chota peelee auto (life is traveling)

return of: adventures in food!

2012-01-29T12:06:00.000+05:30

when hubs lived in egypt for 2009 (back before we were married), i decided that his living overseas and my living at home was a great reason to have a series of adventures in food. you know, so didn't spend too much time feeling badly that he was gallivanting across the middle east on camels while i was sitting at home working a desk job for some bosses that treated their employees like crap.

i made things from scratch that i'd usually buy in the store: bread, bagels, ravioli. as 2012 is my year of the quilt, 2009 was my unofficial year of cooking and baking.

one of the students i work with recently asked me if i made things because i'm not a fan of preservatives and chemicals and all the other sorts of nasty things that end up in our food these days. let me come clean: i wish i cared enough about that to read up and educate myself. i take on these sorts of projects both because i'm a stress baker/ cooker and because i enjoy the adventure of it. and india, my friends, is a perfect excuse for adventure.

we've made syrup for our pancakes (who wants to pay $17 US per bottle?), powdered sugar (stick your sugar in a mixee and grind it to a powder. no more late night runs to the grocery store for baking ingredients) donuts and now, cheese.

that's right: cheese. this weekend, after making some candied orange peels dipped in chocolate, i made cream cheese. before you get all impressed, let me tell you this: it is incredibly easy. boil some milk (or just heat it, if your milk is pasteurized already) with some heavy cream, add some lemon juice when it gets to be about hot beverage temperature, and watch it curdle! cover it for a few minutes, pour it into a colander covered with a cloth (use an un-dyed piece. i didn't have one on hand, so i used green. i also then tossed the whey (strained watery stuff) instead of saving it for our pancakes because it had a green tinge to it). hang the piece of cloth with the cheese curds in it over a bowl so it can drip for several hours. when it stops dripping, scrape the curds off the cloth, toss it all in a mixee and mix to a smooth consistency (i added a little milk, because again, i tossed the green whey. otherwise, use some of that to get a creamy consistency.)

that's all.

through my adventures in food, i've learned that much of what we eat that is overly processed and seemingly very complex, at least from the list of ingredients printed on the label, is actually not that complicated at all.

also, the difference between various dairy products is kind of a joke. the easiest way to make cream cheese? strain some yogurt. the easiest way to make yogurt? heat up some milk, mix in a spoonful of existing yogurt and keep the concoction warm for 8 hours.

adventure.

2012-01-23T19:09:00.001+05:30

as iwrote last week, i want to continue to think through and learn to articulatewhy an american woman would come to live in india. you can read what i’vealready written on this topic here.

{image from our recent trip to agra}

forthose of you who know me, you know i’m a fan of adventure. not always, to besure (especially if that adventure may require dancing), but probably more thanyour average. after high school, i backpacked through europe posing as an austrianstudent (my train ticket cost me half the price of what an american would havepaid!). in college, i backpacked part of the AT and got caught in a thundersnowstorm with two college friends. we ended up camping out for several days ina shelter with some hicks who took apart the bear proof fence around us togrill bagels. after graduating, imoved out to colorado to work for free for an organization i believed in,though i didn’t know anyone in the city and had no idea how i’d pay my bills. iknew after my first trip to india back in 2005 that i’d like to try my hand atliving here, because i love it so much and also just to see if i could do it.

myself-appointed sister recently made a very true statement: the adventurer in melikes firsts. living in indiameans i have a great catalogue of firsts: cooking a full meal in our Indiankitchen, hubs’s first trip to kerala, our first christmas abroad, celebratingdiwali, visiting rajasthan after dreaming of it for so long, rafting theganges. as even attempting to accomplish simple things here makes living everyday into some kind of adventure, i have more good stories than i do firsts,from that time our sink backed up and our drain overflowed nasty food bits andgreasy curry residue all over our kitchen floor to the day we wandered all overtarnation looking for “those demon things to hang on our porch,” we’ve gotenough little stories to keep ourselves looking back and smiling entertainedlong into the future. heck- our boss had a monkey on his porch/ in his kitchen last week!

what’smore, the adventure and challenge each day brings can be incredibly exhausting,and they cause me to reflect more on the little joys and accomplishments farmore often than i do at home. trip to the grocery store with everything checkedoff the list? that, my friends, is a very successful day. sipping ginger honey lemon tea whilelistening to the call to prayer over the chatter of our neighbors in tamil,hindi and malayalam every evening as the sun sets? definitely something i knowi’ll miss when we return to our quiet little apartment in our denverneighborhood.

life is bigger here, whichcan be a frustration and a joy. i moved here because i love a good challenge.

thoughts: on contentment, poverty and why an american woman would come live in india

2012-01-17T13:59:00.000+05:30

{photo from our trip to muthayalapadu in 2009}

“he wasbaffled as to why an american woman would want to live in india, unless it wasto help the poor*.”

this is a recent comment a friend of mine shared with me after he spent an evening chatting with an indian man who now lives in the usa. i've been thinking a lot about this comment since b sent it to me about a week ago- why am i in india? why did i come here (this time, but any time)? why on earth would this be a place i could see myself living long-term? can i really help the poor? should i?- and as with most of my blog posts of much content lately, this is from an email i've been working on.

the last thing india needs is another foreigner bent on "helping." i can’t help the poor. the longer i’m here, the more i knowthat’s true. i can help them in my own country, maybe, but maybe not even then.i can give to organizations that help the poor, but i can’t be mother teresa,as much as i wish i could. i can’t help them. they helped me, though. andthey helped me in ways i can’t even begin to fully articulate. but because not trying makes for boring conversation and pointless emails, i'll try.

anyonewho knows me will tell you that i tend to fixate on certain things i want.you’d think this would be great, given that it sounds as though it would lenditself well to setting goals: i will buy myself a patagonia happenstance pullover this month, and that's all. however, i hate setting goals. mention the word‘goal’ and i tune you out. (fearof failure? who knows. i claim boredom.) anyway, so say i find something i likeand want to buy for myself. if it’s a big financial decision, i deliberate andthink on it for a long time. if i’m in a store, i’ll try it on and carry itaround with me. if it comes time for me to pay for whatever it is and i stillwant it, i usually get it. if i don’t, i put it back. sounds like a fairlyreasonable way to decide if i want to buy something, right? it also means i spend a lot of time thinking about Things. you know, the sort that don't matter in the long run. the kind you can't take with you when you die.

myfriends in calcutta, my friends in bapatla and muthyalapadu, my friends in tamil nadu havetaught me that it is completely and totally possible to live a life ofgenerosity and joy without having much of anything to your name at all. hear menow: there is nothing romantic about being poor, and i think it is patronizingto pretend otherwise, especially given that i fall in the world’s top5-10 %. what i do mean to say is that my friends in this place havetaught me that even with a list of wants (or often in their case legitimateneeds) longer than it should be, ican and indeed should give to those around me, especially if they ask anythingof me. if i stop thinking about myself and my wants for a while, and stop trying to save the world, i can give to those around me, even if that giving is seemingly insignificant. i’ll write more about indian hospitality soon, but let it suffice to saythat while we think we have hospitality down pat, especially in the south, wehave more than a thing or two to learn from our indian brothers and sisters.whether it’s sharing time or a delicious cup of tea, being here is a realitycheck: i have a lot to offer, even when i don’t.

i don’tjust mean that i have a lot to offer materially, and i don’t mean either thatthis is limited to beggars or the poor who walk and live on the streets here. i can offer conversation.i can offer tea. i can offer a meal, a book, a quiet space. i can share a gameof dominoes or a kind word, or give five extra minutes of my time to thewonderful man i married instead of camping out in the internet. i have a lot i can give. (i’m thinking somuch about sharing cups of tea that i’m feeling a little inspired to change myblog name, even.)

i can’tgive much to the poor that will make any sort of lasting change, and ifanything my time here in india has clarified that fact over and over again.(this doesn’t mean i shouldn’t try, but that’s also a topic for anotherconversation.) but i can give time, dignity and sometimes even someconversation. and i can give, and in fact feel compelled to give a lot more to others because of all that i’mlearning and growing into here.

i hopeto keep thinking about and being challenged by this question for the remainderof my time here in india and on into my future beyond this little peninsula. ithink the reasons why someone in my shoes wouldn’t want to come to india arefairly obvious, so i probably won’t spend much time on those, but just as ishare little “snippets” of the things in my daily life here that make me pauseand smile (or want to beat my head against a wall), i hope to think throughthis question and my own reasons more in depth to answer it for myself as wellas to share with those of you reading.

____

the obvious answer as to why i'm in india is because my job is here.

breathe

2012-01-09T08:00:00.000+05:30

{image}

i know i've done my fair share of talking about why i love yoga, but little yellow auto is a place where i write about things that interest me, and honestly, besides maybe baking, crafting, travel and that guy i married (... not in that order), there are few things that interest me as much/ more than taking an hour or two out of my day and getting out of my head and into my body in this way.

it makes me feel like i can conquer the busyness of my mind with quiet. it was the only thing that kept me from losing my mind while i worked with refugees.

it makes me feel like i am using my body the way it was created to be used. not for sitting in a chair all day.

it makes me feel like i can take on the world.

that's all. :) happy monday!

p.s. also, apparently we're not the only ones who are obsessed with this concoction.

post staycation wanderlusting

2012-01-06T15:59:00.002+05:30

hubs and i had a gloriously long, very relaxing christmas vacation. we did not visit our friends at the orphanage. we did watch movies, read books, consume lots of our new favorite hot beverage. we skyped our families, slept in and ate some bombay toast with caramelized apples.

and now, we're back at work this week. our students come next week. and all i can think about is how lovely our ~~vacation~~ staycation was.

luckily, we're planning another.

we're going home in a few weeks. it's hard to believe that our big move, which seemed to be the biggest and craziest thing imaginable on our horizon, is almost over.

on the way back to the states, we're making a few detours. stop number one is that trip that was canceled at christmas. stop number two is the fairy kingdom of rishikesh. (we're addicted. we can't wait to go back.)

stops number three and four are egypt and france, which i'm sure i'll be excited about when the time comes. for now, though, i'm dreaming of returning to rishikesh.

i mean, if i was going to descend from my himalayan mountain retreat, i'd definitely choose this place as my destination!

_______

are you all tired of me waxing poetic about a little mountain town yet? :) what can i say: i miss the mountains. while i'm sad to think about leaving india, i'm certainly not sad to return to a place of tremendous, breathtaking beauty.

also, an update: we haven't had any pigeons on our porch since the demons moved in!

_______

all photos from our last trip to rishikesh (december '11). isn't hubs handsome??

snippets: our latest addiction

2012-01-02T17:46:00.001+05:30

while on our trip to rishikesh, hubs, bossman and i were intrigued by a hot drink that appeared on every menu of every restaurant or cafe we went to: ginger honey lemon tea.

add a quarter of a lemon's worth of juice to your hot water. add a tea bag and use honey as a sweetener. then, throw in a bunch of fresh julienned ginger and let it sit for a minute or two. the result? divine.

we averaged probably 5-6 cups a day during our trip between the 3 of us. we can't quit. we make it at least once (sometimes three or four times) a day at home in the south. when i married into the pinckney family, i married a man who was already addicted to hot beverages. i've finally found the only drink that i could drink often enough to keep up with his habit!

go make yourself some! go, go!

2012: year of the quilt

2011-12-30T08:00:00.000+05:30

it's official. i'm making a new year's resolution: 2012 will be the year of the quilt.

it feels quite ambitious to name a year after something, especially given that my sewing machine and i currently reside in different countries. also, i hate making resolutions.

but i've had my eye on this 'modified bento box quilt' for a while (as well as a number of others on my pinterest sewing board), and today, i dragged hubs to the fabric store and committed to 10 prints and 5 solids, and found myself a fantastic new fabric store!

greens + yellows

my solids. two pinks, for a sweet little lady who loves pink! (jp and katy, as always, thank you for letting me dote on your babies.)

oranges + yellows

and mostly, pink. this little girl (at least, last i asked it was her most consistent answer) loves pink. and i even managed to find tulip print fabric here in india, which i thought perfectly fitting for someone who can name both india and the netherlands as places her family comes from!

the stack all together. my camera is wonky- the far right fabric is a deep green.

i can't wait to see how this turns out, even though it makes me nervous to take on such a large project (especially after saying over and over again that i'd leave quilting to the pros!) i'm second guessing my fabric choices, wondering if the balance of big prints + small prints + solids i aimed for missed the mark. buyer's remorse? amateur quilter's rookie mistake?

eh. if i finish it and it sucks, scratch this post and i'll keep it for myself, as a reminder as to why i shouldn't quilt. at any rate, i found some beautiful fabrics and i'm glad husband was with me, to keep me from completely raiding the shelves.

i'm nervous, and excited. mostly, i just can't wait to get started. april come, she will!

