South India Tour Part 1

Guess what?

The tour of South India was super awesome. Perhaps the single most worthwhile experience of my entire life. Maybe the most fun I've ever had. Certainly a memory I will treasure until the end of my days.

Even with my planned liberal editing of the events of the trip, I am still planning to split the 17-day extravaganza into perhaps three parts. Part 1 will take us from our departure to Munnar, and will then segue into some other things on my mind lately, namely, spending the holidays away. The other parts will come at a later date. Hopefully it won't be too boring, but I like recording the things that I've done.

At midnight changing from the 1st of December to 2nd December, the other four Surat exchange students and myself boarded a train from our hectic terminal that would take us all the way Mumbai. It was already loaded with most of the other exchange students (there are 15 in our district - 5 live in Surat and most of the rest live north of us). This was a sleeper train, however, and we all went to our assigned bunks and tried to grab a few hours of sleep before our 6 AM arrival in Mumbai.

The first day was generally spent sitting, sweaty and disgusting, in waiting rooms or on trains. It was about a five hour train ride to Mumbai from Surat. When we got there we sat in a waiting room for three hours, then took a 45 minute taxi ride across the city to get to the other Mumbai terminal. The drive made me want to explore Mumbai, it looks to be a lovely city. Then we sat at the terminal for an hour or two, then we got on the train and embarked on a 26 hour journey to Cochin, which is quite a ways to the south.

I won't spend an awful lot of time describing train travel in India, but it might merit a little explanation. I'd heard a bit about the Indian train system before I got here, so I, at least, was curious. In a sleeper carriage, you can fit 8 people in one aisle space. On one side of the aisle are two beds, one on top of the other, lengthwise along the train. On the other side, which is much wider, are two stacks of three bunks each, positioned in the other direction. The middle bunk generally stays folded up into the wall until it's time to go to sleep, and the bottom bunks are used as benches. They provide food and snacks on the train, and there are even power outlets to charge your phones or your laptops or whatever, so at least you never get too bored. There generally more space and mobility, so it's way better than a plane. The only big beef I have is that they don't nearly provide enough space for luggage. We had a very nasty encounter with a wretched crone who had like four bags and threw all of ours into the aisle so she could have the entire underbelly of one bench. That might not make much sense to you, but trust me. It wasn't fair.

Sorry. I ended up spending more time describing the train than it really merited.

So the train ride, spent in the good company of the other exchange students, was about as tolerable as a 26 hour journey by train can be, and the food actually could have been a lot worse. We arrived at the Cochin train station, in the province of Kerala. In Kerala they generally speak their native tongue, Malayalam, or English. The national language, Hindi, is not spoken very much there. English is their language that connects them to the other provinces. This worked out well for us.

Cochin is a large city, but it is infinitely more attractive than Surat. It seems at the same time more Western and less traditional than Surat. Western, in that the shops are generally neater, tidier, and cleaner, and in that there's quite a bit of English spoken. Traditional, in that they don't seem quite so obsessed with the material and superficial things that the shops in Surat seem to cater to, and that the way people dress on the streets seems more Indian, rather than the idiotic, flamboyant imitations of Western fashion that I'm accustomed to. I like Cochin very much for all of these reasons.

The first day, we were exhausted and didn't really get out of the hotel until about 5, once everyone was done resting and showering properly. That first night we went to a really nice shop. This is more exciting than it sounds - in the South, especially these more touristy places, there are quite a few very upscale shops with a lot of beautiful, expensive traditional Indian things - woodwork, scarves, rugs, paintings, and all sorts of other exciting things. The shopkeepers really pamper you there, giving you free drinks and stuff, and all the while observing you and trying to sell you something. It's a very subtle art, what they do. Unlike many of their street counterparts, they have mastered the skill of making you want something without offensively pushing it on you, and they most certainly sell more things because of it.

Now I have a penchant for weapons. I mean, violence is cool. Not really, but you know what I mean. I've always had an extremely nerdy desire to have a collection of swords in my house when I grow up. I already have a wonderful machete that I purchased in Costa Rica sitting back in the United States. At this particular establishment, they had a very fine collection of swords. After examining all of them and consulting with the employee assigned to me, I purchased a rather beautiful ceremonial short sword for the price of 2700 rupees, haggled down from 4000 rupees. It's pretty awesome. Swords are awesome. So is haggling.

The night was uneventful - they laid out a private dinner buffet for us and played a fantastic collection of Christmas music for us. Then we all hung out together in hotel rooms and went to bed.

