RESURRECTION!

WRITTEN: Friday, July 30, 2010

Hello friends! All summer I fretted about how, as an engineer, I really should know how to make and manage my own website. And I sort of do! But I mostly don't. So rather than teach myself html this summer, I decided to breathe new life into this tired old neglected blogspot.

The Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program: The specifics of this program seem to be a point of much confusion for you, my friends and family, partly because they are still not clear to me. Here is as much as I know right now!

This is an exchange program for Americans aged 18-24. There are 75 participants in total from all over the United States with all kinds of different degrees from different levels of schooling. The program is funded by the US Congress and the German Bundestag, and I found out about it from a mass email sent out by a professor at Notre Dame last fall. A few coincidences: another trombonist from the Notre Dame Marching Band is also participating, as is a guy from Seattle who apparently grew up mere miles from me.

August-September: I will be in a language school developing my German skills in Cologne. I may or may not be living with a host family. I will probably know in a few days.

October-February: I will be moving to a town, as yet undetermined, in the Bundesland of Niedersachsen. (include map?) Once here, I will enroll in a German University and study Electrical Engineering for one semester. While studying, I will also be frantically searching for a relevant internship to fill the next portion of the program. Again, I may or may not be living with a host family. Anyone's guess, including the people running this program.

February-June: I will remain in the aforementioned unknown town, but during this period I will be working as an intern in a German company.

July: Travel! We get two weeks in the beginning to go crazy (however, I kind of get the feeling that the entire year is an opportunity for travel) and then we all fly from Germany to New York for a final closing seminar.

August: Real World. SCARY!

Presently we have all gathered in Washington D.C. to get to know each other and get ready to fly off together. After a few days of more orientation in Frankfurt, the whole adventure begins! I'll try to keep this blog current, but feel free to contact me directly either by email/gchat (elizruhl@gmail.com), skype (elruhl), or AIM (asteroidcitizen). If you JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH, follow me on twitter (elruhl) too! I would love to hear from you!

The End of India

9 weeks later, I am leaving. But before I get too nostalgic/sentimental about it:

Last weekend I went to Agra and saw the Taj Mahal. I meant to post something about that, but mostly I was just going to write some quick history facts we got from our guide. I'm not wikipedia, though, so now I've decided against it. We went, it was beautiful, the people are pushy, and the British stole a lot of stuff from it. I wish I had pictures to post, but unfortunately my little computer decided to mutiny earlier in the week and moving files from my camera to an internet cafe computer isn't worth it.

While reflecting on my experience, I've come up with a little list:

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT INDIA

-Wandering livestock dictating traffic patterns

-Rooftop Monsoon Underwear Dance Parties

-Being sternly beckoned by elderly strangers, and then enjoying chai and broken Hindi with them

-Reckless Public Transport

-Eating new foods that are "good for health" and my resulting adventures in digestion

-Experimenting with various levels of plumbing technology

-Experiencing various replacements for toilet paper and my creative responses

-Elderly Indian women throwing things at children

-Elderly male neighbors in early morning towel skirts

-Being called Barbie Doll and Auntie in tiny Hindi accents

-The exchange rate

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS

-Public urination

-Sweating through my salwar

-Feeling like a pepto-bismal commercial

-Always paying the foreigner price

-The hazards of being an Indian pedestrian

Because it is my second to last day, I decided to venture out a little bit on my usual commute. Instead of keeping my eyes straight ahead and ignoring all the calls of "Madame! Madame!", today I stopped and actually came to one old guy in a bright pink turban. I saw in his little stone hut/shop while he fixed a motor and we chatted in broken English/Hindi while we had chai. Later on in my walk, I went up to some guys at a Puri and Dal stand and they insisted that I try some of the food. After chatting, I tried to pay but they said, "VIP! VIP!" So now I wish I had been a little more friendly and a little less stone-faced when out and about in Jodhpur. Not everyone is a dangerous pervert. But I might get diarrhea now. What else is new.

On that note, this has definitely been an emotional rollercoaster, but on the whole: Mujhe India bahut acha laga. Namaste, Hindustan!

Traveling is So Many New Kinds of Uncomfortable! And Some Old Kinds.

