India!!!

It’s the second day back on the ship after my five days in India, and I finally have found the time to update me blog and check my email, and try to catch up a little with life back home in my real world. So here’s the India story:

On the first day in Chennai, we finally got off the ship around noon and my friend Kait and I hired a autorickshaw driver to take us around the city for the day for about 5 dollars. It seemed like a good price, and there is no other easy way to get around. Our first stop was a Hindu temple where a guy tried to give us a tour we didn’t want and then attempted to make us pay for it, but we had the chance to see a very pretty place and get a first taste of the sights and sounds and smells of India. Then we pointed to a couple other destinations that were on our list of sightseeing stops, and told the driver he could figure out the best way to take us to al those places, since we didn’t really know the city. Instead he drove us to a bunch of fancy emporiums that sold really beautiful really expensive things like lifesized bronze elephants and ginormous oriental rugs – neither of which could we afford or fit back into our rooms on the ship. We realized pretty quickly, that like in some of the other countries we’d been to, the drivers get paid to take their customers to shops, or they get things like free t-shirts. The driver eventually tried to hike up the price of our day while we were driving, and when we wouldn’t pay more, he simply took us back to the ship. We were a little disappointed, but had wanted to stop by an orphanage that afternoon, so we changed our plans a little and set off again in the other direction. We got a ride from the family of one of our inter-port students, which turned out to be a great thing because the orphanage was pretty hard to find. My experience at the orphanage was a harsh shock of reality. We saw deformed kids who were missing arms or legs or had serious burns and rashes all over their bodies. We played and fed little babies who seemed so mentally challenged that they barely even responded to our touch. It was so sad, but also nice that they were at least taken care of by good people. Kait and I went from the orphanage to the beach – this time finding a more reliable driver – and we spend the late afternoon people watching (the beach was completely different from any beach back home) before heading back to the security of the ship once it got dark.

I left early the next morning (around 5:00) for my three day trip to see Delhi and the Taj Mahal. We spent pretty much all of the first day in travel. We spent the morning on the plane, had lunch in Delhi, took a tour of the city from the bus, only getting off at a single stop, and then spent seven hours that evening on the train to get to Agra. Our single stop was actually a very beautiful place, but the rest of the day was pretty crappy – I felt like we spent way too much time transporting ourselves from one place to another, without actually seeing the places. Actually the train station was a pretty intense experience too. The whole time we were waiting for our train, we were surrounded by beggars and homeless people sleeping between the tracks. We saw rats and cockroaches, and were incredibly thankful that our tickets got us seats in the air-conditioned part of the train. Just the general dirt and grime of the station was a bit of a shocker. We finally got to Agra around 12:30 or 1:00 and then it was another 45 minutes or so before we made it to the hotel and into our beds. It was a long day.

We woke up at 5 the next morning so we could watch the sunrise at the Taj Mahal, and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The Taj was amazing. It was just so indescribably beautiful and so surreal to actually be seeing and touching something that I’ve seen pictures of my entire life. I never thought I would actually see the taj mahal, and I did, and I still can’t believe it, but I do have pictures to prove it to you guys and to myself. After sunrise we went back to the hotel for breakfast and then drove about an hour outside of the city to see an ancient Muslim city that was also amazingly beautiful in a falling-apart-ruins sort of way. We had lunch (mmm spicy Indian food!!) and then spent the early afternoon at a fort in Agra that was built I think about 600 years ago by the grandson of the guy who build the taj mahal. It too was incredible. The view from the palace was magnificent, you could see fields and the river and the Taj Mahal in the background. We then went back to the Taj Mahal again for sunset and this time it was considerably more crowded with tourists, and beggars, and cute little kids trying to sell us stuff. The point of seeing the Taj and sunrise and sunset, by the way, is so you can see the white marble changing colors in the changing light. It is pretty cool. I took a ridiculous number of pictures. The other funny thing about the whole day was how many times I had my picture taken. People would come up to my friend Christina and I at all of the sightseeing places and ask if they could take a picture with us. We were asked by everybody, little kids, twenty-something guys, entire families, its sortof crazy how many Indians now have pictures of me at my hot and sweaty, dirty, unshowered best. According to our tourguide, many of the people asking for pictures were from more rural areas, and hadn’t seen many white people before – so I guess they wanted proof of seeing us now, but it was pretty weird. Before dinner, we went to a marble workshop where we saw workers decorating white marble with inlaid precious stones the same way it was done hundreds of years ago on the taj mahal. They were also selling the marble pieces at the shop and I was really tempted to buy an inlaid table for a couple thousand dollars but had to resist the urge. We had dinner back at the hotel (this time they served us a weird buffet of a variety of asian food and some attempts at western food that didn’t really come out the way it maybe was supposed to… but the ice cream and the naan was good) and then we went back to the train station to catch an evening train back to Delhi. This time we were on a faster train, and we made it in about three hours without any stops. They served us another dinner on the train, and that one was actually really good. We got back late into Delhi and spent the night in a really fancy hotel that had the most blissfully comfortable beds in the world as well as a working shower that was also heavenly to use after a long day.

