The Old Woman and the Sea.

We are slowly moving into the "Winter" season here in South India. This means that our security guards have started wearing adorable sweater vests and wool caps at nighttime, and I'm not soaked in a sheen of sweat until at least 20 minutes after leaving an air-conditioned room, rather than the usual 5 minutes. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually fantasizing about wearing polar fleece and long underwear.

My friends Kate, Cecilia and I traveled to the small fishing village of Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu this weekend, for one of our last weekend trips. The town had an awkward vibe...partially devastated by the 2004 tsunami, it seemed to be stuck between becoming a complete tourist resort town, a sculptor's colony, or a tiny fishing village. The result was a confusing but pleasant mix of all three. The beach was a perfect example of this confusion: groups of fisherman cleaning out their nets and shoving brightly painted fishing boats into the ocean, poor women clutching emaciated babies to their hips while attempting to sell cheap necklaces and blankets to whoever will look their way, and Western tourists stripped down to bikinis, sunbathing happily on beach towels, ambivalent to the chaos around them.

Kate, Cecilia and I spent out time on our rented bicycles, exploring the phenomenal stone carvings and ancient temples left over from the Pallava Empire. We did some bouldering too, scrambling up and down precariously balanced rocks admist herds of goats, Indian tourists, and the occasional monkey.

On Saturday night, we had henna done on our hands by a sweet young woman. Her mother looked on, trying every few minutes to sell us some random trinket from her tiny shop. They were particularly fascinated by Cecilia's foot tattoo, and kept asking all kinds of questions about it, like whether it was done by a machine or hand. Then she got all excited and called the grandmother in, an elderly, toothless, wrinkled, but entirely gorgeous woman who had been sitting outside. The old woman was all smiles when she saw us, and showed us her arms, which were completely covered in the weaving dark lines of tattoos that looked about as old as she was. Using her daughter and granddaughter as translators, she described to us how she got the tattoos when she was 16, how they were done by hand (which I don't even want to imagine), and how she had a fever for a week afterward. The old woman's daughter pointed at her tattoos and the enormous gold rings dangling from both nostrils, and said, "these are the things the older generations did," chuckling to herself. They all seemed pretty fascinated by the thought of machine-made tattoos. It seems that their are infinite ways to express ourselves through cultural practices, and those ways will always seem strange to people separated by a whole world of languages, societies, environment and history.

Ethan comes to town.

My friend Ethan came to visit me last week to begin his Grand Asian Adventure. Having him here made me realize exactly how bizarre this wonderful country is all over again. On the day that he flew in to Hyderabad, I took him on a bike ride around campus. We biked down the long, winding road to the main campus, passing water buffalo with their young, chai canteens, monsoon lakes and about 30 dogs doing an excellent job at playing dead. By this point, all of these things seem very normal to me, but Ethan was in a somewhat state of shock after his first 15 minute bike ride in India.

The next day, after letting him sleep for about 12 hours, we set off to explore Hyderabad. Although I've been living here for 3.5 months, I've been so busy traveling and taking cooking/sitar/yoga classes that I haven't actually had much time to just wander around the city. We took a shared auto rickshaw from the small gate to the Lingampally train station. Once again, Ethan thought it was hilarious that the rickshaw driver insisted that we join his already overflowing vehicle, and proceeded to blast bollywood music the entire way to the station. A man joined us about halfway there and grabbed Ethan's hand, exclaiming, "Hello! I am Johnson!" Ethan smiled and said, "I'm Ethan!" "No, no!" The man kept smiling and shaking his hand, "I am JOHNSON!" There was nothing to do but smile, as so often is the case here.

At the train station, the fascination with Ethan continued. One man came over to us as we waited for our train, placed himself between Ethan's legs (we were sitting down) and started a delightful broken English conversation with us....something about how he was going to Delhi that very same day, and would we like to come? It's a very long distance....and that was his train right over there! We just smiled.

We got off the train after a few stops and took a rickshaw to the Hussain Sagar lake. There's a gigantic Buddha statue in the center of the lake, which we got to by taking a rickety ferry along with a handful of other Indian families. On the ferry, a group of teenagers sat right next to us. After several giggle episodes, one of the girls finally spoke, in perfect English. She wanted to know all about us, where we were from, what we were doing, etc. Then she asked for our signature, on the notepad that one of her friends had just magically produced. It may have been the first time anyone has asked me for my signature, so it was a big moment for me. After we signed, they gathered around and examined our names, and demanded to know why Ethan had written his name in Urdu (Urdu is a language similar to Hindi, but written in the Arabic script). They wanted his name in English, they kept saying. So he printed his name in parenthesis next to the signature. As we were getting off the ferry, one of the girls shoved a gaudy, rhinestoney ring into my hand. Meri dost! (my friend) she said.

At that point we were quite famished, so we took a rickshaw to my favorite Indian restaurant, Chutney's. Our rickshaw driver thought the fact that we were going to Chutney's so hilarious, that he told anybody who was willing to listen...other rickshaw drivers, people walking by on the street, security guards, etc...I decided to show off a little by busting out some Hindi. This too he found hilarious. We pulled up at a gas station to get gas and he demanded that I repeat the few feeble sentences I had attempted to the gas station attendent, who also laughed excessively. Being the butt of every joke definitely gives one a sense of humility.

