Sun? In Mussoorie?

It has surprisingly been good weather here lately.  It has only truly been pouring during the nights.  I woke up at 4am yesterday to pounding rain on my tin roof.  I fell back asleep praying it would stop by the time I had to wake up at 6:30…it did. It has been a foggy but almost rain free week.  It makes me so much happier to be able to walk in the market, sit outside, and enjoy the mountains while I still can.   However, all the locals say it will start to get really, really, bad once August hits.  I am hoping to get out of here mid way through August. 

I have had 8 AM classes for the past 2 weeks.  It has been miserable.  My first four weeks here I didn’t have classes until the afternoon, so it has been an adjustment waking up early.  I wake up early enough to have breakfast and chai at char dukan, half way up to school, before finishing the half hour walk.  The shops are just opening when I arrive, and the owners (who live above their shops with their families) are preparing for the day.  The grandmother who lives at the one shop I always go to is always coming back from the temple and cleaning herself up as I wait for my chai.  The first few days she walked past me with a bucket of yellow liquid and I never really noticed.  She just dumps it over the bridge down the mountain.  It wasn’t until I actually thought about it that I realized, as I was just waking up and waiting for my chai, this old woman was wafting her giant pee bucket right past me.  I can’t wait for next week; I requested afternoon classes again.    

There is no municipality up here, so no one collects garbage.  There are some cans around the mountain that we were instructed to put our trash from our rooms in.  So, once a week or so I carry my little bag to one of the cans.  It wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized the cans are simply emptied down the mountain behind the can.  I watch in the mornings as men sweep the roads (where people just throw their trash) and dump it over the side of the mountain.  It’s appalling; the bridge near char dukan has an enormous mountain of trash under it.  I can only imagine what this place will look like in fifteen years with trash piling up everywhere.  The amount of plastic bottles is atrocious; the way people litter is horrible, and the fact that no one really seems to care is the worst part.  We have a compost pile at our house, but for the most part I have tried to minimize any other waste. 

Classes are going well, as always.  I can see myself burning out a bit as we get into much harder material.  I am excited though, because my friends turn to me in the bazaar when they don’t understand, and I am happy that I can have conversations with locals and actually fully understand what they are saying.  Just a few more weeks left in Mussoorie, hopefully the sun continues to shine! 

Tehri Dam

I went to Tehri Dam yesterday, one of the worlds highest dams.  I knew there was not going to be much to see there, but I had read about it back when my Honors Project was going to be about rivers, so I felt that being so close I just had to see it in person. 

It is about 2.5 hours away, and once we finally got there we couldn’t get “permission” to get onto the actual dam and get in.  We weren’t sure why, and our driver told us that they weren’t letting Indians in either, probably something to do with the recent Mumbai attacks.  So we had to view it from afar, which ended up being fine.  I just wanted to see it. I took some great photos as well.  We ended up driving around a bit to get some different views.  We stopped for chai when we first got there and talked with this shopkeeper who pulled out a book that he had pasted a bunch of photos and postcards in.  There were before and after pictures of Tehri.  It was so sad to see it; they dam had caused the relocation of over 90 villages, which translates to hundreds of thousands of people.  They were moved to “New Tehri” which he motioned was up the mountain a bit further.  Apparently when the water was clearer a few years ago you could still see bits of the city underneath the water.  One of my teachers also told me that the clock-tower from Tehri used to be visible from above through the water.  It made me sad to look at it, but it was hard not to be amazed at the magnitude of one of the world’s highest dams. 

On the way home we stopped at a famous Hindu temple, it was a 3 km hike up to it, and it was straight up, but we did it anyways.  We hadn’t eaten anything and it was raining, but it was a nice hike up and the temple at the top was not much, but still beautiful. We went from there to an Eco Park, which was again nothing special, just some trees with signs and postings encouraging everyone to love Mother Earth.

It was a relief to get out of Mussoorie, if only for a day.  I have been here for almost 5 weeks and have yet to take a weekend trip or anything, while all my friends are traveling all over.  There are going to places like Jaipur, Amritsar, and Manali.  All places I have been, and all places I will be going in a few weeks. So for now I am sticking to day trips, which are nice.  Only a few more weeks here before I am (as of now) off to Bangalore.  Internet still too slow to more pictures up...

