This is the last LONG email from India…
Saturday evening after approximately 30 hours of travel, I arrived safely in the Boise airport. Andy and I immediately went to Harry’s where I enjoyed my cheeseburger a little bit more as it was the first beef I had eaten in two weeks. Actually I take that back, Lufthansa served beef goulash as one of the meals on the plane. The cheeseburger was still much appreciated. As is being home, seeing Andy, Sassy, Gus and Ozzy (the pets), using restrooms that are clean, assured to have toilets, with dry floors and toilet paper. Additionally, I have already felt extra appreciation for my ability to brush my teeth with tap water as well as drink it if I so desire. These are the little things that I missed while I was in India and now appreciate more than ever since I am now home.
I wanted to take this time to chronicle my past week in India and follow up on the second part of the trip.
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BEING SICK
At the conclusion of the writing of my last email, I was sick. I was literally lying on the couch trying to type on my laptop that was on the coffee table. It was NOT FUN to be sick in another country. It is so much better to be in the comfort of your own home when feeling the way I did, but I survived, although not without desires of leaving sooner than my planned two weeks. The little bacteria and I went out it for about two days (Thursday and Friday) and by the third day I was feeling better but I didn’t yet have my appetite back especially for Indian food. I had to decide Saturday morning if I was going to be able to ride in the car for more than three hours to Mysore, where we had planned to visit for the weekend. I was a little unsure of this adventure simply because the previous day, I would not have even been able to wait three minutes to use the bathroom when it was time. I loaded up on Imodium and Cipro (both lifesavers) and decided to give it a try, so our driver picked us up around 8:30 after being 30 minutes late and we drove to Anantha’s house in another part of Bangalore.
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WEEKEND TRIP
Anantha, from Wipro, was our tour guide for the weekend. Keith and I had talked with Raghu, one of the managers from Wipro, earlier in the week about where we wanted to go for the weekend. After giving us our options, we decided on a trip to Mysore, first stopping at the Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary and the Somanathpur Hindu Vishnu temple. Raghu had hoped to join us on the trip but had a wedding to go to. In his place, he sent Anantha to take us since he speaks the local language, Kannada.
When Anantha got into the car, I could tell he was surveying me to see how sick I was to see how miserable the trip might be. I must have passed the test with my answers because we were merrily on our way and were outside of the city in less than 30 minutes. The road to Mysore was being redone so the driver was constantly switching back and forth between the left and right sides of the medium although we never saw a detour or road sign telling him to do so. On the sections of road that had been redone, the road was very smooth but unfortunately other sections left much to be desired. We bounced and sped up and slowed down as our driver obsessively tried to pass everything from buses, cars, ox-driven carts, cows, people on bicycles, people walking (some with items being carried on their heads), grain carts, sugar cane trucks, you name it…we passed it. When I would give my barely audible sound of being freaked out over a particular pass, Anantha would ask Lokesh, the driver, to slow down so that we were not scared. It would last for a short while and then Lokesh was back in the game.
After a few detours to a pottery shop and a road side shop, we made it to Ranganathittu. Apparently, the place is a sanctuary for birds from all over the world. They migrate there and all hang out together for a few months. There were, what seemed like, millions of birds, an area with a lot of bats, a few crocodiles and some other miscellaneous animals. We paid something like $2 to have our own private tour guide row us through the sanctuary in the midst of all of the birds. It was amazing and such a nice way to see them in their habitat. It seriously felt like Club Med for birds. They were having a grand ole time squawking and building nests and hanging out together.
Next, we took this crazy country road to Somanathpur. Actually, the drive to this place was one of my favorite things that we did on the trip. It was a very dangerous road with all of the passing of random farm vehicles we had to do (see pictures), but it was very cool to get a glimpse into Indian village life. As we would pass through an area with houses, people would often be helping load up a cart with sugar cane or straw, OR cooking OR just kind of hanging out watching us drive by. We took a lot of pictures of this drive so hopefully they can describe better what it was like.