The next morning we went to see the sights in Cochin. Like most of Keralan coastal areas, Cochin is stuffed with wide rivers and canals, with a sort of mangrove ecosystem operating on the shores. A lot of the economy is based around that too, mostly fishing and the like. First we went to this ancient Dutch church, where the famous explorer and infamous asshole Vasco da Gama was once buried. This was big news to a history geek like me. I mean, this is Vasco da Gama. He's pretty damn important. It was a beautiful church, and it was nearly 500 years old.

Something I like about traveling outside of the United States is that nearly every place in the world is older than us. I mean, think about it, nothing in our country can be much older than like, 300 years at this point. Maybe like the ruins of Jamestown or something. But you go nearly anywhere else, and you will find ancient things left and right, or certainly things older than us. It's humbling. In my day-to-day life in the US, I'm just not accustomed to seeing things this old. And India can be especially humbling in this since - it has been populated by civilizations since antiquity, and Hinduism is, I think, the eldest of the five main religions. So that was cool.

Just outside of the church was a kind of public square on the shores of a biggish river. There were these Chinese fishing nets there. I cannot describe them very well, but basically they work on some kind of lever system, where these massive nets are lowered into the water, and then hauled out by these huge ropes pulled manually by some hardworking laborers. Stretched along the edges of the square are a whole bunch of fish stands. We went and saw the Chinese fishing nets, and they let us haul some fish out of the river ourselves, then we explored the square a bit.

This place was infested with walking vendors selling moronic little things like irritating carved wooden flutes and stuffed animals for absurdly expensive prices. They were, perhaps, the most annoying people I have ever come across in my entire life. As opposed to the classy shop salesman, their strategy seems to be annoy you into purchasing their products so that they will go away. The only thing to do with these guys is to be rude and blunt. If you attempt to kindly reject their offer, it simply doesn't work.

Usually they start by approaching you and saying "Where you from?". When I tell them, they always say "Oh, US! Obama!" And then I say, yeah, yeah. Then they show you the product, and it is a terrible mistake to even look at it. They think that if you express the mildest interest in their product, you want it, and the only objective is price. So there was this snake made out of a bunch of separate pieces of wood that kind of moved if you wiggled it. I held it and looked at it and determined that it actually really sucked. So first the guy, who was crestfallen at my disapproval, progessively lowered the price until it was like a sixth of the original one. Finally, I lost my temper and said "You could give that to me for a fudging (this is not what I actually said) pese (their equivalent of the penny) and I wouldn't want it.

His hysterical last resort, as I strode away from him was to shriek "Obama! I like your president! Please!" To an extent, I feel bad for them. Obviously this is their livelihood. But I was eager to show them that I am not some stupid tourist, and also I wouldn't want them to get the impression that being a jackass is the way to sell things.

The fish market was awesome. There were all sorts of things there, included a hammerhead shark. Hammerhead sharks are awesome. Their heads look like hammers AND they're sharks. They're like the Ninja Assassins of maritime animals. Anyways, something cool you could do at the fish market was buy the fish yourself (and it wasn't too pricey) and then give to a cook that was standing, and order him to prepare the fish for you in whatever way you wanted. So I bought a small squid and some sizable prawns for myself and had them made to order. This excited me an inexpressable amount.

After our delectable lunch, we proceeded on a bus to Munnar. The bus ride was a bus ride. It does not merit discussion.

Turns out I have a lot more to say than I thought I would. So we'll cut things off there.

Christmas away

To be blunt, it sucks. But it could have been a lot worse. Christmas for me is not an especially religious holiday. I mean, obviously that's what it is, but what it really signifies to me is family. You have to be home, with your family for the holidays. End of story. For me, it's an unbreakable rule in the same vein as something like gravity. Evidently, of course, it can be broken.

In India, Christmas is just another commercial holiday of very little importance, and they don't do an awful lot to celebrate. Santa Claus came with one toy for my little brother Nishant, but other than that my family didn't observe it at all. And India, as a whole, doesn't care much. There are Christmas specials in the shops and that sort of thing, but it's just not given very much importance. It's probably less important than like St. Patrick's Day in the US. Not to mention that they don't have snow, a quintessential element of Christmas for me.

Nonetheless, my family knew that Christmas was going to be very important to me, and they knew that I was pretty bummed to be gone. There wasn't a whole lot they could do, but I really appreciated the fact that they could kind of understand what I was feeling.

