This morning Maulin, Molly and I were out for a jog. And we literally ran into a meter-long snake (you should have seen Maulin shriek & run!). And a few minutes afterward, I landed in the mud...to find myself falling into cobra position.
But about the weekend...
Our team met up with the GV volunteer, Christina from Romania, & got on the crowded, rickety bus to Berhampur. It was so exciting, and we were all squealing with joy for the adventures to come. Driving through the land again, smelling the smells, and seeing the people reminded us that we were, in fact, in India.
As we got closer to the city, the scenery got slummier and we started noticing the abject poverty that we get to conveniently miss while on the compound. Children running around naked; women washing their clothing and dishes in the dirty potholes on the street; men urinating anywhere they please (and I mean anywhere). It was a well-needed slap in the face a bit, to see the reality of India again.
Cities in India are hard to compare with cities like New York. No sky scrapers catch your gaze. No real paved streets. Cows sitting on the streets, not cars. Honking horns of rickshaws, not cabs. Gutters with trash and other bodily matter in it, not just homeless people. But it was a great change, no less. The busyness of the streets was refreshing, and we were saturated with shouts from vendors and strung lights over shops.
Christina has been living at GV for about a year now, so she was our tour guide around, while we all looked around excitedly and aimlessly. She was running errands, and we were just happy to be out, so we trailed behind her like her ducklings.
So our team betrayed our GV diet of rice and daal. We bought a lot of biscuits, some COLD beverages (something we hadn't experienced for a while now), and other junky foods to taste and experience. We went to a bakery and bought some really tasty cookies for the week, all costing about $3 per person. We went to the market and I bought 2 coconuts (COCONUTS!) for 25Rs (= $.50) while Hallie bought bananas for 15Rs. We also landed a liquor shop (much to my surprise) and they bought a few beers for the evening. On the streets they were selling the bright orange poles and clothing of the Kanwar pilgrims, which made me tempted to join them in whatever pilgrimages they take.
Of course it was raining, and crossing the streets in Indian cities make crossing the street in NYC a joke (so I'll have you know there are crazier pedestrians than me in the world, thank you very much).
Our amazing 4-hour field trip ended with us foreigners landing a chinese restaurant for dinner. And the food was delicious. I had ginger shrimp and sweetcorn, which was so good I can't begin to describe it. However, it did take a while to order because they didn't truly understand what we wanted, despite our pointing to the menus, and they couldn't understand that I am, in fact, a fish-eating vegetarian. They kept on trying to serve me chicken, and I kept sending it back.
A few more notes on India:
1) They only ever talk to or take orders from Maulin. He's male. He's Indian. Sometimes it's like they don't even see the rest of us because we're white females. It can be frustrating at times, because here I am right next to Maulin trying to order something, and they'll ask Maulin instead of me. And they always give the checks to him, or take our purchases from him first. The gender gaps are a lot wider in subtler ways than I had anticipated.
2) Restaurants don't have toilets. In fact, many of the local buildings (including nice houses, strangely enough) just don't have them. It's like while they were constructing their buildings, the idea of sanitation or bowel movements never even crosses their minds.
Christina and Chitra have explained to us that it's just part of the older customs, open defecation and urination. Hence why we're here, studying, I guess. But much to Hallie's dismay, while we were in the restaurant, she had to go to the bathroom and wasn't able to (it wouldn't make sense for a student on sanitation to go to the gutter and squat, would it?).
After our wonderful galavant ended with Maulin and me going to Christina's room to chit chat and share a beer. Her room is really really nice, actually. The roof is made of bamboo, and it's a huge room with a fridge & kitchen, very clean and rather pretty! I guess it makes sense, since she's more longterm than us. We were heavily distracted by the resident cat, who took a fancy to Maulin instantly. But our conversation was great, and we ended up getting back to go to bed around 3am.
Sunday's reading day as we've grown accustomed, and we slept in until lunch. It was delicious. I am almost done with my second book now, also! So we relaxed and read and had tea (because I bought a whole box of tea for us).
We met up at lunch with one of the coordinating guys that we've become rather close with, Gobardhan ('Go-bard-on'...we call him Gordon in private because we didn't know how to pronounce his name at first). He is a really powerful, spritely guy, and he loves to talk to us, especially about spiritual stuff. So we ended up in his room and he gave us all of an impassioned talk about his wonderful philosophies on life and talked about the saints and sris that he follows (addressing Maulin, of course). We were there for a while, and he said some really good things that I hope to keep with me for a while. I hear he also teaches yoga, and I'm thinking about asking him for a lesson (but I have a feeling it might be really intense...).
We had dinner at Joe's house, with his family. It was really quite lovely! We had (boxed) wine, and some really good vegetables like okra (my favorite) and beans and cauliflower! No rice! We had some really fun conversations about the US, politics, travels, and his 17-year-old son came to join us too. He was a trip! He's going to RPI in the fall, and we were trying to prep him a bit about the US. But the kid's worldly already; his summer he was all over Hong Kong, the Philippines, and worked on roughly 1000 Websites in some Indian government office (which is when I asked him how old he really was and why did I feel so under-accomplished next to him). We joked around and ate good food until late, and got home to sleep.
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