Before coming to India, I had heard that many Indians are still quite superstitious. I thought that maybe just villagers held onto the old ideas, but all of the interns are finding that our host families and other well educated Indians will in all seriousness give ridiculous advice at unexpected moments. For example, my family has warned me not to stand with my hands on my head because it's bad luck. This weekend we learned that all important journeys or undertakings should begin with curd, even just a spoonful. I really wish we'd known that earlier.This weekend seven other interns and I took a quick weekend excursion to Mt. Abu, a popular tourist destination for Indians from Rajasthan and Gujarat. It started innocently--we crowded into the 9-person van that should really have fit 6 and started off an hour behind schedule, or Indian Standard Time. Our driver didn't speak any English, but halfway through he started singing some special monsoon songs for us and telling us about all the accidents that had happened along the road we were driving (we had one hindi speaker to translate a little bit). Things started getting shady later in the night. The driver kept swerving in the middle of the road and talking about how dangerous the road was. He also kept pulling over to ask for directions. We started suspecting and then it become glaringly obvious that our driver had no idea how to get to Mt. Abu, but for some reason had decided to take us on this trip without even consulting a road map. Instead he had planned on asking random people on the street as we drove, but since we were planning on driving from 7pm-1am, finding people to ask was difficult. Hence the fake swerving and pretending to be too tired to drive. It was bizarre and after ending up in multiple village road dead ends and running into the train tracks a few times, we decided to call one of our internship coordinators back in Jodhpur to intervene. Somehow we managed to get back on course, but we didn't arrive at our hotel until 3:30 am.
Luckily Mt. Abu was worth the journey. Indians like to go for vacations at hill stations, or little towns in the mountains, to get away from the heat and pollution in the cities. Both days we were in Mt. Abu the sky was cloudy and the air was refreshingly cool. We spent the first day just wandering around the mountaintop, enjoying not being drenched ever minute and visiting some of the world famous temples. We visited one temple that was 5,500 years old and built into the rocks of the mountains. The Delwara Temple is a Jain temple on Mt. Abu that is covered in unbelievably detailed marble carving. The artisans were paid by the amount of dust they produced to encourage them to carve more intricately. It was beautiful but I wish that I knew more about Hinduism or Jain architecture so that I could have known a little more about what we were looking at. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed and this time it was enforced.
We ended the day at Sunset Point, along with about 500 other tourists. It was a strange experience. Usually in the US I prefer to watch sunsets in a secluded spot away from too many people to enjoy the quiet beauty. Instead at Sunset Point someone had set up something close to stone stadium seating on the side of the mountain. Chaiwallas, paniwallas, American Sweet Corn-wallas, and all kinds of other -wallas were walking through the seats trying to sell snacks and drinks to the spectators. I guess it was kind of like a baseball game, only with nature. And as we were leaving, we saw monkeys!!
All day long we attracted a ton of attention since I'm pretty sure we were the only non-Indian tourists on the mountain and we were all young women. At Sunset Point, though, it was the worst. At one point we looked around our little seating platform and noticed that although it was completely crowded, we were the only women. We are also finding that Indians like to travel in large packs of young men. I don't know if their families were at other parts of the mountain or left at home. There was a lot of excited laughter and rapid Hindi happening around us and we just tried to keep doing our thing without attracting more attention than necessary. Towards the end, someone from a large Hindi group got up the courage to approach one of the girls in our group who has long, curly blonde hair and asked if she would take a picture with them.
She said yes to one of them, but then everyone started yelling for her to take a picture with them, so she had to say no many times and finally just ignore them. The actual sunset was kind of anticlimactic. It was so cloudy that the sun just slid behind some clouds well above the horizon. But the Indian-watching was hilarious and very rewarding. Indian men are very affectionate with each other and there were many cuddly couples on our platform.
We met a nice guy named Naryan ("nice guy" is ominous sounding, but he turned out to be okay) at a Hanuman temple and we arranged for him to take us on a forest trek early Sunday morning. He led us to some gorgeous look out points and past a few cave dwellings where wandering Saddhus (holy men) can camp out and live off the forest.
Naryan also filled us in on lots of Indian religious stories and superstitions while we were hiking. For example, he was the one who told us about curd being good luck. He also said that sneezing is really bad luck and after someone sneezes no one is supposed to move for two minutes. He told us that the Ganges is holy because in a time of drought the goddess Ganges turned herself into a river for the people, and it flows from Shiva's hair where he sits in the Himalayas all the way through India. He also told us that long ago a young princess was so devoted to the moon that she spent all her time in his temple asking him to marry her. Her father was upset by this so he ordered that erotic statues be put in place along the path she walked every day so that she would be distracted and take a human husband. Eventually she did and the 2-D representations of these statues are the Kama Sutra. He said a popular wedding anniversary trip is to visit these statues and then go to the Taj Mahal. We had lunch at Arbudah, "The Ultimate Restaurant", which was blasting heavily censored Akon when we walked in. I guess that was pretty Ultimate.