Once we got to Somanathpur and got out of the car, we were immediately approached by five individuals. One young boy was trying to sell us little statues of Hindu gods. Another woman was begging for money. Another couple of kids wanted money and I believe there was a gentleman as well begging. We ignored them and proceeded to the temple. Once inside, I was immediately amazed by all of the detailed work that many people over many years had put into the temple. There were replicas of gods carved from soap stone everywhere. Anantha found us an English-speaking tour guide who was very knowledgeable about the place. He began by explaining that there are three main Hindu gods of which all others (330 million of them) are derived from: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma is known as the creator, Vishnu, the preserver and Shiva, the destroyer. They each have a wife: Saraswati (Brahma’s wife), Lakshmi (Vishnu’s wife) and Parvati (Shiva’s wife). Basically, all of the other Gods can be associated with these six individuals and mostly just the three as I understand it. Each God has certain powers and vehicles and instruments that it uses. The tour guide began to test us to make sure we were listening. He would walk up to a statue and say, “Who is this?” Then I would attempt to determine since it was female and had a musical instrument in one of her hands (Gods are depicted with more than 2 arms to show they are not in a human form) that it was Saraswati, Brahma’s wife, who is the goddess of knowledge and music. Another very famous God who I am sure you have seen is Ganesha (or Ganesh). He is identifiable because his head is an elephants head. He is the second son of Shiva and Parvati and is worshiped very frequently by people because he “creates the faith to remove all obstacles.” Since this was a Vishnu temple, there were a lot of depictions of Lakshmi and the incarnations of Vishnu. Buddha, another famous God who has his own religion, to Hindu’s is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu and was incarnated to remove suffering from the world.
Growing up Catholic, in some ways, the different Gods are worshiped in the way that saints are. For example, I have a Saint Christopher that I sometimes wear around my neck for save travel, or some pray to Saint Anthony when they cannot find something. The Hindu’s seem to do the same thing with various Gods. Another interesting thing is that certain castes worship certain Gods. For example, Anantha’s family worships Shiva only. Other people I asked maybe worshiped all of them, but one or two in particular. Because castes have different Gods, and different languages (potentially) and different food they cook (potentially), the need for arranged marriages begins to make a lot more sense. The parents help facilitate finding someone who will match up well with their child and thus mitigate the amount of conflict or misunderstanding that will happen between families because of such extreme differences in upbringing. As Keith and I talked about it, in some very loose ways, I think it can be equated to interfaith marriages in the United States. Parents may discourage them because of the conflict it can create as well as difficulty it can have for children. Anyway…more on the subject of arranged marriages later.
I thoroughly enjoyed the temple and hope you enjoy it by checking out the pictures. By this point, I was starving since I could not eat much more than a couple of bites of my energy bar before getting grossed out. I also still did not have an appetite, so we went back towards the hotel we would be staying at. We experienced our first “pop up ad” (as Keith likes to call them) where the driver conveniently stops at a shop that you didn’t ask to go where he gets a kick back from (for bringing you there). This one actually wasn’t that bad although the salesman for the sandalwood carvings was slightly more high pressure than I like.
We finally made it to the hotel and agreed to rest for a short while and then meet for dinner in the restaurant on the first floor. Dinner was great because Anantha and Keith could eat Indian food and I could have bland pasta. I was full for the first time in three days and it felt good since I had had a dull hunger ache in my stomach all day, although with no desire to eat. After dinner we all made our way to our respective hotel rooms and called it a night. In the middle of the night, my cell phone rang and I was surprised to hear my sister’s voice. I had tried to call her on the drive to Mysore, not realizing how late it was in Boise. She saw a number on her phone that she did not recognize and called it back (Wipro had provided Keith and I with cell phones, a necessity, while we were there). Little did she know that she was calling India. I wonder what her bill is going to be on that one.
Sunday, we slept in and I spent the morning talking to my sister via the cell phone, reading the paper and watching Indian television. The Hindi movies crack me up because the man and the woman run around singing to each other and the woman’s singing is very high pitched. They almost kiss but then the woman turns and runs away and then they continue to chase each other through the location (to me that seems to be the only difference between movies is where they are doing the running around and singing). The particular one I was watching while I was talking with Anna was one filmed in what appeared to be the Swiss Alps, but I suppose it would make more sense if they were in the Himalayas being that it was an Indian movie.
