Living the Life!

I have had these moments over and over for the past day where I ask myself, “Is this really my life!?” Orissa is pretty much my paradise so far and I’m so happy to be here!

Like I mentioned before, the office is based on a campus outside a city on the coast of the Bay of Bengal and at the foothills of some pretty great mountains, but the campus is by no means a small space. It is actually really expansive and covered in palm trees and other Aspen-like trees, grass, and tons of other wild fauna. I went for a run this morning here and in 30 minutes I still could keep going on one end of the campus without hitting the end! It’s a beautiful spot with clear blue skies, peaceful, quiet walkways, and butterflies floating all through the grass…and the occasional scorpion! The main office is about a ten minute walk from my building down a dirt path surrounded in palm trees and cute little houses.

I have two nice neighbors in my building and all of the employees, volunteers, and interns in this part of campus eat at the “mess” just next door to my building. Yes, it is dining hall food, but it is Indian dining hall food which translates into pretty darn good! Tonight we had this fried banana dish and paneer and/or mutton and of course the normal rice and naan. In general I have pretty much decided that naan is the perfect food and I can’t really get enough of it, so I’m really happy with the dining hall choices! We can get breakfast, lunch, and dinner there and morning tea before breakfast if we want too, and yes tea means delicious Indian chai J

I’m also really, really happy with my work here. I am indeed working on the Peer Water Exchange project like I thought and working to convert a lot of the paper documents of the organization into online files for the public to easily see and the organization to easily keep track of and organize. In addition I have started working frantically on an award application for a water award. Both projects are giving me so much insight into yet another aspect of the development world and the people I’m working with are truly incredible! The head of Peer Water Exchange is one of the most inspirational and motivated people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with and all day he is sending me tidbits to show me how much the project has the ability to change the world of water implementation! I’m really excited to be working with him and also all of the Indians that are doing so much great work in rural development here! The organization helps over 200,000 people in villages all over Orissa and there model is very well planned and executed. Another awesome perk of the job is that each day at 11 and 4 a man comes around and brings cups of chai to all of the employees! Gosh, if we got that kind of treatment in the US, I think we’d all be happier at the office! I’ve also met some really cool interns and volunteers from Australia, Canada, and Korea that I’ve been hanging out with a bit outside of our work.

This evening an amazing thing happened. After dinner I was leaving to go back to my room and some of the chefs started making a big hoopla over something. They started to run toward the path with a flashlight and telling all of us to come with them. We walked down the path about 50 feet and there was a baby python right next to the road! It was about five or six feet long and just sitting there frozen still. It had just eaten something so you could see strange lumpy shapes inside of its thick body too! It was really cool to see although terrifying especially because no one caught it or anything so it could be anywhere now! They said it is pretty rare here, but they also said it has happened twice in the last month! And the last time the little cat that lives around here (and is always hopelessly meowing at my door) went up to the other python and started fighting with it. The amazing thing about that, is that the cat actually got away alive to meow another day!

Tomorrow morning I will be off to a site visit for the morning. These sites are close by the main campus, where as some of the others I will be visiting in the next few weeks are much farther so that they can’t even be reached by phone! I can’t wait to see how the projects are actually working in the field and what village life is like here! Thinking of everyone on Thanksgiving back in the states! Eat some pumpkin for me and sure, twist my arm, I’ll have some naan for everybody back home!!

Tales of Train Travel

After a 24-hour long train ride from Varanasi to Bhubaneswar, I feel inclined to write about a few of the hilarities and bizarre occurrences of the trains and train stations here in India!

For starters, just a little description of the train system. First, booking a ticket is really a cloudy process. There are “travel agents” on pretty much every corner, but after using one of these a few times early on, we quickly discovered that the extra three dollars or so that you pay one of these travel agents is silly because they just log onto the internet and book the reservation for you. One time I was working with an agent who essentially turned the screen to me and told me to type in my details on the website, press purchase, and then press print and oh yea, then pay her for her work! So, logically we figured we’d go ahead and surf the net for our tickets. Well this is interesting because no where does it really tell you all of the trains, when they leave, how much they cost, and also let you book on the same site. There are hundreds of sites with ideas about this. There are people who have taken a particular train and written about it so when you search, these things come up, but the information is not centrally recorded at any reliable source and the site where you actually book your ticket only allows you to put in the exact train number, date, and departure/destination information and if you don’t have the tens of hundreds of train routes and numbers memorized, this can be quite a confusing and hopeless process. There is a book about the trains sold at some street stands, but even this book is huge and confusing!

The best thing we’ve found is to go to the train station and talk to an agent and book your train there. This way you don’t have to pay the booking fee and you can just tell them where and when you want to go and then they will pretty much do everything for you and just give you the ticket. This does have one added hassle and life-threatening hazard though which is that you have to take a rickshaw to the train station! For some reason the rides to and from the train station are the most wild and seemingly near death experiences, like the recent ride I had in Varanasi! I was with a new friend Sarah and her and I both actually screamed “Stop” at one point!

