More South Tour

I will get this done soon. I've started to realize that these entries of the South Tour are probably more for my sentimental benefit than your entertainment, but that actually just makes me want to write them more. It's very difficult to motivate myself, in the moment, to actually write something though - I'm constantly distracted by the things going on away from my computer, or occasionally other things on my computer, I will admit. It's hard to trim it down to size, too. Oh well. Where were we? Ah yes, Thekkady, land of elephaants, kung-fu, kathakali, spices, Ayurvedic massages, and American coffee. What a place.

He looks friendly.

Our next locale, Madurai, is a tad less exciting. Madurai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, is one of the oldest inhabited places in India - I believe it has been around for something like 2500 years. So yeah. I sit here proud of Northfield's defeat of Jesse James in the bygone days of the late 1800s and these guys have been around for two and a half milleniums. And according to Wikipedia, it was trading with Rome and Greece around 550 BCE. We did not see much of Madurai, which, in retrospect, disappoints me, considering all the history that seems to reside there. At the time, Madurai did not seem like anything special, the following tourist attraction exempted.

We were pretty much there for the Shree Meenakshi temple, which seems to be the bread and butter of Madurai's status as a very holy city. I think (and I may have this wrong) that Lord Shiva is said to have been married there, which kind of gives it the same importance as Bethlehem. Whatever legend says, the foundations of the building have been around for as long as Madurai has been, although the spectacular present building was built in about 1600, which is still super-old by American standards.

It's a sprawling complex, with many intricately carved towers connected by vast hallways. The exterior surfaces are astonishing - one one tower, there are innumerable, intricate carvings of Hindu deities. Our guide claimed that every Hindu god was represented on this tower. I find this hard to believe. There are 36 million of them, according to some sources. Guessing the number of Hindu gods in existence, even to an expert on the subject, seems rather like guessing the number of mosquitoes in Rice County in August. It fascinates me that this religion that has about a billion zealous devotees can be so deliriously inexact.

The interiors are also something else - we've got the Thousand Pillar Hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. There are tons and tons of statues and paintings and religious artifacts. There is even an elephant that they claim is Lord Ganesha (I feel like this would be kind of like grabbing a random carpenter and telling the whole world that he is Jesus). Nonetheless, it's pretty cool to have an elephant bless you. As I've mentioned before, elephants are really awesome.

So that's the Shree Meenakshi Temple, our only stop in our short Madurai stay. The pictures speak for themselves - this is an incredible structure. This may have been more descriptive than I initially intended, but this place was something else, and I wanted to do it justice. There's nothing else to say about Madurai, other than that our hotel was memorably awesome.

After that, we went to Kanyakumari, which is a touristy, seaside town in the Land's End part of India, the uttermost bottom of it, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean come together. It was another nice hotel, with meat and everything, and very close to the ocean. We got there about noon, and right outside of our hotel you can see an island temple and a gigantic island statue. We took a ferry to the both of them, and I like them both quite a bit. Nobody saw fit to inform us what the massive statue was supposed to be of, and when I asked our tour guide after the fact, she did not know. But they were pretty awesome.

Kanyakumari is a fun little town - it's got all sorts of markets and things, pandering to tourists, and it's also a good place for some solid South Indian food - masala dhosas, idli sambhar, both of which are delicious. It's a good place to sort of wander around. We enjoyed ourselves. Our second day there was spent strolling around the city and visiting various seaside attractions. We also visited a small museum which marks a place where Gandhi's ashes were held for a time after he was shot. These were not all of his ashes - those are all over the place - but just some of them, and I belive they were scattered into the oceans after a spell. It was a solid place to be.