We had an uneventful drive home, thank goodness. On Monday, though, I woke up with a violent morning episode in the bathroom. That isn't too out of the ordinary, though, so I didn't worry much. I got as far as my bus stop before I felt like I was going to pass out in the street, so I decided to come back home and take it easy for the day. All day I had a pretty substantial fever, muscle aches, nausea, and I had trouble sitting up. I kept hoping I would feel better, but finally around 8 pm I decided to go to the doctor. The doctor looked at the travelers diarrhea medicine I had brought with me and he said, "What is this?! You are in India! You need Indian medicine." He was totally right. I got two shots, one for fever, and one for diarrhea and a bunch of pills and mango-flavored electrolyte drink. The fever shot was almost immediate--within half an hour the fever I had had all day was gone. Yesterday I stayed home all day also, just kind of laying around and trying to drink more electrolytes since my stomach was still a little delicate. I'm on a limited diet of bananas, rice with yogurt, and toast. Today I only worked a half day and spent a lot of the other half day napping and watching my ceiling fan spin. Which really isn't so different from my usual afternoons.
This weekend all the interns are driving to Udaipur (6 hours, I hope we have a better seating situation than last weekend) for our midterm retreat. I am under pretty strict orders to eat only bread and jam that I buy for myself or dosas I watch the guy cook. We'll see how well that works. So far five interns have gotten something similar, with two needing to be hospitalized, so my intern director is convinced that it has to be the heat and not just bad food. Probably a combination. I just hope I can survive and still get to enjoy authentic Indian food for the limited time I have!
All day long we attracted a ton of attention since I'm pretty sure we were the only non-Indian tourists on the mountain and we were all young women. At Sunset Point, though, it was the worst. At one point we looked around our little seating platform and noticed that although it was completely crowded, we were the only women. We are also finding that Indians like to travel in large packs of young men. I don't know if their families were at other parts of the mountain or left at home. There was a lot of excited laughter and rapid Hindi happening around us and we just tried to keep doing our thing without attracting more attention than necessary. Towards the end, someone from a large Hindi group got up the courage to approach one of the girls in our group who has long, curly blonde hair and asked if she would take a picture with them.
She said yes to one of them, but then everyone started yelling for her to take a picture with them, so she had to say no many times and finally just ignore them. The actual sunset was kind of anticlimactic. It was so cloudy that the sun just slid behind some clouds well above the horizon. But the Indian-watching was hilarious and very rewarding. Indian men are very affectionate with each other and there were many cuddly couples on our platform.We met a nice guy named Naryan ("nice guy" is ominous sounding, but he turned out to be okay) at a Hanuman temple and we arranged for him to take us on a forest trek early Sunday morning. He led us to some gorgeous look out points and past a few cave dwellings where wandering Saddhus (holy men) can camp out and live off the forest.
Naryan also filled us in on lots of Indian religious stories and superstitions while we were hiking. For example, he was the one who told us about curd being good luck. He also said that sneezing is really bad luck and after someone sneezes no one is supposed to move for two minutes. He told us that the Ganges is holy because in a time of drought the goddess Ganges turned herself into a river for the people, and it flows from Shiva's hair where he sits in the Himalayas all the way through India. He also told us that long ago a young princess was so devoted to the moon that she spent all her time in his temple asking him to marry her. Her father was upset by this so he ordered that erotic statues be put in place along the path she walked every day so that she would be distracted and take a human husband. Eventually she did and the 2-D representations of these statues are the Kama Sutra. He said a popular wedding anniversary trip is to visit these statues and then go to the Taj Mahal. We had lunch at Arbudah, "The Ultimate Restaurant", which was blasting heavily censored Akon when we walked in. I guess that was pretty Ultimate.We had an uneventful drive home, thank goodness. On Monday, though, I woke up with a violent morning episode in the bathroom. That isn't too out of the ordinary, though, so I didn't worry much. I got as far as my bus stop before I felt like I was going to pass out in the street, so I decided to come back home and take it easy for the day. All day I had a pretty substantial fever, muscle aches, nausea, and I had trouble sitting up. I kept hoping I would feel better, but finally around 8 pm I decided to go to the doctor. The doctor looked at the travelers diarrhea medicine I had brought with me and he said, "What is this?! You are in India! You need Indian medicine." He was totally right. I got two shots, one for fever, and one for diarrhea and a bunch of pills and mango-flavored electrolyte drink. The fever shot was almost immediate--within half an hour the fever I had had all day was gone. Yesterday I stayed home all day also, just kind of laying around and trying to drink more electrolytes since my stomach was still a little delicate. I'm on a limited diet of bananas, rice with yogurt, and toast. Today I only worked a half day and spent a lot of the other half day napping and watching my ceiling fan spin. Which really isn't so different from my usual afternoons.
This weekend all the interns are driving to Udaipur (6 hours, I hope we have a better seating situation than last weekend) for our midterm retreat. I am under pretty strict orders to eat only bread and jam that I buy for myself or dosas I watch the guy cook. We'll see how well that works. So far five interns have gotten something similar, with two needing to be hospitalized, so my intern director is convinced that it has to be the heat and not just bad food. Probably a combination. I just hope I can survive and still get to enjoy authentic Indian food for the limited time I have!
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