So anyway, if you are lucky enough to get a ticket and actually arrive at the station, then there are the waiting areas at the station and the boards telling you where and when trains arrive. Now every train is late. In fact, while there isn’t a central internet database for the train info, there is one site I came across that tells you on average how late each train usually is! Not a very good track record, but at least it’s consistent, so whenever you get to the train station you can pretty much be assured you’ll have to wait. There are some food and book stands usually, but mostly no matter if you arrive at four in the afternoon or four in the morning, there are tons and tons of people! Seriously, every time I’ve gotten to a station it is packed, no matter the hour or the station. So with all of these people and all of this waiting, the railways have very brilliantly created waiting rooms in all of the stations. But all of these waiting rooms are just empty concrete rooms with people just sitting and lying on the floor! By now if you’ve been reading the other posts on this blog, I’m sure you are very aware of the gross things that are always on the floors here and frankly they just aren’t places I would lay myself down on and wait for hours on end. There are about six benches per station on average I’d say, but sometimes those benches have been used as toilet areas for some reason and so a few times I’ve seen piles of poop around them deterring (some) people from even using them.

So then eventually you’re train comes. Most of the time I’ve been able to find the train, the number, and the platform it will leave from on the rotating boards in the main rooms…most of the time. But once it arrives, late, everyone pushes and shoves and rushes and jumps to get on the train as it approaches. It seriously doesn’t even stop before four or five men are pushing through the doors as though the train really might not stop at all! And then, once the train does stop, it sits there for fifteen minutes or so…every. single. time. Yep, every stop we go to, we wait at and not just for 2 seconds, but at least a few minutes throughout the whole journey and especially at big stations, yet still, all the passengers push and shove to get aboard so quickly! It is truly baffling to me as to why they do this and actually quite funny to watch if you aren’t brave enough to fight to be the first one on board! It is amazing too, because finding the car you want to get on can be quite the challenge. Often the tickets are printed very fainly so reading them can even be difficult and if the ticket is ripped or torn in any way, you might have a rough time getting the conductor to accept it! But anyway to find the car you are in, just walk up and down along the platform looking for that number. There is usually no order to the numbers on the trains and certainly no connection to the numbers on the platform so you just have to walk back and forth until you find it. Luckily there are usually numbers on the individual seats so you can find your spot once in the car and lock up your bags and sit. And wait. Again.

Ok so you have a ticket, you’ve made it to the station, you’ve waited, you’ve found your train, and you’ve even managed to get on board. Great, right? Well now comes the excruciatingly long journey!! The trains are arranged by class but the one we’ve taken so far is sleeper class. It is organized so there are three berths- upper, middle, and lower. At night all of the beds are properly pulled out and everyone sleeps (and snores). During the day the middle one collapses and the middle (and sometimes the upper) sleeper sits on the lower berth bed. So the lower and middle berths kind of suck because you don’t have the choice to sleep or sit or to make sure no one else sits by- which can be a very important thing sometimes!

Now throughout the whole ride, however many hours you are lucky enough to be aboard the train, there will be people walking through selling things. All kinds of things. There are the chai-wallas, people walking through with steaming hot kettles and cups calling “chai-ya chai-ya” kind of like a beer man at a baseball game. The chai-wallas come all throughout about every five minutes or so. There are similar wallas for all kinds of food from samoas to bananas to peanuts to candy...you name it. Then are the salesman that get on at each of the stations selling other stuff. I’ve been asked to buy books, magazines, and whistles. I’ve been asked to give money to blind people, prostitutes, men scooting along on wheel board with leg problems, and even obvious trans-gendered Indian people!

With all of this the trains are obviously loud and busy, and with all of these products you can buy, you can imagine there are chai cups and peanut shells and tobacco spit and human waste to dispose of. Well all of this goes on the tracks…yep all of straight out the window (or toilets) onto the tracks! It has actually been one of the hardest things to adjust to here…there just aren’t trash cans. There aren’t trash cans anywhere and the only thing to do is to toss your garbage on the ground! Ugh it is so hard to even think about. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it with the ease an Indian can and I always save all my trash in a bag and set it next to other trash somewhere, which I guess ultimately ends up in the same place! The bathrooms are really downright disgusting too, but that will be a story for another time!

So that is the intricate web of train travel here in India as I’ve experienced it! While chaotic and messy, the train system here is amazing in that you can truly get anywhere in the entire county on a train. You can go from North to South, East to West and eventually arrive at your destination. This is wonderful and amazing to me because India is HUGE! If I’ve learned anything being here it is that. Seriously, it is one country but it is so big and diverse- and all connected by trains! What an inspiration for mass transportation! If India can do it…

So on and on you go...

