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