For the sunset, we made our way up to the Birla Temple, a gorgeous white marble temple perched on top of a hill overlooking the whole city. We watched the sky turn to delicious shades of orange and pink while waiting in line to see the Shiva idol, and listening to a elderly women chant "hare krishna, hare shiva..." over a loudspeaker. We met an interesting man in line at the temple, who also thought everything we said pretty dang funny. After we got through the procession and saw the Shiva idol, the funny little man latched on to us and decided to show us around the museum and connecting dinosaurium right next door to the temple. He had already bought us tickets, and was pretty friendly, so it was hard to refuse. We awkwardly walked around the museum, which was completely empty, and the topic of conversation kept getting more and more bizarre, so we began to think of heading back. Note to self: always tell random men that the man you are with IS in fact your husband.

On our way back to the train station, the gods decided that that moment was the perfect time to dispense the last of the monsoon rains over Hyderabad. We found ourselves wading through 2 feet of filthy water in the streets, drenched to the bone, attempting to navigate back alleys in our mad search for the train station.

We eventually found it, and had a completely crazy yet typically Indian train journey back to Gachibowli, where we gave in to our cravings and enjoyed the best Domino's pizza I've ever tasted. All in all, it was just another day in India. A crazy, chaotic, wet, tasty, beautiful day in India.

Nepali Odyssey

By the time we had reached the Nepalese border town of Sunauli, riding 9 hours to Pokhara on the roof of a bus actually sounded like a sane idea. So my brave and exhausted travel companions and I climbed up the shaky ladder onto the roof of the bus where we made our selves comfortable and "safe" by burying ourselves with luggage. We were eventually joined by around 10 Nepalese guys who would leap on and off the roof at random villages and police stops. We stayed buried beneath the luggage for the majority of the trip.

Perhaps our rash decision would make more sense if I explained a bit more about our journey thus far:

Estathea, Cecilia and I left Hyderabad on Wednesday, Sept 23rd, on luxurious plane ride to Delhi. We spent the night and next morning in Delhi, and in the afternoon we boarded a train to Gorakpur. When we first hopped up onto the train, I thought it was a joke. There were probably more people in our car than there were in my graduating class. We managed to find our seats without too much trouble, but we were met by around 12 Indian men in our compartment (that seats 6) who looked like they had neither tickets nor any intention of moving. After an animated discussion in Hindi, around 5 of them left. The aisles were still so pregnant with bodies that a trip to the bathroom was a futile effort.

When we decided to fold the beds out and get some sleep, we had to kick 4 boys off of the very top bunk, where they had been awkwardly perched for the last 5 hours or so. Every time I woke up during the night (about every half hour or so), the scene enfolding in the surrounding bunks and aisles became more and more absurd. There were literally people everywhere! Grown men and women and little children were sleeping on every surface the train had to offer, and then some. There were women in the aisles with newborn babies next to them, and every bunk had at least 3 people on it, who I'm guessing didn't know each other. When I woke up to get ready to get off the train, there was some random guy perched on the very end of my bunk. And the craziest thing was, nobody was getting stressed out or frustrated by the insanity of our train car! I kept thinking that if that train was in America, it would be a train full of stressed out, pissed off, disgruntled people about to suffer from an anxiety attack from having to touch so many strangers.

But this is India, and that scene was not so strange. People here have no sense of personal space, partly because there's just so many damn people that it would be impractical, but partly because the individual is not important here. Here, unlike America, the sense of human unity (physical as well as spiritual!) is so great that people will happily suffer through a sleepless night on a train so that their neighbor has a place to lie down. Bizarre, but incredible.

As soon as we arrived in Gorakpur, 3 hours late at 7 am, we jumped into a jeep that would take us to the Nepalese border. Our jeep was full of 2 Nepalese families, and 3 Nepalese guys we had met on the train. I thought they must be joking when 3 more army guys knocked on the window, but no, of course there was enough space for them. One of the army guys was literally hugging the driver the whole 3 hours to the border.

So by the time we got to Sunauli, and bought our Nepalese visas, we were feeling pretty crazy. And the roof of the bus seemed like an incredibly good idea, considering the amount of people crowded into the inside of the bus. It turns out we got on the bus that makes a stop at every house from Sunauli to Pokhara, because it ended up taking us 11 hours instead of the anticipated 5....

......but we were finally in NEPAL!!!!!

Nepal was like a dreamland. We played all week long, going kayaking and rowing, visiting an island temple in the middle of the lake in Pokhara, climbing a mountain to a peace stupa, watching paragliders soaring above us like lazy insects, eating delicious food and strolling the streets filled with craft stores, cafes and hotels.

We went on a mini "trek," hiking up a mountain on an old trail to the tiny mountain-top village of Sarangkot. We took a guide with us from this women-run trekking company called "3 Sisters"--dedicated to "empowering the women of Nepal." We felt empowered. It was our guide, Saraswathi, who suggested we go paragliding, after noticing us staring longingly at all the tiny parachutes in the sky. We said: "Yes, why the bleep not?!?"

And so the next day, instead of trekking to another mountain top village like we had planned, I found myself being strapped into an enormous backpack by a strapping young Nepalese man in flowerly board shorts. And then, without more than a couple sentences of instruction, I was attached to the Nepalese guy and running as hard as I could towards the edge of the cliff! And then I was flying! Actually flying! It was the most incredible feeling ever and quite honestly no words will ever be able to describe it. So I will leave you to try to imagine soaring over village huts, rice paddies, and the lake surrounding by the most magnificent mountains in the world at your leisure.

Our week in Nepal completely jumpstarted me both mentally and physically. It felt so amazing to use my muscles again, hiking and rowing every day, and the clean, cool air was incredibly refreshing after 2.5 months in smoggy India. Surprisingly, I think being away from India actually made me understand it more. I've decided that this country is so wonderful and insane that you only realize what it's about until you've removed yourself from it.