Week 12: Goa, Aurangabad and Mumbai

Week 12: Goa, Aurangabad, and Mumbai

We started the final week of the adventure in Goa, a very small state on the Arabian Sea (west coast) which is a very popular beach destination for both Indians and Europeans. As a result, the culture is much less conservative than the rest of the country. Women can wear tank tops, wearing shorts is allowable for men, and most restaurants offer meat and alcohol (in India, food with meat is known as “non-veg” compared to the opposite that we say in the US, “non-meat”). Chels and I were both surprised at the amount of Russian tourists, and it was interesting seeing advertisements and restaurants with menus in Cyrillic. We stayed in Goa for 3 days and didn’t do much other than sitting on the beach (and two nights of Karaoke, I seriously might have a problem). There were two things that made the experience different from a beach in the US. For one, there seem to be laws requiring setback of several hundred meters for buildings along the beach. Because of this, the beach still looks natural, as the huge hotels, resorts, or other tacky buildings you see in the US weren’t present. Instead, there are small shacks up and down the beach serving food and drinks. The other difference was the presence of livestock. Both days we were on the beach around 4 o’clock there was a huge group of cows that took a walk down the beach. It was like watching a bunch of cougars going to hit up happy hour specials. They walked up the beach and then about 30 mins before sunset they walked back to wherever they came from. It was really amusing.

My boss Doug gave me a very nice sendoff present when I left in September: a card with cash in it to use for something I really wanted to do but my budget wouldn’t allow. I had been holding onto it the whole time and used it towards the purchase of a plane ticket to a city called Aurangabad. The city wasn’t very memorable, but located 30km north are the Ellora Caves: 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain caves built into the side of a small mountain. In my mind the experience ranked just below Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Jokhang Temple in Tibet for incredible religious spaces. The caves go back and forth between Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism depending on what religion was most prevalent at the time. They date back to as far as the 5^th century AD. The carvings varied including Buddhas, Hindu Gods, lotus plants, etc. One had a ribbed barrel vault carved into the rock that created cathedral-like acoustics. Unfortunately the only chant I know is Christian, so it was probably a bit sacreligious to be chanting “domine fili unigenite jesu christe” but the temple guard didn’t seem to mind, in fact he showed me a better vantage point to get a richer sound. Chels, myself, and Chels’ friend Pinar (who met up with us for Ellora) seemed to be as big of a tourist attraction as the caves, posing for probably a dozen pictures from Indians who wanted to us to be be photographed with them, their families, and sometimes their extended families.

The only other noteworthy thing that happened on the excursion to Aurangabad was that I saw Alex and Graham Miller on TV! Pushing Daisies is apparently aired in India and here I was in this remote city in the middle of Maharashtra and on TV were two guys I went to high school with. It was really great to see familiar faces even if they couldn’t see me!

From Aurangabad we flew back to Mumbai for 3 days. Mumbai is a hectic city of 16+ million, with the worst traffic I think we’ve seen anywhere on the trip. There are some very beautiful parts, both Indian and from the British reign and some very poor parts. When you fly into the airport, you fly over one of the largest slums in the world (which we actually stayed in one night before Aurangabad, it’s okay mom I’m back home safe and sound now!!!). People walk up and down the streets knocking on car windows begging for money. We visited Haj Ali, a mosque that sits in the middle of the bay, connected by a causeway during low tide and disconnected during high tide, similar to Mont St. Michel in France. There were plenty of posters for Bollywood movies coming out. There were billboards for a cell phone company whose phones had facebook capabilites. We stayed next to Victoria Terminus, one of the busiest train stations in India where 2.5 million people pass through every day. They also filmed the final dance in Slumdog Millionaire on one of the platforms here. Being such a large city, the culture seems to be more modern than anywhere in India, with the exception of the European culture of Goa.