Someone missed the memo that the ride up to Mt. Abu was incredibly uncomfortable so they decided to book the exact same transportation for our trip to Udaipur. We ran into the usual Indian-travel setbacks--we left late, the chef at the restaurant where we had reservations had decided to head home early, the hotel where we had reservations had double booked our rooms, etc. No big deal. This time we had our International Coordinator with us. She's from Bombay and knows how to Get Things Done. So we had dinner someplace and had rooms somewhere and I'm pretty sure multiple someones had quite a hindi thrashing.

On our way up our drivers stopped at a flashy little shrine and when we got closer we saw that at the center of the roadside temple stood a battered looking motorcycle draped in flowers, wound with tinsel, with sweets on the seat and Hindu holy symbols painted on it. Turns out that many years ago a young man had an accident at that spot on the motorcycle. You might think then that the shrine was in the man's memory, but no--after the funeral, every night the motorcycle would somehow find its way back to the scene of the accident. No matter how many times it was dragged away, it would show up again. So the community concluded that the motorcycle itself was holy, and built the shrine. And now everyone stops and prays there along the way to anywhere.

We took the weekend pretty easy since we were retreating. I thought the activities might have included at least a few serious discussions about work and development and things, but mostly we wandered about, did a little sightseeing and a lot of shopping. The monsoon has actually come to Udaipur, so we got to enjoy drizzle, mist and mosquito bites. Other subtle differences--the cows were feistier (we almost got charged a couple times) and there were way more tourists. We met a slightly crazy old man in a temple who could beat box pretty well. I splurged on an audio guide for the city palace and learned a ton about Rajasthani history, warfare (the warriors in Udaipur put fake elephant trunks on their horses so that the enemy elephants would think their horses were baby elephants and not attack), and how terrible being a beautiful princess was (one princess accidentally got promised to two different princes, and to avoid a civil war her father asked her to commit suicide. Which she did while singing his praises, apparently). During the Rajasthani culture show an incredibly plump and graceful old woman danced with ten water pots on her head. Ten. One way to make a daily chore infinitely more difficult.

FSD has a second site in Udaipur, so we had dinner with the other interns working there. Most of them were from Northwestern, so we got to talk about the midwest. Unfortunately our restaurant was so slow that they all had to go home before the food arrived. Twenty of us did our best to finish off food for thirty-five, but we were stuffed and it started monsooning before we were done. My host family would be so mad! Plus we got eaten alive all through dinner, making all the Jodhpur interns who had discontinued their malaria medicine (including me) a little nervous.

We enjoyed a little taste of Austria for breakfast at Cafe Edelweiss (Muesli and drip coffee! and Date and Walnut Pie!) before trying to get out of town. Our departure was mass chaos for a couple hours as people tried to sneak away for last minute purchases and our drivers decided to take an unannounced lunch break. Towards the end I just took a seat with a few other interns along what would have been the lake shore if Udaipur lake was more than just a soggy field this year. Some naked boys had found a mud slip n' slide in the middle of the field, and we watched them for awhile. It looked pretty sweet.

On the way back we visited Ranakpur, which has some incredible Jain temples. We entered the temple only a few minutes before it closed. It was enormous--my boss told me today that it has 1440 pillars, each intricately and uniquely carved. I think I liked these even better than the ones at Mt. Abu last weekend. We had to cram an extra person into the cars on the way back, so that felt really Indian. We found a top 40 radio station, though, so we got to enjoy some hot bollywood tunes for a few hours.

I have just started week eight, and I've been feeling kind of homesick and frustrated, so I've been trying to come up with my favorite things about India to cheer myself up. I love the public transportation system (one day on my way home from work I got onto a party bus that was thumping "Jai Ho!"), I love the livestock even when the streets get messy. I love that the giant trucks are all decorated like the circus and that trucks full of gasoline have "Highly Inflammable" painted on them. I love the resourcefulness. There isn't a lot of official recycling, but things are reused until there is nothing left to be salvaged. Except maybe scrap metal, and then that is sold. The garbage everywhere is unsettling, but as another British intern pointed out, at least this way people are aware of how much garbage they are producing. In the US it is just carted away and stuffed underground. If it had to sit on your front porch for six months you might be a little more choosy about what you throw away and make a bigger effort to reduce packaging. I love the Hindu shrines everywhere and the way Hindus incorporate a little prayer or little ritual into every part of life. It's made me think a lot more about my own religion this summer, even though I haven't been able to find an English mass anywhere. Even though I complain about being force fed and not knowing what's up with my food situation, I love the care and effort my host mother puts into preparing meals for her family. Every meal is creatively and skillfully crafted, based on weather, time of year, and availability of produce. And then chai. If I can't have coffee, at least the chai is incredible.