_________

also, with my new discovery of this fabric store, i'm tempted to open an online store so that you all can benefit, too. if i hadn't just pulled my hair out at the post office trying to mail someone some cookies ('eatables not allowed, madam.'), i might seriously consider it.

snippets: the demon on my balcony

2011-12-29T15:41:00.000+05:30

yes. we have a demon living on our balcony.

alternate title i considered for this post: why we spent an entire afternoon wandering around coimbatore looking for 'one of those demon masks that people put on cars and houses under construction.'

we LOVE having a balcony- and not just because we don't have an dryer for our clothes, and hang them all dry. we love it because we can sit out here in the mornings or in the evenings and listen to the chatter of aunties and the dinging of bicycle bells and the occasional autorickshaw that ventures into our apartment complex. most mornings, you can find j out here with a cup of coffee or tea and a good book, reading. we have a fantastic cross breeze from our balcony, and it gives us fantastic light in our living room. the only problem is, our local pigeons love our balcony even more than we do.

enter the demon on our balcony.

i did ~~some extensive research~~ a little random googling and discovered that pigeons won't roost near humans, or near human looking things.

and because every indian problem has a uniquely indian solution, j and i bought two of these demon masks- one to keep the pigeons off our balcony, and one to keep them away from our bedroom window (there's nothing quite like the creepy hmmm-mmm ing of pigeons RIGHT outside your window at 6 am).

our apartment complex has a number of rules and regulations those who live here have to abide by. we're hoping that these demons, used to scare away other demons (the logic of that one eludes me, though i can't pretend there isn't plenty about my home culture that doesn't make sense, either), that as i mentioned above can be found everywhere, from buildings under construction, to nicer houses to the backs and undersides of trucks and busses and autorickshaws, aren't listed in the 'things that are forbidden' rules of the complex. although, we agreed that it would be pretty hilarious if the foreigners got themselves in trouble for something very uniquely indian.

dil kush: heart happy

2011-12-29T01:25:00.000+05:30

my heart is full right now.

in fact, so full that i tried for an hour to sleep and couldn't. so full i had to get up and spend an hour writing about it.

and then, i had to hop on this little blog here and let you all know.

even though our christmas plans didn't turn out as planned. even though we missed our christmas traditions, our families, our friends. without the snow, peppermint bark and smell of evergreens.

some good news from a dear friend sent me running through some beautiful memories from the past ten years. several emails from a self appointed family member, beautiful letters from friends and family as a christmas gift (thank you all more than i can say), homemade pumpkin butter and a myriad of other small things: my heart is full of the small, small things, and i am glad.

love.

merry christmas to all!

2011-12-25T08:00:00.000+05:30

Our new Christmas tradition?: Bombay (french) toast with caramelized/ candied apples on top.

Merry Christmas from Coimbatore.

a bangalore staycation, of sorts

2011-12-24T18:28:00.002+05:30

j and i had big plans to celebrate christmas in andhra pradesh, with some dear friends of ours whom we haven't seen since 2009. our airline got us to bangalore, cancelled our outgoing flight twice (on two separate dates) and then, without much warning, gave us half of our money back with a, 'regret any inconvenience caused.'

we're glad we were in bangalore when the airline gave up on us. see, there's a dear, dear family who lives in bangalore. theirs is the only address in this entire country i have fully committed to memory. it's a home away from home of sorts, though i've never actually lived at that memorized address. it's a place where everyone is welcome, where there's always enough chappati to go around, and where love, joy and hospitality are in abundance.

sundararajan family, you are a treasure. i'm thankful for each and every one of you. you really and truly are family to me!

this is miss leila. it takes a while for her to warm up, but playing ball with her usually quickens that process. what you can't see in this photo is the laughing, squealing and jumping behind that grin.

isn't she beautiful? also, it's nice to spend a little time with her in person, instead of just being the 'sugar auntie' who sends her pretty things in the mail.

leila loves flying through the air almost as much as she loves playing ball. {dad makes a good airplane!}

this handsome little guy is reuben. we got to meet this little man when he was only 4 days old. he made an adorable baby blob, but he's a chill, happy little dude now with a sweet personality!

almost too much handsome for one photograph. j did a fairly good job at sharing the baby, which was a much welcome improvement from the 5 days last christmas it took me to spend a minute or two with our sweet niece. :) (mostly kidding, hubs. thanks for this adventure, though it didn't turn out as planned.)

instead of the shouts and laughter of 150 dear little ones, we shared some time with two who we don't get to see very often, with their parents and grandparents (and even a great grandparent!). in a lot of ways, i'm thankful for our cancelled flights. we may not have traveled to andhra, but we still had an adventure full of beauty and love, and for that, i'm very, very thankful.

rishikesh: fairy kingdom

2011-12-21T08:00:00.000+05:30

12.17.11

rishikesh.a place i had no real desire to travel to. a place that, in my mind, was tiedonly to the beatles and the maharishi, but with no real appeal. not like theforts of rajasthan, or the temples here in the south, or the history of thebrits and mother teresa in Calcutta. you know, just a place that some whiteboys with moppy haircuts traveled to once and made famous.

was iever wrong.

rishikeshfeels like this little fairy kingdom tucked into the foothills of theHimalayas. the ganges here is blue-green, and frigidly cold. it winds, rolls,forces its way through the gharwal mountains, past ghats and sadhus and, everyevening, a ganga aarti. the hills are breathtakingly beautiful, especially inthe morning as the fog from the evening’s chill rolls off and the sun risesslowly, slowly over the peaks, the ashrams and the dogs and cows which inhabiteven this holy city’s streets.

rishikeshis crawling with sadhus. holy men in holy orange everywhere you look, eachhaving taken on the cremation fire in this body so as to be free from the nextcycle of suffering, death and rebirth. they wear orange as a sign to the worldthat they are free from attachments, and that the alms you may or may not feelcompelled to give may make a difference in whether or not they can eat tonight.every once in a while, you’ll find a particularly colorful character (excusethe metaphor even as i talk about wearing saffron), dressed as blue skinnedKrishna or Hanuman the monkey god, with years and years’ worth of dreadlockspiled on top of their heads. the sadhus compete with the local monkeys for theclaim of the largest population. both choose to spend their time near thelaxman jhula and ram jhula bridges, competing for the attention of the hordesof foreigners who come to this city’s shores in search of god and themselves.

it’sannoyingly quaint that every shopkeeper in rishikesh greets you with a ‘namaste.’it’s delightful that every little restaurant serves ginger-lemon-honey tea andfalafel with hummus and pita. the bite of cold in the air and the howling windthat woke me up around 6am are a wonderful, yet brief change from theconsistent 90 degrees and sunny down in tamil nadu.

standingat the ganga aarti on the shores of the icy river, i understood the mysterious,peaceful appeal of Hinduism for the first time in my life. i breathed deeplythe chilly air and snuggled even more into my fleece jacket. it’s no wondershiva, after descending from his Himalayan abode of kailash, chose to come hereto rishikesh and the neighboring town of haridwar. i’d choose to make thisplace my home, too, if i could.

it makesme a bad international traveler, a hypocritical yogi and a terrible example ofopenmindedness and willingness to learn to say that most of the hindusim i seehere in the south is chaotic, loud and a sort of caricature of itself. thetemples here are brightly colored and piled high with depictions of gods andanimals and if i’m really honest, i’ll admit that i have a hard time takingHinduism seriously. until this aarti. the priests with their firebowls salutingthe river just after the setting sun, the chanting and singing of the devoteeswho came to watch, and the man who stood next to us and handed me some marigoldpetals to offer to the river, and the scrawny little white boy with his hair ina ponytail, eyes closed and hands clapping softly in front of his mouth changedmy mind and my heart. as the sun completely disappeared behind the mountainsand the river rushed past, i threw my marigold petals into the stream and letthis place get under my skin.

i’m notsaying i want to convert to Hinduism, or even that i believe that Hinduism issomething you can convert to as opposed to just be. i am, however, saying thatfor the first time in my vast experience of India, i understood the faith in anew and beautiful way.

my love/ hate relationship with india

2011-12-20T19:59:00.000+05:30

{jama masjd, taken during my trip to delhi back in 2008}

i wrote this on the 13th of december, and just now found the time to finish and post it.

i tried to visit a mosque today with ourstudents. for various reasons, we didn’t have a chance to visit one in coimbatore, so visiting the biggest one in india seemed to make the most sense.plus, jama masjid (which really just means ‘friday mosque’, or the arabicequivalent of ‘sunday church’) is beautiful and massive and interesting.

after lunch at karim’s, with food cookedby family members of some of the former chefs of the royal moghal empire herein india, we walked through the crowded side streets and up the massive redsandstone steps of the mosque. after our group was refused entry at twodifferent gates unless we paid a fee of rs. 200 per person, a sum which clearlywas posted as required only of those who were bringing cameras inside, wefinally found a doorway where we were allowed in. as i took my sandals off andstarted to cover my head, the man at the doorway arbitrarily selected me fromthe lineup and told me that my scarf wasn’t sufficient enough (this scarf, mindyou, is purple. it’s also about 8 or 9 feet long). tired of arguing, i sat onthe steps of the mosque and waited for the rest of the group to emerge.

as i sat, i thought about how much Indiamystifies me. one of our students, after our group was denied entry at thesecond gate, made a side comment, saying, ‘indiaaaaa, i don’t understand you!’i thought through how true that statement was for me, about how there’s so muchi don’t understand, no matter how much i want to, even after spending all thistime here. i’d been in this mosque before and had no idea what could possiblybe the problem with my seemingly offensive scarf. i let my brief experienceconfirm all the stupid, ignorant things i’d heard said about this country andthe Islamic faith, about women and foreigners.

as i sat mulling in my frustration, twoyoung boys caught my eye. they laughed and played tag with each other up anddown the steps of the mosque, as a man who looked as though he could be theirgrandfather watched from underneath his knitted white cap and smiled. i lookedaway tried to stay mad, but then, as the late afternoon call to prayer soundedfrom the minarets and scared the pigeons, who flew over the bazaar in droves,my love for India won over my frustration.

even in the midst of all that i don’tunderstand, of all the little things that put me on ‘india overload’, in theface of the noise and the chaos, beautiful moments like these remind me of whatmade me fall in love here in the first place.

rafting in rishikesh!

2011-12-19T19:16:00.000+05:30

our boss is a little bit crazy. the good kind of crazy. the kind that says, 'so what if the (ganges) river is 40 degrees? let's raft it anyway.'

and so, we did. thankfully, wetsuit and splash jacket rentals were included in our trip. i might have frozen in a 'ready to paddle' stance without them.

husband and bossman taking on the rapids with gusto. (... though not in this photo. i'd be a bad paddler if i were to try and take photos during a big rapid.)

bossman taking a turn at guiding. he and his wife (who we adore) worked for years guiding trips in our home state of colorado. a chance to raft on the ganga (and guide a boat, even for a few minutes) had him grinning!

the ganga in rishikesh is blue-green, beautiful and frigidly cold. the river cuts through the gorgeous, quiet gharwal mountains and if you plan it right, your trip ends at the fairy kingdom of rishikesh (you know, the part inhabited entirely by tourists and holy men- not the part where real, average indian people live.)

don't worry, mom. the ganges here is not at all like the ganges in varanasi. no rotting corpses or partially cremated dead bodies here!

more on rishikesh after i recover from this particularly nasty case of delhi belly. in the meantime, we're sipping on lemon-ginger-honey tea (another reason to love rishikesh! as if i needed more), listening to christmas carols, finishing our laundry in preparation for our christmas travels beginning on thursday and trying really hard not to think of the giant cockroaches that turned up dead in our bedroom in our absence (at least they were dead, right?).

namaste, ji.

2011-12-13T10:56:00.000+05:30

{photo from varanasi's ghats last week}

we're in our final days of the semester- hard to believe. we say goodbye to our students on friday, and then it's off to rishikesh for a little whitewater rafting on the ganges.

this semester- particularly the past two weeks- has flown by. even when i'm above my "india limit" (you know, where you lose your patience at waiting an hour for coffee, butter toast and fried egg for the third day in a row, and half the stuff on the menu isn't available anyway), i still love this place.

hope you are well, wherever in the world you are. we don't have any snow (and only a few christmas lights) here in delhi, but are still very much looking forward to our christmas holiday. we'll be traveling to spend it with some very special little friends who we haven't seen since they threw us a huge ol' engagement party back in 2009.

drink some mulled cider (or even better, wassail) and sit and look out at the falling snow for us, will you?

on the road: rajasthan

2011-12-11T17:43:00.001+05:30

one of my favorite mental images of this trip so far (sadly, i couldn't photograph it myself):

{image}

as we left jaipur before seeing the sun this morning, we passed rajasthani men, in rajasthani garb, squatting and warming next to a fire in their huge turbans and wool blankets.

thank you, rajputs, for your beautiful, mysterious culture. i'm sorry it took me so long to finally meet you!

on the road: varanasi

2011-12-10T18:29:00.001+05:30

thank you all for your comments lately! i'm apologizing here for being a bad comment reply-to-er, but i've got very limited internet time (and rather slow connectivity), so i'll respond more when we get back to coimbatore in a week or so. in the meantime, please enjoy my posts that i'm typing as i go (and posting when i can!)

{image}

it makes me feel like a traitor to my“southern roots” to admit that i love Varanasi as much as i do, but i justcan’t help it. as we sat at a terrace café lit by Christmas lights overlookingthe ganga in the mist of a December evening, i understood why so many whitepeople end up here and never really feel the need, or the desire, to leave. wereour life circumstances different, i’d think long and hard about trying topersuade jon into staying here forever.

there’s something magical, mystical andalluring about a stone city on the banks of a river in the mist. the history ofthe place, the holiness of it, even the chaos draw me in. not that some ofthose things (particularly the aghori temple, where followers of tantricHinduism eat bits of dead bodies to prove that they have conquered death) don’talso creep me out, but really, it’s fascinating here.

everywhere i look, there’s something tosee. mud cups and clay pots, bodies carried down to the river, bodies on pyreswith feetheadshands sticking out, flames consuming these mortal vessels. themisty chill in the air, so thick sometimes you could cut it with a knife.marigolds and sandalwood and a fire in a temple that’s been burning for 5,000years. hundreds of steps down tothe river’s edge. cows andmotorbikes and cycle rickshaws appearing as if out of nowhere from the mist. there’ssomething to hear, too. bells and bells and bells, horns and dog fights andcows mooing, jai ram jai ram jai ram, om nama shivaya, SIDE, side please, oarscutting through the thick, polluted, cloudy water of the ganga. tablas and aharmonium. the sound of a skull cracking open from the heat of a fire,releasing the soul from the cycle of death and rebirth. and the smells, ohlord, the smells. cowpies, chai, goats. urine, smoke, exhaust. decomposingbodies and the sulfuric smell that hangs in the air.

the parades of dead bodiesto the river and the determination it takes to get them through traffic chokedstreets to the holy ganga impress me. the sadhus covered in ash and saffron,those who wear a symbolic fire as they’ve given up the world to seek after god,intrigue me. the sons of Brahmin priests performing ganga aarti with pots offire and ringing bells mystify me. i could never grow tired of watching life goby here in this holy of holies.

i'm loving the adventure my life is here. thank you, north india, for reminding me of how much i love this country again and again!

beauty on sudder street

2011-12-06T08:02:00.001+05:30

today, i missed the jeep to the flower market. i was quite sad, given that i’ve been told the flower market is a photographer’s dream, and i’m a photographer with a lot of dreams. i spent a few minutes feeling disappointed for having missed an opportunity i may never have again, but then set out trying to find a very special family who hangs out on the street near our hostel.

this is jora. jora is the little bengali mother of my friend courtney (a dear one who i’ve never actually met in person. isn’t the internetfunny like that?) let me tell you, friends, this little lady is somethingspecial, and does she ever adore courtney. she talked my ear off for about anhour and a half about the things ‘coiney’ did when she lived in calcutta, aboutwhich of her ten children were the favorites, about what snacks she liked themost. and then, we shared tea spiced with ginger in little mud cups.

the joy i shared in the time i spent sitting with jora onthe pavement, listening to her chattering in half bengali, half english, morethan made up for my disappointment at having missed the market. this sweet little lady invited me intoher life for a brief moment in time, which is something far more valuable thana few photos of some pretty lotus flowers. i walked away with a full heart and a smile i couldn't erase from my face.

there’s more to experience here in calcutta than what theguidebooks tell you. thank you, dear jore ma and the sudder street folks, forreminding me of the beauty of relationships, even across linguistic andcultural boundaries, and for helping me get over myself in a very graceful way.thank you for the tea, the conversation, and for sharing Jesus and your smile. (and thankyou courtney, for sharing your indian mother with me!)

india must also be experienced, not only photographed

2011-12-02T21:36:00.001+05:30

we've arrived in calcutta. we've been here for about 6 hours, and i love it already. it feels so much older, more full of history than our little city of coimbatore. the architecture? man, oh man, i love it here.