The next day we slept in a little later and then took another driving tour of Delhi in the morning before heading to the airport to spent pretty much the entire day flying or waiting to fly. Both of our flights got delayed, so it was s ort of a frustrating trip home. Actually, the entire trip was somewhat frustrating in that although the middle day was incredible and perfect and I wouldn’t have changed a minute of it, the days of travel on both sides kindof sucked.

On my final day in India I went on a class trip to the Working Women’s Forum of Chennai, an organization that works to empower women by giving them loans, job training, and classes in their legal rights. It was an awesome place. We met the president of the organization who told us all about the place and how it works and the amazing number of women it has helped in the thirty years of its existence. We also got to attend one of the classes and asked the women themselves questions about their experiences with the organization and how they and they’re families have benefited from it. From there, two friends (Erin and Christina) and I got a ride to the giant shopping mall (Spencer’s) in the center of Chennai and spent the rest of the day doing a combination of window shopping at the really expensive things and bartering and buying the more affordable ones. It was a wonderful place. We’ve all decided that its going to be really hard to go home and have to pay fixed prices for things. I picture myself walking into a store and seeing something for thirty dollars, telling the clerk I would give them five, and then getting thrown out. It’ll be fun. After spending all of our rupees (and without going back to the ATMs to get any more) we took another autorickshaw back to the ship so we could unload our purchases, shower, and eat free food that we knew to be clean and pasteurized.

India was a really interesting experience. Before we got there, they gave us tons of lectures on how sad and how impoverished some of the things we would see would be. The actuality of it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined (though there were some shady areas) but it was still really sad to see in a lot of places. I think the combination of seeing the train station and the Taj Mahal in the same day was probably a really good summary of India – both its highs and its lows.

Thailand

My time spent in Thailand has probably been the best part of the entire Semester at Sea experience so far. I went outside the normal realms of being a tourist to volunteer at an English camp in Northern, rural Thailand. It was an SAS trip that was organized/sponsored by the Volunthai program (An organization that works mainly to teach English to Thai students).

Our group was small, only about 16 people (15 students and one member of the staff who was our leader), so we fit easily into two vans for the long drive to the Ban Khwao province. We stopped briefly for lunch at a Thai mall and then hit a couple rest stops, but spent the majority of our first day in Thailand in the vans, watching beautiful scenery pass us by (about 8 hours) and wishing we could get out to tae pictures. When we finally got to the hotel, we were tired and hungry, so we luckily only had enough time to set down our bags and bounce a couple times on the beds before they put us back on the busses to drive us across the road to dinner. At dinner on the first night we met the people who had organized the camp and who were in charge of doing all the real work. Most of them spoke English and Thai, so they would also serve as our translators in the next couple days. Dinner was amazing, fried fish, soup, veggies, fruit – and pretty much everything was at least a little bit spicy. It was also at dinner that night that I committed the huge social faux pas of attempting to shake the hand (they just don’t do that here, they bow their heads and make prayer-hands) of the big man who was in charge of everything. It was really awkward. Luckily, the Thai people are also incredibly warm and friendly and not easily offended by stupid Americans, so I’m pretty sure it all worked out. But it was horribly quiet and awkward for a good many seconds after I touched his hand. After dinner we had a quick meeting that explained how the camp would work, the tentative schedule, and really just got us super excited about meeting the kids the next day.

