March 11, 2008: Day 1…Welcome to India
India…where do I begin? I’m not going to even attempt to tell you all the little details because I don’t even think I, myself, have been able to digest and make sense out of everything I saw. I will start by saying that India is unlike any other country or place I have ever been to.
Today I woke up at about 0545 to watch the sunrise over India… it never happened. In such a polluted, dirty country I don’t know if you ever see the sunrise. A few kids on the ship told me that their doctors at home said that “one day in India is the equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes a day!” After watching the “sunrise,” I heard complaints throughout the halls as I made my way to breakfast. Many people were looking for their cabin stewards because they thought something was burning in their rooms. I didn’t know what to think of it at first, but then it hit me- We were in India! The whole country smelled like burnt rubber & it was already leaking into our rooms.
We docked in Chennai on the southern tip of India on March 11th. Chennai is a city of about 9,000 residents and is more traditional than many other cities in India.
As I got off the ship, there was a crowd of college-aged women awaiting us. I never felt more like a celebrity in my life. The women wanted to take pictures with me, look at me, shake my hand, ask me for my name, touch my hair, and just bombard me in every way possible.
My time in India begins with an auto rickshaw. Before getting off the ship, we were told that we would have to get around the city in auto rickshaws. The ambassador who was prepping us told us that she’d be shocked if any of the rickshaw drivers had their licenses & said that her 14 year old son could probably drive better than any of them…she was probably right!
Riding around in these auto rickshaws was 100x scarier than riding in a cab in NYC. Not only are the streets in India more insane than in NYC, but it was like we were the “little engine that could,” scooting between huge buses, cars, and motorcycles that weren’t going to stop no matter what! One thing that my friends and I quickly realized was that India is full of tourist traps. From the second we stepped off the ship and onto land, about 100 skinny, barefoot Indian men started heckling the 700 students to get on their rickshaw. There was nothing that differentiated any of their services except how much they were going to charge, so Kristin, Candice and I found a guy who agreed on a price (so we thought) to take us to a local street market called T. Nagar. I swear, bargaining is an art in India. It is as if the agreed upon price goes in one ear and out the other with these drivers & then they try to nail you when you get to the destination and will NOT leave you alone or take no for an answer.
When my two friends and I got to the first outdoor market, our rickshaw driver would not leave us alone. He wouldn’t take the money we agreed upon so we started to walk away as we had been told to do in our pre-port meeting. He followed us, and followed us, and finally we gave him a few more rupees (equal to about 10 cents) because he just wouldn’t leave us alone. I could already tell that traveling around in India was going to be more frustrating than I had ever imagined. The market was a good way to get a sense of real Indian culture. In our pre-port lectures, we had been told NOT to cross the streets…and if we must, to be very careful because there are death stories in the newspapers everyday in India due to cars & buses hitting people. But of course, Kristin, Candice and I went to the local market with no cash, and the only nearby ATM was…across the street. The three of us stood there, trying to figure out how to cross the streets of India, but remained clueless. We had to get a local to hold our hands both ways and I still thought I was going to die! There were lots of beggars at the market. I saw a man holding out stubs, not hands, asking for money. It was really hard trying to ignore all the beggars because I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. At the same time, I am only a poor college student and can’t save the world! Candice & I each got a traditional Hindu outfit made up, shopped around the market for a bit and then decided we had had enough. We asked a man in a store where the closest orphanage was because Semester at Sea had a few trips to orphanages arranged, but we wanted to go on our own.
We ended up being taken in an auto rickshaw to a School/Hostel for deaf children. We basically walked right up to an office, told them we were students from the US, and it turned out we had gotten there just as the children were finishing up with school, perfect timing. We gave all of the children crayons, stickers, and candy as they made their way back from school. However, we didn’t go to the hostel to just give the children gifts, we went there to interact with them. The big challenge was communication as we don’t know sign language and they can’t verbalize. We communicated with the children by writing in a notepad, as they knew how to write and understand some English. It amazes me that these deaf children that live in a hostel, from one of the poorest countries in the world, can read and write English as they do. Through our notepad communication, I learned the names of many of the children, their ages, and how when one little girl noticed that Kristin was wearing pearl earrings, she told us that her family does not have jewelry, only a Holy Bible. I got the opportunity to play soccer and catch with a bunch of the children. The laughter and smiles on the children’s faces made every second worth it.