On Christmas Eve, the 4 other Surat exchange students and I got together at one of their apartments, blew up inflatable snowmen, ordered Domino's pizza, and watched "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation". And you know what? It was a good Christmas. There's something that's all the sweeter about making Christmas happen in a country where they seem rather determined to adopt an attitude of complete indifference to the whole affair.

In Christmas Day, I opened my presents from my wonderful real family, and my dad and I went out for dinner at an excellent Chinese restaurant. Then I had a nice long conversation with my real family. Skype was out of commission, unfortunately, but this was certainly better than nothing. So Christmas could have been a lot worse. It sucked to be away, and God knows I'm never going to do it again, if at all possible, but I'm sure when I'm old, this Christmas is going to stick out in my memory. It was a great comfort to find love and support even on the other side of the world.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

WOO TOUR

So I'm going to be embarking on the thrilling tour of South India from midnight tonight until the 17th of December. The tour will take us to all sorts of exciting places like the famous beaches of Goa, tropical Kerala as featured in The God of Small Things (no I will not be meeting or encountering the Orange-drink Lemon-drink Man in any context whatsoever), and Land's End, the very bottom of India. And all sorts of other exciting temples and museums and places of natural beauty that I can't recall. It promises to be fantastic. If I time and internet (both of which may be unlikely) I may attempt to do a midway blog entry, but otherwise I plan on keeping a daily journal and taking kajillions of pictures. So there will be an ample supply of things to write about on my return.

There's been some other news lately that I may as well fill you in on.

- I changed host families. This was a traumatizing experience, at least leading up to it. It wasn't as bad as that time that I left home thinking I was going to be gone for an entire year. But it was stressful. However, all of this went away when I met my new host family, which is comprised of a great group of people. I miss my old family, and I especially miss the fact that it seemed like my entire social life revolved around my two brothers and their groups of friends.

- I was kicked out of my school, along with the other exchange students. This school expected us to attend every day, which obviously sounds very reasonable but for a variety of reasons is rather difficult for us exchange students. So I missed these two weeks for the funeral, which at least they didn't blame me for. But when we told them we were going to be gone for nearly three weeks on the tour, they decided they didn't want to teach us anymore because of our inability to stay in class and caught up.

This is a bugger, not so much because I loved the school, the subject, or the people in it, but more because I need something to do with my day. Apparently my club is going to work on it while we're on the tour. Possibly they will have me take daytime classes in useful/relevant things, like Gujarati, Hindu classical music...the possibilities could potentially be endless.

Anyways, goodbye.

Diwali

Upon my return to India, I was very pleased to discover that there was another festival in the works, and that the days leading up to it reached anticipatory heights that rivaled the pre-Christmas celebration in the United States. Diwali is the climax of these last few months of festival season, an all-out blaze of celebration and bombast. In my opinion it's the second-best holiday in the world. The only better that I have experienced is United States Christmas. Frankly, there are almost zero things in the world that make me happier than Christmas at home, so it's not a knock on Diwali that it isn't quite up to those very high standards.

Now, Diwali is the celebration of the return of Lord Ram to his village where he was unjustly exiled from some 14 years prior, I believe. The story of why he was exiled and how he returned constitutes the entirety of the religious epic poem The Ramayana. I am familiar with a very condensed overview of the story, and it is far too lengthy and complicated to attempt to explain in blog form. If you'd really like the full story, I'd be more than happy to give it to you, but not at the moment. The point is, folks were overjoyed that he came back, because by all accounts he was pretty great. Here's what is done.

People take colorful chalk and draw a new, intricate design on the street in front of their house every morning. They're cool. I wish I was a good enough blogger to post pictures to go along with this, but it just takes way too long to upload a picture with my internet at the moment. They did this from the day I returned (November 1st) up until several days after it ended (November 7th), and some people have continued to draw them in front of their houses, although they have slowly gotten less multifaceted and colorful.

Then there are lights. They string lights all up around the outside of their houses. Every business does the same. This sounds comparable to Christmas but it's not, because the sheer number of lights on display absolutely blows Christmas lighting out of the water. At some malls it's almost as overwhelming as like, Times Square. Ok, perhaps that was a stretch. But it's really overwhelming. They use all colors, including orange. For some reason you never find orange in any United States Christmas lit scene, and I think I understand why. The color orange, for all of its merits, is an exceedingly ugly color when used in neon lighting. They use these strings of lights enthusiastically to the point of garishness, but it's so festive and genuine that it is very easy for me to forgive a little aesthetic displeasure.

