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.

YESSS!!!!

WHO CARES IF THIS IS POLITICALLY LOADED! OBAMA ISNT GOING TO DEPORT IMMIGRANT STUDENTS ANYMORE!!!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

the fight isnt over, but we made an important step in the sensical and right direction.

Read and Watch more here!

And that friends, is why I will be knocking on all of your doors and registering you to vote and then turning you out to vote. YES.

I can go to sleep happily now!

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.