At 2.30 am on the morning of the 16th I started the second to last leg of my journey. I boarded my 16^th flight since the trip began from Mumbai to London for the start of my 22 hour journey back to the states. Thanks to the magic of sleeping pills I was able to sleep for 8 of the 10 hours of the flight. I landed at Heathrow where it was snowing (compared to 90 degrees in Mumbai) and after going back through security got a HUGE salad (I never would have guessed that would be the food I missed most) and waited for my last flight. I boarded flight number 17 and sat next to the most fun person ever named Tina. Normally I’m not a big flight talker, but after I asked her something about the time change our conversation started and she revealed about 7 minutes into it that she was an energy reader (or more commonly known as a psychic). She was Indian by ethnicity, grew up in Uganda and Britain and now lives in Northern Virginia. Now I’m not one who really buys into this stuff, but without me revealing anything, she knew I was 28, a twin, and that my dad was a doctor. She got plenty wrong: she thought my name was Peter (which is my dad’s ironically), she was insistent I had 2 brothers (just one and a sister), and thought my birthday was November 7^th (it’s the 13^th). I was so excited about all of this I naturally poured out my entire life story for her to analyze. She gave me a 5 hour reading (for free!) and I consequently took 5 pages of notes for everything that she predicted and other interesting bits that I wanted to remember. She told me although my trip was coming to an end, my journey was just beginning. And that is how I’m going to close out this blog. I still have a lot more analysis to do in writing, but that will come later. The trip was an excellent chance to see some very different things from what we have at home, as well as an opportunity to get a better understanding of who I am and what I want to be. Happy New Year!

Photos:

Cows walking the beach in Goa foiled by sandcastle toys, Calangute, Goa

BSU kids, come to GOA there’s a restaurant waiting for you, Calangute, Goa

School kids at the Ellora Caves, Outside Aurangabad

Sign in English and Maharashtri, Ellora Caves

Monkey, Ellora Caves

Showing our fake tatts we got in Goa of Shiva (the destroyer!) in front of a Shiva carving, Ellora Caves

Pinar and Chels Prom Pose, Ellora Caves

Buddhist Temple, Ellora Caves

Buddhist Cave, Ellora Caves

We didn't wait to see if Mr. J. Law was picked up or not, outside Mumbai Domestic Airport

Haji Ali Mosque, Mumbai

Low Tide at the causeway to Haji Ali, looking at Mumbai

He really wanted to take a picture of me, and I wanted to of him! Near the India Gate, Mumbai

Family Business, Mumbai

Me and Pinar in front of the Taj Hotel that was bombed in Nov 08, Mumbai

Week 11: Kerala

We made our way to the south last Tuesday and spent an entire week in Kerala. We flew from Ahmedabad to Trivandrum and landed on a runway that was in the middle of a palm tree forest. Trivandrum, located on the western coast almost on the southern tip of the sub-continent is the colonial name and the capital city of Kerala. It’s Indian name is Thiruvananthapuram, which I cant even begin to pronounce but means “holy snake city”. Snakes are sacred in India (at least I’m under that impression), so much that if you get bitten by a snake you are considered purified and don’t have to be burned in a ghat when you die like we had seen in Varanasi. The weather in Trivandrum was hot and humid, much different from the arid north. I wasn’t convinced I was even still in India until I saw our taxi cab, the same Ambassador model from the 1950’s that picked us up in Kolkata. With that said, the south still seemed like a different world: The men wear skirts (really it’s just a big sheet they tie around their waist), the tuk tuks actually have room for luggage (bonus!) and the people are just about the friendliest we have encountered on the entire trip.

While in Trivandrum, Chels and I did some architourist stuff by finding the works of Laurie Baker, a “Ghandian” architect who did socially responsible, low income, green work. He died two years ago, but his office, Costford continues to operate with the same principles. We saw a coffee house he designed for a coffee bean co-op which is a 4 storey continuous spiral. Inside was a timewarp, it looked like a ramped 50’s diner, with booth seating on the perimeter and the kitchen and bathrooms in the center. The walls and seats were pink and turquoise. The ramped interior definitely did not meet ADA standards, but considering that I don’t think I’ve seen an egress/exit sign in this country yet, I’m sure it is of no concern. We also saw a campus he designed and low income housing under construction in one of the city slums. His brickwork is his signature, and reminiscent of when Alvar Aalto went through his red brick phase (muraatsalo summer house for all you AS2k5 peeps out there) with many different experimentations of pattern, scale, and arrangement. His low income housing also has clay tiles embedded into the underside of the concrete slabs, reducing the amount of steel in the slabs by 25% according to the project architect.

Our last night in Trivandrum we went to this huge old movie house that I can only compare to the Uptown in Cleveland Park only it was a little larger and not as grand. We saw 2012 for a whopping 35 rupees (75 cents!) which was cool to see because it takes place in DC, Tibet and India. They stopped the film mid-way and had an intermission which was strange. The audience was a bit chatty and talked on their cell phones during the show as well.

