Struggling with Modernity

We missed the rain today, but it's all right. We had an entertaining series of misadventures to make up for it.

Our guide figure in Bombay explained his reasoning for everything he does -- from the time that he lived in Dharavi (Asia's largest slum, which happens to be on the edge of the Island that Bombay is built on) to his choice of dress (as you have seen in previous photos, specifically those from our visits to the caves) to what he eats every day. It is all political. And Awesomely radical. I loved it. He tries to live as the change that he wants to see not only in India, but in the world. 

And he told us many stories about the city, and talked about this theory that has really stuck with me all day. Modernity. At what cost? We look to it like it is a beacon of hope, but with each shift we make towards the future, what are the costs? Yes, each step in "progress" solves a few problems, but next ones emerge. Who pays for our choices and our comforts?

I was thinking about this while we walked to the Crawford market today. As usual, there were people sleeping on the side walk next to the street. All within a hair of the cars flying down the streets (we also learned at lunch today that the legal age to drive in 18 here, but it's fairly easy to get a license without ever taking a class... so people learn on the go... it explains a lot). But that is life here, and that is how they continue living.

I was also thinking about it while I was enjoying the benefits of an exchange rate that favors US dollars and much lower living costs of living in India compared to Boston or New York. I was thrilled that my lunch cost me $2.50 and was delicious. So cheap! We all said. And then we walked outside of the college gates and saw the woman who was crippled by polio and now sits on a little wooden board with wheels moving around by the street with her arm outstretched. Or the children. Or the man with a very clearly broken foot who hobbled over, standing 4 feet away from me while I waited for a friend to come back with her umbrella and watched me through dead eyes. At what cost could I afford these options? I could just as easily walk home or take a cab (for the equivalent of 50 cents) and I had choices. I know I will never have to sleep on the sidewalk while cars rush by me and people step over me en route to their next meeting. 

But, do we ever completely let it sink in? I've learned through the years that our minds protect us. They prevent us from fully feeling the effects of things we cannot comprehend. And for me, this was a moment of that struggle. Seeing something and not understanding because I cant process information as it stands in front of me. The UK built an empire while it sucked the resources out of this country. In the same way Spain sucked resources out of Mexico. It built mills and wealth and museums and palaces and a dominant culture of "acceptable" cultural practices that shifted so many peoples. And here I was standing on a sidewalk in a world struggling to make sense of who it was, who it is, and what it has lost along the way. 

We walked into Crawford Market which is housed in a massive colonial building. It is wholesale everything. Nuts, shampoo, pants, etc. EVERYTHING. And all of it has English labels. For me, dirt cheap, for so many people everywhere, not an option.

What is the cost of our choices? Our ability to make choices? What are we still taking away... without realizing it?

Can we ever fully comprehend it?

Cities Through The Eyes of Another

The Monsoons are pouring down on us over here, folks. I think people were amused by me today. I was walking around in completely soaked through and trashed canvas slip on shoes that made squish squish noises when I carefully avoided puddles and avoided slipping down the street and a huge black rain jacket that was my Dad's but I took because I like it better than the women's ones that really dont keep you very dry at all. This giant black plastic bag basically ate me. I looked like an oversized version of one of the ravens that sit outside of my bathroom window and periodically startle us when they start calling. Oh, and also it's raaaaattthhherrr humid. So my glasses tend to fog up whenever I walk outside. It's a good look all around.

We woke up late (truly enjoying this Sunday experience) and went to a series of film screenings in the Mumbai Museum of Modern Art. One of the film makers was there to answer our questions after the screenings, which was super cool. She talked about her experience as a film maker and how she picked her subjects -- ultimately deciding to include herself as one of the people she asked about their experience with film and cinema in the city. My favorite part of her response was about one of her subjects. There was a woman who was very clearly (despite my language barrier) charming and mischievous and wonderful. She just glowed with life and good humor. You wanted to be around her. And the director said that she picked this woman, despite her limited exposure to film, because she was so charismatic. It was clearly a good choice -- it made the film overall more engrossing.