Our two weeks in Varanasi were spectacular! When we arrived there, we had the intentions of staying one or two nights and we liked it so much, we ended up staying the longest of any one place so far on the trip! All of our adventures have really been such interesting experiences in adaptation. We arrive somewhere new and quickly get our bearings of the town and get settled into our "house." It has been very fun exploring all of these new places and really, everywhere starts to feel "homey" after a few hours it seems! Of course with those adaptations come the more unpleasant sides of things- like adapting to much, much different standards of cleanliness and comfort than I’ve enjoyed in America for so long! From laundry to germs, in just a month I’ve really seen a different side of dirty, and what a extraordinary learning experience it’s all been- the good, the bad, and even the smelly :)

Our time in Varanasi and at the school was truly wonderful, but to continue our bouncing we moved along again, and after a truly punishing 22-hour train ride, here I am on the Southeast coast of India in a state called Orissa. I think there is no way I have painted a deserving enough picture of the wild Indian train system yet so my next entry will definitely include these descriptions, but for now I have to get to lunch and I just wanted to give an update about my little spot here.

This part of India is actually much more beautiful than I expected! It is right along the coast so the ocean is really nice, and just a 100 miles or so from the water are some amazing mountains! Nothing like the Himalayas or the Rockies, but still good, high peaks and red canyons snaking through the area leading up to them. The whole are is surrounded in palm trees and sort of jungle scenery with breaks for farmlands. The place where I’m volunteering is near a town called Brahmapur and the organization works in village and rural development.

I have a great little set up with a bedroom, bathroom, and even a little lounge area in a complex of organizational buildings, volunteer and employee housing, and a school. While I’m here I’m going to be primarily working to get the evaluations of water projects the organization has implemented uploaded to the Peer Water Exchange website. Peer Water Exchange (PWX) is the water implementation arm of the non-profit I worked for back in the US called Blue Planet Run. Basically PWX is working to get all water implementers working together by using online resources to manage projects and grants. Once the organizations upload their information, people around the world can check in on any particular project. The site will make it easier for people in near-by areas to review water projects close to them cutting out expensive western oversight, allow more transparency in the system to see that projects are actually continuously functioning, and allow donors to see how their funds are actually being spent. All of the logistics are a little more detailed so if you want to read about the whole organization definitely check out the website:

www.peerwater.org

. They even have an interactive map that pinpoints where I am!

Anyway the local village development organization I’m working with here has many facets so I am eager to meet up with some of the heads at lunch soon to see how else I can help and get started showing them some of the ropes to get their info up on the peer water site. I’m really excited to see how this non-profit functions in a much different rural environment than Varanasi and to tour around some of the projects in the villages. Pictures and updates coming soon!

　

　

Adventures by the Ganga

We’ve been teaching English at this school for just about two weeks now and it has been quite an eye opener into the Indian education system! The school has about 60 students from around age five to 17 or so. There are three classes of kids, but the classrooms are all open air with just a roof over the top of rows of desks. For the most part, the classes that we’ve watched have just been the kids running around, walking on the desks, and hitting each other with their backpacks…oh yeah plus a side of learning! We didn’t have really any direction as to what exactly we would be doing when we volunteered, but the principal just gave us a list of students and told us to come around 12:30 the next day.

So there we were, with 12 kids yelling and jumping around the classroom, and oh yea, they don‘t really understand any form of order, let alone English! The first day was quite hectic needless to say, but for day two we were armed with some more creative teaching methods and really, things have been going pretty well since then. We do a lot of repeating words that we write or draw on the chalkboard and there has been a lot of charades and hokey pokey, but the kids at least are quieting down when we raise our hands now, and they seem to be having fun and learning some vocabulary in the process! I have taken to showing up to school at 8:30 or 9 and just sort of helping in the classroom, but sometimes that can be a little frustrating because the teachers just really don’t seem to do anything during school. When I came in yesterday morning one teacher was sleeping face down on the desk in front of the classroom! Another time during an English class the teacher walked all the way to the classroom I was in to ask me how to spell zebra and elephant. I was just a little discouraged at these moments because it is really hard to help the kids and think that education and school is worthwhile and meaningful for them when the teachers who are supposed to be leading them are so lost in the whole system. Math class consists of the teacher writing some problems on the board and the kids copying down the problem…including the answer! I mean, there is some memorization to any learning I guess, but they clearly don’t understand and some of the kids can’t even write the numbers so another classmate just takes their paper and writes for them!

As frustrating as watching some of that has been, I really really enjoy my time with the kids that do come to English and observing the classes, teachers meetings, and operation of the school has been really educational and guiding for me as I seek out my place in the non-profit and development world!

In a moment of homesickness, we ventured to the IP Mall. Another volunteer at the school had mentioned there was a Domino’s and McDonalds there so we decided to head over for a taste of America! The mall was crazy! There was a movie theater (Hindi only unfortunately) and indeed Domino’s and McDonalds, as well as Baskin Robins, Adidas, and several other chain stores mixed in with some very sophisticated Indian shops and restaurants.