Now I'm back at work for the week, and I think I will be off to some villages Wed-Fri, and in the office Mon-Tues. But who knows! I finally got some questions answered today about the proposal I'm writing, so I have a serviceable rough draft. One of the people from Notre Dame who helped decide to send me here is visiting next week, so I want to be mostly finished with everything so that I can spend time with her if she wants me to.

Apparently Curd is More Important in India

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!

End of Week 5

I have been having a rough couple of days. It seems like every time I am out walking I am attracting extra attention. Yesterday some guy grabbed at my backpack while I was walking and that really bugged me, then some guy yelled something obscene from his motorbike, and later I had to yell at another guy to leave me alone because he kept calling at me and was starting to follow me. And even if every guy on the street doesn't yell, "madam! madam! Hello!", just about every guy is staring or leering, and that just puts me in a bad mood.

I feel a little guilty. So, on the second day I realized that my malaria pills made me incredibly nauseous for an hour or two after I took them, so I immediately quit taking them. Another intern has been taking them this entire time, but didn't realize that they were why she felt so sick every morning. They had even made her vomit twice. I was like, dude, quit taking those pills. And so she did. And now she might have malaria. I feel terrible--I just hope her fever is caused by the bedbugs she caught during a stay at a nearby guest house (this has not been her week). Or mostly I hope she just feels better really soon.

Today on the bus my driver was singing to himself, and that was really sweet.

It has been so hot this week that the local schools are adjusting their hours to end earlier. I feel like curling up and sleeping until August. I hadn't realized that it had cooled off until just now when it has fired back up. It is almost unbearable this time. It didn't bother me as much at first because I was excited to be in India and experience the new climate, but after six weeks I would really like to be dry for 30 minutes. And not so salty. I'm sweating the prints off of my new Indian shirts! The three days of monsoon were just a cheap trick.

I also never thought this would happen, but I might be ready to branch out from Indian food. It is still delicious, and I enjoy it when I eat it, but I would love some fresh vegetables or fresh fruit, or normal cheese, or milk without sugar. The only salad I eat here is fresh onion and cucumber. I'm starting to miss bland! How crazy is that!

Here are some positives: I am buying kulfi almost every day, I found and then bought some fresh plums this morning, the public transportation system still fills me with excitement and adventure every morning and every night, I love having staring contests with the old, turbaned, sheet-pantsed village men who are on the bus with me, my host family is very accommodating of my napping needs, the other interns are full of other perspectives and help me be more reasonable, and yesterday I made friends at McDonalds with an Indian man who is now a french astronaut and back in India with his french wife to visit his mother . So my life isn't all rain clouds right now! Or maybe hazy dust storms?

Also, here are some pictures that probably should have gone with my last blog entry: Sorry about the layout, I don't have the patience today to make it look great.

My neighbor during the monsoon

Mandore Gardens

Review of Week 4: Business as Usual?

For a few days this week I felt like I joined Corporate India. I bused to the office and then did research and wrote some of my report on my laptop all day. Except at this office I was frequently interrupted by the 7 year old who lives upstairs. Sambhav is always excited to run downstairs and practice a little English with me and then lapse into rapid fire Hindi that I just sort of laugh along with. The other day after lunch I played Snakes and Ladders with him for about forty-five minutes and I got to practice counting and losing gracefully in Hindi. That same day I was encouraged by my supervisor to take a nap on the floor, so I did. Then Thursday I had five cups of chai in one day! So my corporate India is maybe a little different from corporate America.

