You know, your average weekend...

I can’t believe it’s been a week since I have written. It may be unfair to you dear reader, but I think it means on this end, I’ve been finding more to do outside of the house in the evenings and during down time. I think leaving this much time in between entries is a bit absurd and now I’ve forgotten those little things I actually want to remember. But here goes a recap of just the weekend and a promise to myself and you to not give up on writing!

This past weekend a group of nine of us traveled to Fatehpur Sikri, Agra and the bird sanctuary. I’d say that we had a blast but were really glad to get “home” to relax. We left at 6am Saturday morning and got to see the desert waking up and shaking off its purple haze. It was really beautiful and the sun glowed like I’d never seen before. Part dust and part pollution I’m guessing made everything a bit murky but it was so nice to get out of the city. Most of the countryside was filled with a sandy brush and occasional fields of mustard seeds or green crops. We had paid our taxi for two days and had the luxury of stopping when we wanted, listening to music and spreading out as the van seated about 15. This is what I would like to call a “soft landing” into travel in India because that was all well and good and then when we got to the fort all hell broke loose. Since our driver didn’t English and we were thinking it would be easy to get from the parking lot to the fort, we weren’t expecting sheer confusion. Swarms of unofficial tour guides and merchants selling postcards, necklaces and key chains just kept getting in our way, sometimes to the point we couldn’t walk. I hate for any of this to sound like complaining, because I still think wow how cool is it that I am in India and out of anything I’ve ever known, but this was a moment I just wanted to scream. I guess travel in Europe, in the states and where I know Spanish seems so much easier and that I could trust someone to ask a question and not be taken advantage of. At this moment near the most visited site in India (I don’t want to stereotype for the rest of the country) I hit my I hate this moment. No didn’t mean anything, we couldn’t get our bearings, and all we wanted were for some signs to point us to something official. After refusing guides and just getting information to catch the bus to the fort, paying for an entrance fee (another fun fact, the HUGE price difference for Indians 20 Rs and Foreign Tourists 260 Rs), we found some peace and quiet in the fort itself. Caroline and I had brought our guide books to get us through it, which said “the purpose of many buildings is uncertain and much of what the guides say is pure fiction.” We skipped around in giant courtyards, climbed towers, posed Bollywood style near columns. Pure silliness but absolutely necessary after all of us just wanted to die feeling so stupid, confused and called out so blatantly as tourists. After that, there was a free mosque we could visit which we did which turned out to be another disaster that I don’t remember half of what we saw because no one would leave us alone. We just wanted to look around and understanding that it was a holy place, we were pretty surprised how many people were out to make a buck. When I was even taking a picture inside, one of them moved my camera so I could get a better angle in his opinion. We left that area pretty quickly too. I just feel annoyed for that to have been my experience while at the same time who am I to criticize how these people make a living. Either way I really just missed paying entrance fees and asking questions with truthful answers and not someone trying to scam you constantly. I just hope to shake it off and not let it taint my opinion of the rest of the country.

We were so happy to back to the “safety” of our van. A part of that also made me so depressed. I hate that it was the only way that I liked traveling, isolated in a privileged luxury taxi, but it was the truth. I read apart in the book: “Nothing can fully prepare you for India, but perhaps the one thing that best encapsulates this extraordinary country is its ability to inspire, frustrate, thrill and confound all at once. Poverty is confronting, Indian bureaucracy can be exasperating and the crush of humanity sometimes turns the simplest task into an energy-zapping battle. Even the most experienced travelers find their sanity frayed at some point.” I felt this really spoke to the weekend.

Anyways, the drive to the Taj was about an hour or so and after our driver got lost we finally made it to the “ sprawling, bloated and polluted” city of Agra. Once again, we got off the van to another swarm of guides and pushed our way through to the nearest eating establishment, a government owned restaurant located outside of the West Gate. I’ve never had a better meal (since we didn’t eaten breakfast and felt like we had gotten the crap beat out of us). I had a thali- which is basically a huge metal tin filled with little cups of glorious Indian things. Usually= dal (soupy lentil), 2 vegetables (like potatoes with spices and cauliflower and carrots-WHICH are red here and sweet and so good), 2 roti (naan but browner and made of a different flower), I think roti actually means bread and naan or chapatti is a type), cup of rice, yogurt sauce, salad and then a crunchy bread piece. I haven’t actually eaten meat the entire time I’ve been here. Our family will not serve meat at home but apparently our father does outside of the house. He’s really into pork, and I find it amusing he makes pork runs. Anyways, it’s not that I won’t eat meat here or don’t trust it, it just tends to be more expensive and I like the vegetable dishes more anyways!