{image}

thank you all for your kind words on my last post. i think i got more comments on that post than i have all year! given that, i thought maybe i'd share the rest. (seriously, thanks for the encouragement. your comments are like a pep talk for me to actually sit down and process through and write what i'm experiencing, instead of just posting a pretty picture.)

i'm including the bits from what i posted last time, so it all makes sense together.

"the thing with India is that you can’t experience it fully just by seeing it. i’ve taken my fair share of photos which i think are descriptive and beautiful here in this country, but none of them do justice even to the brief moment in time that photo was taken. here’s why: India is an assault to your senses. it’s a taste-smell-touch-hear-see kind of place. i can show you a picture and tell you about the packed, red city busses and their tendency to operate at 300% capacity, but until you actually hear the fog-horn blare as it comes down the street hitting potholes and swerving around dogs and bicycles and buildings, causing everyone hanging on the outside to hold on for dear life, until you actually try to squeeze yourself in the door and onto the bus, into the chaos of bodies and blaring tamil film music before it rolls away, it’s just not the same.

i can list off all of the spices in my favorite north Indian dish. i can spend a day in a kitchen photographing all of the steps in the process. i can send you instructions to try your hand at replicating it in your own kitchen, but without the delicious smells in the kitchen, the sound of bread dough hitting countertops and chatter in a foreign language, it’s not the same. you have to smell the cinnamoncardamomcloves as they come out of the mixee. you have to get the gingergarlic paste, the red sauce, the ghee from the bread underneath your fingernails. you have to walk away and smell the spice your fingernails. you have to feel the happy, warm burn of the chilli paste in your belly and fight the feelings of sleepiness induced by the half pound of butter you know was in your food.

{image}

i can take a picture of a woman begging with a baby on her hip, but until you feel her fingers tugging at your shirt, see her mime that she needs to eat, you can walk away unchanged. until you hear the singsong voice of the blind beggar boy as be boards the bus at Gandhi park, shaking his steel plate in your direction to rattle around the coins he’s collected and encourage you to add to it, you can only imagine how awkward you feel clutching a cell phone, an iPod, a wallet full of more coins than you know what to do with.

i can take a photograph of a table full of food, describe to you each dish in detail and tell you of the incredible hospitality of a family i barely know and the joy of sharing a meal with them. but until you walk around race course and smile at shrinivas and bobble your head in his direction, until you wave at the man selling cigarettes and chocolates in his bright orange lungi, until the little boy with spiked hair and yellow sunglasses in his preschool outfit and crocs waves his three year old hand at you from his seat on the gas tank of his dad’s motorcycle, until the Brahmin in his white lungi and holy thread nods his head at you and waves as you walk past the neighborhood ganesh temple, you have to rely only on my words and still images to try and understand my experience with the overwhelming hospitality of the Indian people. it’s not until your belly is overly full of delicious food, and you’ve shared laughter and stories and time together, and you’ve had to turn down thirds and fourths and fifths and you still end up taking food home that you know what it feels like to have the role of host and receiver reversed in a way that leaves you feeling as though you have never, ever really experienced hospitality before coming to this country.

photographs can’t capture the sound of an autorickshaw or a koal bird or do the incessant honking of traffic justice. they can’t describe the overwhelming, nauseating smell of the town trash heap, or the sweet smell of jasmine flowers. they can’t help you feel the frustration i feel at the smells wafting through my kitchen and my lack of ability to recreate them in my own four walls, or communicate the hilarity (and hair-pulling insanity) of Indian standard time. photographs are too limiting. you really have to get here and experience this place for yourself."

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i apologize that none of these images are mine! i'll post some when we get back. we're on roaming mobile internet, so i'm trying to keep my uploads/ downloads to a minimum.

on the road again: calcutta

2011-12-01T21:29:00.001+05:30

{image}

it's travelin' time. the program hubs and i work for has a two week travel component built into the curriculum, and we've (already!) made it through the first semester in coimbatore. tomorrow morning, we bid farewell to our little city and hop on a plane to calcutta. we'll be taking trains and busses from calcutta to varanasi to delhi to agra to jaipur (not in that order. i think.)

i'm looking forward to calcutta, partly because i haven't ever been. i'm most excited about visiting sisters of charity and an organization called sari bari, which works to rehabilitate women formerly employed in the sex trade. a friend of mine (who i haven't ever met, though i feel like i have!) has some sweet families she has made friends with who live on the streets of this city, and i hope to spend part of my sunday in search of them. personal connections always make visiting new places more interesting, i think.

what's more, i'm excited to see some of north india. i love this country. i love living here. i love the sound of trains and chaiwallas and all of it. even though it's maddening sometimes, i love the chaos.

i wrote this in an email to a friend the other day, and i wanted to share with the four of you who read this. i was writing about how photographs, no matter how great they may be, can't do justice to a place like this. i'll leave you with these words, because true to my style, i haven't started packing yet. we leave in 11 hours.

"the thing with India is that you can’t experience it fully just by seeing it. i’ve taken my fair share of photos which i think are descriptive and beautiful here in this country, but none of them do justice even to the brief moment in time that photo was taken. here’s why: India is an assault to your senses. it’s a taste-smell-touch-hear-see kind of place. i can show you a picture and tell you about the packed, red city busses and their tendency to operate at 300% capacity, but until you actually hear the fog-horn blare as it comes down the street hitting potholes and swerving around dogs and bicycles and buildings, causing everyone hanging on the outside to hold on for dear life, until you actually try to squeeze yourself in the door and onto the bus, into the chaos of bodies and blaring tamil film music before it rolls away, it’s just not the same.

photographs can’t capture the sound of an autorickshaw or a koal bird or the incessant honking of traffic justice. they can’t describe the overwhelming, nauseating smell of the town trash heap, or the sweet smell of jasmine flowers. they can’t help you feel the frustration i feel at the smells wafting through my kitchen and my lack of ability to recreate them in my own four walls, or communicate the hilarity (and hair-pulling insanity) of Indian standard time. photographs are too limiting. you really have to get here and experience this place for yourself."

fact: my grandmother was awesome.

2011-11-28T08:00:00.004+05:30

this little lady is my grandmother. i've written about her before over here, mostly in the context of her fantastic travels.

she passed away two weeks ago. it sucks to live overseas sometimes. my dad recently passed on to me a copy of the comments that gram's friend, who is also a reverend, made at her funeral.

i learned a number of things about my grandmother and also about myself from this:

- she didn't mess around. i didn't know half of the stuff she did that were listed in her article in the newspaper. in the NEWSpaper, people. you know, the tiny little summary of someone's life that they print after it's all said and done. the stuff in the eulogy (orphan? WW2 civil defense nighttime airplane scout?)? clueless. i want to be that sort of person- the one who as depths to them that you can never fully uncover.

- gram traveled to israel, jordan, palestine 8 times in her lifetime. that's so often, my friends, that she was put on a watch list by the FBI. my favorite humorous comment from the eulogy? "she always looked like a million dollars... heads turned in bars around the world when she would enter." we had a family joke about gram's egyptian boyfriend, a bedouin horseman who had a habit of showing up at the pyramids whenever she was around. i blame her for my own globetrotting tendencies.

- gram didn't take shit from anyone. i look back and remember the defiant teenage me refusing to play into the role of 'women in the kitchen, men watching tv' during family holidays, and i like to think i learned this from grama even when i was too young to realize it. (she also managed to be a pretty fantastic hostess, which is a difficult balance to maintain, i think!) several different people in the church clergy remarked that gram "made [her] way in A Man's World, and did it without ever losing [her] grace, sense of humor and life goals" and other things to that effect. i dig it.

anyway, my grandmother was quite the lady. i'm incredibly thankful that j and i made time to see her several times when we last visited home. i'm sad that i didn't have the sort of conversations with her about travel and the middle east and being part of the episcopal church that i can't have with anyone else in my family. what to do?

i share all of this with you to say: please, get off the internet and spend some more time with the ones you love. you don't know how long they'll be around, and there's probably a whole lot more to talk about than you'd think.

in pictures: a visit to a hindu-christian ashram

2011-11-25T16:06:00.000+05:30

"On the quiet banks of the Caveri River in southern Tamil Nadu a group of Benedictine monks are re-envisioning what Christianity looks like in India. Inspired by the teachings of Father Bede Griffiths, an English monk who came to India in the 1960s with the dream of contextualizing Christian faith here, the monks have adapted many practices typically thought of as exclusively Hindu and incorporated them into their liturgy and mindset. The monks wear the saffron robes typical of Hindu holy men, chant in Sanskrit before the Eucharist, and model the architecture of their chapel after a Hindu temple."

- hubs on our visit

to read more of what he wrote, see the link at the bottom of this post.

two weekends ago, we took a trip to the town of tanjore with the program we work for. among other things, we visited a temple, saw the world's oldest still functioning dam and attended a sunday morning church service entirely in tamil. the highlight of this trip for me was our visit to shantivanam ashram, a benedictine monastery as ashram outside of the town of trichy.

the ashram, as hubs wrote above, is a place where benedictine catholicism meets hinduism. this photo is of 'cosmic jesus', or jesus as lord of the cosmos. depicting a deity in this manner is typically found in the hindu faith here.

the ashram seeks to bridge the gap between hindu culture and christianity in a place where the latter is usually seen primarily as an imported good: white jesus, western hymns played on western instruments in western looking places of worship.

the symbol on this orthodox cross is probably familiar- it's 'om', or a hindu symbol of the sound the universe makes through the vibration of all things, as well as an acknowledgment of the hindu trinity of brahma, vishnu and shiva.

the ashram was founded on the beliefs that christianity can and should be shaped by the religions and culture in which it exists, and that christianity and and should shape the cultures in return.

banyan trees are symbols of wisdom and enlightenment here in india. i love that the ashram, which seeks to be a place where one acquires wisdom and seeks enlightenment, has a giant one growing outside.

while it appears to be a hindu temple, this is actually the sculpture on the chapel. saint benedict is seated between the lion and the bull, and saint peter between the bull (symbolic of the gospel of luke, and also a very meaningful symbol here) and the eagle (symbolic of the gospel of john).

our visit to the ashram spurred a lot of thought among our students and in my own brain as well about contextualization and making faith relevant to a culture, as well as faith boundaries and to what extent adaptation is good/ necessary/ true. i wish i could do it justice, but as usual, i'll point you all in the direction of my brilliant, eloquent husband and his writing!

____________

to read more of hubs' post on our visit, head over here to the blog i administer for our job.

in pictures: visit to a weaving village

2011-11-23T16:49:00.000+05:30

two weeks ago, we visited a village where a majority of the population (somewhere around 300 families) is employed in the weaving of saris. many of the houses had one (or more!) looms inside.

the vertical green threads are part of the machine. the rest (orangey red, yellow, purple) are part of the sari.

on average, it takes about a day to a day and a half to produce a sari. the time frame depends, of course, on how fast the weaver is as well as how simple or complicated the design of the sari is.

looks like your average village hut, yes? inside: a giant handloom.

the white, tent looking thing in this photo is a "design card" for the loom. for each sari, there are a set of cards with holes in them (they look like braille, but with holes punched out instead of rising up out of the paper) which magically communicate with the loom and result in beautifully intricate, handwoven patterns.

a bright blue sari in process.

the village even has its own giant wheel for making warp thread. i'm a little unclear as to the process, but it somehow involves stretching and strengthening the thread, in the photo above. the wheel is basically an andre-the-giant-sized hamster wheel that spins with thread on it.

i'm sure that people who actually know a thing or two about weaving would cringe at my description here, but what to do?

i know it sounds cliche to come to a developing country and Think Deep Thoughts about globalization and how i spend my money, but being in this village really did make me think about clothing, consumption, the "readymade revolution" vs. having clothes sewn by a tailor (which, believe it or not, is cheaper here than buying readymades, and the quality is usually so much better!).

then, after Thinking Deep Thoughts about consumption, we had a speaker this past week ask us directly if we're happy with our consumerist culture in the states. i've been thinking on this since he asked it, and hope to get my thoughts to meaningful words at some point in the distant future. (note: thinking while living abroad? difficult. maybe that's why so many people come back with dreads and regrettable tattoos.)

but for now, let these pictures suffice. also, this thought: RAJASTHAN! WOO!*

________

we're in the final stages of planning our two-week travel component, which begins, believe it or not, next friday. i can hardly believe that we're so close to the end of our first semester (and so, so close to traveling to the part of india i have dreamed of since i was about 9 years old!)

in pictures: brihadeshwara temple, tanjore

2011-11-17T10:39:00.001+05:30

this past weekend, we took our final weekend regional trip to the temple town of tanjore. i had been to chennai, madurai, kochi before and knew what to expect. tanjore was new to me, and i was surprised by how much i enjoyed it.

we arrived at tanjore's famous brihadeshwara temple right as the sun was getting low in the sky. perfect lighting for a sandstone temple, no?

temple elephant. give this guy Rs. 10 (about 20 cents) and he'll 'bless' you by putting his trunk on your head and letting you take a picture. i'm too chicken- elephant snot in my hair doesn't sound that much fun?

these lovely ladies were all dressed up to perform bharatanatyam, traditional dance from tamil nadu. we happened to be visiting the temple the night of their performance. win!

this little one couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 years old. isn't she adorable? (she was a talented dancer, too.)

this temple was built in 1010 by a guy named rajaraja. it was simple and beautiful, in a way a lot of the brightly colored temples here aren't. (can i say that? i just did.) it also had some beautifully green grass, which is definitely a luxury here in india.

i've seen a lot of hindu temples in my day, but this one was different. it was less crazy, more quiet, and the intricate carvings spoke for themselves minus all the paint. thank you, tanjore, for this beauty!

this isn't temple related. heck, it's not even near the temple. but i love rice paddies and i think they're beautiful, so why not?

