy floor. Finally, she does the dishes. I’ve started washing my own tiffin after lunch because when she does it there are always bits of food left and I have to do it again anyway.

I can’t wait to go back home, where the cleaning is done only once a week but it’s done thoroughly, there are trash cans in public places that people use, and where toilets are generally the only acceptable place to urinate. All these things we take for granted.

Week 14, A Trip to Sangli

I spent the last two days in Sangli, which is a small town 3.5 hours south of Pune where Shelter Associates is working on a big project at the moment. Shelter has been working in the slums of Sangli for a long time now, and one of the biggest problems in slums is that people don’t have toilets. One of their first projects there was a community toilet project in Sangalwadi in 2002. Sangalwadi is a slum with about 256 people in 55 houses, and they built a toilet block with facilities for men and women, with living quarters for the caretaker (and family) in between. We only saw the women’s side, which has 4 communal toilets and 4 private toilets.


Next we visited Jatkar Samaj, where Shelter Associates did an individual toilet project in 2006-7. This is the ideal situation, where every house has its own toilet, but it’s too expensive to implement in all slums. Anyway, with Friends of Shelter Associates (http://www. friendsofsa.org/) funding, they built just over 100 toilets for 137 houses in Jatkar Samaj.


Finally, we visited Kolhapur Chawl, where Shelter recently (2008) did another community toilet and water tank project for 135 families. They also built a bio-gas tank next to the toilets that produces enough gas for a hand-full of houses, but only one is connected at the moment. In this toilet block the caretaker (and family) lives in a room above the toilets, so we got a birds-eye view over the slum. You can really see the conditions in which people are living here; the roofs are made of broken tiles, tarpaulin and corrugated sheets; those that have electricity probably steal it from the power line overhead; many houses got running water from the community toilet project, but none have access to a gas line so they cook using wood or coal.


Surprisingly the streets and houses in the slums are clean compared to the rest of India (post about that to come next time). The people don’t have money for basics like proper roofs, toilets, water or electricity, but they still take pride in the place they live. They smile at us when we come to visit, invite us in and offer us tea. We never have time to stay, but even if we did I would feel bad drinking their tea in case they can’t afford to buy more.

This isn’t the India most people see when they come here for vacation or travelling. I knew I was coming to India to work on slums, but you can’t really prepare yourself for seeing it first hand when you come from a place where everyone has so much. Access to a toilet with running water isn’t even an issue you think about back home. You can’t really describe it properly in a blog post, how people live with so little.

Week 14, Rickshaws

Our primary mode of transport here is the auto-rickshaw. As opposed to the old fashioned cycle-rickshaws, which I hear are still more common in the north of India, these ones are more like little three-wheeled motor cycles. The driver sits in the front and controls the vehicle with the handle bars (no steering wheel or pedals), and there’s room for 3 people squeezed in the back. We take one to work every day, and this is the one we hired for the day to go to Ellora.

In some of the larger cities, like Mumbai and Delhi, rickshaws are not allowed in the downtown area so you take a taxi. To be honest they are not that different from rickshaws; they are the same color, they’re cooled by the air flowing around the vehicle, the driver always tries to rip you off, and they are small. Euan and Chris were too tall to sit in the taxi properly when we were in Mumbai.

Week 13, Jenny is Leaving

Jenny is leaving India today to go back to Cambridge because term starts again on Tuesday. It’s kind of weird to think that I was originally booked on the same flight home. I think I was really lucky to have been paired up with Jenny; it would have been very unpleasant to have been stuck with someone I didn’t like for 3 months! I think we worked well together, and we also had a lot of fun. There are a lot of things I would not have done if I were alone and I think I would have been very lonely and home sick (especially at the beginning) if I hadn’t had Jenny to talk to. We already have plans to go to Glastonbury carnival in November when I am back and then hopefully Susan will visit us in the UK on her way back to the US form India in January, so I know I’ll see Jenny again after we leave India.

Now I only have one month left. I have two more weeks with Shelter Associates, and then I am travelling around a little with my mom and Euan. I fly back to the UK on 3 November. It feels like I only just wrote a blog post titled ‘30 days to India’, and now there’s only 30 days until I leave India.

Week 13, Dasara at Sandhya’s House

We had Monday off from work because of the Dasara festival. I said before that this festival celebrates the triumph of good over evil, which is a Hindu festival; it’s the day when Rama defeated Ravana (an episode from the Ramayana, one of the great Indian epic poems) and also the day when the goddess Durga slayed the buffalo-demon Mahisha. I think it is also a festival to celebrate the beginning of the harvest season, and it is a sort of Labor Day where people celebrate the tools of their trade, which is what we did in the office on Friday. It turns out to also be a Buddhist festival (Ashoka Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din), which celebrates the day that Ashoka the Great converted to Buddhism. It is also the day Dr. Ambedkar, who revitalized Buddhism during the Indian independence movement, converted to Buddhism. I feel like there was so much going on all in one festival that I can’t really keep it all straight.

Sandhya’s family is Buddhist, and since Susan and Jenny were in Goa for the long weekend, she invited me to her house for the festival. Her brother-in-law also just completed the remodeling of his house, so they also had a puja (payer ritual) to celebrate that.

I got there at about noon, and all the houses around the housing society (neighborhood) had a Rangoli outside their front doors. They are made out of a sand-like material that, in this part of the country, is made of died, crushed rock. Rangolis come in different shapes, sizes and colors.

Then we went over to the brother-in-law’s house where they were having the puja. Everyone in the extended family was there. They sat on the floor in two rooms; the women were in the room where the table was set up with a Buddha statue and candles, and the men were in the room next to that. They all chanted and sang some prayers, and then we passed a long string around that everyone held on to and they sang another prayer. After the puja we all went out for a buffet lunch in the backyard. It was really good, especially the gulab jamun (which is quickly becoming my favorite Indian sweet) and the puri (a crispy, puffed up, deep fried bread); there were also papads, a vege curry, a dal, rice and palak bhaji (spinach deep fried in a chick pea batter).

I made friends with lots of the kids there, especially Sandhya’s niece Siddhi and her daughter Aakanksha. Siddhi is learning English at school and is very good at it. Aakanksha goes to a Marathi school and at first she was too shy to try the little bit of English she knows, but she got more comfortable as the day went on. Here is Siddhi with her lunch.

Here I am with some of Sandhya’s nieces and nephews. They have a very big extended family and I think they all live in the same housing society, which Sandhya’s grandfather founded in 1956. It’s an all Buddhist community that was established so that the workers in a local munitions factory didn’t have to go live in the slums when they retired. Six of these kids live in Sandhya’s household: the three girls and three of the boys.

At the end of the day Sandhya’s husband took me home. I showed him our flat and he was amazed that we each have our own room; I think they share about three or four people to a room in their house. I also showed him some pounds because he has never seen any foreign currency, and he was really happy.