It was wild to see the Western influence and the thriving middle class hanging out at the mall especially when you can just look out the window and see the enormous contradictions of chaos and poverty literally right outside. We even noticed a date happening, which is a very recent addition to Indian culture according to some of our local guides! I had a delicious cone from Baskin Robins where the waffle cone was actually hot off the griddle! Dare I say, it was even better than Baskin Robins in America?! It was interesting too that the supply in a lot of the stores was tailored to more Indian fashion trends. The workout clothes for women in the Adidas store (strange since I haven’t ever seen a woman working out here!) were more sweater-like than anything I’d seen back home. The prices were, in general, the same as American prices for shoes and clothes (even though the knock-offs are available at stands right outside), although our ice cream and also the food at McDonalds and Dominos was definitely Indian cheap. One main difference though? This mall, while huge and surprisingly western with many of the corporate brand names from America, was only about one twentieth the size of any mall in America! It is crazy to see how corporations prevail in any society regardless of the poverty knocking on the door and as soon as we opened the door, the honking and dusty streets resumed and the rickshaw drivers immediately started following us asking for a ride…oh India!

Another day this week we checked out the main university here in Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University. (There are quite a few universities here in Varanasi and we also checked out the art university here in town this week where we saw a snake charmer with three different kinds of snakes!) Banaras Hindu University has a huge campus with green grass and well-kempt gardens. There is even a sports complex and field space there! It was really nice to be on a campus again and the student life felt so much like Boulder in the strange way that college campuses always seem to feel linked: Young people everywhere, event posters informing of all the upcoming happenings, tons of students studying on the lawns! In Varanasi style though, BHU’s campus also had an amazing temple on the grounds. It was one of our favorites we’ve seen so far with beautifully-colored mandalas painted everywhere and a mix of red and white architecture. Seeming very progressive and active in the green movement, there was even a vegetable garden on the temple grounds and statues of some of India’s leading education reformists. Again though, it is so interesting how here people continuously just drop trash on the ground in most places and then when you step onto the campus or into the mall, all of this pollution and chaos disappears.

After checking out the campus, we headed toward Ramnagar Fort, one of Varanasi’s other attractions housing another old ruler. Entry was closed when we got there, but the cool part of this little trip was getting there. A cycle rickshaw weaved through the streets to a little bridge built on large barrels. He dropped us here and we walked across with the rest of the pedestrians, cyclists, and of course occasional motorists honking madly! The rickety little bridge held up well crossing over the Ganges and offered some great views of the Fort at sunset.

We finally took a boat ride back to Meer Ghat from the Fort this evening, too. Our rowing wala (that is the term for a worker here) paddled us right in between the giant barrels under the walking bridge and back as the sun was setting on busy Varanasi. Later in the week we did the classic toursit-y sunrise boat ride as well. We hit the ghats at 5am along with what seemed like every other foreigner in Varanasi that day. We all flowed along the banks in almost a traffic jam since there were so many boaters at that time- really all tourists though. It was a beautiful sunrise complete with people bathing, swimming, doing laundry, worshiping, and brushing teeth in the mirky waters!

Additional Info

Hey everyone!

I just found a new site where I can actually upload pictures in a more efficient manner than this google blog. Check it out for a preview of photos, but I will add more soon I promise!

www.mytb.org/Meggotothemoon

Very Varanasi

Today there was a monkey in our room! This wild experience reminded me how many parts of this crazy culture I have forgotten to relate to everyone back home, so I've decided this update will just be all the quirky little details of life here that I want to share and remember - starting with this monkey experience of course…

Our room is on the top floor of about a four-story building (with all the weird turns and stairs and random scaffolding it is really hard to tell how many floors a building has) and when you get to the top floor you walk across a little terrace and into a sort of commons room. Off the commons room are three bedrooms and ours is one of those. The entrance to our room is from here and then also we have a door inside our room to our bathroom (with a squat toilet of course...but I won't go into the details of that here ha ha) and also a door to a little balcony area. Now I should also mention that almost every restaurant with outside seating around Varanasi has a gun behind the counter...to protect against the monkeys! There are so many of these little thieves here and they can actually be quite dangerous so we have been warned about them several times. Apparently they are most active in the early mornings too, just weaving around rooftops knocking stuff over and reeking havoc right around sunrise. Well anyway, I was sitting on the balcony reading this morning and I remembered something in the main room so I walked through our little room to the commons area without closing any doors and barely had I stepped a foot outside my bedroom when a grown, male chimp monkeyed on in through the balcony door!

I turned back immediately hoping it would get scared by me and then I screamed of course, hoping that maybe my voice would scare it away…the monkey just reached for my first aid kit and slowly started pulling out gauze. Tim was at the internet café, by the way, so I was seemingly alone upstairs and I didn’t really know what else to do so I just said loudly, “There is a monkey in my room, help!” In retrospect I’m sure I could have maybe grabbed a chair or something and aggressively moved toward the monkey, but I’m sure no one is surprised by the fact that I just screamed. (Ha ha ha…run ins with foxes on the canal and “gangs” in Littleton are coming to mind where similar screaming has come in handy!) Luckily there was a nice Finnish guest staying in another room on the floor and he ran out with a book and shooed the monkey away. Rather uneventful in the end (fortunately for me I suppose), but it did illuminate how much of a nuisance the monkeys are around Varanasi. Later this afternoon Tim and I watched a monkey reaching through barred windows and stealing something from a third floor window…little pests!! Needless to say I will be very deliberate about keeping doors and windows closed from now on!