______

yep. i have a watermark now. taking pictures has really been my only artistic outlet since graduating from college (and leaving behind studios and supplies and mentors), so i figured it's about time i start taking credit for my pictures, eh? don't judge.

lately

2011-11-10T11:40:00.000+05:30

{photo from a kathakali performance during our recent trip to kerala}

- i saw 19 wild peacocks on my way home from a weaving village earlier this week. in 10 minutes. it served as a good reminder to myself to look around and say, 'when else in my life can i count wild peacocks outside my bus window??'

- we're traveling again this weekend. it's our last regional trip before our two week's trip up north. crazy how this time as flown by!

- my pinterest baking board is out of control, guys. i need an oven, stat.

- sorry i don't have much more to say these days. i was just telling a friend that usually, by the end of the day, all i can manage is, 'jim and pam! jim and pam!' and we veg out to the office with a mix of guava juice and sprite in steel cups. that i can manage anything relevant at all is pretty amazing. :)

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this picture has zero relevance to my post content, but i like it anyway.

stuck in the middle

2011-11-07T13:28:00.000+05:30

{photo from our recent weekend trip to kerala}

it's eid. and it's monsoon season. and it's just over 3 weeks until we travel to north india.

crazy how fast this time as flown, no?

part of me is excited to think about traveling to varanasi, calcutta, jaipur (at long last!), to delhi and agra. i can't wait for the things we'll see, and the nerd inside me is excited to keep researching these places and learn, too. and after we leave india, we'll see egypt and france and dear friends in both places.

the other part of me can't hardly believe that we're very quickly approaching our halfway point. as in, we're halfway through the time we'll spend here before returning to denver.

i'm excited to think about summer in denver, to partake in denver's fantastic craft brew culture, to for walks in washington park, and to get my asanas on at my yoga studio. i'm looking forward to riding my bike, getting my hair cut, drinking a large, non-sugary cup of coffee.

it's a funny place to be, in the middle of this looking forward- looking back place.

brace -face

2011-11-03T11:58:00.002+05:30

{image}

it's true. i got braces. it's also true that they hurt. everyone keeps telling me that they'll be worth it in a year when they come off, but in the meantime, i feel (and look!) like an awkward middle schooler. i'm trying to rock them (and by 'rock them' i mean, pretend i don't feel like an awkward middle-schooler) and also remember that in the end, i'll have teeth that are not only straight, but that won't chip because they will finally fit together correctly. but it's hard, because my teeth hurt and i sound funny when i try to say anything with a letter 's' in it.

the thing about my teeth is that i've needed to get them straightened since they grew in, but braces are just so darn expensive in the states that i never had them. until about a month ago. don't get me wrong- hubs and i are incredibly thankful that we can afford this financially, even on our small stipend here. i'm thankful that someday, i'll no longer have a wonky tooth. and i'm thankful that i'm living in a place where i won't have to convince policemen that i am, in fact, old enough to drive a car, or bartenders that i am, in fact, of legal age to be in an establishment that serves alcohol. (until we go home. but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh?)

consider this my apology, world, for judging you all for complaining about how badly they hurt. everyone i used to silently make fun of for complaining about spacer rubber bands, or getting braces tightened now has my sympathy. all those with whom i attended middle and high school who had braces, i'm sincerely sorry.

i may need a personal cheerleader.

to having straight teeth, and to feeling beautiful even with a mouthful of metal (/ceramic, as is my case!)

true story: i had to have two teeth pulled on tuesday- baby teeth that never fell out. i'm not sure what i was expecting when it comes to pulling teeth/ extracting them, but the dentist used a pliers. i'm glad i didn't know that/ think too hard about it before i sat down in the chair. as the dentist doing the pulling is a pediatric dentist, i at least got to watch tom and jerry.

fact: my inlaws are better than yours

2011-11-01T10:35:00.000+05:30

{some of the loot.}

what's better than a care package? a care suitcase. all 50 lbs worth.

pomegranate fabric, homemade granola, chips ahoy, trader joe's pumpkin pancake mix and pumpkin butter, riesens, reese's + reese's dessert bar mix, instant oatmeal and stretchy lace for headbands, powdered milk, yellow baby whale corduroy.

my belly misses the states just a little bit less these days. :) thank you, beth amma and coty naana! you're the best.

happy halloween!

2011-10-31T14:01:00.000+05:30

what do you do when you live in a country that doesn't celebrate halloween?

invite your friends (american, indian and swedish alike), require a costume for entry, cook up some tasty food and throw a party!

pumpkin donuts in process. guys, you should really try making these. they're so. stinking. good.

lentil brittle, no-bake cookies and beignets. (yeah, we made those, too. we miss you, lucile's.)

deep frying in process.

look who showed up?!: aladdin (with his traditional hindu ceremonial lamp...), jasmine and the genie!

our friend kali. long live gandhi-ji!

i found a tourist hanging out in my kitchen frying things.

but it was ok, because he fried those donuts i keep talking about.

hope you all have a fantastic halloween. we're missing fall, but trying our best to compensate over here. :)

a lot of things can happen over coffee

2011-10-28T15:56:00.000+05:30

what to do when culture shock and cultural differences get you down:

enter cafe coffee day. choco donut and cafe mocha. it's a little pricey, but sometimes preserving your sanity is costly.

channeling you, grace and jRo.

i'm not feeling particularly creative, or communicative, today. all this business of coming up with a creative, yet feasible, halloween costume is sucking my right brain dry.

also, reading through some of my older blog posts is embarrassing, but that's neither here nor there.

happy friday?

'bursting crackers' or, the one where we blow things up

2011-10-27T12:24:00.001+05:30

{image taken by NASA. found via a google search: "india diwali at night"/ friend posted to my facebook wall}

guys.

diwali is awesome.

it is also not for the faint of heart.

i wish i could adequately describe the sound of diwali. the best thing i've got so far is that i felt like coimbatore was under siege. everywhere you'd look, you'd see what appeared to be flashes of lightening- but what was more, the accompanying sounds of explosions were hilarious and sometimes frightening. even when you're expecting explosions all day, hearing them at random from next door still made me jump all.stinking.day.

at one point i had to call my parents just so they could hear what my life was like even for just a few minutes. those rowdy little kids (... and, if indian teenagers and young men are anything like those in the states...) residing along racecourse road did not disappoint! they let those bullets (their actual name) and grenades (not their actual name, but what they sound like) explode with gusto.

a recent email from my brother: "Hey sis, how's the bomb situation over there? Heard it's pretty crazy." (he has no idea how much he'd have loved it here this past week.)

i like this video because while it doesn't capture the bone-shaking sound of explosions (you all know what fireworks sound like), you can see all across the horizon the flash of fireworks coming from every man, woman and child with access to fireworks and a large stick of incense to light them with.

we're talking explosions in 360degree surround sound for a week, my friends.

a student at our host college invited us to spend diwali with her family last night, and did we ever love it. we set up camp in the middle of the street and set off boxes and boxes worth of fireworks (or 'bursting crackers' as it is known here) for hours. then (when we had barely put a dent in the cracker supply), the family generously took us all to dinner and sent us home with small gifts and mango juice boxes.

it was a happy diwali indeed!

happy diwali, y'all!

2011-10-26T08:00:00.000+05:30

happy diwali!

classes are cancelled today. so is work. i guess this makes up for having to work through thanksgiving. :)

happy wednesday, to those of you who don't live in a country that celebrates diwali. i'll be back tomorrow with tales of fireworks, no doubt!

kerala: God's own country

2011-10-25T17:03:00.001+05:30

jew town, kochi, kerala 2011

guys. i'm in the middle of editing a slew of photos from our trip to kerala this past weekend. but! i'm updating my blog! because: we have internet today! this picture is, so far, my favorite from our trip.

husband was out of station today to the coast, because his father/ my father in law is here for the next few weeks. hubs went to pick up not just a care package, which our students have been receiving left and right (that have been making me jealous), but an entire care suitcase! my inlaws are awesome.

tomorrow is diwali, the festival of lights. i'm excited, but also a little concerned. see, here, to celebrate the festival of lights people light off a lot of fireworks ('crackers'). we've been hearing the thunder of exploding fireworks since monday, and i can't even imagine how crazy tomorrow is going to be, given that i jump every time one goes off and people are just warming up! i'm super excited to be living here during two of the festivals i've been wanting to take part in since i learned of their existence- diwali, which is tomorrow, and holi, in march.

there's a break in the monsoon, so i'm going to leave you all waiting on pictures from kerala and stories from diwali with this: monsoon season + festivals makes me a happy camper!

snippets: why i'm not returning emails

2011-10-24T22:58:00.000+05:30

{thank you, petzl, for your fantastic headlamps. they transcend culture.}

let me introduce you: loadshedding, meet my readers. readers, meet loadshedding.

loadshedding, or rolling blackouts, mean we have published in the newspaper when we'll have power outages each day.

except when we don't. and the power is still out.

in sum, "loadshedding," is engineering speak for "cutting off people's electricity" (thanks, k!).

there are more people drawing from the power grid than there is power in the grid. the logical solution?: turn off parts of the grid for a few scheduled (... or unscheduled) hours each day. usually, it's just from 10am to noon each day. sometimes it's all day. sometimes, it's at random.

we haven't had a reliable internet connection since wednesday. i'm not ignoring you guys. i'm just (trying to) enjoy my experience living abroad. at least that's what i tell myself. :)

____________

when i do have a free minute to edit my pictures from our weekend, and then some time to upload them, i'll share. i love the state of kerala!

snippets: the art of crossing the road

2011-10-21T18:17:00.001+05:30

{image from the video game 'frogger', via google}

anyone remember that old school video game frogger? the one where you were a tiny little frog trying to navigate your way across a super busy street, full of busses, trucks and cars?

welcome to my life, everyone. add some goats, a few cows, a lot of people on bicycles

it's funny to me to watch this video and think several times, 'what? WHAT? why did you not cross then???' and other times i think the camera guy is choosing his timing based on what'll make a good video, but my own critiques aside, i am not joking. this is what it's like to cross a busy street here.

____

{image}

that's all for now. we're off to God's own country, the state of kerala, tomorrow morning. i’m looking forward to escape, even for a matter of hours, to one of the most beautiful pieces of earth i have ever seen. we’ll drive through tea rubber banana plantations and over mountains and through communist country to the jungle on the Arabian sea. to say i'm excited is an understatement.

anyway, i should get back to making dinner. have a good weekend!

laundry on a line

2011-10-19T09:12:00.002+05:30

photo from our recent trip to madurai.

the only news i have today (which for most of you, i'm sure, won't be news) is this: guys. getting your teeth straightened hurts. quite a bit. they tell me it will be worth it in the end, but for right now i'm feeling like someone punched me in the mouth.

having said that, i'm still thankful for the incredibly affordable cost of health care here in india.

cheers!

in pictures: shree menakshi temple, madurai

2011-10-18T12:53:00.000+05:30

this weekend, we visited the temple city of madurai, several hours outside of coimbatore.

i have visited madurai several times before, but this time was different. it's nice to visit a place and compare it with your 'home city'- not for comparison's sake, of course, but in a deeper sense, to be able to notice subtle differences that wouldn't be apparent at all to someone who hadn't spent two months trying to see and learn the intricacies of a city's culture.

anyway, why you're all really here:

our first glimpse of meenakshi temple. it was, believe it or not, harder than it would look in this picture to navigate the crazy streets near the temple entrance. (i blame the a/c bus. it was a nice bus, but certainly made navigating narrow, busy streets difficult.)

one of the main gopuram of the temple. this one's around 170 feet, or 17 stories tall. the temple was built in the 1600s in its present form.

nandi, shiva's bull, surrounded by clay diya lanterns.

golden pillar near the inner sanctuary of the temple (closed to non-hindus. sorry, no photos).

i love how much more dramatic even pigeons can make a picture!

the temple really is a visual overload. even in black and white, there's no shortage of things competing for your attention!

taken from the rooftop of a nearby building filled with beautiful treasures. we may or may not have just used the store for its view.

this temple made the ~~short~~ medium list to be one of the 'new 7 wonders of the world.'

if i could correctly identify even three of the deities on this temple, i'd be pretty proud of myself. there are around 33,000 sculptures on the 14 towers like this one, so i guess i could cut myself a little slack.

thanks for stopping by! i'll be posting more photos from our trip throughout this week.

happy monday! navaratri photos

2011-10-17T15:14:00.002+05:30

navaratri ended a week ago (at least). i know. but i forgot about some of the pictures i took with my real camera and i wanted to share them. plus, this lets me buy time until i can upload and edit my pictures from our trip to madurai this past weekend. :)

i love traditional gujarati dress. the entire garba was lit poorly for picture taking (but it was great for dancing), so a lot of my pictures turned out blurry. sometimes (as in the photo above), that worked in my favor. i'm not too sad to not have excellent photos, as i spent most of this evening wishing i was gujarati and could dance.

these girls were beautiful. they kept asking me (white, two left footed me) to dance with them.

thanks for entertaining my kickback to navaratri even as we prepare for diwali, the festival of lights, next week! and thank you, coimbatore gujarati community, for sharing your space with a bunch of rhythmless white kids for an evening.

have a happy monday! today is civic election day in coimbatore, so school is closed and the streets are quiet- after several weeks of campaigning via autorickshaw-with-speaker-tied-to-roof. as hilarious as i think campaign tactics are here, it's nice to not constantly be on the lookout for speeding autos or trucks with film-star politicians waving from the flatbeds.

travelin' again

2011-10-14T16:31:00.000+05:30

meenakshi temple, madurai, tamil nadu

tomorrow morning, we head to madurai, the 'temple city.' we've been talking with a lot of our students lately about how to be and stay engaged, even while they're tired and on information overload. this is a personal challenge to me, too, and one i will try to take to heart in a place that's as hot, busy, and crowded as madurai.