When I was reading the paper I saw a love section where people send in their “stats” for parents looking to arrange a marriage. Keith and I had been talking with Anantha about this during dinner the night before. Although it is probably very different based on the family, parents generally ask their kids if there is anyone they would be interested in marrying, for example someone they have met at work. If there is not anyone like that, or if the person does not have the correct “resume,” then the parents will check with friends and family looking for a suitable spouse for their eligible child. If they still don’t find one, they can put the resume in at a local area (I don’t know exactly what it is) where people can go and peruse the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes. I guess the last resort is the newspaper, which is what I was reading. It was interesting because people were able to say in the same number of lines that you place a car ad, how a person looked, their educational background, caste, where they work and more. (I have a picture of this on snapfish.)
After breakfast, we went and visited another temple where there were a LOT of people. The beggars made a b-line to us with our white skin. We didn’t stay long there or at our next stop, a cow statue, before we were finding our way to the Mysore palace, the main attraction of the city. We were not able to take any pictures inside of the palace, only the outside. We found a tour guide who by the end of the tour, Keith had nick-named Rosemary because he seemed to be wearing this rose perfume. We had met some other friends the previous week who had a driver who wore some lavender perfume they had bought for his wife, so we were laughing when we figured out Rosemary was the one wearing the perfume. Keith kept saying out loud, “I think that rose smell is following us. I don’t think it is just the palace.” By that point, I had figured out it was the tour guide so I was trying to figure out a way to tell him that it was the tour guide before the guide heard Keith. The tour was interesting. Basically the kings of Mysore, when India still kind of had kings although were ruled by the British, built the palace. The original one had burned down in the early 1900s and then was rebuilt with the current palace. I had never seen a palace so recently built. For example some of the paintings had cars in them instead of just horses. I wasn’t expecting that, but it was interesting. After the palace, Keith and I rode an elephant. Then we were ready to head home. On the way to the hotel, we stopped at another pop up ad, this one with a more aggressive guy. I vowed not to give an aggressive salesperson my business and the driver was surprised when we were quickly ready to go. Instead, I decided to purchase this beautiful 100% Pashmina scarf that I had seen at the hotel, partially because the salesman was very nice and not pushy.
We proceeded back to Bangalore. Once there, Anantha invited us into his house and showed us his wedding photos. It was nice to meet his family and see how he and his family (wife included) all live together in one home.
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SHEKAR’S PARTY
We quickly changed from the trip and then headed down to the party area of the apartment complex where Shekar had planned a party for the Wipro UI and Fax teams. The party started with a game where the group was divided up into two teams and one team would sing a song and then (I think) the other team was supposed to sing a song that started with the same letter that the previous song had ended with. I began taking pictures in order to not partake in the singing. Lucky for me, nobody said anything and I couldn’t have participated anyway since the songs were all in Hindi.
After singing was pizza, which I was glad to have since I still wasn’t up for Indian food. When the food was gone, game #2, musical chairs was started. The party was very segregated with men on one side and women on the other, so I went and talked with the women for awhile until we got drug into round two of musical chairs. The women asked my interpretations of India and then laughed as I described some of the things I had noticed. It is funny how amusing it is to hear someone else describe your culture. The women asked me questions about how I live in the United States. One thing that multiple people asked me while I was there was, “how do you take care of everything without your parents help.” In India, the support system between parents and siblings is so strong and parents do everything for their kids until they are unable to at which point the kids begin doing everything for their parents. People couldn’t understand how I could work and go to school and take care of a house, etc. This was kind of an “ah ha moment” for me because I often wonder why it seems so hard to get everything done and how people in other cultures don’t seem to have the same difficulty that we do and are able to have more free time. I guess when you have six people living in the same house, all working together to take care of things, it is just easier. Anyway, I found this interesting.
Another interesting thing to find out was to learn how long the girls have to commute to work in the morning and evenings. To avoid the traffic, they leave early but are still on the bus for 1.5 hours. So they can spend as much as three hours commuting to work each day. Can you imagine?