I have now been here a month.  Classes are going well, mentally exhausting, but my Hindi is improving more than I had though it would.  I am now much more confident to speak with the locals than I have ever been.  It is great having other international students around as well.  I run into a Korean woman who has class before me as we are switching rooms every morning.  She speaks no English, and of course I do not speak Korean, so we converse in the only language we have in common, Hindi.  It is so fascinating to me that two people, from two very different lives are brought together by a common interest.  I think its great that we can speak to each other, and it helps us both practice our Hindi as well!   

I am sure most of you have read about the happenings in Mumbai. The most recent attack was the fourteenth big blast in the past eighteen years.  Before it, the most recent was 26/11/08.  This time, instead of hotels and Western frequented places, the blasts came from a motorcycle and a tiffin box (lunch box).   Mumbai’s vulnerability makes it an easy target, it is roughly a third the size of Delhi, but has 29,000 people per square kilometer, compared to Delhi’s 4,000 people per square kilometer.   I have read numerous accounts from newspapers and magazines, recounting the events of 13/7/11.  Each one asks the same question: “Why again Mumbai, why?” Mumbai’s citizens are “tired of living in fear,” as one citizen was quoted in India Today, and sick of the danger involved in living their everyday lives.  Even this high up in Mussoorie, locals are sick of hearing the horrific accounts of what happens in their country.  It’s sad that in a country so vibrant and full of life, religion, and culture, people live their daily lives in fear of when and where the next blast will be. 

I was planning a trip to Mumbai for mid August, but I think I will skip over and head straight to the South.  I am sure I would have been fine, now that almost all the bigger cities are on high alert, but I am going to play it safe.  I was selfishly happy to have been up here, tucked safe away in the mountains when all the commotion happened.  I am hoping to spend some time in Bangalore before my parents get here.  I want to visit some spice and tea plantations and relax a bit in a drier place after I finish the Hindi textbook. It will be my reward for completing the entire course in just two months.   For now, my daily life consists of nothing special.  My days are filled with school, walking in the bazaar, and hanging out with my other foreign friends and locals.  

Time for an "Out of India" Experience

The monsoon has officially started.   The rain on Friday poured down harder than I have experienced in my entire life.  I had to walk to the bazaar to pick up things for a dinner party on Friday night.  I waited as long as I could for the rain to stop, but it didn’t, so I ventured out in my rainboots, umbrella and raincoat.  I was soaked after five minutes.  The rain was beating down so hard it was coming through the top of my umbrella.  I ran from shop to shop and got what I needed, and spent an hour sitting and talking with my tailor waiting for it to slow a bit.  It didn’t, so I began the half hour walk back up the mountain.  The roads are so steep that the rain was flowing down with the force of a river.  I struggled to stay standing as I forged the flowing water, but the water was so high it filled my boots and felt as though I was walking through a waterfall.  I couldn’t help but remember last summer in Rajasthan; every time it rained I ran into the streets with joy letting the water soak me from head to toe and cool me off.  This time, I couldn’t wait to get home and dry off.

I changed my clothes and headed up for school.   When I got there, I was not on the schedule for next week.  There had been a mistake and therefore I hadn’t gotten the times or teachers I requested for the coming week.  After arguing with the principal, who was trying to fit me in to some classes, I ended up with a random bunch of teachers and the worst times.  I have two in the morning, one mid-day, and one in the afternoon.  It was a frustrating day, and only got worse when I arrived back home to see that my roof was leaking and water was pouring in through my door, which doesn’t close all the way. 

The rain finally stopped and it was the clearest it has been in the four weeks I have been in Landour.  For the first time I could see far enough to see the snow-capped mountains.  It was a nice treat after a terrible day!

After my day on Friday I decided I needed a break over the weekend. A bunch of us from the school decided to go down the mountain to Dehradun and see Harry Potter.  We took a taxi down the hairpin turns that make everyone car sick, and two hours later were back to the blazing heat of Indian summers.  I missed the mountains the minute we hit the heat! There was AC (thank god!) and it was a pretty nice theatre.  The movie was in 3D, and the quality was terrible, it was dizzying to watch the 3D, and the only seats we could get were in the 4^th row, which didn’t help.  Indian movies have intermissions, so it was nice to be able to take the glasses off for a bit! People were answering their phones and talking throughout the entire movie, but the seats in the theatre were reclining, and much better than the ones we have in Rochester.  It was a great break from the mountains, and worth the treacherous trip down for a relaxing afternoon and a taste of American culture.   