It was fun to see the city in several different neighborhoods, through the eyes of different people who live here. There was the man washing old film to be recycled into collared shirts rather than the bangles they used to make with it. There were the men from distant villages living and working in the city as migrants -- finding work some days and not others, subjected to changes that come from strikes, and creating spaces of refuge within the city. There were stories and families and the reality of what life looks like outside of the glamourous spotlight of major film studios. What's not to like?

We all left feeling thoughtful and wandered through the rest of the exhibition before I left with two other students to find the only open bookstore in the area. We have official things to do tomorrow and I needed a notebook!

We dipped and ducked under plastic tarps meant to keep the rain off the vendor's roadside stands. Every few minutes one of them would tip and dump buckets of water onto the unfortunate soul standing under the tarp. The city was a lot darker without the sun. Men crowded into the corners of stores, avoiding the alleyways with streams of brown water and garbage flowing out of them. Sometimes all that you would see were the figures of children huddled together watching the rain from beneath their blankets. The same ones many of them will sleep on this evening on the same side walks.

In my determined march to the bookstore for a notebook, I found the same child that I ran into a few days ago. He cannot speak and instead mimes at you. I think he remembered me, despite the large ridiculous bird figure I'd become with the changing weather. I am determined to find him before I leave (perhaps on my last day?) and finally give him the rice he asks me for every time I see him.

The treck back was interesting. We fell into silence and just managed to get through the growing puddles and dodge the few cars that we saw on the streets to make it home before we were completely soaked through. It helps that I spent so much time making myself rain appropriate for this trip, no? (This was from yesterday, so I wasnt wearing the rainboots, but you get the idea. This group of women wearing beautiful saris and trying to cross the street with us yesterday kept smiling at me and pointing at my boots. It was fun!)

For now, the rain is welcome. There were still children playing in soccer tournaments this morning. I woke up to the persistant whistles of time-outs etc. ...Makes you feel a little lazy, not gonna lie.

It was also a day full of smiles. I have to admit, there are a number of things that I missed about home. Since being back and connected to the internet/able to communicate, it has been much better. This is really a very different world from anything I've ever experienced before (which was kinda the point of me coming here...) and I know I felt really lucky to have the friends/family I do have to keep me sane through some of these episodes. So thank you :) I love you all.

Monsoon Rain Video

A little more on where we are living...

From the views of another traveler:
YMCA Colaba, as told by Emilie

The rains have started, as you will see from the video I am trying to upload. And we are going out for our first night in the city... What does one wear to survive a monsoon, go out, and still be covered up conservatively enough to attract less attention but not get hit by a car in the dark?

Yes. We would all like to know.

A Story Best Told in Pictures: A Trip to the Kanheri Caves

Promises of Rain

The rains are starting. Yesterday when we climbed back down from the Kanheri Caves in the national park in the center of Bombay we felt a few cooling droplets hit our faces. It was a great contrast -- we sat on black stone on top of the largest of the hills and cooked -- the stones absorbed so much heat! But the rain on our faces made the experience worth it. For the first day this week, we were sitting outside and we were drenched in sweat, threatening to collapse.

We navigated our way back down the old, worn stairs of the mountaintops where monks built caves and buddhist figures stare out at you from the darkness. I was wearing a pair of very treacherous, flowing black gaucho pants and sandals which wasnt ideal for the climb down the steeper parts. Still, this wasnt as frightening as the morning experience we had when we tried to cross the equivalent of a 3 lane highway exit ramp and were almost mowed down by a bus coming very fast, running 5 lanes of traffic and going in the opposite direction... directly into oncoming traffic.... (we were saved by my paranoia and a loud series of unsavory language also from me... clearly keeping it classy here). Driving to the park was also an adventure... we distracted ourselves from the fact that we actually put our lives in the driver's hands as we sped between cars, trucks, buses, autorickshaws, motorcycles, bicyclists, etc. on the high way.