We left Trivandrum for Kollam on the best train ride of the whole trip. It was only an hour long but it was in the lowest class where we sat in a train car with no glass in the windows (only bars!) and looked out at the towns and countryside of southern Kerala. The doors were non existent and people would jump off of the train as it slowed down before we got to the station.

In Kollam we did a canoe trip through the backwaters, tiny canals that branch off of the river that runs parallel the coast in a similar way the Intracoastal Waterway runs up the gulf coast of Florida. We saw people building canoes, a tapioca farm, and a couple fish farms. I spent a good part of the time laying across my bench looking up at the palm fronds that arched over the waterway. It was very calm and peaceful. The next day we took an 8 hour boat ride up one of the larger waterways to a town called Alleppy. We were on a boat that sat maybe 40 people, but was only half full. We made friends with a couple from Austin who have been traveling since July and have no definite ending date. We swapped travel stories, talked about food we miss the most (we both more or less agreed on Guacamole). It made me feel good that they’ve also had “fat kid camp days” (their words) where they gorge themselves at McDonalds or other western fast food that they see every now and again because it is familiar and although maybe not eaten a lot at home, very tasty on this side of the world. We tried to outdo each other with “craziest bus ride” stories. They knew a guy whose friend Andy was traveling in Boliva on a bus when it got pulled over by a guy with a machine gun. The bus full of people was very nervous but after the machine gun guy stopped talking to the driver, the driver turned around and joyfully said in Spanish “don’t worry, they’re only robbing this guy!” pointing to the only foreigner on the bus, Andy. They took him off the bus with all of his stuff and when he returned he had only the boxers he was wearing. Thankfully, that beats anything we’ve had to encounter!!

When we arrived in Alleppy we went to our hotel which was a resort type place on one of the backwater canals. We stayed in a hut clad in palm leaves with a hammock and what seemed like the first piece of grass I’ve stepped on in months. It was perfect and we were happy to have a change of pace as we wind down the last 11 weeks of being on the move.

Our last week is going to be a fast one, we’re off to the beaches in Goa for 2 days, then Mumbai with a quick side trip to the Ellora Caves which Ted Wolner apparently talked up quite a bit in Arch History (chels remembers hearing about them, I don’t). I’m back in DC on Wednesday!

Pictures:

Laurie Baker Indian Coffee House, Trivandrum

We decided against this restaurant, Trivandrum

Center for Development Studies, Campus designed by Laurie Baker, outside Trivandrum

Center for Development Studies, outside Trivandrum

Boatmaking, Backwaters near Kollam

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Backwater boat ride from Kollam to Alleppy

Dusk on the boat from Kollam to Alleppy

Week 10: Jaipur, Udaipur and Ahmedabad

It was inevitable and I knew it would happen: Travelers sickness finally caught up with me and I was in bed for 3 days as a result. I think something in Agra got me sick which forced me to stay in bed in Jaipur, missing the city while Chels went and toured the fort, palace, etc. The city is known as the Pink City, because when Prince Albert of England came to visit, the shah or King or whoever was in charge had the entire city painted Pink in his honor, though I’m not sure why pink was chosen. After only 1.5 days in Jaipur we flew to Udaipur because there were no trains available. I thought I had recovered so I stupidly stopped taking my meds which actually made whatever was wrong with me come back even stronger and I spent two of the three days in Udaipur in bed. When Thursday rolled around, I still wasn’t taking to food, so my thanksgiving feast consisted of 3 or 4 ritz crackers, water, and Cipro. I was able to listen to about 10 episodes of “This American Life” on my Ipod which was nice and the ceiling of our hotel in Udaipur was beautifully painted in bright blue stenciling with peach colored flowers which I stared at for the majority of the day.

Udaipur is known as the White City and has a huge lake with a palace in the middle of it (now a very expensive hotel). The city is also well known because it is where they filmed James Bond’s “Octopussy”. Our last day there when I was probably about 70% recovered I was walking to pick up a pair of pants I had made (if I’ve had one indulgence on this trip, it has definitely been tailor-made clothing) and about 30 seconds after walking in the shop, I turned around and who was there but Johanna, the girl who sits directly behind me at SmithGroup! We knew we were both going to be in India in November, but after an email a couple weeks ago, we didn’t think we were going to be anywhere at the same time so we made no plans to meet up. I had no idea she was going to be in Udaipur and there she was! We hung out for the rest of the day, saw a wedding ceremony (the groom was on a horse, a marching band played, fireworks were shot off, very different from any wedding I’ve ever seen) starting and then watched Octopussy while we ate dinner at a hotel restaurant. What a crazy small world!