The rain hasn’t stopped today, and there has been no electricity all day.  It has forced me to do some homework.  Back to the grind next week. 

A Curryous Taste

I haven’t been up to too much, just going to school in the afternoons/evenings and walking in the bazaar (when I don’t have too much homework) in the mornings.  

Not having a kitchen in my guesthouse has proven to be more difficult than I anticipated, as there are not many choices around here, but I have been managing and meeting my friends who either have kitchens or are at guesthouses with restaurants for dinner.  One of my recent dinners was at a new restaurant and guesthouse that is exquisitely painted in bright Tibetan designs.  A few people I go to school with are staying there and it is just a ten-minute walk down from where I live so I met them for dinner one night last week.  I ordered a coconut curry with noodles and peanuts and was enjoying it very much when I got a not so pleasant bite.  It was sandy, and kind of popped in my mouth when I bit into it.  I did my best to hide my shock, but all I could think was that it was some sort of bug, a cockroach or beetle or something.  The friends I was with have a small 4-year old boy that they were in the middle of teaching table manners to, so I didn’t want to spit it out in the middle of their lesson.  I took a huge sip of water and did my best to swallow it, but the grit was stuck in my teeth and I couldn’t get rid of what felt like tiny little legs floating around my mouth.  I looked in the bowl, but saw nothing else.  By this point the family had noticed my surprise, and I just decided I couldn’t eat anymore. 

After that fiasco, I decided it was time to treat myself to a nice dinner.  There is a place called Rokeby just up the mountain from where I live.  It’s an absolutely beautiful guesthouse, salon, and restaurant that is known for its amazing (and expensive) Western and Indian food.   I heard rumor of mashed potatoes, lasagna, nachos and chocolate cake.  Ten of us got together for dinner last night and went to Rokeby (Google Rokeby Mussoorie and I am sure their website will come up).  I shared a hummus and pita appetizer with Lisa (the French girl that lives in the guesthouse with me), and had chicken tortellini for dinner.  We split chocolate cake for dessert.  It felt as though I was no longer in the Himalayas, but the pounding rain outside the windows forced us to scream to each other and brought us back to reality.  It was an amazing dinner and place, and I certainly shouldn’t get used to it! The entire dinner cost us less than ten dollars each, but I usually get dinner for a little over one dollar each night.  It was certainly a nice treat though. 

I have spent most of the weekend doing homework; it has been raining so it forced me to get it all done.  The sun came out for a little bit yesterday, so I walked in the bazaar, but the rain came pounding back around dinner time and hasn’t stopped since.  Thank god we bought a heater to dry our clothes.  Everything is starting to smell and get moldy.  And it will only get worse as the days go by…

An Indian 4th of July

Someone recently asked me what I did last year for the 4^th of July.  I honestly couldn’t remember.  I think I let the day pass while I was in the village without even noticing.  My concept of time and day there were blurred (most probably because I couldn’t think straight from the heat!) and I don’t remember even thinking about it there.   

There are a bunch of Americans up here, so we felt it fit to have a 4^th of July celebration.  There are only a handful of us; the other people we hang out with are Canadian, French, Italian, Austrian, Indian, Pakistani, and Dutch, but we invited them anyways.  We planned it the day before and everyone was assigned to bring something.  The host, Naseem, went to the bazaar in the morning to get mutton, where he watched them kill, skin, and prepare it for him.  He got home and made it into burgers, which we planned to roast with vegetables on the fire pit in his front yard.   There are a few vegetarians, so we made some veggie burgers as well, with cheese, potato, and spices. 

It rained a bit in the afternoon, but by evening time was clear.  However, the rain dampened all the sticks we had planned to use, so our idea of a blazing fire turned into a much harder task.  We were able to get something going, but it certainly wasn’t enough for us to safely cook the meat.  We ended up using a tawa on the stove, a pan used to make chappatis, to cook the burgers on.  It worked pretty efficiently, and we were able to crank out at least 20 mutton burgers.  We had gotten locally/homemade cheese and bread from the bazaar so the burgers were great with all the fixings.  I had Naseem keep my burger on the tawa extra long because I was nervous of consuming undercooked meat (even though it was so fresh) but it was pretty good and I have felt fine all day!  We put ghee (clarified butter) in the husks of the corn and let it sit on the fire for over an hour and they still weren’t fully cooked; of course I ate it anyways. 