It has cooled down quite a bit since the clouds came. Sun still makes a regular appearance, but this is better. Or, at least, I like it better. I know this is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for-moment, if nothing else than because my morning walk brought me through piles of sludge and dark mysteries on the side walk that I had to very carefully avoid or else wipe out in. (I managed to avoid slipping... but it was pretty disgusting and I dread the day that I fall in the sludge, regardless of what it is)

It was nice to walk alone this morning. I can imagine my Dad freaking out while he reads that (dont worry, Dad, I was fine). I found a place that sells coffee (it was getting weird... cutting my habit down from 2-3 cups a day to nothing felt a little off. I think I've reached my mother's level of coffee love: I look forward to my first cup of it every day) and really smiled like a cat when I saw that I could choose the location that my coffee was grown. Yes. I had coffee from Bolivian cooperatives. Does this make me a fair-trade-shade-grown-vegan-hipster/fresa as Francisco calls me? Yes. Yes it does. Was it worth it? Yes. Yes it was. And no, for the record, I am still not a vegan (despite a 3 day experiment when I first got home just to make Zak and Cole and all of the other vegan friends I now seem to have happy that I had at least tried...)

So the rains are starting. Our professor made an interesting opening statement about them a few days ago. He said, this is the perfect time to be in Mumbai because you'll see the city as it struggles to survive.  .... that's going to be interesting. I'm a little worried about what that actually means. I guess we'll see what happens.

But it had me thinking this morning about the value of rain and the sort of cleaning out (or not...) that it does of the city. I am LOVING the nearly 10 degree drop in temperature, making walking outside not an instant sweat bath. It is cleaning in that way. I'm scared of what it will do to the traffic since people dont really seem to look where they are driving anyway, and now they wont be able to see us super well through the sheets of rain... (I am even more worried about the first night we actually manage to go out in the city. I am half way through Super Freakonomics, and was just made paranoid to the fact that more people die walking home drunk than from drunk driving. Not that I plan on walking home drunk, but this is a serious concern for being out in this city at night and walking around. Looks like its time for me to find a way to draw even more attention to myself... neon yellow jumpsuits, anyone??)

But the rain has an equalizing element to it, that I think will be interesting to think about alongside all of the inequalities that I am having such a hard time mentally processing and dealing with. I honestly feel like I shut off my emotions and leave them at the door the moment I leave my key at the desk downstairs in the building I'm living in. I see the beautiful but completely decrepit colonial mansion across the street that I have dubbed the "Jumanji house,"the women in colorful saris who perch on the curb across the street next to the smashed front windshield that has lived on the sidewalk for who knows how long, and the grocery store with a restaurant of sorts that alternates between smelling very appealing and very very terrible depending on the hour and it just sinks in how sheltered I am within even the living space I have here. Dont get me wrong, I am BEYOND grateful to have running water, a shower, and a very clean place to live. But I am well aware how weird this is too.

Really, let's be honest here. It's the little kids. And I think they know I am internally a sucker for little kids. They stare up at me and I feel like I have to stare at them from behind a steel mask to keep myself from reacting or offering them anything. I dont even let myself speak -- it's that moment of being a foreigner and knowing that you cant escape being foreign and being unsure that its worth speaking and revealing where you are from anyway. Kudos to the kid this morning, he tried me in English, Hindi AND GERMAN. I almost cracked... I know it will only get worse if I hand them anything... at least until the end of my trip. Then maybe I can be nice and try not to promptly burst into tears when I realize how little I as one person in this space right here and right now can do for them.

So the promises I see with the rain:
Maybe it will be easier to deal with everything mentally -  the constant sensory overload, dodging cars at all hours of the day, ignoring the people who stare without stopping, the kids, the smells the EVERYTHING this city really is a Maximum city in every way.

I am grateful to have found my quiet coffee place this morning. I suspect I will take refuge from the rain there frequently when I want to remember the smells of home. There really is nothing like Latin American coffee to bring you back.

We Made Some Friends

We’ve Made Some Friends!   June 14, 2012

The two men who work at the front desk of our building recognize us now. They always hand me the right key number without me asking, and they smile and odd as though we are old friends. Perfect. There is an old blind, Muslim man who walks down the alley of one of the nearby shopping streets chanting, Allah, between steps and holding his hand out for money to those who pass by. There are children who play in the public square near the Gate of India while their older siblings help wash the clothes that are hung along the fences, trees and gardens nearby while they dry in the hot sun. This same square will turn into a market place later in the day, full of men selling sponges, toys, huge balloons, and food.