********

* i have the cutest niece, ever. i love that when i married the most wonderful man i've ever met, i got a huge, fantastic, interesting and wonderful family, too. you know, the kind that loves you well and makes you wonder how you ever did life without them in it. aren't all three of these ladies beautiful?? (we love skype dates.)

* i learned to make paratha today. it was pretty exciting when i mastered it on my second try. we baked them in a tandoor, but i'm pretty confident in my ability to make them on a stovetop (a plus when you don't have an oven.)

* i can't wait to travel back to varanasi.

* i am enjoying midnight's children now more than ever.

* i missed our last trip, which was to a hill station (read: elephant safari) a few hours away because i drank some cranberry juice and it put me in the hospital. guys, i'm not joking. that is some scary ish (and i have no idea why?) i'll have to wait until next semester for the elephants. i'm trying to be geeked about temples, but it's just not quite the same. but the good news is that the elephants will still be there in a few months, and my kidneys are fine.

all for now. have a good friday, everyone!

magic and thin spaces

2011-10-13T08:00:00.000+05:30

my friend Pravachana, Bapatla, 2008

“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

looking for magic and thin spaces here these days, and looking forward to returning to the ones i so love.

p.s. isn't salman rushdie's writing brilliant? (i <3 haroun and the sea of stories and midnight's children. so much.)

the dignity of poor people, a post by jonathan higgins of yet real

2011-10-12T08:00:00.000+05:30

This is another post written by my friend Jon Higgins, who is currently living and working in Bangladesh with an organization called ICDDR, B where he is researching, learning, observing, traveling, having meaningful conversations and taking beautiful pictures. Jon and I have had the pleasure of spending some time in India together in a former life. He's someone I respect and admire tremendously, as he is the sort of person who isn't content with going and seeing; he's the sort who refuses to let apathy and cynicism cloud his passion for serving the poor and marginalized and instead spends his life chasing after his vocation with reckless abandon.

I spent a lot of time at my job hoping that my students will grow in their faith and their understanding of their place in the world as a result of their experiences abroad. As I read Jon's blog, I read with tremendous hope for my students that they will grow and change in such a way that they will turn around and give back in a way as meaningful as Jon has. I hope for myself as I read, too.

__________

“I believe the people of today do not think that the poorare like them as human beings. They look down on them. But if they had thatdeep respect for the dignity of the poor people, I am sure it would be easy forthem to come closer to them and to see that they too are children of God, andthey have as much right to the things of life and of love and of service asanybody else.” - Mother Theresa

Contemplating today how I look at the poor.

The people I am here to ultimately serve as a youngclinical-researcher-in-training. The people Virchow meant when he said that“physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall toa large extent within their jurisdiction”.

Yes, it is quite possible – and regrettably quite common –to serve the poor and struggling and yet still look down on them. Some doctorsand nurses do it all the time back home. Some global health workers do it allthe time here. I have seen it over and over in most of the contexts, and evendone it myself at times. Not everyone does it, but far, far more do it than theyrealize. It is not universal, but it is insidious.

I don’t want to look down on the poor. I don’t want to thinkthat they aren’t like me as a human being. I do want to have deep respect fortheir dignity. And I do want my actions to reflect such an attitude in agenuine and put-my-money-where-my-heart-is kind of way. To reflect in myactions the inner realization that this is real life for these people.

People that laugh and smile and cry and fall in love andfall out of it and don’t like vegetables and talk back to their mothers andhave ambitions and like to dance with their friends and might be good at mathor science if anyone had ever bothered to teach them.

They’re not really unlike us. It’s high time we stoppedtreating them as such.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but havenot love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have propheticpowers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have allfaith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I giveaway all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, Igain nothing.” - 1 Corinthians 13

-Jon Higgins

____________

jon's blogs can be found here and here, and this post can be found in its original context here.

jon's posts on my blog can be found here and here.

please, go and read his blog so that your heart can be full of hope and joy like mine is when i read what he writes! i'd suggest reading this one and this one to start, in addition to the two i've featured here at chota peelea auto.

learn/move/eat

2011-10-11T08:00:00.000+05:30

these make me want to spend my life traveling. i'm compiling a list of places to travel to (and have been for, maybe like 5 or 6 months now) and will post it here soon, if i can ever decide that it's done.

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

learn.

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

move.

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

eat.

i must confess, i held out for a long time before finally watching these. i blame my wonky internet connections and scheduled (... and unscheduled) power cuts.

ok, seriously- stop procrastinating and watch these. you won't be sad you did!

snippets: why it's impossible to take a drink of water without also taking a bath

2011-10-10T14:01:00.001+05:30

this is my friend kali demonstrating how to drink "indian style" from a pitcher.

what you don't see in this picture is the "bath" that inevitably follows drinking from a pitcher (or a waterbottle, or a nalgene, or a cup, or anything) without touching said vessel to your lips.

at least, it follows whenever anyone with a melanin deficiency ... er, lower levels of melanin attempts to drink in such a manner. our indian counterparts have mastered this art of drinking liquids to such an extent that they can swallow while pouring. yes, that's correct- they don't have to come up for air.

i, however, always end up with water all down my front, swearing to never try this tactic, as brilliant as it is (no awkward conversations about sickness/ health/ etc!), again.

sorry to be a little light on content.

i visited a hospital this week where a nurse tried to tell me i have kidney stones. (i don't). and then i missed an elephant safari. more on those later. happy monday!

khameera naan: recipe!

2011-10-07T08:00:00.000+05:30

khameera naan

4c flour

1 egg, beaten

½ c plus 2 tbs milk

3 tps khameer

1 tsp salt

1 tsp white poppyseed

1 tsp anise

ghee

1 tbs butter

make khameer the night before (see following recipe).

sift flour and salt. add ansiseeds and butter. mix well withfingers.

gradually add egg, warm milk and khameer and kneadthoroughly. cover and let rise for 2 hours.

divide dough into 1- equal parts and shape into balls withthe help of dry flour (additional). cover and let rise again for 15 additionalminutes.

flatten each ball into a pancake by tossing back and forthfrom one hand to another. pull into oval shape.

brush with ghee and sprinkle with poppyseeds on one side,and a little warm water on the other.

place on hot griddle/ cast iron fry pan, moist side down.when the lower surface is baked, flip. char one side with open gas stove flame.

enjoy with saag chicken, chicken makhani or any other north indian gravy dish (or by itself!)

khameer

100g all purpose flour

½ tsp sgar

1 tsp salt

175 g yoghurt (plain)

mix together into thin batter. cover and keep in a warmplace, letting ferment overnight.

saag chicken recipe

2011-10-06T08:00:00.000+05:30

saag chicken/ chicken palak

(spinach chicken, from punjab, north india. check out a bread recipe to go with it here.)

500g chicken breast, cubed

1 bunch (about two cups) spinach)

3 tbs oil/ ghee

salt to taste

¼ lb onion

paste:

1 tsp garlic

2 tsp ginger

powder:

1 tsp white poppy seeds

½ tsp chili powder

1 tsp cumin powder

remove spinach stems. boil in hot water for 4 min, drain andpuree.

fry chopped onion in ghee until golden brown.

add ginger an garlic paste and fry 2-3 min.

add chicken and poppyseeds, chili powder and salt and cookon low flame until chicken is lightly browned.

add cumin powder, coriander and spinach paste.

cover and simmer on low, checking to make sure chickendoesn’t burn. finished when chicken is cooked through.

enjoy with roti, naan or bhaturey (link for bhaturey is above.)

chicken makhani: recipe

2011-10-05T08:00:00.000+05:30

chicken makhani/ butter chicken

a savory, delicious chicken and gravy dish from kashmir, north india

1g red pepper

.05g carrots

1.5g tomatoes

.05g ginger

.05g garlic and .05g ginger turned into paste

.03g cashewnut turned into paste

.005g red chili powder

.25g ghee(clarified butter)

.01g salt

.01g cinnamon stick

1 bay leaf

.002g peppercorn

.002g black cardamom

.002g green cardamom

.02g khoya paste (reduced milk)

.002g kasoori methi (fenugreek)

.01g honey

remove eyes of tomatoes and boil with ginger garlic paste,peppers , carrots and salt. when cooked, remove seeds and skins.

put strained tomato puree in pan and simmer with spices andbutter.

add cashewnut paste and khoya paste.

add honey and kasoori methi.

send all of this through a blender to make a fine paste.

add chicken tikka (following recipe) and enjoy!!

serve with naan or kashmiri pulao. (recipe for pulao found at the end of post here).

chicken tikka

3-4 lbs boneless, skinless chicken

1 ½ c curd (plain yogurt)

1 tbs paprika

½ tsp chili powder

¼ tsp turmeric

paste:

4 cloves garlic

1 tsp garlic

1 tsp salt

¼ tsp cinnamon

1.2 tsp ground cuin

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp white pepper

2 tsp lemon juice

2 tbs ghee

wash and cut chicken into strips, being sure to remove allthe fat pieces.

take a fork and poke holes in the chicken pieces. add alittle salt to the chicken, coating well.

combine all ingredients, coating chicken well. marinate 6-8hours, or overnight for best results.

cook in tandoor. in absence of tandoor, grill, taking carenot to burn.

little check-in

2011-10-04T12:29:00.001+05:30

one of my students and i found this man selling tender coconuts outside one of our 'old haunts' in chennai. doesn't he have a great beard?

- i've got a guest post over at como say what today. as always, miss grapes is too kind. head over there to see the 'kandyce alphabet', as well as the rest of her blog- she puts my traveling adventures to shame, that girl. (true story: she got a tattoo AND went bungee jumping overseas. i'm just working at an office). she is also a very talented artist and photographer.

- i'm finally on pinterest. meaning? i'm now sharing my favorite recipes with the world. you're welcome.

- we're heading to the tiger reserve at mudumalai for the next few days. not crossing my fingers to see a tiger, but we'll definitely see an elephant or two!

- as we're "out of station" the next few days, i've got a few delicious recipes from cooking class scheduled to post. get excited- they're damn tasty!

pining for an oven

2011-09-30T08:00:00.000+05:30

will someone please make and enjoy these

{pumpkin cupcakes with cloud frosting}

and these for me?

{mrs. bean's famous nutmeg ginger apple snaps from the fantastic mr. fox}

i'm wishing for an oven and ingredients for these things.

i miss fall: these flavors and crispy leaves and sweaters and even tall brown boots, though i don't own any.

enjoy your weekend, lovelies. we're off to celebrate navaratri with the coimbatore gujarati community tonight. i'm excited for lots of dandiya!

family love

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000+05:30

i love my family. we talked to these three jokers on skype last night from a bootlegged internet connection down the hall (thank you, neighbors, for sharing your connection!) we'd be having a serious conversation with one of the three of them, and the other one or two would sneak into the frame and make a face similar to what you see above.

i died laughing. j and i went back to our apartment and laughed and talked about how hilarious you three are until we fell asleep.

in case anyone was wondering, this group is precisely where i get my own sense of humor from. i happen to think these are some of the most hilarious people i know, especially when you get them all together.

mata ji, juice naana and bro-fo, i love you all. i'm sorry i don't say that to you all more often.

a visit to a village with FORWORD

2011-09-28T10:51:00.001+05:30

subtitle: when a hot, smelly, busy city starts to feel like home.

when i first came to India back in 2005, i never saw myselfhere, with this job and these passions and this man, 6 years later.

what’smore, i never thought i’d feel at home in a city of 4.6 million people, a city slightly larger than los angeles, not counting the street dogs, rats and cockroaches.

the overflowing city buses and thebuzzing autorickshaws, the chaiwallas and the beggars, it's a cacophony of sounds like anywhere in india, but amplified with its huge population.

chennai is hot. it’s humid. (hear the midwesterner in metalking about humidity, and not the coloradan.)

chennai smells. i have yet to find a body of water (asidefrom the bay of bengal, which is only sometimes exempt) that doesn’t reekof sickly sweet rot, urine andfestering garbage.

and i love it. i love chennai. i spent several hours on the overnight train trip home smiling in thanks for such a fantastic two days in this loud, overcrowded city.

in the middle of all of chennai's insanity, shiamala baby fights for justice on behalf of those whose voices often don't reach above the noise, whose empty eyes haunt your memories long after you leave this place.

shiamala works as an advocate for battered women and children, and also for the untouchables or dalits of india. if you've been around chota peelea auto for a while, you'll know i have a heart for these people groups. this woman is a large reason why. here she stands about to introduce our students to a group of women in an urban slum.

the women welcomed us with glass bangles for our wrists, yellow sandalwood paste for our cheeks and red kumkum powder for our foreheads.

they also wanted to share elements of their culture. this picture is their depiction of 'pongal', the festival of harvest here in tamil nadu.

these are oil lamps, to show our students how diwali, or the festival of lights, is celebrated.

fireworks ('crackers') are the favorite way of ushering in diwali.

and this little girl is a reminder that even though from my perspective of tremendous privilege, the women in this village have perhaps far more to offer me than i have to offer them, especially as they give joyfully.

our fantastic host college staffers modeling their jasmine flower garlands pinned to their hair.

singing a song about overcoming divisions of gender, caste, religion and bondage.

these lovely ladies saw us off to our bus after giving us a tremendous gift of hospitality. and some glass bangles as a momento.

these photos are my albeit weak attempt to capture what i love about chennai. this welcome trumps any of my disgust at larger-than-life cockroaches, any frustrations at being started at. the sweet smell of jasmine flowers, tied into garlands by these women, overpowers any rot from the open sewers nearby. the huge hearts of these generous women create a space safe from the constant insanity and make me feel at home.

pictures! food! recipes! over at Riding in Rickshaws

2011-09-26T18:28:00.000+05:30

i'm back from the coast, and posting over at riding in rickshaws, the blog i'm administering for the program i'm working for. (... does the layout/ photography look familiar? girlfriend knows what she likes.)

head over there to find my food post, on indian cooking and a class i was able to observe last week. i also included a recipe for some delicious kashmiri rice pulao (pilaf) at the end, for anyone wanting a recipe. :)

on that note, for anyone interested in what else we're up to with ISP, check the rest of the posts. our students have written some excellent posts on life here!

i'll be posting pictures from my wonderful weekend in chennai here hopefully tomorrow, after i've had a chance to process them.

we're off! chennai, here we come.