Our first day of camp was a busy one. We woke up around 7:00, got ready, had breakfast at the school, and had time for another short meeting before the kids arrived. I keep saying kids, which is rather incorrect, because the students were aged 15-18, not the little elementary-school kids we had been expecting. We went through the boring speeches of the opening ceremony and then got to spend the rest of the day singing songs, playing games, and dancing, to give the students a chance to practice the English they already knew (we weren’t really there to teach them, we were there to give them the opportunity to get comfortable using English with native English-speakers). Kids in Thailand don’t feel the need to grow up as fast as high-schoolers do at home, so they were all willing and excited to play games with us, and sing our silly songs, and that was really surprising. After camp that day, we took a tour of the silk factories in town (the major industry of the area) and I ate a silk worm!!! (terrible texture, but it tasted like a bean!). We had the chance to watch every step of the process, from the worms themselves to the dying of the threads to the little shop where they sell silk everything. And that night we had another amazing meal with our Thai hosts (pad thai in Thailand is the best thing ever!) This time they pulled out the karaoke machine and we had ourselves a multi-cultural little dance party that night that was ridiculously fun. It was so cool that people who don’t even speak the same language can have so much fun laughing and dancing together. They attempted to teach us how to dance traditionally, and as a group we failed pretty miserably, but had a lot of fun.

The next day we played more of the same awesome camp games, sang songs, and ate lots of interesting Thai snacks. We had a traditional Thai lunch where we sat on the floor (feet pointed away from everybody else) and ate sticky rice with our bare hands. We had another long fancy closing ceremony at the end of the day where everyone who had played any part in camp at all got recognition for it, which was very nice. We then headed back to the hotel, packed up, and were sent off to spend our last night doing a home-stay with on of the students and their family.

My Thai sister (Nat) picked me up in a tuktuk (old truck/taxi-type thing) and we drove to her home for the evening. The home stay was the most incredible part of the whole experience. I feel like I learned so much in those few hours. I went to temple, was given a bracelet by a Buddhist monk, saw a crocodile, helped to cook dinner, sang and danced with the family, learned to weave baskets, took a shower from a bucket on the back porch, figured out how to flush the toilets, fed the monks, met the whole family… everything. I did everything. And I’m sure there is also so much that I missed out on. My experiences at the Buddhist temple were probably the most interesting. Meeting the monks, having the opportunity to offer them food and bow to them and just to take part in a really important ritual of daily life was so cool. Indescribably cool.

Heading back to the school the next morning, we took a tuktuk ride of the area. I’m amazed by how absolutely beautiful Thailand is, everything is green and growing. There are chickens and skinny cows and buffalo running everywhere. And the air is perfectly clean and pure. I’m doubtful its as nice in the big cities, but it was pretty much a paradise in this rural province. When we got back to the school, we had to load up for the long drive back to the ship. I was surprised by how emotional the goodbye became. As we said goodbye to the students, the teachers, our host families, there were hugs and crying all around. Nobody wanted to leave. Nobody wanted us to have to go. It was awful. But we did it, we got in the vans and drove away, waving for as long as we possibly could. We stopped for lunch on the drive and again had incredibly delicious Thai food and at a rest stop a little bit later and I ate a grasshopper!! (there was a guy selling them on the side of the road and we thought we ought to try them out – tasted a lot like a potato chip!) The rest of the ride we basically spent reliving our experience and making plans to return to Thailand.