We walked past the gate of India this morning to jump on a launch headed towards the Elephantine caves on an island about an hour off the mainland. The ride was uneventful on the way over apart from the rolling swells that we worried would make one of the group members sick. On the island we met the goats, monkey and cows that inhabit the island between the market stands offering everything from sequin bowler hats to grilled corn. One of the students with us learned quickly that this sign was serious:

The grandfather of all of the monkeys came up to her and prepared itself to assault her if she didn’t hand over the corn. In the background these little guys were harassing other tourists, and eventually had a drive by theft of Simon’s water bottle. 

We hiked up into the hills where the ancient Hindus carved incredible sculptures into the caves that they built themselves in the rock face. Even after all of these centuries, many of the sculptures are still incredibly detailed and truly breathe-taking. 

We wandered around this finished cave and few unfinished caves on the island, admiring the incredible detail and workmanship of the caves. It definitely had the feeling of a spiritual place… you felt the presence of so many years of history there. It was really great to see!

I am very distracted right now by some chanting outside my window. The voices sound very young, but there is a very loud and unified chant going on right now. I’m curious…

In the meantime, we had another full day of the-white-tourists-in-Bombay experience. While we sat on the jetty to the island, people stared and stared. Apparently it was at me for a good deal of the time, but I’m used to that now. I am “blonde” by many different countries standards (which is why people shout Guerra Guerra! At me when I’m in Mexico, and why a little kid or two here has reached out and tried to touch my hair while I was sitting somewhere in public). It stands out even more here when I’m wandering around between people with black hair. Various men were taking pictures and videos of me and another student while we sat on the boat and ignored them. This wasn’t the first time, and by now I had learned to ignore it.

The sun is still beating down hot each of these days. We keep hearing promises of the rain and how the rain will bring cooler weather but much more dirt… it will be interesting to finally see what happens. And pleasant to be out of this heat! One of the other students on this trip mentioned a really interesting idea while we hid in an air-conditioned restaurant today:

She said she was looking forward to watching the Euphoria of the city as it moved from the intense heat of these days into the cool rains. Rain brings a new kind of life to a city.

This was an interesting idea to me. Rain does bring life, doesn’t it? And when it is as intense as a few months of monsoon, where the rain comes down in sheets all day long, it’s hard not feel its presence in some longer term way. I mean, you have to come to terms with this very intense weather condition, and for those who are optimists, this could be a very good way to look at the months of rain.

When I talked to my parents this morning and voiced some of my concerns/frustrations, my Dad gave me this piece of advice:

This is a world unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. The only way to manage it is to watch, listen and learn from everything happening around me. There was no reason to try and “conquer” anything because this city would chew me up and spit me out before I realized what was happening. My best bet was to consider this an adventure without goals and just crazy stories to collect along the way.

And as such, we will continue on our merry way in Bombay. Perhaps the best course of action in these longer-term plan-altering decisions is to let go and see where it goes. There is a feeling of sporadic-ness underneath everything here that was making me feel crazy. There didn’t seem to be rhyme or reason to anything – from timing, to driving, to purchasing tech equipment, etc. and maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. But there is a desire to survive in everyone here – from the poorest beggar on the street to the entrepreneur starting out with a stall in the informal economy of the market places here. They are all making it just fine and figuring out how they will keep going as they go. Time for me to take a page of their book and relax…

Apart from the Colombia work that still needs my attention! Tomorrow we have another expedition to some ancient caves nearby, and I am sure that more lovely pictures will find their way into my blog. I am also officially buying a router tomorrow morning, so these entries will no longer be sadly hidden in a word doc on my computer! Perfect! 

The Continued 5 am Wake Up

The Continued 5 am Wake Up    June 14, 2012

It’s interesting – I never thought I would repeatedly get up at 5 am for a second round in my life. (The first time was when I was little and more of an insomniac… then it was everyday but I loved it) But here I’ve been falling asleep at 9:30 pm at the latest. So I’m back and up at 5 am today, for the third day in a row.

I was also feeling so SO frustrated this morning because we are in a country that is growing really quickly and supposedly has the best technology in the world… and yet my cell phone doesn’t get messages until 3 days later and then floods me with them, there honestly isn’t anywhere that I can hook up to wifi and send off the work I’ve been doing (I’m a workaholic, this is a SERIOUS frustration), and even then when I want to buy a router I need to bring my passport, the equivalent of an Indian sponsor with her passport, and a passport sized photo of myself…. What?!