In addition to working with women and children through the Anganwadi Center system, my organization works with leather artisans in Jodhpur. Meera Sansthan is trying to organize the artisans into Self Help Groups so that they can apply for loans from microfinance organizations. They also organize trainings on leather design development and quality improvement. They also are trying to help the artisans find a better path to customers. In any case, one day this week to break up the monotony of office life (which is actually usually pretty eventful) my supervisor decided to send me off to the leather cluster to see the leather workers in action and ask them some questions. They really do amazing work--Jodhpur is famous for producing Jutis, which are leather embroidered shoes, and the designs are sometimes quite intricate. What blows me away is the price of all these leather products. The Jutis sell for about 170 Rs., or $4. Handmade, all leather, hand stitched--such a labor intensive product for so little profit. Which is a problem--most leather artisans are barely getting by, and the men I talked to said they weren't letting their sons go into the family business because it was so much work with so little return. However, somehow one guy had the time and energy to build the world's largest Juti! It was 8 ft long, three men can sleep inside, and 12 children can sit inside. He said his next project was to build an entire room out of leather.

As part of my host sister's 17th birthday celebration on Friday we went to the McDonald's which just opened in Jodhpur. I was pretty curious what would be on the menu since this country is mostly vegetarian and almost completely beef-free. There were a lot of chicken products and then three or four veggie or paneer options. The whole experience was a little overwhelming--there were a lot of people and I'm not sure how familiar my family was with the American fast food process. They asked me for recommendations and I just had to say that the entire menu was new to me. I didn't elaborate on the American version--the last time we brought up the fact that Americans eat beef they all seemed pretty scandalized. We all got the Tikka Burger which had a patty of potato masala. It was nice, but not as spicy as the name implied. About an hour and a half later we went out for real dinner (burgers are just snacks, I guess?) and the place knew my family so well that when we sat down we didn't even order. The servers just brought out "the usual"--onion salad, roti, dal, malai kofta, and then some papad at the end. Dolly said that the dal here was the best in all of Jodhpur. I'm not experienced enough with Jodhpur or dal to agree or disagree, but it was really spicy and had about a cm of straight ghee sitting on top. Even my host family agrees that the food there is really rich.

The interns got together to celebrate the 4th of July yesterday. We had some group birthdays this past week too, so we had birthday cake, biryani, mutton, chicken, egg curry, paneer, dal, salad, tons of fresh fruit which none of our host families seem to want to give us ever, and gaudy Indian birthday decorations. We even got some fireworks and shot them off in an abandoned lot across the street from the office. That attracted a lot of attention--a bunch of foreigners yelling and shooting off fireworks on some random night in July? But it was pretty exciting. Someone's hand almost got blown off (of course). And I forgot to take pictures.

Today was apparently the hottest day so far, and somehow we had decided to spend it outside touring Mandore Gardens. They are a popular picnic spot for Indian families, so on a Sunday they were starting to get a little crowded, even with the heat. Since Rajasthan is mostly desert, I was expecting the gardens to be sort of dried out. Instead everything was very green and lush with bright flowering bushes. We walked through some shrines to past maharajas, saw lots of monkeys, and wandered back to what we thought might be ruins of the original fort. One of the other interns also was accosted by a local old woman who really wanted to touch a white face.

I think this last weekend was my last quiet weekend. I have travel plans for the remaining three before I have to leave. Next weekend the interns are going to Mt. Abu which is a hill station not too far from here. Apparently it's a popular Indian tourist spot, which is intriguing. The following weekend we have an intern retreat in Udaipur. Then my last weekend another intern and I are going to try to make it to the Taj Mahal, which is about 12 or 13 hours from Jodhpur. And then the next weekend I fly to London! But it's India, so who knows what will really happen.