More on worshipping…

After another really rainy day on Monday, today has been exceptionally beautiful with clear blue skies. Even the river looked refreshed and somewhat “clean.” But just because it rains here doesn’t mean the devoted don’t attend to their temple rituals and so they slopped through the poopy streets the same yesterday as everyday…barefoot! Aside from bathing in the Ganges, people here walk to various temples bringing gifts of flowers, candles, sweets, milk, incense, and gold to the gods. No one can go into the temples with shoes on so they leave them down the street and walk all the way to the temple barefooted. I have had a hard time walking with shoes on through the streets in this condition so this ritual has particularly impressed and disgusted me all at once!

I also discovered how many people “safely” bath in the Ganges even though many, many people here are very aware of how terribly polluted their holy river really is. Aside from all of the daily bathing, dying rituals, and bodily functions occurring in the river, there are tons of factories upstream dumping horrible chemicals and metals into the water as well, so the pollution is really awful. We heard that some scientists recently introduced high-resilience, flesh-eating turtles into the river to try to clean some of it and very shortly after they were introduced, they all died! Anyway, apparently the method for many to safely bathe in the Ganges as part of their daily prayer ritual, is to rub holy mustard oil over their bodies first so the water won’t absorb into their skin. Hmmm…holy mustard?! I learned of this practice from one of the elderly uncles at our house as he ran around wearing a sheet-like sari and pouring this holy oil all over himself as he was late for puja, of course!

Every night, there are also religious ceremonies throughout the town. At the temples these pujas last all the way until eleven with bell ringing, singing, and offerings ringing through the alleys. On the banks of the river, holy men sit atop platforms raised out of and facing the river and onlookers sit in stands on shore to watch the ceremony. The holy men sing, spread incense around, and shake fire from golden torches and candelabras for a couple of hours just after sunset. These ceremonies seem to be very elaborate processes and really offer a cool show by the river- if you can avoid the children begging you to buy candle-flower boats from them!

Tons of kids sell these little coffee filters filled with holy flowers and a candle that they light and set floating down the river for five rupees (about ten cents). They are meant to be special blessings sent into the river, but these cute little kids pester you about buying them from the moment the sun goes down. I had two girls hasteling me so much that they eventually just lit the candles and sent my boats afloat telling me to come back and pay them tomorrow! (She promised she’d remember me by the buffalo necklace from my Grandma that has attracted many questions from a lot of Indians I’ve met here. They don’t know what an American buffalo is so they always ask if it is a cow I worship ha ha ha.) Then one of those same girls ended up being a student in my English class the next day! I guess that’s how it goes here very often: Students by day…salesmen by evening. The river really does look quite magical though, at night with the fire ceremonies and the all the flower-candle boats floating down the river.

Chai and watching the skies…

Two of the coolest things about Varanasi too, are the kabooters and kites. From the roof tops there are very often Ganges views which are indeed very pretty on clear days, but also the nice clean air after the rain brings out tons and tons of kiddos flying kites from their roofs. These kites are tiny square pieces of tissue paper and dowels really. Nothing elaborate but it is so cool to sit and watch literally hundreds of kite squares flipping in the wind. Also, here in India, one of the things people do for sport or hobby is corral and keep pigeons! I was laughing with one of the old uncles that lives in our little complex about how in the US we keep dogs as pets and pigeons roam the skies wildly where as here in India, dogs roam the streets in wild packs and people keep pigeons as pets!!

Anyway, the way this hobby called Kabootering works is that people have packs of pigeons that they raise and keep in cages. Then, they have to exercise their pigeons so they let them out a few times a week and the birds fly in groups through the sky responding to their owners calls and flag twirlings. Eventually they usually all come back to the cage as their owner calls them and go on living in captivity! Sometimes there are apparently even tournaments between different kabooters for money! Between listening to the worship ceremonies and pigeon calls, this place has so many interesting layers of noise, and watching the kites and pigeon flocks dive through the air in the afternoons while sipping some of the most delicious (and costing less than a nickel!!) street chai has become a favorite part of our day!

Preparing for the cold…

I have to say Tim and I have both been really homesick when we hear of all the snow back home and thinking of the upcoming winter holidays, but here in Varanasi they are preparing for winter weather as well! Everyone I’ve talked to and everything we’ve read reiterates basically the fact that there are two seasons here in India (and all of Southeast Asia it seems): hot and rainy or just plain hot! Well the rainy season has come and gone here so that leaves us with just hot, but again the few rain storms of the past few days have been totally out of the ordinary. With the storms has come much cooler temperatures than average…about 75 degree days. We love it! Really the weather is beautiful, but all of the Indians here are walking around in scarves and wool hats! Today we saw a little baby all bundled up in a snowsuit! It is so funny to hear the local people in an uproar about these “freezing” temperatures and think of the feet of snow Colorado has been getting!

Well on that note, thinking of everyone back home as the holidays get closer and we are already beginning to ponder what a "turkey" might be like here in Varanasi…more on that soon I’m sure!!

The Holy City: where the Streets are Paved in Poop!