I frequently complain about Mexico’s inefficiencies… but this is a whole new level of WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?! I’m in downtown Mumbai, supposedly in one of the most developed neighborhoods… and there seems to be very little infrastructure for tech stuff. I hope it’s just that I am blind and missing obvious things right in front of me. Really I do. The fact that this is day four and entry 6 on a word doc isn’t making this any better either.

I AM SO FRUSTRATED.

On the plus side, it really has given me a better appreciate for everything that exists in Latin America. We really do have it far better than I was able to comprehend before I arrived here.

I’m also fending off what I really hope isn’t something wrong with my stomach from yesterday. I cant tell if its in my head or not – its that sort of discomfort where if you think about it, it just feels worse… it will be corn flakes for me today! And hopefully some fruit… I need to figure that situation out better soon. The food has been so heavy all the time that I need to work out an alternative to 2 really heavy meals a day and then corn flakes in my room.

We have a trip planned for a few hours from now to see some old caves in either of two places (depending on the weather and how choppy the ocean is). Hopefully sometime around then we’ll go back to the router store and pick up something to use here! (I’m prepared to beg and scrape at this point. If nothing else, I am super embarrassed about how long it has taken me to reply to scheduling emails for Colombia)

I think the next episode of today will be less angst ridden, I apologize for all of this. I am also supposed to keep a journal to turn in at the end of this process, so I am throwing this out there as part of my fully realistic experience. 

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. 

First Morning Walk in Mumbai

First Morning Walk in Mumbai --  June 12, 2012

I went for a walk this morning at 8 am because I was going a little stir crazy. My roommate was supposed to get here last night so I left the lights on while I slept. That is, until the first of the many wake ups at 2:40 am. Since she wasn’t here I shut off the lights and tried again. By 5:40 am sleep wasn’t coming back, so I read for a while and then decided, by 8 am when breakfast opens here, that it was time to emerge.

So really, it’s actually more like I went to breakfast in the sort of cafeteria thing at 8 am. I got ahead of myself. We are staying in a YMCA, which I didn’t realize meant that it is pretty much all men and me here right now. I have yet to see another woman enter the building… this morning ended up being me walking into a crowded room full of Indian men sharing tables silently. I felt like I should pull out one of Matt’s signature nerdy hey guysss motions but it was already painfully obvious that this was weird. Or at least, my presence seemed to surprise a few of the visitors. I promise, I am dressed like a nun – leggings in already 95 degree heat and all – but it was still odd. Something to get used to.

I paid less than a dollar for a pretty decent breakfast (even China was not this cheap… though maybe I was going to the wrong places?) and found some silent, brooding guy who had a table to himself to sit down next to while I stared out the window and thought about how freaking much this reminds me of Mexico City. As soon as I walked out of my door and breathed in the eggs cooking in the kitchen nearby, the same indescribable spice smell, and some smoke (from a guy melting metal outside, I soon discovered) it was like being back. It’s a little hotter here right now, but otherwise very similar. There was a door cracked open next to the cafeteria (though I need to find a better word for it, it was more like a meeting/common space with Christian things posted everywhere), and I didn’t think twice before climbing out onto a beautiful white and mirror mosaic balcony overlooking the street. It was still too early for the streets to be really crowded, but there were a few people (mostly men) walking down the street towards the main strip.

After breakfast I dropped my keys off at the desk and set out to find wifi. It was still too early for things to be open (I forgot what time it was since I’ve been up for so long), so I managed to cross the street from last night without feeling like I was going to be run over and got to see men setting up their market stalls for the day. I love inform economies, as you well know, and it was cool to see the process of them hanging things and re-hanging them to catch the light better, people sharing tales (I assume, based on the laughter and the pats on the back. I cant pretend I have a clue as to what they were saying because I live in my little language bubble right now), and the sun peaking through the dark alleys that would soon be filled with people.

The coffee place I went to yesterday that promised wifi was not open yet. There was some guy in there watching me essentially stalk the door and eventually he came over and made it “not open” gesture to me while on his iphone. Damn.