From Udaipur we took a bus to Ahmedabad. Ahmedabad is one of the largest cities in India in a wealthy state called Gujarat. Chels studied there when she did CAP Asia in 2005 and one of our professors and a classmate of Chelsea’s were both there doing a Fulbright. I was unsure if I was going to like Ahmedabad but ended up really enjoying it. For one thing, it isn’t really touristy. Its’ claim to fame is that Ghandi lived there after he returned from South Africa in a commune of sorts. There were many perks to being in a city that didn’t have tourists. For one, the tuk tuk drivers don’t rip you off. We were shocked at how cheap it actually is to use them and how much more we were paying elsewhere. Of course it is all relative, but a tuk tuk that would cost 100 rupees ($2) in any of the previous places we had been was only about 25 rupees (50 cents) here. They use meters and you don’t have to barter for the price. It was such a relief.

Ahmedabad had some great modern architectural landmarks as well which was refreshing after having toured about a million temples/religious structures since September. IIM, the India Institute of Management’s (premiere business school, modeled after Harvard) original campus was designed by Louis Kahn. The dorms, faculty ofices, instruction space and library are all in the same vein as the Philips Exeter Library with huge geometric circles cut in to brick facades. Kahn’s mastery of scale and organization of the various programmatic components created a beautiful campus that seemed like an inspiring place to learn and live. I think the most exciting component of his design is his integration of light and shadow with his response to the hot-arid climate. The buildings are laid out like fingers, keeping them small and open to allow for daylight and air. They are connected with long arcades/corridors with rhythmic punched openings that produce beautiful clean, geometric bursts of light on the brick facades while providing a cool space to walk and keeping the buildings out of direct sun. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get very many good photos, because security made me put my camera away.

Another notable building was LeCorbusier’s City Museum. Standing in the courtyward on the ground level you know you’re in a Corbu building because 3 of his 5 ‘ideal principles’ are all present: Pilotis with open ground floor and raised first floor, ribbon windows, and a ramp. It was an institutional brick version of Villa Savoye in a way. The inside left something to be desired though. The circulation of exhibit space was poor (I think due to modifications of exhibit spaces and not Corbu’s intended design) but his stair details were nice and the concrete was beautiful. Sorry to geek out on the architecture descriptions but my exposure to modern architecture had been lacking until now.

From Ahmedabad we fly to Trivandrum which is almost at the southern tip of India. It is in a state called Kerala which is a socialist state and has a higher literacy rate than the US despite being one of the poorest states in India. It should be exciting!

Pictures: Apologies, I have none from Udaipur and Jaipur..

Kahn’s IIM main quad. Library in back, Faculty Office buildings on the left, classroom buildings on the right, Ahmedabad






New IIM dorms recently completed, inspired by Kahn’s original design, Ahmedabad

Old IIM dorms designed by Kahn, Ahmedabad

Kevin's dorm room at IIM, although I didnt get to meet him...

This was a menu item at a restaurant called "Uncle Sams". It was kind of a mix between Friendlys and Chuckee Cheese. Which is why we were shocked to see this on the menu, but it was hilarious! Ahmedabad

This was a Stepwell, an temple that goes 5 stories below ground. Adalaj, outside Ahmedabad

Jama Masjid (Main Mosque), Ahmedabad

I was supossed to be looking at this: Swaminarayan Temple, Ahmedabad



But was more intrigued by this behind me:

Week 9: Kolkata, Varanasi, and Agra

WEEK 9: Kolkata, Varanasi and Agra

Our first week in India has been amazing. The experience has been eye opening to say the least. We left Kolkata early in the morning from a chaotic train station aboard a very calm train arriving at night to Varanasi which was an even more chaotic train station: Touts tried to get our business before we were even off of the train, cows were walking on the platform (we have no idea how they got there), and the main hall in front of the ticketing counter looked like a church lock-in, with what seemed to be a hundred of people asleep on the ground as they waited for their trains.

We awoke the next morning at 5am to take a sunrise boat trip on the Ganges. The Ganges River is holy to Hindus and is very important to the daily life of those who live in Varanasi. With that said, the water is very polluted and yet we saw people bathing in it, drinking it, doing laundry in it, and worshipping in it. Lining the Ganges is a series of Ghats, or steps to the river. Many Ghats have temples at the top of them, some have public plazas, and two of them are known as “burning ghats”. These are where people bring their loved ones after they’ve passed away to be cremated and then have their ashes spread in the river. There are several fire pits with wood stacked high and the fires can be seen burning at all hours of night and day. When the ceremony is performed, the body is first marched to the burning ghat, then placed in the river to cleanse it and then put on the wood pile to burn with family and friends watching. After the body has burned, the ashes are spread in the river and those attending the ceremony bathe in the river to cleanse themselves. We didn’t see the entire process, but parts of each step I believe.