Traveling in India so far has truly been a spiritual experience! It seems that every city is a holy city to someone! In one month we have bounced from Buddhist stupas to Hindu temples and from magnificent Muslim tombs and mosques to golden gurudwaras and the holy center of the Sikhs. From North to South and festival to worship ceremony, it has been very educational and really amazing to glimpse into the worlds of so many devoted followers and their unique religious traditions! Now here we are in the “holiest” of holy cities here in India: Varanasi. What a truly unique and wild place this is too!

We arrived after an even longer night train to even more hassling touts trying to take us all over the city in search of a room! After finally managing a “fair” price for a rickshaw, our ride from the train station to the area of the town we intended to stay was another seemingly near-death experience as our driver zoomed around the jam-packed streets!

We quickly learned that Varanasi is seriously about impossible to navigate with a map or without one. There are so many little alleyways and backstreets crowded with cows and water buffaloes, beggars and tourists, motorcycles, bikes, and endless stands selling everything from bindi dots and face paint to kitchen sinks! Obviously as white people, we stand out everywhere we go, but when we have our backpacks on we basically have neon, flashing signs over our heads! So we snaked through the streets, tired and hungry from the 20+ hour train ride with a line of followers begging us to let them lead us to a room where they can get a commission! It was quite an entry, that’s for sure!

Finally after over an hour of searching and firmly denying our hasselers, we found a place with vacancy and just collapsed into the cleanest room they offered. Little did we know, at the time, that there were much better deals and views in town, but we were entirely too exhausted to care! Once we had recovered from that grand entrance, we found the famous Ganges just yards away from our guest house. (We found that once you know where the river is here in Varanasi, it really does make navigating the town much easier!)

The Ganges and Varanasi are almost exactly as you’d picture them from studying anything about India in school or in the news. Cows wander the streets here more than anywhere I’ve seen so far. They are decorated in holy flower strands and really they have the right-of-way everywhere they go. The alleys are so narrow in most places that frequently cows block the way entirely and they often conveniently sleep in the middle of the streets. Now, I’m used to having to slide by them to squeeze through because there is hardly a chance that one will move for you. That is how I had a slight mishap with one of these beasts the other day! I was just squeezing past a little opening, following a group of Indians that were passing the cow blocking the way in the same fashion and suddenly, the cow bucked its horns right into my leg! Of course it was funny…but it really did hurt too! I learned a new meaning for the term “Holy Cow!” and also to pass with even more caution next time!!

Here, there are temples everywhere and people are always on their way to pray and offer puja to the different gods and their proper temples. The Ganges is really disgusting, as everyone said it would be. There is all sorts of trash floating in it, people bathing at the steps, young kids swimming, folks brushing their teeth and filling water bottles. Tim and I saw a dead cow floating down while Tim was trying to help a big group of Indians pull a boat onto shore. We learned that they had to get that boat out because it had a hole in it and earlier that morning it sunk and someone drowned…so of course, the hole needs to be fixed.

There are also two burning ghats here which have been very interesting to see. (**Note: pretty much all of this information I learned from men standing around the ghats trying to lecture tourists on the rituals and also luring them to their shops to buy something of course, so don’t take it as fact for any reason really, more just observations on my part!) Men carry their dead on bamboo sticks covered in golden blankets and flowers to the Ganges and then fill the mouths and cover the bodies of the dead with holy water from the river. Then they build wooden stands to put them on and light the wood with a flame from the temple that has been burning for 5,000 years! Women aren’t typically aloud to be around this ceremony because they are labeled “too emotional” and crying prevents the souls of the dead from reaching Nirvana. The whole ceremony is absolutely fascinating to observe, but one of the most incredible things we learned was about the babas.

Babas are holy men and there are apparently three types. One is the standing baba who never sits in their whole life! We haven’t seen one of these babas yet, but apparently their legs have grown differently overtime from standing for their whole life. Then there are the orange babas which are holy men that dress in orange and they survive on donations from the public. I’m not entirely certain of their exact status or traditions but we see them everywhere. All of the babas seem to have dreadlocks and walking sticks also. The third type is the kind we encountered for the first time at one of the burning ghats. He wears a dress with a leopard-print pattern and also a black cloak and wooden flip flops that seem very painful. He covers himself in human ashes and spends all his time by the burning ghats. Uniquely, these babas actually eat dead women’s bodies! Yes…India is quite a place!! Apparently it is an honor to be eaten by a holy man after you die…though I’m still pondering how it could possibly be healthy for these men to eat raw, dead human flesh!

To add to the craziness, in the last few days it has been raining an unseasonable amount here in the holy city. The rain has been so nice in clearing away the haze from the sky and cooling the temperatures, but one bad side effect is the gross mixture of cow poop and rain! All through the streets on dry days are piles of poop which can easily be avoided by stepping around them, but when it rains, the piles mix with water and just cover the streets! It is really terrible because in order to get anywhere you have to walk on the poop-paved streets- GROSS!! Combined with the consistent power outages at night and the tiny streets, going out can be one daunting task!!