Diwali season is considered a lucky time to buy and make investments, so a huge amount of people do things like buy cars and houses. At the very least, everyone buys something, and stores - clothes stores especially - respond with insane discounts, like "Buy 1 get 5 free" or "80% off all items". Everyone took advantage of this. They also buy new things for around the house - my house got a new portrait of Sai Baba (kind of a Hindu saint - he's quite revered), new couch covers, new teacups, new curtains. And all of us got some new clothes. Young Indians are exceedingly focused on things like "looking cool" (which is one of greatest frustrations but I'm not going to get into that now), and they especially care about it during Diwali time.

Then there are the fireworks.

The English language is marvelously expressive, but there simply are not words to describe the effect of Diwali fireworks. I will still do my best. It's absolutely nothing like the Fourth of July. Nowhere near. Take the amount of fireworks and firecrackers that are used on the Fourth and multiply it by about a thousand and then you will some idea of the sensory effect of being in India on the day of Diwali.

The thing is, there are no restrictions on purchasing them. Someone who had no idea what they were doing could go to the store and buy hundreds of them. A massive explosives industry springs up right around this time, and for a few weeks there are these fireworks superstores that have a seemingly unlimited stock of things that blow up.

People are constantly setting off firecrackers in the street, and these are not friendly firecrackers. Some of them light up in the same way that ours do - fountains and spinners and stuff - but the vast majority of them simply explode violently. Little pieces of firecracker shrapnel go flying in all directions at high speeds, and it really stings if you get hit by one. I was told a story last year where an explosion in our very narrow street was so violent that someone's window got blown out. They have strings of firecrackers that are 10,000 units long. It takes like a minute and a half to get through all of them, and each and every one is disruptively loud. Now I mostly reveled in the uncontrolled ability to explode all of these delightful devices. I mean, blowing things up is really really fun. But there is one product that goes by the name "The Bomb" that sucks. It's like a stun grenade. Or at least it has the same effect on my ears that a stun grenade does when I'm playing as James Bond in Nightfire. We had just set one off in the street and I looked around, too late, to see that everyone in the neighborhood had plugged their ears except me. My right ear only stopped ringing four days ago.

As for the fireworks themselves, on actual Diwali night we went to the roof of my house and watched them. I took two videos of fireworks, and I'm going to post them to Facebook soon. There's simply no way to describe how incredibly noisy and overstimulating it is to have millions of fireworks exploding. And I really do mean millions - my city has four million people in it, and most people fire these things off. There is variety that you can't find in the US. It is noisy and it is beautiful. Fireworks are a wonderful thing. I loved every second of it.

The biggest explosive night was November 5th, but every once in while even now, you can still hear them.

On November 4th, one of the Rotarians rented a plot of land and hosted a dinner/dance party for all Rotarians and their kids. Now, I really don't like dance parties, as most of my friends know. It might be because I'm too self-conscious or whatever, but I just don't do them. At least in the US. Inexplicably, I kind of went off the rails (by my standards) and kind of had a crazy-good time. I've always been reluctant to change very much about my identity here, but I mean, this was fun. The rest of the Diwali days, I just conducted my own business, saw family and friends, and blew stuff up.

Diwali is an amazing experience. I have to recommend to every single person who reads this blog to try and come to a good-sized Indian city sometime during Diwali. These are sights that you will never see in the United States. I never counted myself more lucky to be in India. And think about - early November isn't much of a travel time - school and work will be holding me back for most of my life. I may well never be back for another Diwali. I sure hope I am though.

I was going to write about more things. But this has gotten to be quite a bit. So, until next time.

