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.