Walking through the streets of Varanasi was just as interesting. The market area was overrun with crowds of people and shop owners begging for you to come in and look at their stuff “looking is free! Very cheap!”. Our hotel was connected to the main area of Varanasi by a 10 minute walk through a very poor neighborhood. On the walk, we had to every now and again look behind us to make sure bulls weren’t charging towards us. There were goats wandering the streets and dogs sound asleep in the middle of the road. There was an area that just had trash all over the ground that we called the “bull market” because bulls were perusing the area, looking for food, the same way people do in real markets. One night walking back on that road the power went off in the entire city. We watched the lights shut off in about 50 yard increments along the water front and soon the entire city was in darkness, the only light from hotels with generators and the glowing fires of the burning ghats. Walking down this street in the dark was fun. People went on with their daily lives with candles lit, but extra caution was made to avoid animals walking in the street so as not to spook them.

That evening around 8 PM a hindu temple one building over from our hotel started a religious service. At first Chels and I thought it was a mosque doing the “call to prayer” because the top of the building had a green light flashing as minarets sometimes do and we could’ve sworn we heard the name “Allah”. After about 10 minutes we realized it was not the call to prayer, but something much longer. The chanting over the PA was so loud we had to raise our voices to hear one another as we ate dinner outside on the Hotel’s terrace. The service went on from 8 AM until around 8 the next morning, stopping only a couple times when the power went out for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Sleeping through it was miserable, it was so loud you would think they were chanting in the room we were sleeping on. That night we used the last two things we had packed but not used yet: a flashlight and ear plugs. The next morning the hotel staff informed us that once a year every temple in the city has a worship service that involves broadcasting over a PA system the reciting of some religious writing. Each temple in the city does it on one night a year, and the one next to us just happened to be one of the nights we were sleeping there. It was miserable but interesting to hear. Although we had heard many things about Varanasi, it has been one of my favorite stops on the trip so far and it will be hard to top as we finish out the trip.

We left Varanasi for Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Although the landscaped pools and walkway to the mausoleum were shorter than I had imagned, the building was as beautiful as. The structure was built as a final resting place for a Shah’s second wife who died during the birth of their 14^th child. The Shah was so upset over it, his hair was said to have gone gray overnight and construction on the building started within the year. It took 8 years to complete the Taj, 15 or so more to complete the grounds and structures surrounding it. A couple of years after the completion of the entire site, the Shah was overthrown by his son and for the last 8 years of his life could only see the Taj through a window in his bedroom at the fort he was being held prisoner in. Walking to the Taj is not what I had expected. You are in an old part of town with small cramped roads that suddenly stop at the huge red sandstone wall of the outer boundary of the site. With a building of such national importance and monumentality, I guess I had expected something more of a grand road with the wall as the terminus.

We left Agra on a bus to Jaipur which was about a 5 to 6 hour ride. Chels and I got the last two seats on the bus and were excited to have the back row where the seat was an apholstered bench and not individual seats, which seemed more comfortable. It was comfortable for about 2 minutes until they brought in the other people to sit with us. In a space that was designed for 4 people we had 7 crammed in, 5 adults and 2 children. It was tight, the man next to me could have been friendlier, but then again we were getting quite a bit of attention, being the only non-indian people on the bus. We arrived in Jaipur, Rajasthan and will be here for the next week before we head to Ahmedabad and then to the south!

Pictures:

Sunrise over the Ganges, Varanasi

Worshipper, Varanasi

Flowers and garlands in the Ganges, Varanasi

Bathers/Worshippers, Varanasi

Meditation, Varanasi

Our boat guide, Varanasi

Boat ID, Varanasi

Laundry, Varanasi

Eating a flower garland floating in the Ganges, Varanasi

A Ghat, Varanasi

Bathing, Varanasi

Auto Rickshaw, Agra

We saw a lot of this, attempted visual illusions, Taj Mahal Agra

Courtesan and Penniless Sitar Player, Taj Mahal, Agra

Stone detail, Taj Mahal, Agra

Agra Fort, where the Shah was imprisoned, Agra