After our time at the hostel, Kristin, Candice and I headed back to the ship for dinner via an auto rickshaw. Kristin and I hung out for a while after dinner, took a nap and woke up at 0300 to meet with our Semester at Sea group for our trip to Delhi/Agra to see the Taj Mahal.
There is no such thing as sleeping while in port…just catnaps.
March 12, 2008: Day 2…IWA (India Wins Again)
0330 and I am on my way to the airport. I didn’t get to sleep much on the bus ride to the airport; water from the ceiling dripped on me the whole time and there were no empty seats to move to. I knew nothing could be done about it, so I didn’t say anything…IWA. We took Kingfisher Airlines to get from Chennai to Delhi. It was kind of like jet blue, but much nicer! For breakfast, the flight attendants came around with menus and took our orders…I got chicken, potatoes, an omelet, fresh fruit, a croissant, water bottles, and coffee…talk about a breakfast for champions. Each seat had its own TV, and playing on one of the channels was Friends! The seats were very comfortable with tons of legroom. I certainly didn’t feel like I was in India.
When our flight arrived, a tour guide awaited our group of 35 to take us on a city orientation of Delhi, the capital of India. Let me start of by reiterating how dirty and polluted India is; there is trash EVERYWHERE. Many people will even laugh at you if you ask them where the garbage pail is; they just throw their trash on the ground or in the streets. So, we are driving down the streets of Delhi…
You have 3 lanes of traffic going one way, 3 lanes of traffic going the other way, and no divider. Note: there is no stopping at red lights, and people cross over the divider and drive into oncoming traffic as they please. What can you find going down the streets of India…people walking, people on bikes, auto rickshaws, motorcycles, cars, buses, cows, camels, elephants, and trash. I don’t think there are any RULES when it comes to driving in India. Nor are there any crosswalks…
As I was saying, we were driving down the streets of Delhi and I look out my window to see nothing less than cows eating trash in the streets. It’s kind of strange to be driving down the street and to see a car to one side of you and a cow to the other, but it is even weirder to see cows in the street eating the trash. Hey, that’s India! I also got the opportunity to see numerous men peeing and pooping on the sidewalks. There are not many toilets in India, but you can find squatter toilets more commonly. Squatter toilets are basically just a hole in the floor for you to do your business in. However in the poor streets of Delhi, most of the people don’t have access to squatters.
We stopped off at Paradise Buffet to meet up with other Semester at Sea groups for lunch. Paradise buffet was a buffet full of Indian food. I put a little bit of most of the foods on my plate to try, but to no surprise I didn’t really like it. The bread on the other hand, Nan, was delicious. So for lunch I stuck to nan, soup and vanilla ice cream. As we ate our lunch, there were 3 Indian entertainers that walked around the tables while we ate. This was the first time I saw the Indian “bobble head.” You know those bobble heads that you can get of different sports players, or other famous people? “The bobble head” is kind of like that, except the head only bobbles in the no direction. Many people do the bobble head even when they say yes, so you get all confused why they verbally say yes, but their head is shaking no. For example, when I asked the waiter for more nan, he bobbled his head (looking like a no) but then went to get more nan. I sat there and kind of wondered if he was going to get more nan or if he was bobbling his head and saying no at the same time. So this Indian boy would do these crazy dances, weird things with his eyes, and twist his arms completely around his body, all while doing the bobble head….it’s kind of creepy! (Try looking it up on youtube)
After lunch we hit the road and began our 5-hour trip to Agra (where the Taj Mahal is). You all know how I like to sleep when I am a passenger, but I tried my best to stay awake (a few naps here and there) because it was a great way to see the country. One thing that helped keep me awake was the fact that my tour guide never stopped talking on the microphone & that all Indian drivers honk their obnoxiously loud horns at least every 30 seconds, no exaggeration. On the back of almost every vehicle, it reads “BLOW HORN.” This is probably the only road rule that people in India follow! We passed through many Indian rural villages, all of which could be described as overcrowded, filthy, and poverty stricken. We drove for hours through Delhi and we never drove through an area that I would say could not be described by these words. I am used to driving past some poor parts of New York; but here there is no driving past the poverty. For hours on end I thought to myself, where does the poverty end, when will we get past this part of the country…we never did.
