Vacation

     I'm writing this post from the middle of the mountains in Kerala, India. Our week-long vacation started on Thursday evening and I've been here for the past two nights. I'm staying at a hotel called Camp Noel (http://campnoel.com/) that's extremely isolated in the Western Ghat mountains and I'll be here for the next four nights. I'm also here by myself. I decided that after six weeks of constant time with the group, I need some space alone in  a quiet, natural setting. I really haven't had the time I need on the program to rest and reflect about everything that has happened, and also to prepare myself for the next nine weeks of the program. I also desperately needed to get out of the city, especially a place like Chennai, and breathe some clean air. I'm very lucky to be a guy because it means I can travel on my own here. I know some of the girls would have liked to do their own thing, but it just isn't an option for them.
     I'm also the only student on the trip really traveling alone for vacation. One student went on her own to visit family in Delhi, but it isn't quite the same thing. Other students are traveling with boyfriends and girlfriends or moving in groups that range from two to seven. Two groups went north to Delhi to see the city, the Taj Mahal, and large temples, but most students are going to Goa for a couple of days and then south to different parts of Kerala.
     So far I've had a great time here. It was very strange to be alone at first, but traveling alone feels wonderful after so much time with groups of different sizes. I realized that Friday night was the first time I've slept in a room alone without someone from the group in six weeks. To get here, I flew across the peninsula from Chennai to Kochi and then a car from the hotel picked me up at the airport and drove me five and a half hours to the hotel. The last hour or so of the drive is very difficult and slow going along a dirt road that runs through a tea plantation, hence the isolation. After I first got to the hotel, I slept for about sixteen hours with a couple of breaks for meals. I really felt the wear and tear of the trip.
      I'm very isolated physically, but ironically, the hotel lobby has the fastest and most consistent internet I've had in all of India.

India vs. Switzerland

        India seems like almost the complete opposite from Switzerland. The contrasts between the countries have been striking for us and there have been some tough adjustments from the comforts we’re used to, such as the toilet situation, showering, dirt, smells, etc. Switzerland runs like a well-oiled machine. It seems like most people know where they fit into Swiss society and live fairly well-off. There are also programs and services for those less fortunate. I can’t remember seeing a single homeless person the entire time we were in the country. At night in Chennai, you have to watch where you step so you don’t step on the many people sleeping on the street and there are many, many beggars.

            Switzerland is also almost impossibly clean. Any trash on the streets is cleaned up soon and people just don’t litter. In India, however, it’s very hard to find a trash can. People don’t even seem to want them, they just throw trash on the ground wherever they are or dump it somewhere. There are mountains of trash around the city and you can see lots of it on the edges of waterways and floating down rivers. We were here for over a week before I saw a garbage truck for the first time.     

            I don’t understand how Chennai functions. It seems like buildings just pop up whenever someone wants them to and small businesses just come and go. The city is a lot of small roads and completely unorganized urban sprawl, at least to my eyes. It’s no wonder Indians don’t really use an addresses to get places, they just keep asking people on the street how to get somewhere. Switzerland is very decentralized in terms of the cantons (the Swiss equivalent of states), but at the same time each canton is very centralized around the government. For instance, everybody is required to pay the government for a basic health insurance policy and one of our faculty members, who lived in Geneva for several years, described the country as a police state. Apparently, every apartment building has a concierge who reports basic information about the residents to the government. Thus, it’s very difficult to be an illegal immigrant in Switzerland.

            Somewhat strangely, though, some of us feel freer in India than we did in Switzerland. Everybody follows the rules in Switzerland and there are steep fines for those who break them. You have a lot more flexibility in that respect in India. The Swiss also appear to have a clear definition of who is Swiss and who is not. There are a lot of Turkish and some African immigrants in Switzerland, but the Swiss seem to put them outside of Swiss society and they’re a very hot topic in politics. A couple of years ago, there was a law passed in Switzerland to ban the construction of new minarets for the Muslim population. Chennai seems more like a mix of Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, and some immigrants here and there.  

Men Are Evil. Men Are Evil.

            Several women guest lecturers have applauded the fact that our group has thirty girls and only five guys because when they were in school it was the opposite ratio. One speaker who helps to run women’s empowerment group for rural women even stereotyped all men as incompetent, power-hungry people who waste all money on women and alcohol. In fact, their group sponsors microloans and they only give them to women because the men don’t pay them back and spend the money on women and alcohol. This portrayal bothered me, but during the next couple of days I saw a few things that proved it true. I think we men need to shape up.

            However, men still have a lot of power in Indian society and there are cultural restrictions on the women. I can pretty much do whatever I want here, but that’s not the case for the girls in our group. They are expected to be back at their homestays by 8:30 or 9, so no staying out late, and some parents want the girls to always let them know where they are. They girls in our group cannot wear shorts, tight-fitting clothes, or expose their shoulders in public, and so the first few days here there was a lot of shopping for light pants, long skirts, and light, long sleeved shirts.

All Better!

     I'm healthy again! I was back to normal by Saturday afternoon, thanks to three days of antibiotics. Some other members of the group are also having stomach problems, but nobody else has been lucky enough to get the fever/stomach combo that I did.
     Of course, this morning I hit my hand on the low-ceiling fan in my hotel room and wound up with a great slice across my knuckle. I just can't quite stay healthy anymore here. This also brings up another point about India, which is size.
     I'm just too big for India. My feet almost always stick off the end of beds and I seem to hit my head on everything in this country, such as doorways, bus tops, roofs of the tiny cars, and low-hanging things in hallways. I still haven't seen anybody taller than me and I usually tower a good head above everybody else in a crowd except Tom from the group, who's about an inch shorter than me. Apparently one of the faculty members saw a group of Indian guys who were taller than me, but I haven't seen anything for myself yet. 