What Happened

I realized I haven't published for over a month, which is especially strange because I'm definitely one of the most prolific publishers of the kajillion Northfield exchange students. Here's what happened the last month, in a nutshell.
Where we last left off, I believe, was the exciting school trip to the Saputara Hill Station, which was fantastic. After that, however, things started to go downhill. There is nothing specific that went wrong, although my frustration with my teacher that has me do nothing but draw straight lines grew immensely. School went on normally, family life was solid as usual. I don't know what it was. Everyone tells me about this notorious slump that comes about three or four months in, and I think I might have been hitting it. Just a combination of homesickness starting to really set in and all of my little frustrations with the country teeming up and bursting. So it was bad. I felt about as unhappy as I've ever really felt.
Then, one Monday night, I was sitting down with my family, watching the delightful program Kaun Banega Crorepatti (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - exactly the same as in Slumdog Millionaire) hosted by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. Amitabh Bachchan is awesome. Anyways, the phone rang, and it was for me, which is highly unusual. I was surprised and pretty overjoyed to hear my dad's voice on the end of it. Of course, I quickly realized that was only one event that would necesitate an urgent call rather than an email or Skype date.
My grandfather died, very suddenly, in a car accident. Grandpa was not a young man, but he was really healthy and this was completely unexpected. And I've never really had anyone in my life die before. Up until now, my family has been completely intact. The worst that happened is once my cat died.
This was killing me. I took a day to carefully consider the repercussions of the choice I faced - sticking it out or going home for the funeral and burial. It was a tough choice, and of course, it was probably made in some haste. There might be weird, unforeseeable consequences to my exchange arc by having done this, but it just felt ethically wrong to sit in India while this was happening. I felt guilty for abandoning my mom and my grandma. And, I'll be honest, the decision was somewhat for me too. My host family did their very best to comfort me, and I'll always be grateful to them for that, but despite their best efforts, they weren't the same as my real family. I've never felt so very lonely in my entire life. Maybe it would have been worse for the exchange arc to have stayed and not grieved properly. I don't know. But I decided to come home for two weeks, the length of the journey being necesitated by the fact that the burial itself had to occur nearly two weeks after the funeral. Grandpa was in the Korean War, and he wanted to be buried at Fort Snelling, and it takes a while to get a slot there.
It was a rough trip in many respects, but I got the closure I needed, and frankly, it was incredible to see my friends and family and to have a short time to enjoy the beautiful Minnesota fall that we had this year. At the same time, I learned a valuable lesson - every time that little voice pops into my head and tells me to hop the next flight back to Minneapolis, I know that's a bad idea. Because, fellow exchange students, there's nothing for us there, as a permanent resident, right now. Our friends are at college. We don't have any school we can go to. We'd be dead weight around our folks houses. Which, granted, it was exceedingly nice to be for a short while, but we simply can't do that permanently. I wouldn't want to - I would have gotten restless after another week or so.
So I came back to India, sad to leave, but not nearly so much - I knew that I had good family and friends in both countries supporting me. I'm reinvigorated about this exchange, and I have to say - the first week back has been darn good. Hopefully I ride this high for the rest of the year. And there's a lot to look forward to - South India trip is coming on December 1st. I'm stoked.
I'm really grateful - all of you exchange students and Rotarians and friends and family and whoever else reads this thing - you've all been incredibly supportive of me, and that was the thing that got me through what was a really crappy October.

Next post will be about Diwali, which is contributing hugely to my good mood.

To the Indian Countryside

I had another terrific weekend. Well, I suppose I don't know how Sunday will play out yet but based on the strength of Saturday alone it should go down as one of the most memorable times of my first stage of India.

My older brother Pratik is a student at an engineering college in Surat. The students from his class (they all do everything together...college is different here) put together a trip to a place called Saputara, which is a hill-station to the south. Hill-stations are smaller villages situated at higher altitudes than the surrounding countryside. They were mostly founded by British colonial folks so that their people could get out of the heat of the lower countries and so they would have a more peaceful, pleasant place to be. The Indians today have happily inherited these lovely locations and made them tourist sites.

The time leading up to this excursion was a bit strange. My Friday was fairly uneventful, but at 1030 at night Pratik, Akshay, one of Pratik's friends and I went to see the Priyanka Chopra/Ranbir Kapoor film Anjaana Anjaani. It was ok. Priyanka Chopra is so unbelievably gorgeous that she can make any film at least tolerable, but Ranbir Kapoor, in my opinion, is not fit to lick the mud from the bottom of Priyanka's shoes. I have developed strong opinions on Bollywood actors and actresses.

The point of this is, I didn't get to sleep until two, and the bus was leaving at 5. So I boarded the bus and conducted the following on two hours of sleep.

So we boarded the bus, which was only slightly less comfortable than one of our coach buses. That is to say, it was comfortable as buses go. The drive to Saputara was about 4 or 5 hours, with two stops. At the first one, we stopped in a fairly normal village that housed a very large and very ancient temple. There weren't any tour guides to give me exact dates or anything, but everyone told me that this was over 1000 years old. You couldn't go in at all, and it wasn't that huge, but I was still pleased to see it. I like the temples here. The village itself was pretty impoverished but it still had modern stands and amenities (modern is always a fairly relative term here). There were a lot of hut-dwellers, which always makes me feel very bad. It was not a prosperous place, but for some reason it was rather a pleasant one for me to be in.