2130 we arrived at our hotel. Everywhere in India I had seen so far was covered in trash, smelled horribly, and had beggars everywhere, but when we pulled into the driveway of our hotel, I felt like I was in another world. It is amazing what globalization enables us to do; here we were, 35 Americans in a western-standardized hotel in the midst of extreme poverty. We were greeted in the hotel as we were each given a lay and an orange dot on our forehead. Dinner was set up in one of the restaurants for us in the hotel- buffet style. Once again, I enjoyed some nan, pasta, and ice cream. After dinner, I looked around the hotel shops, and went to sleep.
March 13, 2008: Day 3…The TAJ MAHAL
The phone rang at 0500, it was our wake up call. We woke up early to go to the Taj Mahal and see the sunrise. The Taj…WOW. Word’s cannot describe. I cannot believe that some guy built this monument for his dead wife; I can’t imagine what he must have done for her when she was alive! I wonder if he has any relatives around my age?! My friends and I basically had a photo shoot the entire time we were there. It was weird knowing that I would probably never go back to visit the Taj again. This was my first real experience feeling like a celebrity. I think some of the Indian men thought my friend Kristin and I were Barbie or something because groups of men were constantly coming up to us and asking us to take pictures. One time a group of about 20 men asked me to get in their group photo, so I did. After we took the group photo, one of the men asked me if he could stand in-between Kristin and I for a picture. The next thing I knew, the other 19 men wanted to take turns taking pictures with us. It was funny, but at the same time all I was thinking was, “hellooo, I want to take my own pictures!” All of the men were laughing and were so excited to be standing next to us and getting a picture of it.
After the Taj, we got back on the bus to go see a fort called Fate Puhr Sikri. As we boarded the bus, tons of hecklers (all Indian men & boys) followed us and were trying to sell us cheap trinkets. It got annoying very fast. Even if you didn’t make eye contact with them, they’d come up to you and say “’Excuse me, mam, how much you want this for?”…even when you didn’t want it! And they’d follow you, and drop their price 50%, and follow you, and drop their price even more, until they were selling whatever it was for $1 USD and you still didn’t want it! When I looked out my bus window before we pulled away, there was a little girl crawling on the ground using her hands and feet, she had polio. She was holding her hand up at the window for money & it was really sad to see such a young girl in this condition.
I don’t know much about Fate Puhr Sikri except that some king lived there at some point. It was very beautiful & again, turned out to be a photo shoot with my friends. On SAS, I quickly learned that the small things we did in port were some of the most memorable. As I was taking pictures, I noticed a poor homeless woman, wearing a colorful sari, filling a water bottle up in a fountain on fort grounds. I decided to take a picture of this woman filling up her water bottle, but she saw me and started smiling. So I took a picture of her and walked over to her to show her the picture I had just taken. I sat down with her, showed her the picture and began interacting with her; Kristin soon joined in. This woman didn’t speak much English, but I learned that she had a husband who died from rabies & had two little boys. She was Hindu. As we sat there and interacted with this woman, she took 2 of her bangle bracelets off her wrist, and gave Kristin and I each one. It was a pretty painful experience because Kristin’s and my bones weren’t as malnourished as hers and the bracelets hardly fit over our wrists. It amazes me how a woman with so little in life gave the two of us these bracelets. We found out that these bracelets had some meaning in this woman’s life, but we have yet to figure the meaning out. Kristin and I gave her a little money before we left to go back to the hotel for lunch.