2011-09-23T21:35:00.001+05:30

we're heading to chennai via overnight train in just a few minutes to see these lovely ladies and their incredible, strong, beautiful mother who fights on behalf of the marginalized and defines for me someone who is fighting the good fight and simultaneously managing to keep the faith (which is harder to do than one might believe.) i couldn't be more excited to see these faces!

we're also stopping by UNESCO world heritage site mahabalipuram and, hopefully, finding our friend siven swamy, who roams around the streets of chennai in his hand-pedaled bicycle.

i'll be back early monday morning. lucky for all of you, that's middle of your sunday night which means i'll still have time to write something for you all to keep you company during your monday morning coffee and blog catch-up.

for now, i leave you with a beautifully written cross post: "structure-less thought-reflections from india", written by that insightful, eloquent guy i married::

India. Autorickshaws and incense from temples and ikons of Ganesh.Hot, sweet, creamy coffee in tiny paper cups and the acrid, foul scent of ditches and alleyways. Exhaust from huge, multi-colored busses and the scent of delicious curries wafting through the hallways every time we leave our apartment.

India, smiling, welcoming, open and yet profoundly mysterious, profoundly hidden, strange and alien. Dark, dark temples beneath their massive, mountainous roofs and strange, strange idols. And even these mysteries are merely indications, pointers towards a deeper mystery: Brahman, Brahman, Brahman, beyond karma and concept and yet ever-present in every face, every scent, every flash of light. Brahman, Brahman, Brahman, the eternal omnipotent One who spoke all things into being and who upholds the universe by the Word of His power.Brahman, Brahman, Brahman, eternal and glorious, Lord of the Worlds, rab al-alimiin, ar-rahman ar-rahim, malliki youm id-din.Brahman, Brahman, Brahman, made known in the face of Jesus Christ. No man has ever seen Brahman. The Son, the only Son of Brahman, who is in the bosom of Brahman, He has made Him known. To know the Son is to know Brahman, to know moksha.

Namaste, India. Namaste. I recognize the God in you, I recognize God’s image and His real presence, I recognize the eyes of Jesus in your dark eyes. Teach me to love Him better through loving you. Teach me to lead others to him through teaching them to love you.

read the original post here, at living in truth.

take each day at a time

2011-09-22T09:01:00.001+05:30

"You are good. You are strong. You are going to make it. Take each day at a time, and try your best to live into it with the gusto it deserves. Love and hate it both, for both are ok. Try to be fair to yourself, and full of grace and pardon even while you try to be fair to India, and full of both grace and pardon. It is a fine balance."

i received these words in an email a day or two ago from an insightful, beautiful, culture-crossing friend, and to say that i appreciated this reminder is a gross understatement.

thanks, k. this came at the right time.

_____

image mine, from hyderabad, 2007.

gurudwara pt:2

2011-09-21T08:00:00.001+05:30

a continuation from my previous photo post of our visit to the gurudwara. usman and jon tying on their uber-stylish rented saffron headscarves.

i know it's very american teenager of me, but i kept thinking they looked a little like pirates- usman less so as he was also in a kurta, but you know. if the shoe fits...?

usman looking pensive as he realizes he understands gurmukhi, a form of punjabi used in sikh scriptures. usman's family (including usman) speaks punjabi. (and english and swedish and probably a few others).

turbans. yessss.

in other news, i love the sound of a harmonium. who knew? i mean, why can't churches incorporate the use of a harmonium and a tabla? i, for one, would not be sad.

how great is this face?

here's a link to a song with a harmonium in it, if you aren't familiar.

sitting outside the gurudwara post-service.

this is one of the spiritual leaders of the gurudwara reciting from the sikh holy book, the guru granth sahib.

outside the gurudwara.

this is simran's dad. doesn't he have a great smile? he's as friendly as he looks.

also, he speaks german.

a family on a motorbike after the langar.

as explained to us in the gurudwara, sikhism is a 'simple' religion, meaning no idols, no superstitions. sikhism also stands for equality across gender, class, caste and their worship space is open to all. i can't say enough how great it was to go to the gurudwara on sunday and learn from sikhs themselves about their religion. it's really easy here to observe a lot of different faiths and make assumptions based on those observations. it's an entirely different thing to sit through a service with someone who practices, have them explain the different elements of the service and the faith in general, and be incredibly approachable and open to questions. we found the sikh community here to be incredibly hospitable, friendly and open to our visit. we so appreciate it!

special thank you, too, to simran and family!

a visit to the gurudwara

2011-09-20T08:00:00.000+05:30

some of you probably already know this, but i'm fascinated by sikhs. when my indian brother james introduced us to his friend simran, and we learned that simran is punjabi sikh, i was super excited. turns out simran's dad is the president of coimbatore's gurudwara. our trip yesterday was interesting, informative and full of punjabis in turbans!

we SO appreciated having simran show us around the gurudwara yesterday and explain the whys behind the whats and de-mystify sikhism just a tiny bit.

on sunday, we went with our friend simran to the sikh temple, or gurudwara, to observe prayers and share langar.

students with their heads covered climbing the stairs of the gurudwara.

jon and usman in their saffron headscarves. as these guys (sadly!) don't sport turbans and men cover their heads in gurudwara too, these guys borrowed matchy-matchy scarves.

sharing langar after the service.

our 12 on the steps after.

more pictures to come tomorrow. :)

i did something i was warned never to do.

2011-09-19T14:14:00.000+05:30

many of you know that i'm not a rule follower when it comes to certain things. in college, my roommates and i found creative ways to get around the rules (including once throwing a pool party in our dorm room. she was the mastermind, though, and i can't claim the credit for anything other than living in the room which played host).

this weekend, i broke a rule i was told to follow quite strictly in my previous trips to india.

no, it wasn't food related- i've broken all of those rules several times over.

my rule breaking this time?:

i rode the public city bus.

and it was awesome.

as we got on, there were maybe 15 people vying for the same bus entrance. i grabbed hubs's arm and, with a huge grin on my face, used my other hand to grab the railing and pull myself on the bus. i knew if i could just get myself in the door, i'd be fine. i got in. and it was, as my photo caption says, awesome. i felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment first at getting on the bus, and second at not being elbowed, shoved aside or pickpocketed (the first two are fairly likely, and the second is either a scare tactic or a real possibility- i'm not sure which) and third at getting off at the correct stop! i'm glad i was there with hubs, who had been on a city bus before and knew the route better than i did. i'm also glad the bus wasn't as packed as i have seen them before. but really, it was awesome. i grinned like an idiot the entire trip.

and the best part, above and beyond the insanity of a bus at three times its capacity by u.s. standards, was that it was only Rs. 4 for each of us (8 cents) instead of Rs. 100 ($2) to go by taxi or auto.

i can't believe i held out and kept following this rule for so stinking long. :)

snippets: why we still don't have mobile phones for our students

2011-09-16T14:14:00.000+05:30

this photo is completely unrelated to the snippet below. that's ok with me. i think, at this point, if any of us were to see a picture of an airtel store, an airtel employee or even the logo, we might go ape.

you see, we've been trying to get mobile phones for our students for about two weeks now. we've been to the cell phone store combined probably a total of 6 times (i only went once, j twice and bossman has been taking most of these trips.) this is not including the number of trips our indian staff has taken to the same store, for the same purpose.

how to spend two weeks of your life trying to provide your students with mobile phones:

step one: purchase phones. step two: try to purchase sim cards. step two is foiled by the lack of some papers which the person trying to buy sim cards was not informed he or she should have in their possession at the time of trying to purchase said cards. go home. get required information and documents. step three: repeat step two 4 more times. wait approximately one to two days between going.

first, they asked for our passport photo page copies. we provided. then, they asked for a photo copy of the visa pages. we provided. then, they asked for each student to fill out a document with basic information and attach a passport photo. we provided. then, they told us all of our students needed to bring copies of their college IDs, which we provided. then, they told us the information sheet needed to have a permanent (non-indian) address, and every page of the above requested information needed to be signed. we provided. NOW, they're saying we need proof of permanent (home, non-indian) address. we put our foots down. we should have put our collective foot down a long time ago, but even our indian staff are saying just to provide them with the information, because at this point we're so far along in the process that it doesn't make sense to give up.

people, i am not making this up.

i think director-ji is getting to a point where 'what to do?' will no longer suffice.

black and white wednesday

2011-09-14T12:27:00.002+05:30

cross-cut road, coimbatore

k.k. juice and bakery! yeah! it's meant to be.

a sea of 'two-wheelers': outside the railway station. this doesn't even do the number of motorcycles justice. i'd like to ride through the streets on the back of a motorcycle soon, please.

_____

nothing super remarkable happening, which is fine, really. :) india's crazy enough without having to pack up and move every week or so a la my previous travels here!

we had dinner with our swedish ex-pat friend usman last night, and our conversation got me thinking about a lot of the little quirky things that i forget about when we leave india. you know, the things that make me smile (and sometimes that make me want to beat my head against a wall,) things that are quintessentially india that you wouldn't necessarily think to tell someone about when talking to them about what to expect when coming here. i'm hoping to make that a fairly regular feature over here.

lastly, i tried to fix my mis-spelled hindi (not that any but three of you can read it anyway! :)) to no avail. i can't find my header file to edit, so i guess ye olde blog will get yet another facelift. in the meantime, we're back to the original, which i think is too dark. blarg!

hopefully i'll have something more exciting to update you all on soon. for now, off to lunch for some dhal.

four photos for your tuesday

2011-09-13T18:46:00.000+05:30

our neighborhood ganesh temple, race course road. i walk by this temple on my way to work every morning.

hindu temple + mahaveer's store near cross-cut road.

from the bus window. that's a massive pile of stuffed animals center right.

coimbatore's big mosque, near town hall.

i have more photos, but as i was uploading them our internet died.

on that note, things that make it hard to get any work done:

a shaky current. even with a laptop usually when the power goes out the internet power goes out, too. and then has to be re-set by a chap with a moustache named 'mr. dickens' with an office the next building over. but even the title of my little paragraph here reflects my incredible american-ness, as sometimes it's not about getting work done. at least an internet power outage is a good reason to get up and take a short walk, right?

as we say here in india, 'what to do?'

Thiruonam Aashamsakal! : happy onam to all!

2011-09-12T11:04:00.001+05:30

here are a few photos from the onam celebration here on campus. onam is a harvest festival celebrated in our neighboring state of kerala, where many of the students at our host college come from.

a kathakali dancer on the welcome banner! i kept hoping someone would come out in kathalaki costume, but considering it takes several hours worth of preparation (dressing, face painting, etc), i wasn't too surprised when it didn't happen.

while i'm not an expert in kerala (or any state of india)'s dancing, i believe this was from the mohiniyattam dance. we also saw some kaikottikali and thiruvathirakali dance. (youtube has some great videos if you're interested in what these actually look like!)

more thiruvathirakali.

singing some traditional kerala onam songs.

love this one. the low light means a lot of my pictures are blurry (... i should really learn how to take better pictures), but i like how this one turned out!

while we were tremendously sad to know that onam was happening just a few hours away, across the kerala border, we were quite happy to see just a little bit of onam celebrated in our corner of tamil nadu. living in india is quite different from visiting (a post for another day), and one of the more exciting parts of living here thus far has been the festivals!

i'm working on editing some photos of our students' "Amazing Race: Coimbatore" adventure as well as some other shots of our new city of residence, and will hopefully upload some of those for your viewing pleasure tomorrow. :)

_________

not sure if this will work, but try clicking here to see a friend's fantastic photography from a cultural celebration this weekend. aren't the photos fantastic?? (let me know if you can't see them).

our office!