Expanding MyComfort Zone on the Indian Railway

Not many families in India have air conditioning, or at least not in Jodhpur. For the most part the Indians use fans and then also these giant coolers that force hot air through water to cool it down before blowing it into a room. They work pretty well as long as they have water in them, but the water dries up after a couple hours or so. So far Deva as been the one to make sure my cooler is always full of water before I go to sleep at night, but if I spend much time during the day in my room the cooler dries out and then I just sweat a bunch. Today, as I was sitting on my bed completely drenched, I realized that I could probably figure out how to fill the cooler up myself (I mean, it's only been what, 3 weeks?). I got out on the balcony, ready to apply all my super engineering lab experience and saw that it was super obvious. The hose was already inserted into the water holding tank. All I had to do was turn on the knob. When I turned around to come back inside, I saw that the family across the street was out on their balcony laughing at me. I gave a little wave.

This past weekend the other interns and I ventured to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan! We left Friday night for a 6 hour overnight train ride. We decided to save a little cash and go for the 320 Rs. round trip non AC sleeper car. I thought there might be sheets or something, but instead we just spread out on vinyl covered bunks, three to a wall. On our first day we visited the Hawa Mahal (Wind Palace), which was the Jaipur Maharaja's Playboy Mansion. He was the only man allowed inside, aside from the castrated Eunuchs who had to wheel the royal wives and concubines around (they were wearing too much jewelry to walk up stairs comfortably). Next we went to a collection of giant astronomical tools and sundials built by a Maharaja who was particularly into astronomy. The tools calculate the exact time and the exact position of the sun within the zodiac. Hinduism uses astrology to name babies and also to determine auspicious dates for things like weddings. We were all exhausted but we continued on to the City Palace, where the current Maharaja still lives. The museum part that we could see had cool garment and artillery exhibits. One Maharaja was 7 ft tall and 450 lbs, and they still had his old robe and a pair of his pants! Then we ate a lot of lunch, I took a nap, and we ate the most expensive meal I have had yet. Pizza Hut was 300 Rs. a person! Ridiculous.

Day 2 we had planned to wake up super early and climb a temple, but since everyone had only gotten about 4 hours of sleep on the train and we didn't get to bed until around one, we weren't travel ready until about eleven and it was already 105 degrees or something. We grabbed some rickshaws and headed up to Amber Fort. Ruins from the 10th century are visible behind the current fort, which was built in the 15th century. Unfortunately, most of the young male tourists seemed more interested in following our group around than enjoying the fort. I don't mind taking pictures with families or kids, but it is really uncomfortable to be learning how the Maharaja would meet with his concubines in this room and be given spoonfuls of wine before making glory (?? what does that mean?? I was too scared to inquire further), and then notice that four or five different cameras are pointed at you and your other blonde friend. At first we just tried to ignore them, but after some guy was videotaping Rachel for about 2 minutes straight we got a little more forceful. The Indian American interns were telling us that our ideas of politeness don't apply here, and that we should be just as rude as we need to to make them stop.

Next we took a jeep to the largest cannon in the world (only fired once, just for practice), I got some ice cream for myself and bananas for the group, and then we went to the Sun Temple. The Sun Temple is up on a mountain where wild monkeys also like to have shenanigans. We chilled up there for about an hour and a half and we saw monkey families, monkey wrestling matches, monkeys not caring about our existence, and we also saw the temple caretaker's toddler daughter get totally owned by a rogue monkey. We ate another expensive and leisurely dinner at a Chinese place (but no lunch besides bananas and roadside fried goods, so the cost was okay). We raced to the train station but it was delayed (surprise!). We didn't leave until 1am or so, but every seat on the train had three or four different numbers on it so no one knew where to sit. No one as in no one on the entire train. Kind of chaotic, but so Indian, which is why I came, so I tried to keep calm. We got into Jodhpur again around 7am. I decided to take the day off and I slept from 7:30 to 1:30. Longest nap ever!

Having hindi speaking interns made this trip so much easier. I'm really curious about what would have happened if we had tried to go without them. I'm thinking that we would have paid a lot more to do fewer things with so much more confusion! I think another intern and I might head to the Taj Mahal soon, maybe by ourselves without any hindi speaking crutch, and that might be quite a bit more adventurous.

Indian ice cream is the best. More specifically, this frozen milky dessert very similar to ice cream called kulfi is the best. It's kind of chunky and you can get it in the best flavors, like pistachio, or chowpati, or cardamom dessert flavored. I need to start making a bigger effort to eat it b/c I don't think I'll be able to get it outside of India.