I asked the girls if this was a common format for a party. Since Shekar had not lived in India for 10 years, I was not sure. They told me that it was entirely common and that the games we had played were the most common games. Keith and I were surprised by this but then figured that without alcohol, you have to do something. (just kidding…kind of) When I was talking to Nazeer about parties in India, he said that at Muslim parties (he is Muslim), there is a curtain in the middle of the room and the women and men cannot even see each other. So much for going to a party to get a date. J
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WORKING, ETC.
The last week of work went quickly and fairly uneventfully. I got my appetite back and enjoyed many more delicious Indian meals. If I hadn’t been sick, I am sure that I would have gained 10 pounds. The food was so good. I was more careful with what I ate since I didn’t know what made me sick the first time. Since then, I think we have figured out that the maid was going to a restaurant that was convenient for him and not “safe” for us. Keith got sick after I left from the same food that probably made me sick earlier.
Luckily I was able to find some time to do some shopping on Commercial Street and at Cavalier, this government-run shop. You will all be so surprised to learn that I bought some jewelry. J Actually I went to this gold shop, since the Indian gold is so shiny and since Gold is in style right now according to US magazine. I attempted to try on some earrings and they would not fit in my holes. According to the gentleman who was helping me, they were standard Indian size, yet the stem was literally twice the size of the earrings I was wearing. Once the lady was finally able to screw the earring into my poor ear, it left ear matter on the stem when I took it out. Needless to say, I did not buy those earrings and found some with a smaller stem.
We also were able to get a mini city tour from Lokesh and see the government buildings in the center of town. They were pretty neat.
On the way back from shopping one day, I was looking at the businesses on the street as I always do, and I noticed a granite slab yard. Then, I started to notice other ones. There were probably 50 granite shops with varying types of granite on this particular road. It was amazing and explained why every place we went to had granite flooring.
I spent one day at HP-India and gave a presentation on the project I am working on to the individuals who will be working with Keith on this project. It was fun to meet some new people and see one of the many HP sites in Bangalore.
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TRIP BACK TO BOISE
I arrived at the Bangalore airport at 12pm Friday evening for my 2:15 am flight. Again, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was certainly not one large room packed to the gills with people waiting for two flights leaving around 2:15. There was literally no place to sit down and were people everywhere. I think that Bangalore is going to need to upgrade/remodel/expand their airport if they are going to continue to attract visitors. Hopefully when they do, they will get real toilets and not just have the holes in the ground. I found it ironic that I chose to wait until I got on the plane to use the restroom.
After my 10.5 hour flight to Frankfurt where I mostly slept, I wandered around, again looking for a seat (they were all taken) listening to the melody of so many different languages that I cannot even describe. If I could even name the language that each person was speaking, I would have been proud of myself. It was a humbling experience to know that almost everyone in the airport probably spoke three or four languages. Once I had found some coffee and a chair with a table, I worked on my schoolwork and then an older Russian gentleman sat down and started talking with me (once I had finished with my schoolwork). He had moved to Calgary, following his daughter and teaches comparative religion. He showed me pictures and I had a great time talking with him.
I thought I had plenty of time to get to my gate since I was already through security, but come to find out, the United States has instituted another security area for outbound flights to the US which had a really long security line. I waited forever in that line as they literally felt everyone up who went through. On the flight to Denver, I sat next to a nice German woman on her way to Vegas.
Let’s see, I think that is about all that I wanted to share with you all. If you are interested, you can view the photos (from both Keith and I) I have mentioned in multiple places using the links below. You will probably need a snapfish account to view them. Let me know if you have any troubles accessing them. (Also I have attached my first email in case anyone didn’t receive it.)
http://www.snapfish.com/share/p=314301138639023343/l=79261625/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB
http://www.snapfish.com/share/p=671301138638295012/l=79261622/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB
Thanks for sharing in my adventures with me by reading this message!
Cheers!
Alecia
P.S. I want to add a caveat to all of the things that I said that I may have not got all of the details exactly correct about customs or religions OR may have made a generalization based on what one person told me, where I should not have. So take these as my interpretations and memories, not as fact. J
Related posts:
- Hello From India!! Part One A recap of my first week in Bangalore, India on business travel in 2006....
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