I'll have to get this done soon - I'd better, the North Tour is coming up. I haven't talked much about my actual life lately, because there isn't anything spectacularly new to report, but I've been happy and healthy - I hang out with various Indians and other exchange students, I work on the language, I do yoga, I drink tea, I mess around with my 7-year-old host brother. It's fun. It's not super-eventful, but I'm slowly realizing just how valuable this year has been on a personal level. There's not much left, actually. When I get back from the North Tour there will be less than 3 months left. It's really hard to believe. Right now, this is a good place to be - things are going well, and if I ever get in a foul mood I know that home isn't very far off. At the same time, it's far out enough that I still feel like I have plenty of time left here.

My mission has changed a bit - I'm determined to get as close to the bottom of this dizzying, incomprehensible, dichotomous nation, and it's a fascinating excursion. I've also realized that I simply will have to come back here. There's simply no way to understand this country in just 10 months, and I am too interested in this to let it fall away. Also, I will miss people my friends and family. I'm only just starting to realize how much.

I will admit, I'm not looking forward to the post North Tour life here - the exchange students are going to start peeling off, and the Indians are going to have their end of year exams, which are pretty much a full-time occupation for a long time. Additionally, summer will start, and summer here is like, 115 degrees. Apparently nobody does anything. It's just too hot. I hope I can work around the weather and keep doing stuff with my last days.

Still, I'm a pretty content exchange student, and I have been for a long time, and I'm starting to realize how many things I will miss when I leave. It took some time, but life has gotten pretty good here. Stay tuned for the concluding part of South Tour, if you're interested.

South Part 3

I'm just gonna keep on rolling and posting. It's not an especially busy time, so I want to get caught up fast.

Place number 3 was Thekkady. Thekkady is about 100 kilometers away from Munnar, but it takes nearly 5 hours to get there. It's still up in the hills, but in terms of elevation it's quite a bit lower than Munnar. It's dry and hot, but not too hot, and you can see mountains in the distance. Surrounding the tourist-oriented town are lush jungles and traditional villages.

Thekkady was not my favorite place (that honor is given to Munnar and Goa), but the things that we did there were definitely the best. We left Munnar quite early and made it to Thekkady by the early afternoon. Thekkady is famous for its spices. So we went to an elephant-riding zone/spice garden in the late afternoon. We walked around the garden (which isn't really a garden, it's just basically spices growing in the forest). After that, we all took turns riding on elephants.

Elephants are just awesome. These are the Asian elephants, of course, which are known to be not as large as their African counterparts, but they are still very big (bigger than they look in the picture) and intimidating, what with their thick hides and flailing trunks. These guys were very well-trained though. I felt a little bad for them. It seemed like they could be leading much more interesting lives. Still, I enjoyed it. The best part, however, was when we all were led to the elephant's bathing pit and were each given an elephant bath. It was an experience. It also provided me with perhaps my favorite profile picture of all time.

That evening, we dried ourselves off as best we could and attended a Kathakali show at the same place. This facility seemed to be a combination of a wide variety of entertainment. Kathakali, which we sort of learned about in AP Lit while reading The God of Small Things (another excellent India book to read), is a very ancient, traditional song and dance style of storytelling. In our particular show, there were two male actors that were ridiculously made up, one to look like a woman. There was a man singing what was presumably the story in maybe Malayalam (Kerala's widely spoken native tongue) or Sanskrit (the Indian equivalent of Latin). In our tale, a studly warrior-king caught the eye of some sort of demon, who disguised himself as a seductive woman and failed to attract the attentions of the king. The demon then revealed himself to be Blackbeard and had a dance fight with the king before having his ear sliced off.

Kathakali is an experience.

The next morning we got up early and went on a jungle hike through a tiger preserve. Nobody saw any tigers. But the guide said that in four years of taking folks on jungle treks, he had seen tigers four times. I suppose it was too much to expect that we would provide his annual sighting. It was still a lot of fun. This is the kind of thing I like, walking through some beautiful outdoors, looking for wildlife, trying to be quiet enough to photograph deer and birds and monkeys and things.