2011-09-09T06:00:00.002+05:30

the title is more excited than i actually feel about this space right now, but we're working on it. :) just wanted to give you all a visual as to why i haven't posted many interesting photos yet: this is my life lately!

we did take a bus tour yesterday and celebrated onam the day before, so i'm hoping to have a few more interesting "snaps" in the days to come. :)

on a walk

2011-09-09T06:00:00.000+05:30

school's out for the day!

yes, i'm the tourist who took a picture of heart shaped leaves.

my favorite color blue.

again, thanks for stopping by as my content the next 3-4 days will be rather light. :)

snippets: why it's so darn hard to turn on the lights

2011-09-08T07:00:00.001+05:30

not the prettiest picture, but i wanted to share a little snippet for those asking about living here in india. :)

this is how we turn on the lights in our office. i'm not making this up. every outlet (and every fan and every light and every hot water heater) has its own switch. while it's super practical from a money and energy saving standpoint, it means it takes us a while to turn on our lights in the morning. it also means we end up shutting lights off on people when we don't intend to. :)

all for now- thanks for your patience as we are occupied this week!

home sweet home

2011-09-07T14:42:00.001+05:30

or, as some people say here, 'aum sweet aum.'

we'll be a little busy for the next few days, as our students just arrived (with all of their luggage) and we'll be busy orientating them to our fair city. here's our apartment complex in the meantime. i'll post as i'm able this week!

and a side note: today i saw a sign for a shop called "KK Bakes: Juice and Baked Goods." (it was meant to be.)

i also saw a woman in a sari with converse all stars. total win.

how i start my mornings here

2011-09-06T09:49:00.000+05:30

a peek into my morning yoga routine (not in any particular order):

trikonasana/ triangle pose

rajakapotasana/ king pigeon pose

adho muka svasana/ downward dog pose

bakasana/ crow pose

vrksasana/ tree pose

more tree pose

even more tree pose

natarajasana/ dancer's pose

prasarita padottanasana/ wide legged forward bend

*please don't judge me for poor posture. our mattress can be likened to sleeping on a board, or the floor, or something similar. some days, even standing up and reaching for the ceiling is a challenge. i don't pretend to be nearly as awesome as miss grapes.

and, completely unrelated, why didn't anyone ever tell me how great kermit arms are before??? (YAYYYYYYYY!)

snippets: laundry (and life with a bucket)

2011-09-05T11:59:00.000+05:30

when i first came to india, i had no idea how much of my life would revolve around a multi-colored bucket. between bathing and laundry, i'd say this bucket is one of the most significant pieces in our flat.

i put together this little photo essay on doing laundry by hand yesterday, as our washing machine has actually been delivered, but still has not been installed.

step one (ignore my still-chubby feet): soak your laundry. many a good, light colored piece of clothing have been ruined in this step.

step two: use your bar of soap (i found tide soap, and not that i'm all about supporting globalization, but this is significant because tide is white, while rin (local brand) is blue and stains clothes, which is counter-productive.) scrub your clothes with said soap.

step three: scrub.

step four: try your best to re-create the agitation that happens inside your washing machine, only in your bucket.

step five: rinse. repeat, on average, three times per piece of clothing to get the suds out.

step six: hang to dry.

i wish this little photo essay could communicate how time and labor intensive this process is, as well as how much muscle i'll be building if our washing machine continues in its present state of non-operation. let's just say, there's a good reason i stuck to shorts, a kurta and a few shirts and avoided our sheets, jeans and dress pants. (super. tiring.)

if you come visit us while we're here in india, we'll treat you to some delicious food, take you on some adventurous rickshaw rides, show you some beautiful fabric and clothing shops and let you stay in our flat for free. you'll be in charge of your own laundry, though. :)

snippets: bossman

2011-09-02T20:21:00.000+05:30

meet my boss. almost every day this week, we've been greeted by this sight: dress clothes, computer bag, indian bike AND, the icing on the cake, a kayaking helmet serving as a bicycle helmet. (no one. i repeat: no one wears bicycle helmets here).

if that wasn't great enough, please note the bubble wrap still on the frame of the bike, as well as the green 'antennae' serving as brakes. when we laughed and asked why he hadn't fully unwrapped his bike, he explained that it's because of the indian tendency to leave new things (particularly the seats of cars) wrapped with the plastic they come with even after purchase. he was trying to "indianize", he said.

j and i have talked several times about how incredibly grateful we are to be here with said hilarious bossman and his family- because we love working under him, because we adore his wife and two boys, and because he's the right touch of leader + hilarious to make our time here both throughly enjoyable as well as productive and something we can both grow from.

that he rides by us every morning in this get up, on this "indianized" bike just makes it all the better.

'sweet and savory', a post from jon higgins at yet real

2011-09-01T16:24:00.001+05:30

{image of old dhaka}

this is a cross post written by a friend who i have tremendous respect and admiration for. he’s currently in bangladesh working and learning to be a doctor and caring for people in a professional capacity, and has lived abroad a number of times before. he’s also a writer, takes some beautiful photographs, and is a stud. i hope you'll see firsthand all of those things through this post.

thanks, jonanna, for sharing!

________

I don’t remember the last time I ate apples and peanut butter. But today, I did just that.

Sitting semi-comfortably under a roaring ceiling fan, each bite an enticing mixture of sweet and savory, creamy and crunchy, juicy and thick. It brought me right back to apples with Papa watching Mets baseball before bed, back to our 7922 Elati Circle dining room table, back to my childhood.

And therein lies the lesson.

For I think I was already in such a place. This simple culinary reawakening was a symptom, not a source. In the face of uncertainty, in a new city, culture, and set of relationships, where I can’t even tell what kind of meat composes two-thirds of the items in my fridge and where late night Taco Bell runs require two 8-hour flights, I was reverting to a child-like state. Good thing I didn’t start sucking my thumb.

I have found that the difficulty in moving is often as much about the transition as it is about the place left behind or found anew. The humility found here, when stripped down to its core, derives from the inescapable fact that these transitions are like a reversion to childhood.

I can’t read. Anything.

I can’t speak more than three words in the local language.

I can’t drive or transport myself.

I can’t find the way back to my place if I go more than a block away.

These are the characteristics of a 1-2 year old.

Yet in many ways, I am certainly not quite a child again.

I am more experienced: I have made a similar transition thrice before. I am more knowledgeable: I am in 19th grade, with two years of accelerated medical school under my belt. I am more hardened: I made it through my surgery clerkship’s 70-80 hour weeks waking up at 3:30am while maintaining composure to control my gloved hands gingerly yet confidently while operating inside a premature neonate’s abdomen. I have greater responsibility: I am here on American taxpayer dollars to perform clinical research that has the potential to affect many lives for the better.

All of these difficulties, of course, can be overcome to some extent. Quite easily, even, by admitting that I can’t do it on my own, and learning to depend on others. And that’s the rub. My ego stings after such a realization. That is the lesson I am to learn today. Doesn’t go down as easily as my late-night snack.

“And calling to him a child, [Jesus] put him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:5.

I thought I just wanted some apples and peanut butter. But thrown in was a profound and timely reminder into one of the most difficult yet obviously true mysteries of my faith. This is good stuff.

Jon

___

originally posted on 'yet real' on 31 August 2011. be sure head over to jon's blog and spend some time reading!

snippets: ganesh chathurthi

2011-09-01T12:11:00.002+05:30

we were informed that the students at our host institution are on holiday yesterday (wednesday) through the weekend because of ganesh chathurthi/ vinayagar chathurthi. aka, ganesh's birthday. we found this little diya and flower offering outside our neighbor's door this morning and i couldn't help but snap a photo.

we've yet to see any super exciting processions or really, any sort of indication at all that it's a festival around here, which is odd given what i've read about this holiday. we'll have to find and ask a local to be sure we don't miss 'the submerging of a giant ganesh statue in a body of water' part of this holiday.

{apparently, the flower and idol markets are packed.}

on driving in india

2011-08-30T12:52:00.001+05:30

{image}

part of our job duties here include reading some manuals and other india travel/ life- related documents from other agencies and non-profits sending people here to hindustan.

the following written by someone who lived in hyderabad for two years, and i think it's hilarious, accurate and will give you all a better understanding of a small piece of our life here. i copied it from an orientation manual for people moving here short term. it's a little long, but worth reading (i swear, i am not making this ish up)!:

for the benefit of every tom, dick and harry visiting india and daring to drive on indian roads, i am offering a few hints for survival. they are applicable to every place in india except bihar, where life outside the vehicle is only marginally safer.

india road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best, and leave the results up to your insurance company.

{image}

the hints are as follows: do we drive on the left or right side of the road? the answer is 'both.' basically, you start on the left of the road, unless it is occupied. in that case, go to the right, unless that is also occupied. then proceed by occupying the next available gap, as in chess. just trust your instincts, ascertain the direction and proceed.

adherence to road rules leads to much misery and occasional fatality. most drivers don't drive, but just aim their vehicles in the intended direction. don't you get discouraged or underestimate yourself except for a belief in the reincarnation; the other drivers are not in any better position.

don't stop at pedestrian crossings just because some fool wants to cross the road. you may do so only if you enjoy being bumped in the back.

pedestrians have been strictly instructed to cross only when traffic is moving slowly or has come to a dead stop because some minister is in town. still some idiot may try to wade across, but then, let us not talk ill of the dead.

blowing your horn is not a sign of protest as in some countries. we horn to express joy, resentment, frustration, and romance and bare lust (two brisk blasts) or, just mobilize a dozing cow in the middle of the bazaar.

keep informative books in the glove compartment. you may read them during traffic jams, while awaiting the chief minister's motorcade, or waiting for the rainwater to recede when over ground traffic meets underground drainage.

night driving on indian roads can be an exhilarating experience (for those with the mental makeup of genghis khan.) in a way, it's like playing russian roulette, because you do not know who amongst the drivers is loaded.

what looks like premature dawn on the horizon turns out to be a truck attempting a speed record. on encountering it, just pull partly into the filed adjoining the road until the phenomenon passes.

{image}

our roads do not have shoulders, but occasionally boulders. do not blink your lights expecting reciprocation. the only dim thing in the truck is the driver, and with the peg of illicit "arrack" (alcohol) he has had at the last stop, his total cerebral functions add up to little more than naught. truck drivers are the james bonds of india, licensed to kill.

during the daytime, trucks are more visible, except that the drivers will never show any signal. only, you will often observe that the cleaner, who sits next to the driver, will project his hand and wave hysterically. this is definitely not to be construed as a signal for a left turn. the waving is just an expression of physical relief on a hot day. occasionally you might see what looks like a UFO with blinking colored lights and weird sounds emanating from within. this is an illuminated bus, full of happy pilgrims singing 'bhajans'. these pilgrims go at breakneck speed, seeking contact with the Almighty, often meeting with success.

{image}

autorickshaw (baby taxi): the result of a collision between a rickshaw and an automobile, this three wheeled vehicle works on an external combustion engine that runs on a mixture of kerosene oil and creosote. this triangular vehicle carries iron rods, gas cylinders or passengers three times its weight and dimension, at an unspecified fare. after careful geometric calculations, children are folded and packed into these autos until some children in the periphery are not in contact with the vehicle at all. then their school bags are pushed into the microscopic gaps all round so those minor collisions with other vehicles on the road cause no permanent damage. of course, the peripheral children are charged half the fare and also learn newton's laws of motion en-route to school. autowallas follow the road rules depicted in the film ben-hur, and are licensed to irritate.

{image}

mopeds: the moped looks like an oil tin on wheels and makes noise like an electric shaver. it runs 30 miles on a teaspoon of petrol and travels at break-bottom speed. as the sides of the road are too tough for a ride, the moped drivers tend to drive in the middle of the road; they would rather drive under heaver vehicles instead of around them and are often "mopped" off the tarmac.

{image}

leaning tower of passes: most bus passengers are given free passes and during rush hours, there is absolute mayhem. there are passengers hanging off other passengers, who in turn hang off the railings and the overload bus leans dangerously, defying laws of gravity but obeying laws of surface tension. as drivers get paid for overload (so many rupees per kg of passenger), no questions are ever asked. steer clear of these busses by a width of three passengers.

one-way street: traffic people to add jest in their otherwise drab lives put up these boards. don't stick to the literal meaning and proceed in one direction. in metaphysical terms, it means that you cannot proceed in two directions at once. so drive, as you like, in reverse throughout, if you are the fussy type.

lest i sound hypercritical, i must add a positive point also. rash and fast driving in residential areas has been prevented by providing a 'speed breaker'; two for each house. this mound, incidentally, covers the water and drainage pipes for that residence and is left untarred for easy identification by the corporation authorities, should they want to recover the pipe for year-end accounting. if, after all this, you still want to drive in india, have your lessons between 8pm and 11am, when the police have gone home and the citizen is then free to enjoy the 'freedom of speed' enshrined in our constitution.

god bless india.

_____
my own photos coming soon.

day #3

2011-08-27T22:24:00.002+05:30

some day soon i'll have more interesting titles. and more photos.

things we learned today that we should have learned long ago:

autowallas know where everything is, and are happy to give directions. same with google.

the combination of the two can be, and in fact are, incredibly helpful when learning to navigate a new city.

we’re doing well here on our little corner of race course road. we found out after arriving that we packed all the wrong stuff for working at an Indian university, so we’ve spent a fair amount of time running around the city shopping for salwaars for me and some more dress pants and shirts for j. never sad for an excuse to shop at fab India, we’ve had a decent time navigating the city. it helps to join up with people who have been doing precisely the same thing as we are doing for the past 3 weeks already.

the staff at our host institution are fantastic, and super willing to help. i say this even in the context of a country where everyone is incredibly helpful. (also, we finally learned “the wave’s” actual name: rajendran.)

with the help of google and some friendly autowallas, we took a long walk today from one borough of the city to another (dress pants and home goods, it turns out, are sold in different places!) and ended our afternoon at our favorite coffee shop- café coffee day. (those of you reading, please drool over the fact that i had a ‘devil’sown’ and a slice of chocolate fantasy cake.) not a bad deal when one of the big things on your to-do list is to learn more about the city where you’re living and learn to navigate your way from one place to another!

also, on a different note, when we arrived we were informed that there were, according to the last census done here, approximately 40 foreign (read: white) people living here. we met or came across 13 of them today. 10 of them were together, and quite friendly. we’re hoping to spend some more time with them and understand their context and reasons for being here sometime in the weeks to come.

i finally busted out my camera today and took a few photos, which i’ll upload shortly (maybe tomorrow?). i’m also hoping to put together a ‘photo tour’ of our apartment to entice all of you to come visit us.

guest post! hannah from journeys toward peace

2011-08-26T21:01:00.000+05:30

hi friends-
while i struggle to make sense of my experiences and write about them in a way that is meaningful, please enjoy this guest post from my dear friend hannah at journeys toward peace. hannah just returned from 7 months working with an international non-profit in rwanda, and has a lot of good things to say regarding, well, everything (check out her blog. do it!) i asked her to share her thoughts and impressions on life abroad.

