They don't call them special for nothin...

Currently recovering from the 18 hour journey that brought Anna and I back from Hampi to Chennai. Bullet points of an amazing weekend are as follows....

*Hampi is amazing. If you go to India, go to Hampi. Yes, its in the middle of nowwhere but there are giant boulders and ruins and lots of monkeys and puppies and babies and wonderful people and good food that is served in under a half hour! Oh and wonderful familes to hang out with when you get lost! What more could you want in India?

*There will always be something infinitely wonderful to me about getting to play outside and get dirty. Anna and me pulled ourselves up boulders, climbed over walls, shrieked at lizards and got closer to baby wild monekys than I think I ever will again. Oh yea and watching the sunset go down on top of a boulder overlooking a river and an anciet temple with no one around=awesome

*While I know they mean no harm there is something really annoyingly creepy about having 20 Indian men and boys surround pointing and leering and wanting pictures. Hello??? Do you do this to girls from your own country? What makes it ok to do it to me?

*Apparently I am sooo bad at driving a moped I can't even get one rented to me in India...not good man...not good

*Along with not being able to drive a moped apparently I am unfit to ride a bike in India as well (though they only provide man bikes which I think is saying something)

*Indian puppies are really cute. Indian babies are really cute. Indian babies sitting with you whilst playing with Indian puppies is a rediculously blissed-out combination

*Warning: Special Lassis are special because they are laced with marijuana, and lots of it...always an interesting evening when your travel companion gets stoned over diner...

Hampi, good place to visit I reckon.

For the Love of Chocolate

I rode a bus for 7 hours this weekend to spend 3 hours in Pondicherry eating.

Real bread and pastries, real coffee, real chocolate and an attempt at real wine (it turns out all Indian wines taste like a mix of grape juice and nail varnish).

We literally spent hour entire trip to Pondicherry in a cafe.

Not much to see in Pondicherry, but there is plenty to eat...

Planes Trains and Automobiles

I've been comtemplating a great deal recently the differences between living in India and touring India.

Lately I've been doing quite a bit of road-tripping across the subcontinent and the trend will only continue with a few more big trips before I leave. Coming off of Kerala, and trying to stay in Chennai only a for a few week days at a time it is interesting how my feelings towards this country change when I am on the road.

Sure there are the puke covered seats, the croweded buses, the creepy men on trains, the devastatingly poor villages that fly by the windows, the cold showers and dirty hotel rooms, the touts, the annoying white people who seem to have too much respect for their cameras and too little respect for the Indian poeple around them. There is all of this but still, there is something about traveling that makes the ugliness of Chennai seem to slip off my shoulders.

I meet shy girls and their moms who politely want to practice their English on me. I meet Indians, men and women, who are so gracious about my stay in their country that they want to hear all about what I think of it, I meet people who help me with my stupid questions and sew up clothes for me at a bargain because they "know I'm from around here." I see insanely beautiful countryside juxtaposed against impossibly thin women and men working in rice paddies.

I hold sleeping children on my lap when the bus is too full for their mothers to hold them up and marvel at how much Indians, men and women, adore their children with abandon. I pass whole families on scooters and fathers stopping buses and standing protectively over their young daughters for them to pee on the side of the road. I see old Indian men and women touring their country for the first time with wonder and feel better about my own tourism. I see young Indian couples shyly holding hands for the first time in public on their vacations and realize how much is changing here before my very eyes.

Chennai is still as frustrating and unfriendly of a city as ever and India won't become clean or egalitarian over nigh. In living here it is easy to get bogged down in the corruption of everyday life, the poverty, the pointlessness of my work but in traveling, in traveling it becomes easier to realize all of the little things that are so captivating about this place and easier to still to be enjoy it.

Kerala = Heaven

Before leaving for Kerala I joked with messiah that maybe the incredible HDI indicators for the Indian state of Kerala would make it a great place to vacation in India. We both laughed but then I went to Kerala and saw for myself what a government that is actually accountable to the people can do.

People in Kerala seemed happy, healthy, well-educated. There was a pride and sense of dignity in work that I haven't seen yet in Chennai. Even though Kochin, Kerala's largest city is much smaller than Chennai it felt about 10 times more cosmopolitan with real lane markers in the road, trash bings and even signs telling people to make their cars more environmentally friendly. There were jute bags to buy in the market so as not to use as many plastic bags.

