I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner...

Wow, this has been a huge hiatus! Apparently there's this crazy thing called "school" and took over my life. However, I am officially done with school and heading back to the U.S. in four days so it's time to wrap up.

I've done a great deal of traveling since I last checked in! Seen some great sights and taken amazing pictures.  I took a trip to the Ajanta and Ellora caves with a bunch of friends from the program a few weekends back. These caves were carved into the mountains of Maharastra hundreds of years back. Most interestingly, they were carved from the top down.

These are the caves of Ajanta. Everyone  says that the caves at Ellora are more interesting, but I preferred Ajanta. There was more to see and the paintings were amazing.

I've seen this painting in a couple dozen history books, so it was cool to see it up close!

Kelli and Kim

Ryan and his umbrella. He's clearly smarter than any of us.

Gwen and Kim in a moment of awe.

Great picture... or greatest picture?

From left to right: Chelsea, Kelli, me, Gwen, Ryan, and Kim.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

Take Two.

Me, obviously.

Hope you like 'em! I'll put up the Kerala pictures by tomorrow.

Some quick notes

So I started my internship last week. I'm working with Saheli, this organization that works with female sex workers in Pune in the red-light district on Laxmi Road. I'm interviewing FSWs- some of whom are HIV negative and some who are HIV-positive- to gauge the psychological trauma they've experienced and compare and contrast with those of the opposite status. It's been very interesting so far- I haven't ironed out all the kinks in my questionnaire but the interviews I've done so far have been very informative. I also love and adore my interpreter, Vaishali, who makes everything much, much easier.

I'm also super excited because I'M GOING TO ROME!!! I can't believe I already got in- the application process only wrapped up two weeks ago. Finally, 5 years of Latin will actually count for something!! (Italian might come in handy once in a while, too.)

We have the next week off for Diwali and so we can travel around India on our own. I'm going to Kerala with Dani and Chelsea until Thursday. Kerala is this f-ing gorgeous state in SW India. (Google image search at your own risk; you may stare and your screen and drool at the pretty.) I can't even tell you how excited I am- it's going to be so much fun, and Dani and Chelsea are going to be phenomenal to travel with.

I'll check back in on my return on Thursday!!

Mumbai!

Wow, I’m so behind again. Let me give you a quick update for our Mumbai trip.

We stayed in a YWCA- the women’s equivalent of the YMCA. I was kind of surprised of its setup- I’ve never stayed in a YMCA or YWCA before, so I didn’t realize it would be so hotel-like. It looked out onto “Old Mumbai,” built when it was part of the Empire and which really does look like an old European city.

Some group snapshots:

Anna, Stephanie and Amy all look so cute!

Our first stop? St. Vincent’s Centre for the Visually Impaired.  I was particularly interested in this because, well, I am the daughter of two special-ed teachers and anything about disability always makes me prick up my ears. I think it’s particularly interesting in India, because there’s not a lot of documentation on the subject, considering how ridiculously big the country is and comparing it to the rest of the world. (It REALLY gets like that if you try and find out anything significant about psychological issues in India. Psychology as a discipline is only just gaining a real foothold in Indian society.) I also don’t have a whole lot of experience with the blind, so that also made things more interesting.

Here’s something cool we found there- a Braille typewriter. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get a picture where you can see the actual Braille, but it’s really cool.

Someone showed us his modified computer and text-to-speech system.

Yeah, this poster pretty much says it all.

Then I got to geek out a little more because we went to the Mahatma Gandhi Museum. Gandhiji has always been a fascination of mine and one of the subjects that really drew me to examine India more closely. Getting to visit his house was so cool.

Pictures of me and Giselle (respectively) with Gandhiji.

The museum’s mostly made up of photographs and documents of Gandhiji. A lot of his quotes line the halls.

Baby Gandhiji!!

This is one of my favorite things that we found: hidden away, there is a letter that Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler in the early 30s. (If I remember correctly it was from 1934, so right around when he took over… Czechoslovakia, maybe?) It sounds like a 70s buddy cop TV show waiting to happen, and the letter is as bizarre as it sounds. He basically argues, “Hey, why you gotta fight, baby? Have you ever thought about trying nonviolence? It’d probably get your way much faster.”

There’s also a letter that he wrote to FDR asking him to lobby for an independent India in WWII, but that’s not as entertaining as Gandhi and Hitler.

Here’s a picture of where he used to meet visitors.

They also had these nifty dioramas on his life. Here’s his famous march to the sea, the satyagraha, and his death, respectively.

Then we went to Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world and the setting for Slumdog Millionaire. They very clearly brought us to the nicer parts- it was astonishingly clean and very much not what you’d think of as a slum. I’m not so naïve as to think that’s what the whole thing looks like, though.

We met some local potters.

There were all of these little kids that swarmed around us and started asking me to take pictures of them.

A goat and…

A KITTY! (for Mom’s benefit, of course. He even sort of looks like Freddy.)

A view of the rooftops of Dharavi.

And now for something completely different..

I'm back from Mumbai now. I had an absolutely fabulous time. I didn't really get to explore the city much on my own (and by "not much" I mean "hardly at all") but I'm fine with that. I loved all of the lectures that we went to and things like that. I wasn't feeling particularly at the top of my game- I was so tired that it was really hard to not nod off during these lectures (which had nothing to do with their quality, as they were both fascinating). I also experienced a couple of focal seizures. Again, I must stress that these are more of an annoyance than anything else to me and have never escalated into something more dangerous. This is also the first time I've had them since I came to India, which is pretty damn good.