Sick

         I finally got sick. I came down with a fever Tuesday morning and went home to rest. I slept most of the day, but felt pretty awful at night. Yesterday morning I felt a lot better, but I don’t think I’m quite in the clear yet. I didn’t go to class in order to rest. On Saturday, we’re leaving as a group for a five-day visit to rural India and then our week-long vacation starts when we get back, so I want to be well rested and healthy for those. I haven’t had access to a thermometer, but my mom said that whenever I have a fever that reaches 102 and above I throw up, so since I didn’t throw up the fever probably wasn’t that bad. I can’t pinpoint how I got sick because it feels like pretty anything I touch, eat, or breathe in India could make me sick.

            Yesterday I also started having diarrhea and stomach pains, so today I came to class to see the doctor. He put me on antibiotics, advil, and tums for three days and diagnosed me with a bacterial infection, probably from some bad food. I’ve been resting and sleeping the whole day and hopefully the antibiotics will start working soon.

Homestays

           We’ve all been in homestays for about a week and a half now after a week in a hotel. At first, it felt very strange for the group to be separated after three weeks together 24/7, but it’s nice now for everybody to get some space. I live with two other guys, Tom and Mateo, in a house with our host dad (Ashok), 24 year old host brother (Vignesh, or Vicky as he usually goes by), and their 2.5 year old German shepherd (Max). We have a 30 year old host sister (I don’t know her name), but she lives with her husband in Scotland. Whereas most dogs play with dog toys, Max plays with coconuts. He’s never happier than when he has a coconut in his mouth and someone is chasing him. The house is huge by traditional Indian standards. One floor tall, it has a living room, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large kitchen,, and two small storage/laundry rooms at the front and back of the house. The house is also surrounded on two sides by a yard with many types of fruit trees.

            Sadly, our host dad’s wife passed away four years ago from ALS, and it sounds like a very difficult time for the family. We also don’t see too much of our host brother because he always has to work. He’s usually at his office from 9 am until 10 or 11 at night and he’s had to work most of the past few weekends too. He’s only had the job for five months now and since he’s new they treat him like a slave. Our host dad really doesn’t like the way he’s treated there, but can’t say anything otherwise they’ll take it out on his son. Luckily, today is Vicky’s birthday so he finally took a day off.

            The homestay situations vary pretty widely in the group. Students are all in pairs, except my homestay, and some students are with elderly people who barely speak English, some are with families with young children, and some are with families with children our age. Some students live close to where we take classes, but others, like us, live pretty far away. Our house is located in a suburb on the southwestern edge of Chennai. We have a commute every weekday to and from classes of about an hour. We get dropped off at the train station, take the train for about fifty minutes, and then take an auto-rickshaw to the hotel where we have classes.

            It’s a little far, but the train is really the best way for us to commute. Traffic can get horribly congested in Chennai and if you’re not in a car with windows and air conditioning all of the car exhaust can get to you. I really dislike taking the auto-rickshaws long distances because of that. The train also allows us to get more of a bird’s eye view of the city. We all just can’t believe how big it is. It just sprawls and never seems to end. Farther away from the center of the city there are also massive construction projects popping up all over the place. Some of these office buildings are the largest that I’ve ever seen, they’re mind boggling. We do get a lot of looks on the train, though. Most white people don’t join the regular commuters on the train.  

            Overall, we’re really happy with our homestay. Having a dog again is wonderful, I miss my dog, and he always want to play with us.   

Indian Food

            South Indian food is very different from the North Indian food I’m used to eating at home. I like it, but I’m really sick of white rice and I’m craving meat, pretty badly. I’ve had meat a few times, but you need to find a Sikh or Muslim restaurant and even then the quality can be questionable.

A normal meal consists of three courses: the first course is rice, chapatti, or dosa with some type of gravy dish and sambar, the second course consists of rice with rassam, and the third course is usually rice with curd, a type of homemade yogurt. When we first got here nobody in the group had any idea of the proper order to eat the food in, so we just ate it all together and found ourselves laughed at by the hotel staff. It was probably like mixing pasta, a hamburger, and ice cream together in one dish. Most South Indians are also Hindu and thus keep vegetarian, which leaves me with a lot of rice and not a lot of protein. Lentils are pretty prevalent in the diet, but it’s just not the same as a piece of chicken. North India grows a lot of wheat, which leads to more breads in the diet, while the South grows mostly rice. I love the curd because it provides protein and good bacteria for digestion.

            My stomach has taken a couple of hits, but it hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting going into the trip and I can usually recover pretty quickly too. Some of the other kids haven’t been so lucky, though.

            American fast food is also really popular here, especially KFC and McDonald’s. Apparently most Indians swear by KFC. Just for the hell of it, three of us went into KFC and McDonald’s two days ago. We were really surprised by how nice they were. They were clean, busy, and relatively “hip.” Fast food also has a reputation in the US for less than ideal standards of hygiene, but these kitchens were probably the cleanest that I’ve seen in India. At KFC we ordered some popcorn chicken and at McDonald’s we ordered a McAloo Tikki and the Chicken Maharaja Mac. If we closed our eyes, we could almost feel like we were home. All were pretty good, but the Chicken Maharaja Mac had something in it that we could only imagine had been a chicken at one point because chicken was in the name.