We sat outside in the fog of the clouds for a few hours talking about what we would all be doing in the states if we were home, and watching as mosquito hawks stupidly flew into the candles on the table.  Oh, the things that amuse us in the mountains… Overall it was a great 4^th and I was surprised when I got home to see fireworks going off across the mountain.  Today in class one of my teachers said her husband is American, and there were a lot of others in the area setting off fireworks.  Another teacher had no idea what was going on and laughed as she told the story of the night before and how she thought it was gunshots.   

Classes are still going well, overwhelming, but well.  I have them all straight in a row this week and one new guy teacher that I didn’t have last week.  I am in class straight from 1:30 to 5.  It’s not too bad because I get them all done with in the afternoon, but it’s tough to not have a break in between them this week.  My homework load is building up and getting more difficult because I am getting into higher chapters that I have not learned or reviewed since I was last studying Hindi at American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS) in Jaipur.  It’s amazing how much I had forgotten when I wasn’t truly speaking it at school, just being tutored.  I find that my reading and writing skills are much better than my speaking and grammar.  I still lack the confidence to engage freely in conversation, so I have asked my teachers to work with me on that as well.  We start each class with a ten-minute conversation.  I have made many local friends in the area, and the local shopkeeper has been talking to me as well.  Everyone in the area knows of the language school and likes to converse with us in Hindi, so that helps too.    

Weekend

It is Sunday afternoon and I had a relaxing weekend, with lots of sun!

            I went out to dinner on Friday with the other Lisa and a family from Seattle that is here learning Hindi for 3 months.  I am by far the youngest one here, and I have actually learned a lot about “life” from hearing what everyone else is doing and why they are here and learning Hindi or Urdu at the language school.  Many are pursing masters, but most already have and are going towards their PhD’s or into the Foreign Service.  There are a few select people who have interesting degrees (one going for her PhD in anthropology) that I have made a point to talk to about their degree choices and what they plan to do in the future.  At such a point in my life when I still can’t decide what graduate program to go into it is really helpful to have these people to get advice from.  I don’t usually like being the youngest of a group, but in this case it is really beneficial!

            I walked in the bazaar yesterday for the entire day.  I had class in the morning and then met Lisa and the American family from Seattle (they have a young boy about 4 years old who is a bundle of energy).  We walked the 45 minutes to the main bazaar and walked the entire thing until we stopped at a small dhaba for lunch, after which we continued until late afternoon.  I was finally able to get a fleece and a sweatshirt and some scarves, in preparation for the cold weather to come in the next week or so. We have had three gorgeous days in a row, so I do not have high hopes for tomorrow’s weather; I think it is due time for more rain.  I do appreciate the great weekend weather though.

            I am literally the only foreigner up here that wears Indian clothes.  I have no other choice; I didn’t bring any clothes so I had to get them here! Everyone else who is here for a few months like me came with two or three suitcases full of Western clothes. Upon hearing I only brought one backpack they are shocked… It is a much different crowd of foreigners than I am used to in India.  In fact, sometimes up here I do not even feel like I am in India.  I am so used to desert life and big city India life (which are so different from each other as it is) that the mountain life is almost surreal.  Comparing my experiences in India, each is vastly different from the next.  It makes me realize even more how many different Indias there can be.  Every place and every state is so different from the next; it continues to amaze me.  

            We went to one of the guy’s guesthouse for breakfast this morning; he wanted to make us the miti chappatis (sweet chappatis—2 chappatis filled in the middle with sugar and ghee, clarified butter) he used to have as a kid in Pakistan.  We had eggs as well, and I was so excited to finally have something other than carbs in a meal.  I feel like all I eat here is bread and potatoes. 

            I have spent all of today doing my Hindi homework.  I get so much, while some of the other students with different teachers don’t get any! I find it helpful though, otherwise nothing I learn would ever stick without the drills I have to do in my own time.  I have 200 more vocabulary words to learn by tomorrow, so I brought my notecards to dinner tonight.   I did 6 chapters worth of work last week, so I can only imagine how much there will be this coming week….