That afternoon, we went to an Ayurvedic massage session and we were given a long, very traditional massage and steam bath. It was exceedingly pleasant. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Thekkady, which is a nice place to do this because it has a lot of tourist oriented shops. Also, it had a coffee shop. With filter coffee. This was a terrific discovery. The coffee that you can find in India is really overly sugared. Not my style. But this place was cozy in a Blue Monday kind of way, and you just don't find these kind of places in India. Made my day.

That night we went to fighting show in a kind of battle pit, surround on balconies above by excited tourists. It was kind of like a wrestling arena. 7 highly trained athletes had these very fast, incredibly choreographed battles with all sorts of exciting and dangerous weapons. They also jumped through rings of fire. It was really cool.

So that's Thekkady. Post 4 coming up soon.

South India Part 2

As time-consuming and rather wearisome a task as it has become to update my blog regularly (as you may have noticed), I am determined not to let it die off, because I like it and I like writing. So I am going to prune my tour details as much as is reasonable and plow through it. Hopefully by the end of next week I will be all caught up. The essential problem has been that there can be very long stretches of inactivity, where there's very little that is new enough to be blog-worthy, but there can be even longer stretches, like in the past two months, where is simply so much to write about that I am completely overwhelmed and backlogged. Now, for example, I have to cover, in addition to the rest of the trip, a thrilling new festival and our bombastic District Conference performance. And the North tour is rapidly approaching.

On a non-tour-related note, I would like to recommend a book to anybody who may have an interest in learning about modern India but wouldn't like a textbook , or, sometimes even worse, a textbook masquerading as a novel. The book is The White Tiger by one Aravind Adiga, a Mumbai native who was educated in the United States and London. It is a very sharp satire that tracks the ruthless rise to power of a very poor, low-caste villager. It is an outstanding book. It will not take you long to read. The pages practically flip themselves and it's a pretty short novel anyways. It resonated very clearly with me - it is, perhaps, the first piece of literature about India that tells the story of India as I have seen it. There were so many little pieces and details that I can see clearly out of my daily life. India is a deeply misunderstood society, and it is misunderstood in a lot of different ways ways. If you happen to be interested in a very entertaining and brief crash course in the real India, this book is the best thing I can recommend.

Thank you for indulging my sales pitch of the day. Now to more tour.

When we last left me and my fellow travelers, we had just proceeded on a drive up into Munnar. Munnar is not a large city, but rather a series of communities built around a flourishing tea industry high up in the mountains. Now these are spectacular mountains, but they aren't exactly the Alps or the Himalayas. Look at the picture. That's them.

Beautiful, eh? Admittedly, it isn't the untamed, rocky, snowy beauty of some of the aforementioned mountain chains, but they are still gorgeous. If you look at the ground immediately in front of them, you can see neatly arranged clumps of some sort of crop. The said crop is tea. Munnar is full of tea plantations, and a large part of the mountainside is occupied with these crops. Normally I would not approve of farming and industry spoiling natural beauty, but as you can see, this doesn't spoil it at all. Munnar is gorgeous.

In Munnar, we toured a tea factory and saw a video on the history of the region. This is a place where somehow the humans and the mountains have interacted very well, and the mountain ecosystems have remained safe and beautiful. There are parts of India that are very polluted (most populated areas), but it also should be noted that the government has set aside a ridiculous amount of land for preservation. Then we explored a pleasant town in the hills and we found BEEF. Turns out the cow-slaying taboos don't apply to bulls. This is certainly still frowned upon in a lot of places, but clearly it was ok here. I cannot express to you how thrilling this was. Then we visited a dam and a beautiful, crystal clear mountain lake. We walked around there for a while, visited a roadside market, and took a boat ride. I cannot express to you how nice Munnar felt to me. It was just so cool, so fertile, so beautiful, so natural. This was one of my favorite sites on the trip.


I think I'll stop there for today, but like I said, I'm going to try and plow through this trip pretty fast in the next week or so. I'll probably make a lot of posts, and then make it like two parts trip, one part something else. Just bear with me.














Look how much fun we're having and how proud we are that one of us is from Brazil.

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.