But I'm not going to put my pictures up just yet. Instead, I want to write something that's almost ~educational.~ Obviously, there are lots of preconceived notions about life in India. I know because I had them too. There are good and bad parts of this, of course. But I just want to address some of the parts of life here that no one ever tells you about.

1. Everywhere you go there are people on the side of the road selling socks. Absolutely everywhere. I have no idea why. There just are. There are also a ton of booksellers on the road, but that makes much more sense than selling socks.
2. It is actually fairly easy to get American products/food in India. They’re just presented differently. For example, there is a KFC on
   JM Road
   that is a couple stories tall. Even the Papa John’s is a classy two-story restaurant (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Papa John’s that had a place to sit down, let alone one that had a terrace). And if you go to the supermarket (particularly one called Dorabjee’s) there are an absurd amount of American foods there. When I went yesterday, I saw a huge rack of Pringles (which I’ve also encountered at Big Bazaar), Oreos, tortilla chips and (my personal favorite) Goldfish! Unsurprisingly, there were a LOT of white people shopping there.
3. Also, the pizza in India in general is surprisingly good. It’s actually better than a lot of the pizza I’ve discovered in Washington D.C. (With the obvious exception of 2Amy’s. I still love you, 2Amy’s.) There’s also a lot more variety on what you can get on your pizzas. There are a whole slew of Tandoori pizzas, for example. The only thing that weirds me out about Indian pizza that they don’t use tomato sauce on their pizzas- it’s actually ketchup-based. I would be freaked out if I found that in American pizza, but somehow it works here.
4. When cars back up here, they play music. Weird music, too- nursery rhymes and stuff like that. There’s one by the hostel that plays “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” at least once a day. I’ll never get it un-stuck from my head. Even the horns on cars are musical.
5. I cannot stress enough the number of stray dogs here. You think you’re prepared, but you’re not. They’re EVERYWHERE.

A Holiday in Goa

My trip to Goa turned out to be this horrifying comedy of errors. It was definitely not the kind of relaxing getaway you'd expect from a weekend trip to a tropical state. Goa is definitely gorgeous, but Kelli and Priyanka and I had some phenomenally bad luck. We only got two days in of quality Goa time, and even those... not so quality.

First, let me explain our fun with the hotel:

We arrived at 8 am on Friday morning and it was pouring rain. When we got to the hotel, they said we'd have to go up and see the room before we booked it. It was very nice- the bed was really comfy and there was a TV and stuff. There were two doors on the opposite wall. The guy opened up one and said "Aaaaand this is the balcony! :D :D :D" Then he said, "And this one is the bathroom." DOES NOT open the door, but merely gestures to it.

We decide that we like the hotel, so we go down and pay. We come back to the room and collapse onto the bed- it's a long-ass busride to Goa and it's nice to take a load off.



Priyanka

 We have, however, been in transit for several hours and thus really have to pee. Kelli opens the bathroom door... and finds this:

Okay, so you can't see it well, but basically... the bathtub faucet was exploding. The entire room was drenched; you could hardly open the damn door without getting wet. The water was really warm, too. When the guy from the hotel came up to look at it, it was almost like a routine from a Marx Brothers' movie.
So they move to another room which is not nearly as nice. for one thing, the door to the balcony would not close. When we went down to the desk to ask if someone could fix it, they decided the most helpful thing to do was...

To take the FRONT door off its hinges. Yeah, I didn't get it either.

Next, the beach:

Around three or four on Friday it finally cleared up enough to head down to the beach. It was gorgeous, and we pretty much had the beach to ourself (for a while, anyway, but we'll come back to in a moment). So we enjoyed swimming (or rather sitting and soaking) in the Arabian Sea.

But then we got swarmed by guys. They kept asking if they could take our pictures (which they would probably cut-and-paste onto nude models) and saying nasty things to us in Hindi. This really freaked me and Priyanka out (Kelli not so much), so we moved up onto the rocks.

But after fifteen minutes, we got pounced on by a gang of hawkers, who kept trying to sell us stuff and would not leave us alone. We got so frustrated that we ended up leaving the beach entirely. (We did end up going back later that night, but it was still very frustrating.
Okay, now onto the parts that didn't suck:

THE FOOD. OH GOD THE FOOD. Goa has amazing seafood, which is my favorite thing ever. (Prawns, people, prawns! No lobster, because it was too expensive, but still.) We were particularly in love with a restaurant called Top Nosh. We ended up going three times because they were never busy and the food was awesome.

I rest my case.

Also, on Saturday, we went to Old Goa, back from the days when the state was a Portuguese colony. For a hardcore Art History slash general-cathedral-geekery nerd, this was hardcore awesome!

And here's an awesome statue of Gandhiji from Old Goa as well.

Then we went to three Hindu temples.



A detail from the bottom of that column.



We left Sunday around 11 am. However, since we took an overnight bus on the way there, I don't think we realized what an insanely long trip it was. We didn't get back to Pune until midnight, at which point I just crawled into bed and crashed.

Last week was kind of nuts as far as school goes. I had two papers due on the same day. Then I had a Contemporary India exam and a presentation for FSS assigned for the other. (Turns out we ran out of time in FSS, so I didn't go until Monday, which was the same day that our last paper for the seminar portion of the class was due and our very last session.

Tomorrow we leave for a three-day trip to Mumbai. Next week we get the menus for our internship options (as well as a whole bunch of other assignments) and we start writing our research proposal. And then the week after that the internships start!

G'night everybody! I'll be reporting back in when I get back from Mumbai.