Living Abroad: Long Term vs Short Term

I guess technically you cannot even say that short-term trips are living. Those
experiences are more like visiting. Not that visiting is not a worthwhile venture; visiting
introduces a person to new ways of thinking, new lifestyles, and ultimately aspects of his/
her own personality. But despite all a person learns and experiences on short-term trips,
nothing can prepare you for life on a long-term venture. The job is still awesome, but
instead of accomplishing it in three weeks, you know have six months. Hanging out with
the locals is definitely an enriching part of life, but when you live here, the obligation to
have you over for dinner sinks to next week, or the week after, or when the kids are out
of school, or, later really. In short, you have more time, so things might take a little bit
longer to start happening. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It means the highs and
accomplishments are that much better. But it also means the lows and disappointments
are that much deeper. Loneliness comes easier when you are not working a physically
intensive type job 12+ hours each day. And when you have six more months before you
can collapse onto your best friend’s couch and vent, rather than four weeks. But you
also make new bet friends, who leave the front door open for 3 am visits and problems
that require a strong cup of boiling tea to fix. It just takes some time to make these
friendships.

Having said all that, patience is the only thing I can think of that must be packed when
moving somewhere new. Give yourself time to adjust. Give others time to adjust to
you being there (or being gone…) And give your heart time to adjust to the people that
come and go with an ease unrelated to the depth the relationship has reached. With
the globalized world, it is possible to replace just about any material object in the new
country. Sure there are some things I wish I had brought, and others I wish I hadn’t
brought. But ultimately, my willingness to just go with the flow made life in the middle
of Africa possible. Sure there were days when I really wanted to just head over to Target
and get a new t-shirt. And times when my late-night-empty stomach really craved
some Taco Bell, or pizza, or even ships and salsa that can be acquired from 24 hour
grocery stores. But being flexible gave me the mindset capable of handling the fact that
everything closes at 10 pm, and there are no mega-markets to replace cheap goods with
cheaper goods.

Picking up and moving to the opposite side of the globe has its ups and downs. But it
was life I was living, and life has ups and downs anywhere.

______
photo is hannah's, from her blog

day #2

2011-08-25T22:36:00.001+05:30

a man who we affectionately refer to as ‘the wave’ keeps showing up where we are, asking us for the key to our apartment and disappearing with it for hours. while this would be a cause for alarm somewhere else, here it means we end up with a new air conditioner, a second set of furniture (intended for another apartment?), a stove, and an entire box of ice cream. it’s not a bad deal, really.

traffic in India as a whole is generally pretty chaotic. i don’t know if i’ve never paid close attention to it before, but today, in our journey to fabindia, i noticed for the first time how a driver makes his way across oncoming traffic. he just sneaks out with his blinker (… a novelty i never noticed before) on, and waits for some kindhearted soul to stop his line of oncoming traffic and let us cross.

just because our apartment has a pool and a battalion of security guards does not, in fact, insure that we will have a working shower in our apartment.

at the same time that India feels very familiar, it also feels very foreign. while i’ve gotten pretty good at shopping for salwaars, i have no idea how to use a gas stove of this sort to cook myself anything edible.

it is simultaneously adorable and frustrating that everyone here assumes we speak and understand tamil. i wish, coimbatoreites. i so, so wish.

there are approximately 79 switches per outlet/ light/ dial. you’d think that after time, you’d start to learn which ones control what. maybe i’m being too hard on myself given that we only arrived yesterday, but i still run through the gamut of them every time i enter or exit a room.

our toilet seat tilts back at about a 25 degree angle. yes, that is as awkward as it sounds.

i hope for some more coherent updates after we’ve had a little more jet-lag-free time here in CBE. J and also, some photos, because let’s be honest, text heavy posts are not as enjoyable as those that have pretty pictures.

we've arrived!

2011-08-24T19:39:00.003+05:30

{image}

we made it.

today, we were in a traffic jam with a holy man band, an idol parade and a large elephant.

that is all.

in which i reminisce about college

2011-08-23T19:30:00.007+05:30

this may be super boring for a lot of you, but i'm going to take you on a quick photo tour of my college campus.

i graduated from college back in 2006. i loved gordon, and feel like a large part of who i am and what i care about is because i spent 4 years at this fantastic institution. and even though i owe gordon a large sum of money (still), i wouldn't change my experiences in college for anything.

i often feel like i'd do whatever i could to 'ungraduate' and go back. i miss learning. don't get me wrong- i don't miss finals week (or the 'week of tears' before finals when everything, ever, was due.) i don't miss cafeteria food or being overcharged for every stupid little thing. but there is a LOT i miss, and i remember that every time i'm within a 100-mile radius of the north shore of boston (... or new england, for that matter).

while on the north shore for a friend's wedding this weekend, hubs and i took the opportunity to hop up to our alma matter (during orientation weekend. oops). imagine my surprise when i walked into the new, fancy 'dry pub' on campus and found the drink name signs i made anywhere from 5-8 years ago on the wall! (turns out i was funnier back in college.)

this is the dining hall. it has gotten way classier and a lot more like hogwarts since my graduation... like most of the rest of campus (save for the crappy HUD dorms we lived in and loved so much, which are, of course, still standing. evans for life.)

we're clearly trying for a lot of culture here, given that the college is (or was, at least while i was there) largely made up of white kids from upper middle class suburbia.

yes. our admissions and financial aid building is a castle. i went to an international economics class in this building, accessible either by traipsing through the entire building up to the third floor, or via fire escape + window on the left side of the building. guess what i chose?

bethel prayer chapel. a really, neat little space famous for its feeling of sacred. also because it's a secluded, constantly accessible make out spot. (i wish i was joking.) this is a map on the wall in bethel where people sticky note their prayers for the world on it.

our library and classrooms (those that aren't in the castle or other less interesting buildings on campus, that is.) while in college, we thought we were pretty bad-ass for spending the night in jenks and watching the emperor's new groove on the video screen in one of our old testament classrooms.

this is where i lived in college (and by 'lived' i mean, spent not quite as much time in this building creating art as i should have, but at times it definitely felt like i spent more time here than in my dorm room). i heart art.

evans 4 life, peeps.

our little chapel.

i think what i miss most about college can be summed up in these three things: community (the real, genuine kind, where you know not only that you'll always have someone to pull pranks with but also someone to stay up with until 3am drinking coffee in our coffee shop), academics (i'm a nerd. i love learning, and miss being challenged in this way) and growth (who doesn't like continually growing and expanding their brains?).

i hope to post a photo tour of our new town and new college campus in the next week or two, after we get moved in and settled. in the meantime, thank you for walking through 255 grapevine road with me and allowing me to indulge in my sappy nostalgia for my college days of yore.

congratu-freaking-lations, team wellwood!

2011-08-22T17:56:00.000+05:30

my friend kevin got married this weekend to a beautiful girl i just met the moment i snapped the picture below. kevin used to date my roommate. he used to come over and play scrabble. he bought me ice cream on more than one occasion. he once traveled to india with me and some other friends. kevin's family is rumored to make moosemeat tacos for friends who visit his family's home in maine.

while i appreciate all of these things about kevin, one of my favorite parts of our friendship is that we walked (/ sloughed/ struggled) through very difficult relationships at the same time, and somehow both of us managed to get out relatively unscathed, to find love and life and happiness. though i've only known sarah for just over 2 days now, i couldn't be happier for this friend of mine and his beautiful new bride! (doesn't she look super classy here? and don't they both look geeked? i love it.)

after our wedding, i always get nervous for my friends who walk down the aisle. not because i'm nervous that they're choosing to spend their lives with each other- or because i was nervous about the decision i was about to make- but because i remember how nervous i was to walk through a church full of friends and family and make the biggest promise of my life.

9 times out of 10, my favorite moment of a wedding is the expression on the groom's face when he first sees his bride walk down the aisle. k, couldn't be happier for you and your lovely lady.

thank you, toy camera, for a very interesting first dance perspective. :) i'll definitely leave the pro photos up to the pro photogs, but i happen to really like how these turned out. i am thoroughly enjoying my plastic lens and can't wait to take a slew of market photos next week and introduce you all to coimbatore! we're off (today)!

little miss clara

2011-08-20T18:47:00.000+05:30

i miss this little beauty. and her adorable sister.

that's all.

final hoo-rah: b-cycle and more alpine slide

2011-08-19T21:04:00.000+05:30

i'm writing this from the eastern seaboard, and i must admit, there are plenty of other things i'd rather be doing right now than writing a blog post. just a quick little last minute post about how much we love b-cycle. it's awesome! while mom and dad were visiting us in CO, we rented bikes and rode around cheeseman and washington parks while hubs took the GRE. what a fun (and practical) idea to rent bikes to the masses!

b-cycles and flowers outside the botanic gardens (or, if you're my dad, the 'bionic gardens.' he's seriously the funniest guy i know.)

b-cycle goodness (isn't my lens fun?)

of course dad pops a wheelie less than 3 minutes on the bike. i'd be lying if i said i didn't expect some sort of shenanigans. :)

aren't they cute? they're working on 30-odd years of being cute together, so i shouldn't be too surprised.

mata-ji.

the juice naana.

juice naana gives the alpine slide two thumbs up. (unfortunately, i don't have any pictures of how much he enjoyed the candy factory, because it definitely gave the slide a run for its money!)

hubs likes the slide too. we're not-so-secretly really happy to have yet another excuse to go sliding.

mata-ji took this one. i think she likes my lens, too.

colorado, i miss you dearly already. please don't change too much while we're gone. we adore you.

sadly, that's all for now. we're spending some time with some dear friends in connecticut and going to a wedding tomorrow, so stay tuned for pictures of adorable babies and friends getting hitched before we depart on monday afternoon!

guest post: kisha at from india with love

2011-08-17T20:04:00.000+05:30

i hope you are all super excited for an update here, as i'm currently sitting on the (cold, uncomfortable) edge of our bathtub to catch the bootlegged internet signal. i'm wearing the same shirt as i did yesterday, because i can't find anymore.

why this pseudo-asceticism? we're leaving at 1am tonight/ tomorrow morning for the first leg of our journey!

so today, my dears, i have another guest post, this one from kisha over at from india with love! i thought she'd make a fantastic guest poster because she's several months into her year in india, and because i enjoy reading snippets of her life in north india i thought you all might enjoy it, too. thank you, kisha, for your packing suggestions! i'm off to get some breakfast, get a haircut... and then, maybe pack.

I'm incredibly flattered Kandyce asked me to contribute a guest post here to her fabulous blog as she and her hubby prepare to move to India (how exciting!)

I'm currently 5 months into a year long volunteer placement in Delhi and remember exactly what is what like as I was packing to make the big move (excel spreadsheets galore!) - so I decided to share a few things that I wish I had packed, a few things that I wish I hadn't packed, and a few things I packed that helped make my transition to living abroad (away from family and friends) a bit more bearable.

Truth be told, you can find almost anything in India. And I'm sure if you have the time and patience (and money!) you CAN find anything in India. But here are a few things I wish I had brought along with me:

- Solid/stick deodorant.

Oh how I wish how someone would have told me that it would be close to impossible to find here. Once the two I brought were finished I found myself in a bind (and ended up wearing Men's Gel Gillette - Sport Fragrance for 3 weeks!) Spray deodorant is everywhere but my good ol' fashion favourites like Secret and Dove...no where to be found. (Luckily a friends friend who recently visited from the US brought me THREE!)

- A good high quality power converter.

I'm really partial to my blow dryer and flat iron and it appears that they are too strong for most of the power converters I'm able to find here. I can always just buy a new (Indian) blow dryer and flat iron - but I really like mine :)

Of course, since it was my first time coming to India (and I'd be living here for a year no less!) I might have slightly overpacked. In hindsight, while I think I did a pretty good job shopping, there are some things I could have left behind....

- Jeans.

I'm glad I brought them because I DO wear them. I just didn't need to bring 4 pairs.....half the time it's much too hot to wear them and I go with light weight cotton pants that I buy here at the market. Plus I'm not fortunate enough to have a washing machine and hand washing denim is no fun. No fun at all.

- Sandals/Flats

Before leaving Toronto I was scouring the city for cute sandals (in February!) and did find a few pairs....but there are SO many cute sandals here at a fraction of the cost of what you'd pay back home. Before coming buy a good quality pair for walking around the rough streets here in India but save your dollars and buy all the cute ones in India. Trust me.

And a few things I'm glad I brought because they helped make my transition to living here easier:

- Pictures of Family & Friends

These were one of the first thing I unpacked and put up on my wall and table. Immediately made my flat feel more homey.

- My Favourite Snacks

Vanilla Oreo Cookies, Mr. Noodles, Cadbury Creme Eggs....when I'm feeling for a tiny taste of home or something familiar I dip into my stash and savour every. single. bite.

- TV Series + Movies (on an extra hard drive)

Ahhh the life of a volunteer on a small stipend! I don't have cable (yet) but luckily I don't miss it because I came prepared and have tons of tv series and movies I hadn't watched that I now watch on my laptop. Of course during my spare time I like to go see the sites, do some shopping, and hang out with the new friends I've made....but every so often it's nice to grab some Vanilla Oreo Cookies and get lost in Entourage, 24, or Modern Family - just like being at home!

all photos are kisha's. she's got a bunch more over at from india with love and at her photography website (my favorite photo of hers so far is the rajasthani camel, but she's got some from travels in egypt over there, too!)