After lunch, we went to the famous Agra Fort where I saw one of the funniest things on the trip so far. Monkeys were all over the fort. It is crazy how intelligent they are and how aware of their surroundings they seem to be! Two monkeys started making love in front of all of us (I got some hilarious pictures). At one point, the male monkey had basically mounted the female monkey from behind while eating a candy bar. Wait until you see my pictures! After leaving the Agra fort, we went back to the Taj for sunset (although it looked the same as it did at 6am since it was an overcast and/or polluted day). During my last visit to the Taj Mahal, I took the time to actually go inside and see where the body lay. What a beautiful building. I still cannot get over the fact that this huge, beautiful building holds the remains of one woman’s dead body. After going into the Taj, the photo shoot continued.
We left the Taj and headed back to our hotel to pick up boxed dinners before we headed to the Agra train station to go back to Delhi.
Agra train station was probably the saddest thing I have ever seen. It was dark by the time we arrived to the train station. When I got off the bus in a creepy dark parking lot, tons of beggars surrounded us. There was even a man with elephantitus in his foot. We walked through the parking lot and upon entering the train station, I saw piles and piles of poor people lying on top of each other as if it were one BIG sleepover in the station that night. Tons of starved looking people were sleeping in the dimly lit area for the night. One girl in another SAS group said that she saw a dead person on the ground that still had his hand out as if he were begging for money. A bunch of the little kids followed us to the other side of the tracks where we had to wait a half hour for our train to arrive. Beggars were everywhere and they would just hold their hand out and stare at you with empty eyes, sometimes touching their mouths symbolizing that they wanted food. A few men were crawling around down at our feet trying to scrub our sneakers with a dirty brush for money. Lots of SAS kids gave some of the poor people food they hadn’t eaten from their boxed dinners. I felt awful because I had eaten all of mine even though I hadn’t been that hungry…I’ve come to realize how much I take food for granted; I have noticed that many times I just eat to eat, not necessarily because I am hungry. I wish I hadn’t eaten it all. I gave one of the little boys 2 water bottles, he looked so hungry and thirsty. I noticed this little boy and his friend throwing the water bottles on the ground, trying to burst them open; they were drinking out of the bottom of the bottle where they punctured a hole. They had no idea how to open the water bottle! A little boy came up to Kristin with a torn shirt that looked like he had worn it for years. He kept pulling the tear over his head so Kristin gave him an extra t-shirt she had with her. He quickly ripped his old shirt off and put Kristin’s on. He stood out like a sore thumb because everyone else was in dirty, ripped clothing. I wondered how long this shirt would last him…
The train wasn’t too bad. We were in “first class,” which was nothing like you would expect a first class cabin to be. Luckily, my train ride went smoothly because when I got back to the ship the next day, I found out that one SAS group’s train caught on fire in the middle of the night and they had to evacuate in the middle of nowhere! We got to Delhi at 11pm and boarded another bus to go to our second five-star hotel, The Ashok. Once again, the hotel served as a place for us to sleep and eat, not to hang out.
March 14, 2008: Day 4…India is exhausting
0800 wake up call. So I got some sleep, but not much. We started today off by eating breakfast and going to a park. It was nice to see green lawns, flowers, and landscaping. The monuments here were what the Taj Mahal had been modeled after. There were a bunch of school children that were on a field trip to visit these monuments as well. I got the permission from the students’ head master to videotape some of the children singing “Happy Birthday” for my mommy. So cute! That afternoon, we went to Ghandi’s tomb. We had to take our shoes off to walk to the area of Ghandi’s memorial. I can’t believe that I stood just a few feet away from such an important figure! After visiting the Gandhi Memorial, we stopped at another park where we got henna tattoos on our hands. Somehow Kristin & I got stuck with a lady who basically put chicken scratch on our hand. Everyone else’s designs were really intricate & cool. This lady practically grabbed my hand and started scribbling; she was probably so excited to see so many Americans- it meant more people to do Henna on, which equaled more money for her. After the park, we went back to the hotel since we had some free time before we would head to the airport to go back to Chennai.