We have been here almost a week now and actually, for all its craziness, Varanasi is definitely my favorite place we have visited so far! We found a new place to stay after the original desperation of the first day and it is in a family’s home where they have a little bakery and a school! We are volunteer teaching English to the older children at the school in the afternoons and helping the women in the bakery as well! It is really awesome to actually stay with a family and get to hear all about their traditions and customs. The kids at the school are so cute and fun even though a lot of their day is totally unstructured and consists of them yelling and using their desks like jungle gyms! English is slow going but we love hanging out with them and I think they like us too?! I am loving watching all of this chaos and being a part of the bakery and school and we still have to summon the courage to take a boat ride (fingers crossed it doesn’t have a hole in it) so we are planning to stay at least until the end of the week.

Until then, we will try to stay dry and watch out for cows!

In India, Anything is Possible!

Since my last update, the journey south from Amritsar has been like traveling to a completely different world from the heavenly mountains of the North. With each train or bus trip out of the Himalayas, the weather has become a little warmer, the streets a little dustier. We spent two nights in Agra, stopping of course, to see the majestic Taj Mahal. We arrived in the morning after a night train brought us through the rest of Punjab and Haryana on a 14-ish hour trip. Periodically throughout the night, the Indian police would board the train at stops with guns and uniforms and just begin prodding and feeling the men’s pockets. Tim and I stayed in the “upper berths” which means we were a little out of reach for this random groping, but thankfully they seemed to generally not care about us anyway! Something about the man below Tim must really have clued them off because police came back searching him over and over again.

It was strange on this trip too because at each stop their seemed to be random disputes over tickets. A family would board and fight with someone supposedly in their seat and they would shout and argue for a while before either sharing the seat in some cases (this option seemed utterly uncomfortable and basically terrible) or the conductor would escort one of the travelers to another class or something. I was thankful the whole time that our spots never seemed to be the focus of these “double-sold” tickets and also all the while learning a new appreciation for American organization!

Upon our arrival, we were armed and ready to deal with the pestering touts we had read were just terrible in Agra. In all of our destinations so far, when we get off the train with all our stuff the rickshaw drivers immediately begin to haggle us about where we are going and what is the name of our guest house and how they have a friend or a cousin who will “give a good rate.” They are relentless in directing us where they can get commissions and so we have to be very stern with what we want and have a few ideas of where we want to go from the guide book or other recommendations before we get off the train. It is terrible in these really touristy destinations and Agra is obviously the most popular!

After much persistence we found a place with a good rate and even a Taj view in an area of Agra called Taj Ganj. We just hung out the first day in Agra, taking in the views of the Taj from the roof-top cafes and meeting other tourists from all over the world. On the next day we woke up at sunrise to take in the Taj in all its splendor. We darted through the dusty streets with all the other tourists at 6am hoping to catch the red hues of the morning against the marble…only to find out that sadly, three months out of the year, the sunrise is so clouded by pollution that you can’t really get any of the wonderful colors from the sunrise and the sky simply lightens to day - and November happens to be one of those months!

The Taj Mahal was still absolutely incredible however! We arrived at the gates early in the morning to a line of hundreds of tourists and since Tim has been here a few times before, he knew a viewing point from the back side of the Taj. We went past the lines to this little spot by the bathing ghats and admired the amazing marble for a little while before going back toward our spot for breakfast. After breakfast, I bit the bullet and bought the most expensive thing so far on the trip: my ticket inside the Taj! It cost about twenty American dollars for foreigners and only about ten cents for Indians…tourist trap indeed! But walking inside the magnificent gardens and standing just below the towering white buildings was well worth the coin. The grounds were simply breathtaking and really being inside the Taj Mahal complex is so drastically different from the outside poverty-stricken dirt roads that it is almost impossible to believe they are in the same town. One thing persisted inside however, the bothering. Indians would stop me every ten seconds asking for a picture with me and I really could barely snap a photo of the buildings myself before a new Indian family with their crying baby in arm would be sneaking in for a photo! It has happened everywhere we have been: people wishing to photograph the whities, but it was the worst of all the places inside the Taj! Eventually I was darting around the far gardens inside the complex trying to escape the paparazzi and still see some of the beautiful views of the Taj. Really it was just a silly and fun little game to play (I have really had to keep a sense of humor in dealing with a lot of the bothering or else I would just lose my mind!) and such a magnificent experience to be inside what is truly one of the wonders of the world!!

After the Taj we went to the city’s other tourist attraction, Agra Fort. After spending the afternoon inside the Taj I was burnt out of sightseeing and we only walked around this enormous and beautiful fort, but the highlight of this sight was definitely the cycle rickshaw ride to and back to the fort. We had opted for cycle as opposed to auto because we had never taken one before and it was about a third of the price so we decided to give it a try and within minutes, Tim had talked the cyclist riding us through Agra’s busy streets into letting him try! Our driver was having as much fun teaching Tim how to navigate the craziness as Tim was stretching his legs on a bike again! We finished up our Agra touring learning yet again on this trip that in India, anything is possible!