Adventures

I went on the leech walk I spoke of in my last post.  There were three of us, and we were prepared.  We had long socks and tucked our pants into them (quite a sight…) and salt, and lighters to get them off if we encountered them.  It turned out that the leeches were the least of our problems…

We left around 10 AM after a large pancake breakfast at Char Dukan (literally “four shops”, the only four shops around where we stay).  We hiked down the mountain in search of the beautiful stream that others had told us we would come across.  At the stream, if you take the trail past it you will end up at flag hill, a beautiful side of the mountain covered in Tibetan prayer flags.  That was our goal and we had packed a nice picnic lunch.  However, we took the wrong trail at the stream.  Our feet were covered in leeches by the time we reached the base of the mountain where the stream was and we simply went the wrong way.  Before we knew it, we were on an entirely different mountain.  We hiked along the beautiful green terraces through the clouds and fog (all the while throwing salt all over our feet to keep the leeches off).  It was gorgeous, but we knew we were not headed in the right direction.  One hour, we said, and we would have to turn back.  It took us two hours to climb down the mountain, and would surely take us more to retrace our steps back up.  We headed onward, hoping we would stumble across  a larger trail leading us in the direction of flag hill.  No luck.  The trail ended.  We looked across the valley to the mountain we were supposed to be on and decided that it would be quicker to continue forward than to retrace our steps all the way back.  After all, it was mid afternoon and we didn’t want to spend the night out there.  So, we continued on a small animal path and it suddenly ended.  We had made it too far at this point to turn back; we would be walking in the dark.  So, we decided to push our luck and hope that we could make our way back to the river and follow it to the trail we came down on. 

            The guy we were with (a mountain man from the Appalachians in his 5^th year of grad school at Harvard) had a large umbrella that he used to “bush-wack” for us, and we followed behind him as he made a trail.  We came to a cliff and decided to scale it, so he went first and made it to the bottom.  He was covered in mud and leeches, but there was no other way.  We followed.  We continued on and found the river.  All we had to do was follow the stream and we would come back to the trail we had started on.  A small bridge served as a marker point, once we could see the bridge we knew we were safe.  We followed the banks of the stream, but in most cases there were no banks and we were climbing over rocks and down waterfalls.  Thank god we had a guy there because he scaled each waterfall, then put his hands and knees out to catch us on our way down. We were all soaked from head to toe.

            I was no longer worried about leeches, or getting dirty, or breaking anything in my pack as we jumped waterfalls.  I simply did not want to be stuck there during the night. I was tired, but didn’t think about it; I was wet, but ignored it; I was dirty and covered in leeches, but it didn’t phase me.  I simply wanted to find the bridge that would take us to the path back up. Finally, right when I was starting to freak out, as it was nearing 5:00, I saw the tiny foot bridge in the distance. It was hell hiking straight back up, and at times the slope was so steep I felt like I was crawling.  We could feel leeches in our shoes and clothes from swimming through the water and hiking through the brush, but we decided to wait until we made it to a leech-free spot higher on the mountain to take everything off. 

            Two hours later we made it to the top and I ran to the nearest shop for water.  We looked and felt like hell, and everyone laughed at us.  Anil, the shopkeeper who fed us breakfast and knew where we were attempting to go just laughed. 

            I do not regret it, as I think it made me stronger and the views from the green terraces at the top of the other mountain were amazing.  However, I do not think I will be doing it again anytime soon.  It was not what I expected for my third full day in Mussoorie, but it sure was a blast.  I think the things that try us and the experiences that test our will ultimately make us more accepting to similar things in the future.  Granted, I still don’t want bugs in my room, but I am okay with them even more now when I see them.  I can’t say I won’t be dreaming of leeches for the next few months though….

Classes started this week and are already quite overwhelming.  I started on chapter 7, though I should really be somewhere close to 14.  The easy grammatical things I learned in my first two weeks of Hindi two years ago never stuck, so I am re-learning them now.  It’s a lot to handle; I have class from 12-6 everyday and four different teachers all designated to work on a different thing.  Its nice having one-on-one classes (even though they’re more expensive) because we work at my pace and when I don’t understand something I can ask a lot easier than if I were in a group.  There is much more work outside of class than I anticipated.  I am spending every free second on flash cards and grammar exercises, but I am excited to be able to converse a bit more freely in Hindi when in the bazaar or someone’s home. 

            So for now my free time on weekdays is spent doing Hindi, and reading this cool book about the man-eating leopard that was 800 km away.  Leopards and leeches, who could have asked for better nightmares!

                                             Yes, notice the nerdy but "leech-safe" attire!