Well, if it wasn’t painfully obvious that I am not from here this morning, it was only more of an adventure outside. I’ve become pretty good at avoiding unwanted eye contact from many years of practice in Mexico, but this was a new level of interesting. It was barely 8:15 am and already 3 men had taken it upon themselves to walk me down different streets and try to solicit me for something. The last two wanted me to pay for an all day city tour with them. The first one was its own brand of interesting because I was trying to lie my way out of a bizarre situation. He appeared out of nowhere, and looks about my age. He asked me if I was looking for something I could not remember much less pronounce or try to spell here and I just shook my head. I was trying to decide if I was going to speak English or not. I kept walking, a little more quickly now, and he asked me where I was from. I said, Mexico, in as highly a German accented English as possible (though… really I’m such a crap liar. WHY WOULD I BE FROM LATIN AMERICA AND HAVE A GERMAN ENGLISH ACCENT? I need to work on this.) He said oh. Are you single? But I couldn’t understand what he said so he had to repeat himself a few times, all while I was basically running away from him at this point.

Who me? Oh yes, I’m uh…married ImeanIhaveaboyfriend… and then I turned quickly down another street while he said something like, oh ok sorry and went on his way. This was 8:30 am.

This street was busier because it fed into a rotary near some lovely old mosque looking buildings. I walked down the street to the waterfront and saw the gateway of India. The sun is still out, no rain yet, and it was beating down on the square where all of these children were playing. Their mothers sat in the shade watching their wares and their children. Some of the older girls were making things in boiling pots of water on the cement. Their clothes were hanging from the streets and the railings on the sidewalk drying. All next to the famous Taj hotel, where some of the richest people in the world come to stay for an evening. I was surprised and pleased that they didn’t seem to notice me. It was easier being around a group of women and children who just ignored my presence, as I hoped they would. I was already wary of the leering from earlier.

It was still pleasantly quiet my 9 am when I walked down a few other streets looking for wifi. Still nothing was open, which isn’t really a surprise. It was, however, getting really hot. I ended up coming back to read for an hour or two before I go out and try again. It would be nice to let my parents know that I’m not dead…

Playing in Traffic

Playing in Traffic – June 11, 2012

(Disclaimer, I wrote this entry in a word document on June 11^th before I had access to internet. It will be posted at a later time after I work out a local hotspot option)

This is all really weird because I woke up 24 hours ago, and now I am sitting in a room I’ll live in for the next 5 weeks in downtown Mumbai. The drive from the airport here was everything it promised it would be.

First I went through security without issues until I got to some intermediate customs situation where suddenly I was “searched for gold.” My bags went through a scanner and the guy working there walked up to me, got really close to my face and pointed at my back pack saying, Gold? Gold? Eh… no, sir. Because in truth, I don’t travel that way nor do I EVER carrying around bags of gold. The most valuable thing I am carrying is my laptop, and unless Mac is secretly building macbook pros with gold, I wasn’t carrying anything real. Maybe some fake metal that looked shiny and gold colored… but not gold. I mostly brought my own designs with me here, and I dont trust myself enough to work in gold at this point.

So the Pirate checkpoint continued. Suddenly 5 men in white uniforms were digging through my bracelet pouch and asking me if I was hiding treasure. I kept asking if it was illegal or what the deal was here… I couldn’t tell if this was like a quest: did you bring enough gold/treasure to pass go and get into Mumbai?? Or if this was a weird, not discussed part of culture. Being me, I immediately jumped to a corruption/money laundering control assumption. I mean, it might make sense that they would stop people carrying large amounts of currency in this easily convertible model…

But let’s be honest here: I didn’t have any gold (much to their dismay?) and the two things I had that were gold-colored were definitely a mixed metal material that was not worth anything. And in all honesty, do I look like someone who would launder money? (The correct answer is no, just in case you weren’t sure.) [Side note: while we were on the highway to get here, there was a random sign in the middle of who knows where guiding you across the barrier in the highway to the Anti-Corruption Bureau… odd.]

So I made it past the people seeking treasures from my fraying backpack and found the pre-paid taxi option. I had one of those flashback moments where you know people told you about this multiple time, and then had to remember if this was supposed to be a good or a bad idea. I decided it was good because there was some other concern about random taxis overcharging tourists. And since I don’t speak any Hindi what so ever, I figured I’d go with the easy route.