I’m actually serious about the idea of returning to Thailand. We were so completely welcomed there, that it would be hard not to go back. I had thought people were kind in Vietnam, but deep down they wanted us to buy things, whereas the people I met in Thailand really just wanted to meet us, to learn from us, and to let us into their homes and their lives. It was awesome. It was one of those almost cliché feel good experiences in which you are sure you learned more from the people you were helping than them from you (the workcamp feeling). I’m going to try and stay in touch with my host family and with the other volunteers who had been there to be in charge of everything. Thailand is an awesome country, I’m going back. There is so more to see and do than I got the chance to experience, and I want to re-experience all the things I just did for more time and with more people. So, I’ll just have to go back.

Good Night and Goodbye Vietnam!

So on my final day in Vietnam, Molly and I decided to take a trip to the Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels are about an hour and a half north of Saigon, Cu Chi is famous for its 200-kilometer network of underground tunnels. The tunnels were built and used by the Vietcong forces during wars with the French and the Americans.

There was an official SAS program that would have taken us to the tunnels, but we decided that going independently would be the much more affordable way to do it. We found a travel agency that gave English-speaking tours to the tunnels and bought tickets with them. We took a taxi to the travel agency, bought our tickets, and then had breakfast at the next-door French restaurant. Then we hopped on the bus, for an exciting 2 hour drive. The traffic was really bad that morning, but even worse, the air-conditioning on the bus kept shutting down. Every time the AC would quit, the bus would slow down (but not stop) and two guys would jump off and run along side the bus, pounding on the sides of it until the AC started back up again. The bus driver would be yelling out the window to them whether or not it was working. It was quite the experience!

When we got to the tunnels, we watched a video explaining their history and construction that was interesting not really for its information, but for how propagandistic it was (and it was biased to the side that I never get to hear bias for back home). After the film we toured the area, seeing the carefully hidden doors to the tunnels, the air vents, the smoke vents, and the traps. Then we had the chance to crawl through the tunnels ourselves. What was amazing was not just how dark and creepy the tunnels were but how small they were – and we were seeing them after they had been enlarged 40% to accommodate tourists. It was impossible to imagine actually living for months at a time without being able to stand, and spending most of that time crawling on your hands and knees, or in the lower sections, even on your belly.

The other cool thing about the Cu Chi was that we were seriously out in the jungle. We walked on a winding muddy path through dense forest that you really couldn’t see through. Gunshots rang out over the area because there was a shooting range for people to try out an AK-47, and that sound added a lot of atmosphere to the place. We were there for about 2 hours total, and by the time we were done, we were all hot and sweaty and ready to climb back onto our (semi) air-conditioned bus.

The ride back was pretty uneventful, and once were in Saigon again Molly and I got lunch at a little hole in the wall restaurant that had awesome food. At lunch we met a really cool American lady who has been living in Vietnam, teaching, for the past couple years. She was really awesome, she told us all about her love of Vietnam, gave us some shopping advice, and even some tips about what we ought to do in Thailand. It was really great to have the opportunity to share our Vietnam experiences with her, to tell her about the awesomeness of our entire trip, and just to reflect for a little while on how amazing this place was with someone who felt that way so strongly that she had picked up and moved here.

Though I basically loved all of my time in Vietnam, the thing that stands out the most to me was how incredibly friendly, kind, and welcoming everybody we met was to us, even when we are so obviously American. I had expected to meet people who continued to hold grudges against the U.S. for the war (which would have been completely understandable), but nobody did, at least not to us. Tung, our tour guide from the Mekong Delta trip said it was because the Vietnamese are Buddhist, and they choose not to hold onto regrets, not to live in the past, and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that not a single person was unkind to me in any way shape or form in Vietnam, and that was wonderful.

On a last note, I also have to include the song I made up with Molly and Sam that sums up the hardships of our fourth day in Vietnam. To the tune of the 12 days of Christmas, the countdown part:

12 bikers honking
11 knee-deep puddles
10 different tailors
9 streets to cross
8 knock-off movies
7 pairs of shoes
6 shots of liquor
5 tired girls
4 dollars left
3 slippery steps
2 broken ankles
And 1 horrible, motorbike death!