Days 1 and 2: Delhi and Jaipur

Day 1, Delhi:

7:45am

I have been in India for a little under 24 hours now. In classic Indian style my new friend, Alex, and I were met at the airport not by the director of the program as we were expecting, but by some random Punjabi man who spoke no English. However, he was very friendly and got us safely to our first hotel, the YWCA in Delhi. We fly all the way across the world and end up at a YWCA filled with Christmas Trees and Santa Claus.

Lobby at the YWCA, New Delhi

While in the car the driver got a phone call from the assistant of the program telling us that the program director was running late and would be there in three hours. We were to check in and order dinner.  Not knowing what else to do, we followed the directions and then Alex and I hung out in our room for a while.  We even successfully ordered food, even though we had no idea what we were eating. 7pm came and went and no word from the director. By 9pm we had been awake for over 24 hours and could not keep waiting so we went to bed without ever hearing from Vidiya.

Both of us were awake at 7:30 the next day and we decided to shower after we waited the required 30 minutes for the water to heat up. Alex is about to get in the shower when Vidiya finally calls, only 12 hours after we were expecting her. And so I begin my first full day in India.

9:00 PM

Humayun's Tomb

It has been a crazy day in Delhi. We met the director of the program at breakfast, an adorable woman from South India named Vidiya Ji. It turns out she was late because the train from Varanasi to Delhi that was supposed to take 11 hours took 35. Welcome to India. Vidiya Ji will spend the next ten days with just Alex and me. She is an incredible woman with more connections than should be allowed. After breakfast we got back into the car, with the same driver as the day before. He was wearing the same sweater as well. We started at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) where we met the people who basically organize and sponsor all students and scholars who come to India. They were incredibly welcoming and seemed genuinely excited that we were there.

We then went to Humayun’s Tomb, one of the major attractions to Delhi. It was so vast, that I thought the front gate was the entire structure until we walked though it and saw grounds that covered 30 acres and a structure that was 3 of them. The structure was red and white stone; a 13^th  century creation of the Moughol empire, and was at the time used not only as a tomb but also as a military fort and the location of government. The Muslims who built it made it a tomb because their positional enemies, the Hindus, would not mess with a house of the dead. Good call Muslims.

Close up of a restored arch in Humayun's Tomb

After walking around for an hour or so we went back to the car. It took us a while to find our driver, but when we did he was wearing a different sweater. The old sweater was nowhere to be seen. We then headed to the Indian equivalent of Fridays where I had the biggest Masala Dosa on the planet.  Alex managed to finish her whole meal, but I was not as successful. Garbage plates aint got nothing on this stuff.

Next came our Health Orientation at the Fulbright house with Dr. Gita, one of the most beautiful women I have every met. Tall and slender with lovely grey hair, her teal sari and  navy bindi looked amazing. She was also incredibly funny and poetic, managing to incorporate The Little Prince into our lesson about Malaria. She also gave us a power point on breast cancer and cervical cancer just because she thought that we should know about them. After her presentation she told us about the place she spent her childhood, painting an idyllic picture of the Indian hill sides filled with flowers, monkeys, temples and grandmothers.

My First Masla Dosa  and Sambar. Yes, it was as big as it looks

After Dr. Gita we had some time to kill so we went to the Indian equivalent of Old Orchard or Eastview Mall, a place where upper class women hang out. Alex and I were too overwhelmed to buy anything, but we had fun looking at all of the beautiful and soft clothes. Vidiya Ji acted like the mother that she is, reminding us how expensive the stuff was, and how we could get the same items for much cheaper elsewhere.

Vidia Ji, Program Director,  at Lunch

The reason that we went to the particular shopping mall is because it was not close to the center of the city, and fairly closed off to the general public. This was important because there were fear of massive riots in the streets today due to the death of a girl who had been brutally raped in Delhi a few days ago. There were roadblocks all over, and more police than I have ever seem in my life. That being said, I saw no riots at all. The city was relatively normal for a Saturday night.

 Things I noticed today and other random musings:

•     Everybody speaks English, and all of the signs are in English because English is the only way that Indians from different states can talk to each other. It is the great unifier between foreigners of every nationality, Punjabi speakers, Hindi speakers, those who speak Tamil, Urdu, ect.
•  SOOO many American companies and SOOO many motorcycles
•   McDonalds (no beef), Pizza Hut (delivery man drove a motorcycle)
•  Traffic Rules are irrelevant and things are run by honking. If there are three lane markers, there are five lanes. You go however fast you can, wherever you can, whenever you can. There were times when we were even driving towards oncoming traffic. No tickets were written, but somehow no one crashed.
•  There are people EVERYWHERE. More then I have ever seen in my life. People were doing their laundry in the middle of an intersection, and a man was comfortable peeing by the side of the road. But, there were not that many women. Some, but few. And everybody seemed to have the knees to squat all of the time.
•  Everyone wears scarves in everyway possible.
• I am of normal height. That means people are short.
•  I have eaten Chutney and Kofta in the same day. Go team Eugene! 

Day 2, Delhi and Jaipur:

We started our day off early by heading to one of the more popular sights in Delhi, Qutab Minar, a HUGE tower fort. It was built in the 9^th  through 11^th century by Muslims, using scrap material from Hindu temples that were destroyed do to bad architecture. Before we went Alex’s guidebook told us that the tower in the center of the fort was 5 stories tall, so we figured it would be big, but nothing to shocking. We were wrong. There were five distinct levels of the tower, but this thing went into the sky. The first “story” was probably the height of a five story building.

At the site there was a large group of Indian schoolboys, so Alex and I got our first taste into Indian male adolescence. We were asked to take a million photos (we refused) and there were many pictures taken of us while we were not looking. At one point we were even cornered by a bunch of boys asking for a picture, and though no one touched us it was a little freaky. The boys were all in school uniforms, but there were no teachers around and no order was kept. American school kids on a fieldtrip would never be allowed to behave the way these kids did.

We then went to a posh part of Delhi, where we had an amazing and huge lunch. At lunch we were met by our Hindu teacher, Verendra Ji, a fubsy old man with an amazing story. Fifty years ago he started a school in the small village in which he lived, teaching students of all ages. He also headed a youth movement that did a lot to modernize the village through the connections he managed to make in the American Peace Core. We start Hindi lessons tomorrow.

After lunch we got back into the car for a five and a half hour ride to Jaipur, where we will spend the next five days. We had to drive five hours from one city to another, yet people lined the side of the highways the entire time. There was not a bit of space with no people around. Some people were selling things, and others were working construction sights, but many seemed to be doing nothing at all. They just seemed to be standing there waiting for something, anything, to happen. The same was true in Delhi.

When we checked into our hotel in Jaipur we were met by Danielle, a girl who will be on the program with us as a yearlong student. This means she has been here for a semester already and knows the ropes. She had dinner with us and gave us the dirt on things we needed to know to survive in Varanasi.

Things I learned today:

•         Indian males act like children in groups until they are much older than they should
•         Get out of water buffalo’s way and whatever you do, do not mess with the monkeys.
•         There is trash everywhere. It is gross, but nobody else seems to care.
•         A 1 liter bottle of water is 30 cents, and food is incredibly cheap.
•     You did not need a building for places of business to be considered legitimate. 
• Women actually like it when people try to sell them things at their car window when stopped at a red light.
•    The women are all in their houses
•    Wear a long kurta.