After a tasty breakfast there we drove to the Gira Falls, which as you may have guessed is a really cool series of waterfalls. I was taken aback by the natural beauty of the area - we were starting to rise in altitude and there was some beautiful forests surrounding the impressive falls. I was delighted to find that once you get out of the ridiculously overcrowded cities of India, the countryside is something primal and untamed, stuffed with a mass of tropical plants completely different from stuff you would see in the States. One thing I miss majorly about Northfield and the United States in general is the easy access to some open space. It's really easy to just go the Arb in Northfield if you want to get outside, and it only takes about 5 minutes to be out of town and among some pleasant countryside. So it was great for me to get out and see some natural beauty.

After perhaps an hour walking around the area by the falls, we got back on the bus and drove maybe another 2 hours to Saputara. The route to Saputara was rather treacherous - a bus is obviously a wide thing, and these roads were pretty narrow. We basically spent an hour climbing up dozens of switchbacks on the roads, so it was pretty slow going. The ascent was lovely though. Once we got to Saputara, we were at an elevation of about 3000 feet, and the air was noticeably cooler, which was something absolutely fantastic for me, because another tough adjustment for me in this country is that it's just really hot. Saputara has very little in the way of housing. It's mostly a tourist community, and the folks who live there are propietors of hotels, shops, and tourist businesses. It really is built almost right on top of a mountain overlooking a plateau below that is already quite a bit higher than Surat. There's a small lake in the middle of the town, which is awesome considering that's it basically built on top of a mountain, and a small collection of hotels and other stores built into the hills. The hills around us were just screaming at me to go hike in them. If I was by myself, I probably could have spent at least 3 or 4 days there.

We didn't get there until about 230, and after visiting a bathroom that nearly caused me to vomit, I just walked around the town a bit and visited some shops. Then we were given a lunch of puri and vegetables. Then Pratik, a few of his friends, and I, rented a paddleboat by the lake and just floated around for a while. It was unbelievably serene and peaceful, especially when I've been living in a very noisy city for all of these months. I think that might have been one of the reasons I loved it there so much - it was just such a fantastic contrast to the mass of activity and overcrowding that comes with living in a sizable Indian city. It's really not that Surat's a bad city at all, it's just that I'm not a major city person (probably due to the location of my upbringing), and to get to somewhere a little bit more peaceful was massively refreshing.

After that, we walked to the outskirts of town and looked down into the breathtaking view of the valley below, and discovered that with the massive zoom of my camera, we could see people probably from a very long ways away. Then we went back into town and Pratik and I found this service where you would dip your feet in a small pool and these small, toothless fish that were about leech-sized (but they weren't like leeches at all) would come and nibble at your feet. It was called a fish foot massage, and although it felt really weird to look down and see dozens of little fish trying to eat my feet, it felt really good, and afterwords my feet seemed to be very clean.

All in all it was a terrific day, although by the end of it I was really exhausted, and we didn't get back until 2 AM or so. It really reinvigorated my enthusiasm for India...I can't wait to see more of this beautiful countryside.

The New School and A Piece of National News

After a lengthy (and largely unwise, on my part) hiatus from schooling, my club has successfully enrolled me in a college, which is nice for a number of reasons, the first being that it's more age-appropriate for the 3 graduated seniors that make up our clubs. The school is simply titled School of Interior Design. It's housed in what would probably be some kind of apartment building otherwise over four floors and one other workshop setting. It's nice and clean, and the spots that are dirty are dirty in a "we're working here" way rather than a "we are too lazy to put trashcans in our schools" kind of way.
The classes that we take in the first semester class are Drawing and Painting, Color Workshop, Studio. TRD, IT, History, and Structure.
Drawing and Painting and Color Workshop are quite self-explanatorily titled classes that basically involve me painting things. I have now been wishing that I hadn't avoided all art classes like they were some kind of poisonous animal throughout my entire school career. To put it bluntly, I really suck at painting. I like it fine, and at least I'll get better at it. It's a new thing to be learning, so that's good. The professor (or the sir, as they call it) is a really awesome guy. He has a cool beard and sunglasses that he usually wears to cover up an eye injury from an accident. The only mark the accident has left, however, is that half of the white part of his right eye is red, which to me only adds to his badassery. What is also awesome about this guy is that he's a lot like MacGyver (if you're not familiar with this classic 80s show, find it on DVD and catch up - it's terrific). Forgot your easel today? MacGyver Sir, as I have taken to calling him, willing just whip you one up out of toothpicks and a piece of thermocoil. Also he's quite a good artist. So while I display an ineptitude that has likely never been seen before in these two classes, I quite enjoy them.
Another Sir teaches Studio and Structure. I'm not exactly sure what the stated purpose of studio is, but right now we're working on a complicated project that started with us randomly drawing a bunch of lines and boxes on a sheet of paper and will culminate with us creating a 3D model representing something that developed from the original drawing. It's kind of cool but a lot of work, and again I have absolutely no talent in the subject. Still, I like the Sir so it's allright. Structure is like physics and math - the numbers and calculations of architecture. I like it because the math is pretty basic and I know how to do it and Sir is really impressed with me when I know something like Newton's Laws or the Pythagorean Theorem. I think I could do ok in that one.
TRD and IT involve using a parallel (basically it just helps you draw straight lines) to do "drafting", which is the name for drawings of designs of things. It could be one specific piece of furniture, or a birds-eye view of a room, or whatever. The problem is that the Ma'am for that is very very focused on extremely minute details of whatever project we are doing, and if she doesn't like the work that you just spent two hours doing, she has no qualms about ordering you to do it again. So these two bug me quite a bit.
History is ok - they learn a lot of the stuff that I learned in AP World about ancient civilizations, but then they have to do things like memorize how wide the alleyways were in the Indus Valley city of Harappa from 5000 years ago. How these type of rote details will ever help us in architecture is beyond me, but hey, at least there's a history class here.
I definitely like it better than the other school - the professors remind me of the college professors I know back in town. They are cool folks who trust their students, and for the most part, the students return the trust with a maturity that wasn't present in my high school experience. Interior Design is far from my forte, and I think the teachers will soon become exasperated with my extreme incompetence, but I'm learning skills that I really wouldn't have an opportunity to do anything with at home, and that's the whole point of this exchange, right?