My taxi and I took off into the highway and I had to catch my breathe before remembering that cars drive on the opposite side of the street here. Another fun thing is that lanes really are just lines painted on the street for the benefit of those being paid to paint them. No one paid any attention to them. Something I found curious and amusing was that everyone honked constantly. Not in the obnoxious and impatient Boston driver way – in a hi I’m here kind of way. I figured out quickly that this was mostly because no one checked their blind spots (since traffic rules seem to be vague suggestions rather than laws, I think looking anywhere except in front of you while you drove would mean certain death) and most cars didn’t have side-view mirrors. It was a way of alerting people to your presence, as you creep down the street in and out between cars.

Then there was the size rules of the road element. Trucks and buses just did whatever they wanted, and those who challenged them be damned. It was game over for you.  The motorcycles and boxed motorcycle-chariot things crept in between cars and trucks at stop lights, all while honking away to let you know they were beside you. One man with one of his eyes gouged out (not recently… but still very visibly) was sitting in the back of a truck watching me through the window. At one of the stop lights we were all but touching and surrounded by car exhaust, which was when he blew me a kiss and the truck turned down a dark and twisting alley way. Odd. I guess that was my first, Welcome to Mumbai, moment?

The rains haven’t started yet – I’m told that I have 3 days. Exciting? I sat with the professor and had coffee after walking down the street and essentially getting my ass skimmed by cars that drove by within a hair of the two of us walking down the street. He was completely immune to any sort of emotions for it, while I think I actually jumped 5 feet in the air when I felt the door of a car narrowly miss me. He kept looking at me while we walked basically in route 9 (for those of you from MA… for everyone else, imagine a busy street where the minimum speed people were moving was around 45 mph) and asking why I looked so uncomfortable. (probably has something to do with the 25 images that Yale health made me watch about people dying in car crashes every few minutes in India)

I felt a little lame in that moment – after all, during the 1.5 hour drive from the airport through various parts of the city, I saw kids riding bikes in the highway between cars. Yup, I’m never going to try that. The funniest part were these young entrepreneurial sorts who had one person pedaling and the other person selling cherries through car windows. ON THE ENTRANCE TO THE HIGHWAY. Dedication. If I liked cherries I would have rewarded their… courage. There were also two guys happily chatting to each other while they dodged 4 lanes of traffic on the highway. My only episode of dodging traffic on the highway was a few years ago when I was running away from a burning van in Mexico City (a strange and never quite solved incident… but clearly I survived!) and it was rather traumatic. Lucky for them they didn’t have drivers honking and yelling vulgar comments and sexually explicit comments at them, that only made it worse (I think I actually did something extremely out of character and yelled something like, Fuck off back at them. It was the adrenaline speaking…), but still. PEOPLE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I’m not sure, Life is Short… dodge traffic, was what anyone had in mind.

The city reminds me distinctly of Mexico City, except that Mexico City doesn’t appear as gritty for quite as long. Yeah, there is grunge. I’m not so disillusioned and enamored with it that I don’t see that. There are many buildings with peeling paid, and huge glass towers next to sheds made of corrugated metal in both cities. It’s also nice here because the air has a distinct flavor to it – it’s spicy and dark, not all together unpleasant. I expected more of the sewage and smoke smell you get as soon as you step out of your plane in the DF. People looked at me with curiosity, instead of the suggestive smile I was so used to in Mexico (AND I DON’T LIKE).  We could see the sky today – in all of its bright blue, 110 degrees of glory! And there were people everywhere regardless of where we were in the city. Walking, playing in the shade, sitting and chatting… It was really cool to see! I do miss speaking and understanding the language though. That was a serious plus. A lot of people speak English here, which is easier for me but I’m also in that delirious WHAT ARE THESE LETTERS ON THE SIGN AND WHY CANT I READ THEM phase,. That is until I remember where I am and don’t feel bad for not being able to read Hindi anymore.

