The Summer I Learned to Eat Bananas!

The Summer I Learned to Eat Bananas. -- June 13

I miss fruit a little bit. Ok a lot. I love living in the US now – I can walk down the street by myself and avoid catcalls, I can travel between cities (also by myself!) without worrying about being mugged or kidnapped, I can drink tap water and eat fruit without thinking about it, etc.

And here, everything looks beautiful and tasty and smells great… but I know in the back of my mind that I’ve been out of the game too long to eat street food and survive right now. Even with its tempting and promising smells – fried mystery potato things, curries, all of these delicious sliced fruit and MANGOS everywhere! Too soon… I will fight temptation for now.

So for the time being, my options have included Bananas and that is about it. Many of my friends will remember me as that girl who actually cringes when bananas are hidden in things. I just hated them. A few bad memories from working a summer camp skit, and mostly the texture. I know that makes me sound like a total diva… maybe I am about bananas. I accept that.

But so far its been hard to eat fruit… we found a grocery store near our housing last night and today when we took the other students back we were able to buy some bananas! It’s a welcome treat after eating only things that I am certain were cooked – it’s too early for me to tempt fate and risk food poisoning or worse.

After breakfast we wandered out into the city and went further away from our neighborhood (Colaba). This time we walked all the way to the Marine drive we’ve read so much about and walked along the ocean next to the Art Deco strip of the city. It was oppressively hot – I have the really awkward sunburn lines on my back where I missed with sunscreen to prove it. In one direction a man caught up with me and asked me, “Are you an actress?” I laughed and said no…. when we came back to the same space on our way back to meet our professor, he caught up with me and asked me for my “good name” while trying to pass me a photo of himself. He told me that he was a director filming on the spot and then I kept walking because this was weird and it was hot and I wasn’t sure if this was a scam or not.

The shoreline has these really interesting rock sculptures everywhere. I have a photo of it, check it out:

And this is Marine Drive (along with a grinning Tia):

By this point you don’t even realize you are sweating. It’s just all the time. I never really thought that would be something that I would come to terms with, but you really only notice how bad it is when you aren’t outside anymore. Or when your glasses get kinda gross (sorry for the too-much-information-moment here).

It’s really interesting. Mumbai is at once very cosmopolitan, and also very traditional. Or at least, for me it feels “traditional” in that vague ambiguous meaning of the word, where “traditional” refers to things that don’t seem to be western… you are all welcome to have problems with this use of the word and my terminology later, it’s just a theory I have about westerners when they travel. (Most recently, when I was packing to go the Mexico, my mother and I had the conversation about what to wear. She told me, most people in the area you are going to are very “traditional” – it’s better for you to wear pants and cover up. Whereas maybe the assumption was that in less “traditional,” read Western, places it is fine for me to bear my shoulders and calves, here it feels really awkward.)

So I’m running with this idea and use of “traditional.” Bear with me. It is over 100 degrees outside and yet there are tons of women wearing skinny jeans. JEANS. This is still far more westerner than many other parts of the country, I am told, but it is oppressively hot and people are covering up by wearing normal length jeans. It was also been virtually impossible to find wifi. Even this morning as I retreated to the coffee place that let me download 20 precious emails before it stopped working did not have wifi today… There are internet cafes down the street, but I was under the vague impression that there would be wifi somewhere nearby our housing – whether in some cafes, a hotel, something! After all, Mumbai is the finance center of India… and therefore there are many people visiting from my neck of the woods. It was just make making assumptions, but even in many of the places I worked in for the past few summers in rural Mexico were moving towards wifi… weird, huh? It’s cool to be isolated from the world – I would actually super love it if I wasn’t trying to turn in thesis research and reply to interview scheduling emails… the tech is also pretty interesting. My American phone wasn’t working for the past two days, but I didn’t realize that until it connected to a different network, freaked out and brought in the 15 texts I’ve received in the last two days while it ignored them… sorry everyone! I have an Indian number now, just in case you want to skype call me: (whatever the India code is) 916-760-3576.

Getting the phone was also a bit of a production. Ada and I wandered through the streets yesterday when it was still just the two of us. We came upon a stand that sold SIM cards, which of course didn’t work in my old phone because it is an American phone and the manufacturers prevented it from ever leaving the US and functioning without American coverage… classic American marketing in SO many ways (I say this as I fiddle with my converter to charge my laptop). The guy from the stand had to copy Ada’s passport to sell us both SIM cards (everything seems to require a passport here…) and then include passport-sized photos of here in some paperwork. He then offered to sell me a phone, which I decided was fine since it cost me about $14 for a new phone and a little more for a lot of phone credit. He called someone and his brother appeared out of no where. I paid the stand guy for the phone, SIM card and service, and then we followed the brother through the winding streets and insane traffic to his store where he gave me the tiny candy bar phone that I am using now.

We wandered off down the street, got lost, and then found our way once we made it to the shore – outside the Taj Hotel and the Gate of India. It was easy to get back from there because I’d done the walk so many times at this point.

Taj Hotel

Gate of India

Getting in a taxi while you are more aware of your surroundings is also pretty awful. It costs about 24 rupees (a little under 50 cents) to get from our class space to our housing, but in that time you come within a hair of cars every few seconds. And trucks and buses and roving pedestrians. Today our professor gave me truly valid advice: he said, when crossing the street walk confidently. If you are confused then the driver will be confused. We all have a similar goal here, which is not to die or kill anyone. It made sense, but I had that moment of Wow… this is a totally different mind frame that I’ve ever had before. It shows that even when there doesn’t seem to be any sort of rhyme and reason to something, there is a natural order that develops from somewhere or another.

Not sure I could handle this logic everywhere, but it is definitely a system here. Today was much easier to deal with, because you need to shut off your brain and just function without over thinking it. Really, it’s time for your survival instincts to take the wheel. This is also something I’m not terribly good at, since I like logic, and plans, and predictability… it’s just not an option here.

Interesting, no? The promise of rain coming soon keeps being repeated, though the sky is completely clear and the sun is very intense. It will be about 7 degrees or more cooler, which will be great. I still bought a pair of very cheap but gorgeous dark green cotton “genie pants” (as I always called them). They are wonderfully comfortable but still cover everything they need to cover, which makes them perfect for this experience. All of the girls I am with purchased a pair to spare us in this intense heat. On the plus side, we were told by a girl from Madras who joined us today that this humidity protects us from the sun strokes common in her city, and sweating this much, supposedly, has a healing/anti-aging property to it. I’ll keep a list of its benefits to keep myself from going insane.