Ayodhya
Ayodhya is a site in India (I really don't know where it is) that is purportedly the birthplace of Lord Ram. I'm sure that most of you aren't familiar with him, but he's really really important. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him an equivalent to Moses or someone like that. Jesus probably would be a stretch. The Ramayana, one of the two seminal Hindu religious epic poems, is the tale of Ram. His stature in their religion is exceedingly great.
For obvious reasons, there has always been a temple there, but back in the day (1700s or so), the Mughal Empire (an Islamic dynasty) smashed the temple down and built a mosque there. Then the British came along and the issue was not resolved one way or another. But ever since 1949, there has been a legal battle raging about whether the Hindus should be allowed to have a temple there, or whether the Muslims should have a mosque there. For 60 years this pitched battle has been raging, and today the Allahabad High Court made a decision.
The tension leading up to this decision was incredible. Extreme rioting and violence was predicted all over India no matter which way the decision went - and nobody was really able to predict what the decision was going to be. At the site today there were nearly 200,000 security personnel on hand to stem the potential tides of rioters. The state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located (one state to the south of me) was completely closed. Nobody in or out. Cell phone signals were shut down in some areas. It's nuts.
What the court apparently did was release a 10,000 page verdict. They made it so long so that it would take a really long time to decipher what it's true meaning is (and it's going to be something very simple). Hopefully the Hindus and the Muslims will cool off and no blood will be shed.
This case is a big deal. The potential for riots is keeping home from school for two days. Well, on that front I'm not complaining.

There's some serious unrest on a lot of fronts here - Ayodhya is just an extensin of this. I might post something on all of that unrest next time. But for now, in the spirit of the Brazilian bloggers always writing something in Portuguese at the end, Challo.

Ganpati Part 2

Ganpati Part 2

As you may recall, the festival celebrating Lord Ganesha lasts for 11 days. The final three days of these 11 were pretty fun, at least for me personally. Prior to these experiences, the Ganpatis had been sitting in the societies. Along with the Ganpatis was the presence of some exceptionally loud drums. I must admit, I'm really not used to this kind of obtrusive noise just coming from the street - it's the sort of thing you would actually call the police for in the US. I did get accustomed to it, and eventually I came to realize that what sounded like the sound of some kind of military band was really just two little kids equipped with really loud instruments. And at least they never really did it when I was trying to sleep.

Other than that, every day at about 9 o clock there was a society prayer, which my parents only went to once out of 11 days. One day they hired a professional to come sing religious songs for them. There are always a few people manning each Ganpati station and if you go up to one of them, they will always give you a small handful of some treat, always called Prasad, no matter what food it actually might be.