Hippie hangouts, Sikhs, and the Border Ceremony

Over the past week we have traveled from Manali to Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile and then onward to Amritsar on the Indo-Pakistani border, and of course the journey has been quite the adventure! Our trip to Dharamsala was about seven hours, so not nearly as long as the bus from Delhi to Manali, but since we went in the day, the terrifying driving conditions were really illuminated! After about four hours of fidgeting, car sickness, and heart palpatations, we arrived in the evening to the Tibetan communtiy in exile built on the slopes of tall Himialayan peaks. As you would imagine, Tibetan prayer flags covered the area and fat street dogs wandered the town looking for more food from the generuous Buddhist monks filling the streets. The other side of Dharamsala that we had not expected was the large Western hippie crowd that frequents the town. Really, this is the place so far where we have seen the most white people- Germans, British, Australian, American. Really at least a third of the people on the streets were white and at least a third of those people have quite the head of dreadlocks! The town is filled with activists and organizations working to free Tibet and to aide the refugees fleeing Tibet to this hill station as well as a surprising abundance of coffee shops. The whole culture reminded me so much of Boulder with so many posters posted on street signs about benefit concerts and organizational meetings.

We went from organization to organization looking for a volunteer position where we could help for a longer period of time, only to find that with the Dalai Lama coming in three weeks and so many Westerners in town until then, there wasn't really much opportunity for us to stay around and have something to fill our time. As much as we loved hanging out with the monks and some of the recent refugees eager to practice their English, our exhaustive search showed it would be hard to find something to keep us busy throughout the days, in order to stay for a longer period of time. Even so, our time in Dharamsala was filled with amazing walks through prayer-flag covered grounds to the Tibetan Chilsdren's Village, the Dalai Lama's residence and the Tibet museum, delicious Tibetan dishes like tingmo (steamed bread) and momos (dumplings), and great new friends who told us a little about their life in Tibet and now in Dharamsala in exchange for us helping them with their English. It was a great stop on our journey!

After a week in Dharamsala, we took the state bus to Pathankot. This town is very close to the border of Pakistan and it is filled with Indian military departments of every kind. We only stayed long enough for a quick lunch before heading off on the train to Amritsar. Our first train trip of the voyage was a short three hour ride through hot, dusty towns of the Punjab region of India. We arrived in the evening to the noisy, congested city that is home to the Sikhs. Here we visited the famous Golden Temple which is the center of the Sikh religion and a beautiful golden building in the middle of a pool surrounded by marble buildings. We spent the morning touring the grounds and watching the holy practices of the devout followers. In both Dharamsala and Amritsar, I was so excited to see two very different religions and to learn about their practices and beliefs at their spiritual centers. At the Golden Temple, visitors (especially Sikhs, but really everyone is welcome) can stay at the Golden Temple "dorms" and eat for free for up to three days! We didn't take up staying for free since there were so many people who really made the pilgrammage for their religion, but we did visit the feeding frenzy that was lunch at the Golden Temple. Huge bins of plates invited bare-footed visitors into the "mess hall" where traditional Punjabi meals were being served by community members.

In the afternoon, we headed shared a taxi with a Canadien couple to the Indo-Pakistani border in Wagha. Everyday at sunset, the border is officially closed by the guards on the India side and the Pakistani side and there is quite the ceremony accompanying this closure! There are actually stand errected on both sides for all of the fans from each country to watch their side close. We arrived early because Aaroon, one of the Canadiens was actually going to cross the border and meet his Pakistani friends on the other side. The whole affair was really a huge tourist attraction for both Indians and foreigners. The street leading to the border was lined with stand selling all sorts of snacks and goods - Indian flags were everywhere. We got to the border area and were escorted to the "VIP" section. (The VIP section was more or less the "white" section. We have found that a lot here, just because we are white, people either escort us to the front of the line or give us some preferential treatment which is completely and utterly unecessary or else, pester us constantly for a picture with them.) The ceremony lasted about an hour and consisted of Indian school girls dancing together and singing patriotic songs in the middle of the street and outrageously dressed borded guards wearing hats about three-feet tall and marching in the most spastic manner back and forth around the border. Eventually each side took down their flag and closed the border to hundreds of cheering fans on both sides of the border. It was really an experience to see!

One of the best parts about Amritsar is the Bharawan da Dhaba. Dhaba's are basically little street vendors so we haven't really eaten at very many of them yet, just trying to avoid sickness but the food they are making always looks DELICIOUS! Well this dhaba, is famous and so much so that it is much more like a diner than a street-side booth. So we have been there everyday for lunch so far! It is hot off the griddle naan and perfectly spicy little Punjabi dishes for so cheap! We love this place and it definetely merits its celebrity status!

Now we are moving on, yet again, to Agra. After stopping in Agra and Varanasi for a quick dip in the Ganges (just kidding!) we hope to be down south at a volunteer project with Blue Planet Run by the end of the week! Our internet connections will probably be less and less for the next few weeks but around the end of the month we are hoping to be moving North again so keep the updates coming from home and we will write more as we have a chance! Off to another 12-hour long train journey! Lots of solitarie and reading for the next few days :)