And now onto the ticket counter where again, Indians 20 Rs and Foreigners 750 Rs, we got into a line for women and left Ben to the men’s queue- which had three lanes while the woman’s had only one. 25 minutes later, we met up with him and carried on into the complex. My history/museum nerd really hated the fact that I didn’t know too much of what we were looking at aside from ginormous buildings of red with Koranic inscriptions etched into the walls but then they gave way to the Taj. The path we followed into it was so gorgeous and can really only be explained with pictures.

We played for the rest of the day taking pictures, doing cartwheels, enjoying our own company and the fact that this was no ordinary occurrence. Every angle was amazing and watching the sunset approach even changed the color of the building itself. The taj was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial for his wife Mumytaz- who he obviously loved a lot- who died in child birth giving their 14th child in 1631. He was so heartbroken his hair apparently turned gray overnight. He began construction immediately- employing some 20,000 people from Central Asia, India and even Europe to work on the marble screens and marble inlay work made with thousands of semi-precious stones- and it was completed around 1653. Not too long after it was finished, he was overthrown by his son and imprisoned in the Agra Fort where he apparently could see his creation from a window. He died there and was buried alongside his lover in 1666. Tragic.

It was worth the hassling and constant picture taking. We were asked to be in several family photos, approached by several men wanting to be in pictures with us. Magy even tried to turn it into an entrepreneurial scheme by charging…she may be onto something. When we asked them for money they laughed and walked away. I think dealing with their fascination of us with a sense of humor makes the whole thing seem less annoying.

After our walk back through a crowd of camels- which I found I’m allergic too as well as horses, ugh I’m so lame- we made it to the van and to our hotel in Bharatpur, where we stayed nice and snug in three rooms of three made for 2. For dinner I had another thali and afterwards we hung out in our room watching mtv India (one morning last week I woke up to our dad singing along with “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The “oooh ooh” was incredible) and then Jumanji in Hindi. We woke up and Caroline and I ordered food for everyone: French toast, scrambled eggs on toast with ketchup and masala omletts. I’m curious what masala really means to Indians because masala omletts and masala chips just means flavored, but not really the same way. ANYWAYS. The French toast was really tasty and served with electric red jam. It seems that “red” is another Indian fruit flavor, possibly strawberry. Sometimes you’ll find really red ice cream too that tastes insanely artificial but I’m not sure like what.

The bird sanctuary was really peaceful as well and we paid for a guide to take us around. We saw kingfishers, which may now be my favorite bird- an item I never thought I would have, owls, egrets, crazy Indian duck, antelope and wild cows. We all passed out in the van on the way back to Jaipur and were so excited to shower. After a weekend of no homework, in class today we discovered none of us even tried to do it last night. Oh, well, I think we got enough of a cultural lesson.

Last week was pretty tame. Some highlights: discovering potato smiles (a fried potato with batter in the shape of a smiley face), eating a paneer salsa wrap at McDonald’s, finding a music store with “sizzling bollywood hits” of which we as a group decided to buy lots of cds and then share it with one another and visited Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, the World’s Largest Limb Fitting Society. It is an organization, which has established branches all over India and holds a large amount of mobile camps in Asia, Africa and Latin America (the director had just come back from a trip to Colombia) to fit anyone who comes on site with a limb. I didn’t really understand the exact logistics of what materials were used but we saw the production of them and plaster and rubber and joints developed with the help of MIT and Standford are used. The average limb costs the society $35 to make when some in the US can cost upwards of $8,000. It was a really incredible organization that only uses 4% of its funding to do this. I didn’t really know that the loss of limbs was such an enormous factor affecting the poor in this country, or for that matter all over the world, but by helping a person regain his ability to provide for his of their family and general livelihood means a world of difference.

So that’s been life here. I’m getting a bit tired now and have to start getting down to the nitty gritty of actually doing my Hindi. I have almost mastered the alphabet and script, basic sentence construction and the oblique tense, which I think it pretty impressive for about two weeks of class. Class tends to be pretty overwhelming since we started with written Hindi “Mera nam kya hai” and had it written in script, and had it written in English. Today apparently she felt we were done being babied and went straight to Nagari script. So yeah, I’ve gots some studying.

Tidbits:
Our new favorite hangout at night: The Rock, where there is hookah, food and servers who wear Western fringed vests and cowboy hats.

Tasty treat: Zulu bars. A hunk of chocolate on a stick, surrounded by chocolate ice cream dipped in chocolate with nuts. Sooooo good.