I have officially survived two trips away from Jaipur without the protection of a male companion. Surprisingly these trips weren’t as scary as we had anticipated. However, in true Indian fashion we did run in to some roadblocks. Our first destination was Bundi, a small tourist town in Rajasthan where Kipling once wrote and allegedly served to be the inspiration for his novel Kim. I have not personally read this piece, or anything by Kipling in fact, but if you have perhaps you can see where Kipling was coming from after checking out my pictures. My roommate Jocelyn and I hopped on to a bus en route to this esteemed destination. They gave us seat one and two, the first two seats that are slightly isolated from the rest of the bus. On the way home they gave us the same two seats, and even kicked people out of those seats to give them to us. While this phenomenon was slightly confusing to us we assumed that maybe this was to minimize our harassment? While we were waiting for the bus to pull out of the station I was harassed nonetheless. A man was perpetually putting his hand on my shoulder and back and was not deterred by my rather public and loud chastisement of him. After that small debacle it was smooth sailing for the next long five hours. Well, perhaps not exactly smooth sailing, as it was a very bumpy and jostling ride, but what else could really be expected?
We arrived at 11 at night tired and ready to fall in to our beds. We hailed a rickshaw and were delivered to the door of the guesthouse where we had made a reservation. While we had the presence of mind to make a reservation, we did not have enough to remember to call our accommodations to inform them of how late we would be arriving; in Bundi at 11 PM the entire town is fast asleep. So we found ourselves stranded in front of our guesthouse on a dark alley attempting to open the door, not quite cognitive enough to accept the fact that our hosts were not going to wake up. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily, there was a guesthouse right across the street. All of our attempts to get in to the other guesthouse woke up the owner of the adjacent guest house and following the lady offered us a room for the night. This being India with our guard constantly up we were slightly skeptical. Yet the time and our exhaustion did not really allow us any other options. We graciously accepted her room for 200 RS a night. 200 RS roughly translates to 4 USD. But let me tell you, it was not even worth that. It was entirely infested with bugs. We laid down in the beds and instantly had bugs crawling over every inch of our body. Jocelyn conveniently brought bug spray with some absurd concentration of DEET, which we doused our bodies and bed in. I ended up wrapping my head in a scarf to ward off bug bites on my face. Somehow we fell asleep, but it was in no way a deep or fulfilling sleep at all. I now have bug bites all over my body. Hopefully none of these bugs were carrying any diseases.
While we left that guest house as soon as possible and found ourselves is much more pleasant accommodations, the rest of our weekend followed suit with not exactly going according to plan. We spent the next morning touring a dilapidated palace and doing a little shopping. For the afternoon we had planned to go visit this picturesque waterfall that the Lonely Planet Guide raved about. In order to get there we would have to take an hour-long rickshaw ride. We met and informed a British couple who was staying at our new guesthouse of our plans and together we arranged a rickshaw to take the four of us to this waterfall. About a half an hour in to the ride our rickshaw decided that it was its time to die, and puttered out in a small little village. Our driver informed us that another rickshaw would be there in thirty minutes to rescue us. The villagers rustled up four little stools for us to sit on, and the four of us got to know each other a little better while the village crowed around us to stare at the strange people. We never did end up making it to that waterfall as the following day we had to stay at our guesthouse and write our first papers for the semester. It was quite a bummer that we had to miss out on this acclaimed waterfall, but the Bundi experience was nonetheless pretty amazing.
The following week the Common Wealth Games opened in New Delhi. For those of you who have no idea what the Common Wealth Games are they are an Olympic style competition between the former British colonies, as well as Britain itself. When we initially flew in to Delhi the whole city was kind of a pit as it was undergoing renovations with the hope of being immaculate by the time the games began. My housemate Dede and I decided that it was entirely necessary that we attend, it’s not every day you get the opportunity to go to a sporting event of that magnitude. After making all of the accommodations the only true pocket buster was our transportation to and from Delhi. The actual tickets for the games were rather cheap, 2-4 USD. So we made all of the accommodations and set off to go early on Saturday morning. We had the conception that Delhi would be filled with people, as it always is, and furthermore filled with tourists. As we entered Delhi we could immediately sense that this was not going to be the case. While the city itself was very nicely put together, the people so characteristic of pretty much anywhere in India were nowhere to be found. Yet, it was not only local people that were missing from the equation, the tourists were also missing. This proved to be a very strange sight indeed.
While we were yet again the novelty white people we attended the games with a lot of enthusiasm. We had tickets to a field hockey game of Canada v Trinidad and Tobago and following tickets to an evening squash match. The field hockey stadium was not even close to being full, in fact it was much closer to being empty. The audience was predominately Indian, there were very few representatives from Canada and Trinidad and Tobago. As Canada is our neighbor Dede and I thought it would be only right for our allegiance to lie with them. We were surprised to find that the majority of our Indian counterparts felt the same way. The whole stadium was animatedly cheering for Canada. After making friends with the fans next to us they told us that this phenomenon was probably due to the fact that Canada is just easier to say. The whole game was quite fun with the enthusiastic crowds. The following squash match we attended was not quite as exciting. I had never seen squash before and did not exactly catch on to what was actually going on. Following the games we splurged for a delicious meat filled dinner and returned to Jaipur.
Some of you have noticed that I haven’t really been veiling my negativity all that well in my recent blog posts. But I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that my negativity derived from the difficulty is beginning to subside. Many of the things that were aggravating me before I have stopped noticing or stopped caring about. Furthermore, this week we went to a restaurant called Barbeque Nation where we had all you can eat meat filled barbeque, what’s not to love? Of course, next week all of the students are moving to new locations in Rajasthan. We are starting our internships next week and will all be given accommodations near those locations. My internship is located in Rajasthan and is through the NGO Cecoedcon (http://www.cecoedecon.org/home.htm). Ideally I will be working with environmental policy, but won’t really know what I’ll be doing until I get there. As for my accommodations I will be living in a hostel near the main office. Hopefully I will have at least decent food there. That pretty much concludes the recent news in India. This weekend we are heading out to the desert to go on a camel safari! We are all very excited about this!
No comments:
Post a Comment