There were mountains, and jungle and peaceful back water communities and I even saw wild baby elephants. The people were friendly, hardly anyone begged and the older women looked healthy and happy, so unlike the women here in Chennai who walk around hunched over and so thin their skin hangs off their bones. The air smelled of wood smoke and cardamom, I am not kidding you.

If I could live in Kerala for the rest of my time in India I think I would, as a sign said on the road that wound up the mountains and crossed fresh water streams and falls it was "almost heaven"

Truckin' Along

Sometimes it feels like India and I are engaged in a sort of cat and mouse game where "India" tries to do everything it can to piss me off short of giving me malaria while I run around and try to keep up.

Sick again and confused as to why I am unable to book any flights around India, my only direct link to the ngo I "work" for has quit leaving me wondering what I am supposed to be doing in India besides washing my flatmates dishes...

I'll figure something out I guess, I'm getting good at that here in India...

I'm Seeing Stars

Yesterday I saw stars for the first time since I arrived in India

Peering out a bus window on the way back from Pondicherry I looked up and there they were. Wow.

I also realized yesterday that coming home might indeed involve a bit of "reverse culture-shock." In Pondichery I walked down a wide, clean road with almost no one on it and rather than enjoying it, I felt deeply uncomfortable. Where were the people? the smells? the garbage? the life? Have I really been here long enough to crave crowded dirty streets? Maybe it was just my being sick taking its toll (Chennai and India in general are soo bad for one's health, no one, not even people who live here are ever healthy for more than a week or so) or maybe not. In any case, I'm back in Chennai at least for a day and reveling in my strange relief at being back amidst the smog and dirt and noise and shit once again.

What's Going on In Chennai??

So I think the events of the last few days deserve a synopsis, sort of like one of those bulleted "The Buzz" columns you might find in my grandpa's newspaper from the cosmopolitan metropolis of Phillips (population 775 all over the age of 75) Anyways maybe I'll call it "Chennai's Loose Change" or something, in any case, here goes:

Bulleted Point Number 1 (*) Last night I met a girl. From Italy. In India. In Chennai for one night sleeping in my room. She studied in my tiny hometown of Green Bay for six months our senior year. What the deuce?? This girl is in Chennai for one night, like less than 12 hours, she's from Italy, the only reason she is here is that my roommate is from her hometown and she studied in my hometown....woah....small world after all?

*I watched an Indian dude nearly get in a fistfight at the movie theater last night because a bunch of white kids accidently sat in his seats. There were 8 of the kids and the dude was only with his wife but he shouted at them until they moved across the theater and then continued shouting about how rude they were and how no one should tell him to calm down and how he was the polite and decent one...wow...ease off the testosterone buddy...he also pretty much hit his wife in front of all of us, really cool dude....



*We had a Halloween Party the other night that deteriorated (some might say unraveled in honor of the mummy at the table) when I happened to mention the extreme inequality of India to two (very annoying and creepy) Indian men who invited themselves to our party. I received in turn an earfull of shouting about how the poor are lazy and swindling the government and how they have boatloads of opportunities here but they just prefer to take advantage of the system

what system you might ask? I for one never heard any glowing reports of India's social welfare programs, it must be the same program that lets the man starve on the street to the point that he cannot move even though he is within feet of a grocery store, the system that lets kids sleep naked under the highway, the system that provides for all of the crippled old woman I see digging up shit in the streets...but yea why listen to me? After all I'm just a pair of boobs to these guys

*I have devolped a chronic case of the Chennai cough. There is also "Chennai eye" but that is another disease altogether (and much more disgusting). I'm glad I only have the cough...

*Auto driver last night asked us rs 150 for what should have been an rs 80 tops. This is pretty standard, what happened next was not. We low-balled him at rs 50 hoping to get a ride for rs 70 or 80 except then something really really strange happend. We said 50 and he said ok. He didn't even ask us for more when we got to our apartment...

I think that might have been my most surreal moment of all this week....20 seconds to go down rs 100 in price??? I sometimes spend 10 minutes arguing over 10 rupees...there must be something new in the water....maybe its getting cleaner?

Next stop: Pondicherry for the weekend and Kerala all of next week, I can't wait to hike in the jungle, stay on a houseboat, drink alcohol that is not made in Tamil Nadu, and see a bunch of new places with two of my favorite people here..stay tuned for more stories of trains, buses, boats and autorickshaws...