DAY 10 - This was my first day of the new school, and I actually had homework. So I was resigned to a night of drawing and sketching, which is far from my forte. But Pratik said "Tonight we're going to drive around and see all of the awesome Ganpatis. We won't be back until after 12 and the Ganpatis look really awesome and it's a great cultural opportunity for you and you're coming." Well, I thought "eff it, this is a cultural exchange not an Interior Design exchange". Good decision. There are some really awesome Ganpatis around, and the other thing was that all of the crowds at the Ganpatis were very eager to have a foreigner come to see their beloved Ganpatis, so everyone was immensely friendly to me. We went out for dinner at a tastilicious restaurant and all in all I had a lot of fun. Among the awesome Ganpatis was included one that was riding a gigantic dragon. The dragon was some kind of animatronic thing - it moved, it made noise, and it breathed steam out of its nostrils every 10 seconds. I'll have a bunch of sweet Ganpati photos up on Facebook in the next day or two.
Fortunately Sir was very forgiving at school.

DAY 11 - The final day of the Ganpatis. There was a gathering at our societal Ganpati and everyone in the society that I encountered that day impressed upon me the importance of my attendance and one man who seemed to be running the show told me that he intended for me to make some kind of speech. So I went, after probably my most hair-raising motorcycle ride yet from Akshay (which is really saying something) I arrived at the society's Ganpati.
A spot directly in front of the Ganpati was cordoned off by small wood barriers and all the young guys of the society were in there. They instantly invited me in there. The Ganpati looked amazing - it always does, but they seemed to go all-out on the lights that night. Also, there was an unbelievable amount of Prasad placed in front of the Ganpati. There must have a hundred dishes in front of him. They were all covered up, though, so I couldn't see what they really were.

The nightly ceremony included drums, a bunch of organized religious chanting, and a burning of a giant plate covered with candles. My bit ended up being that I went up and was asked what I thought of the Ganpati celebration (I enjoyed very much!), led a recitation of the Gayatri Mantra (which is something I say everyday in yoga), and then led the crowd in a very simple Ganpati cheer. All of it seemed to go over very well. Everyone is always very excited when a foreigner does anything related to their own religion.

After that, Pratik told me that my yoga teacher had specifically invited me to come to her society and see their Ganpati finale celebrations. I was surprised and rather touched by the invitation. So we went to see that. Theirs was a little less organized and more relaxed. People were just sitting around the large central courtyard of the society, watching little kids participate in these goofy games. They reminded me of the Field Days we used to have back in elementary school. Kids were doing things like having races holding spoons with lemons in their mouths, trying to go as fast as they could without dropping the lemon. I liked both experiences quite a bit.

DAY 12 - Technically, I suppose, there are 12 days, the last one being where the Ganpatis are taking to the river. I've discovered that the Ganpatis are made of some sort of hardened sand, so that when they are dumped in the Tapi River they will just disintegrate into the water. I think. Not a hundred percent sure on that. Apparently the Ganpatis this year are eco-friendly, as in they are supposed to not pollute the water at all. I can only applaud this idea, as the Tapi River, for all of its merits, is abominably polluted, and the thought of dumping a bunch of dissolving statues with potentially harmful chemicals into it made me cringe. It was an eventful day in the city. It was tough to get around in the streets. The Ganpati processions stop for no traffic. Also the unsmiling cops were really out in force today, and they were pretty heavily armed with shotguns and assault rifles. Apparently this is a pretty big drinking day, despite booze of any kind being completely outlawed in Gujarat.

For this, my family went to the home of my mothers parents on the other side of the river. Before the Ganpatis are dumped into the river, they are loaded onto trucks and paraded through the streets one last time. Their house has a balcony that overlooks an especially well-traveled Ganpati parade street, so it was another great place to see a bunch of Ganpatis. Another thing, once all of the people sitting on the trucks saw that a gora was taking photos from the balcony, they got really excited and started making poses and offering me huge encouragements to take photos, which was very amusing to me. It was a very enjoyable day for me. I like the food at my grandparents house a lot, and I also like them a lot, so all of that was good. They rent out part of their house to a young doctor, and actually we seem to have kind of a standing invitation to just come to his apartment anytime we feel like it. And actually it's in his part of the building that the balcony with the view is located. So we passed most of the day alternating between watching the Amitabh Bachchan classic Sholay (which, by the way, is an awesome movie) and stepping out to the balcony to see all of the neat Ganpatis passing by. Also my grandma made chicken as a surprise for me. I nearly cried with joy.

So overall, I've definitely enjoyed this festival and I'm going to miss seeing all of these cool statues about when I move around the city. Ah well. There's no shortage of other upcoming festivals, that's for sure.

I was going to write about my new school, but this post has become quite lengthy anyways. So I'll save it for another day.