So for now, I came here, unpacked and actually passed out facedown with a book open next to me until there was a knock at the door and my professor was here to make sure I had survived the journey here (yeah… it was fine… now in retrospect I wonder what he thought was going to happen. While I break into a cold sweat standing next to every moving vehicle in the planet passing just a hair away from me, he was so relaxed and in his element… what was supposed to have happened in my journey from the airport…?) I was not appropriately dressed to be outside (see… I was wearing shorts and a tshirt. I was told quickly this afternoon to always cover my legs unless I wanted to be groped [yes. Groped. Apparently its still pretty common, even when I’ll be trying to cross the street or something. Super.] or cat called incessantly. It looks like it will be leggings and pants for the whole trip! I wouldn’t mind if it was… you know… not 100 degrees everyday, but whatever this is better than the alternative).

We’re living in the “white part” of the city, as my professor put it. Meaning, the older, rich, Colonial part of the city. And the difference between buildings is visible between this part and the “native part.” It feels older, darker… almost more jungle like here. More trees and such anyway. While we were walking down the street he pointed to the Taj hotel and the restaurant/café here that has become a famous tourist space because a few years ago there was a terrorist attack in the building that killed a dozen or so people there. He gave a half smile while he mentioned it and said, isn’t it strange how these things become tourist sites? I am fairly certain my face said, …Cool..? and that’s about it.

I’ll add photos as soon as I can take them and actually know what I am talking about. When I say I passed out earlier, I mean I promised myself I was not going to sleep and then all but died. Tomorrow I am going to venture out and find a sim card for my phone (apologizes in advance – if I had your number by freshman year of College, and you get a random WEIRD hour of the day call from me its because I am back to my crazy phone that calls people without my consent and doesn’t tell me about it… I tried to wipe the memory so hopefully this wont happen… but you’ve been warned.)

And in my usual bizarre fashion, I am now going to go back to reading about Colombia until my roommate gets here… or I fall asleep. Probably the second option given how weird my body clock is right now and the fact that I already passed out and managed to sleep through my alarm for THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE. Actually. But that’s what happens when you decide sleeping is for the weak on an entire day’s worth of flights… I am foolish.

Onward! Till later.  

That Time Where...

you have a pile of books and want to bring all of them but know that there isnt any conceivable possibility of reading them all. It's also kinda like that for me and the pile of library books, half of which I read and half of which I havent touched, for my Colombia research. Between class work for my Bombay history/city planning/appreciate how epic this place is class, the Colombia stuff (a few books and roughly 500 documents that I was given by the National Security Archives) and emails... we're just gonna make it work. But I simply cant read all of these things.

I think it's going to end up being a weird combination of A Picture of Dorian Gray (as recommended to me by a friend), a few books on cartels and Colombia, and a few books I apparently "have to read" on Mumbai. And probably all of the internet blogs/articles I read but maybe wont for the 5 weeks I'm away/working...? Crazier things have been suggested today.

Also went through the fun, so it's going to be roughly 100 degrees, raining and 100% humidity every day thing today. What does one wear for this, when most people also wear mostly long pants and sleeves? Yeah, it was a fun mind game. But I think I've figured it out.

To be honest, I really cannot even begin to picture what this will be like. And I love that. I decided to do this because I wanted to go to India and actually learn about everything I was seeing. I wanted to have more than just a tourist experience there because I've read so so much about the country and pretty consistently I had those... wait this kinda sounds like Mexico... moments. I am certain that it is not, but it made me curious. That and every image I've ever seen has so much color in it that I cant imagine a place I want to be part of more right now.

So here's to an 8 am flight to London and then to Mumbai. With probably too much to read... and very little idea of what to expect, except that it will be awesome. And the malaria medication that was hiding under everything and I found just in the nick of time.

Over and out. 

Mumbai. Visa Secured.

Despite the previous episode of my attempts to get a Visa to India, my threats to the visa arranging company (... only in the US would you need to seek a private contractor to deal with the embassy for you... this is called, the middle man at its finest) because they seem to have a HUGE disconnect between their customer service representatives and their processing system, and me almost forgetting to send a money order with my rush delivery passport

I NOW HAVE MY VISA.

MUMBAI. HERE I COME.

(After I finish reading the Mumbai fables... it's very interesting. So much of the city's history reminds me of certain parts of Mexico. I cant wait to see the real thing.)