Kristin, Ashley, Jesse and I decided to use some of our free time and take a cab to go to a Hindu temple. However, our cab driver took us to the SKETCHIEST area ever. It was definitely not the right temple & there were flies & poor people everywhere. Creepy beggars kept coming up to us & cursing under their breath when we wouldn’t give them money. Just like I had seen many times before, there were little kids that had been taught to dislocate parts of their body or show their weird double joints to do tricks for money. One little girl got on the ground in front of us, put a small metal ring around her neck, and then bent her feet up backwards into the ring and pulled her entire starving body through the loop. It is so sad what these people will do for money. We finally spotted a temple, but when we attempted to go inside, we were told that we must take our shoes off and leave them outside…YEA RIGHT! I would never see those shoes again. As we made our way back to our cab, we saw a woman sleeping on a bench, with her fake leg on the ground! You never know what you are going to see in India… Trying to get back to our cab was a nightmare. 2 young boys, about 16 or 17 years old, wouldn’t leave us alone. They kept asking us for money and when we wouldn’t give it to them they would basically curse us under their breaths. The boys followed us through the parking lot all the way back to the cab, kind of scary! After this experience, Kristin, Jesse, Matt, Zach Effron (yea, there is a kid on the ship that’s name is Zach Effron!), and I decided to spend our last 2 hours in Delhi at the hookah bar next to our hotel.
Our flight back to Chennai was just as nice as our flight to Delhi. This time I got to watch Scooby-Doo! We got back the ship at about 0100, I was exhausted.
March 15, 2008: Day 5…HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY!
Back in Chennai, my last day in India. I woke up at 8 am to go to Mother Teresa’s Orphanage. The orphanage was another one of the saddest things that I have ever seen. About 50 children lived here, all of which were either mentally or physically (or both) disabled and had been abandoned by their parents. I really didn’t know that people could exist in these forms. I didn’t take pictures because we weren’t allowed, but it was so sad. It was nice to see they were in good arms though. Some little boys bodies were permanently stuck folded in half, kids didn’t have arms or legs or didn’t have either, some couldn’t walk, and others had strange growths on their faces…I saw a lot, you can’t even imagine.
We came back to the ship for a quick lunch and gathered up a few people to go to Spencer’s Plaza to shop. Kristin, Lauren, Hilton, James, and I split up into 2 auto rickshaws. As we pulled up to Spencer’s Plaza, we were told they were closed. There had been a fight between two Indian men over money, and one of the men stabbed the other…India. We asked our auto rickshaw driver to just take us to a local street market so we could shop around, bargain, and get some souvenirs. However, the rickshaw drivers are full of scams and never take you where you really want to go. They get commission taking you to certain expensive tourist stores, so they kept taking us to them even though we told them we weren’t going to pay them if they continued to do so. It is impossible to win with the drivers. I would constantly say that we wanted to go to a local market, and they would say “ok ok cheap market, let’s go,” and they would pull the same scam time after time. We spent most of afternoon driving all over Chennai & finally took a break at a restaurant & hookah bar called Mocha. After Mocha’s we decided to go back to Spencer’s Market because the cops had cleared it. Kristin & I got really good at bargaining (Grandma you would be proud). I think we got the best prices for all our pashmina scarves among all the SAS kids! At about 1800 we headed back to the ship, I couldn’t be more excited. I had enough of India. It was great to see what another part of the world was like but I was ready to move out to sea and see what else is out there!
You cannot, in your wildest dreams, imagine what life is like in India. All I know is that I never thought a place like this existed. It has made me realize how much I take for granted, and how much I need to change that.
It is amazing how people with so little have taught me so much…
