The main event

I’ve now officially been in India for about 24 hours. It’s still blowing my mind. I’ve never been this far away from home before, and I’m having trouble coming to grips with the fact that I am literally on the other side of the world. It’s going to take time to get used to this place. However, let me backtrack a little bit to Heathrow.

Dawdling in London
The whole experience of waiting at an airport shouldn’t be that exciting, but there was something about the British-ness of it all that made it funny. For one, the overhead announcements were hysterical! Is everything in the UK supposed to be taken as a personal insult?
- “You must check in for your flight at least 35 minutes before takeoff. Otherwise, your baggage will be unloaded and the flight will leave without you.”
- “Please do not leave baggage unattended. All unattended baggage with be confiscated and destroyed.”

Fire up the incinerator! ☺ Having a lowered drinking age also had some weird social consequences. I mean, I certainly took advantage of it (do you know how much wine the flight attendants tried to push on us en route to Mumbai??), but it was odd seeing people younger than me casually walking around with a pint or two without cops swarming the premises. Diversity in the airport was different too. I don’t’ know if Heathrow is really reflective of the UK, but it seemed like everyone was either white or Indian. AKA there were, like, three African Americans. And a couple Asian people. It wasn’t as shocking getting to India and having everyone be Indian, but maybe I have different expectations for a country that I think is more like mine? All and all though, I’d like to make a trip back to the UK and properly visit.

Watched more movies on the plane—Watchmen (pause here and wait for TM to stop seizing with joy) was interesting, if more than a little dark, and Tales of Desperaux (sp?) was the worst children’s film I’ve seen in a while. Watching movies has made me feel like I’m just going to stop watching the movie, turn around, and walk into my kitchen… but in reality I’m not going back to the Western hemisphere for a long time. Movies do help to take my mind off things… like the idea of jumping up from my middle seat on a plane packed with 200+ people and screaming, “ARE WE THERE YET???”

Touched Down in Bombay
Touched down in Mumbai (Bombay? Can’t figure out what people call it) at 11:00 in the morning, got screened for swine flu, and waited for my luggage. I was panicky because, 15 minutes before I’d boarded the flight in London, the agent told me that my luggage was not on the plane. Relieved when I finally found it (one of the porters had pulled it off the belt early on… way to let me know). My friend Mehek, who will be a sophomore at Princeton, was supposed to meet me at the airport, but she called me in London and told me that she had been sick for the past couple days. Instead, I met up with a man from her dad’s office, Pradeep. He and his driver were both very nice, and surprised about my light packing! I can see why-- several Indian families from my flight had also been waiting for their luggage, and they came away with, like, 6 giant suitcases each!

Drive-through impressions
Driving away to Mehek’s house, I figured out why Pradeep had a driver. I feel like that’s the first person I would hire if I lived here—traffic is CRAZY (and not even because they drive on the wrong side of the road!). There is really no comparison to anything in the US, even US city driving. South Asian taxi drivers in New York must be those drivers that got kicked out of Bombay for admitting that following distance and passing etiquette exist. Drivers literally just swipe into you and it’s your job to yield and make room for them. Or, like our driver, you can choose to assert yourself and keep a ready horn for when you want to sidle into someone else’s lane (even if they are still in it). You would never be able to drive a large car here—there would be no way you’d be spatially aware enough to keep it intact.. Most of the vehicles are not cars, though. About 50% that I saw were little auto-taxis… which, upon inspection, are actually motorized tricycles surrounded by a large box that holds the passenger. There are only three wheels! I have a feeling I’ll be riding these to class in Pune… that will be fun!

The city itself was also very different. I’d read things about Bombay being dirty or that the poverty is shocking… but it’s not at all like that. Guaranteed, I’ve only seen the part around or 40 minutes from Heathrow, but what I’d say is a better comparison is that the city looks like it is still under construction. You know the way there is random litter around a construction site and dusty dirt just from it being unbuilt? That’s what the buildings and streets were like—as if they were still being finished. It didn’t seem dirty in the sense of purposefully unclean, just gritty and sandy. The style of most of the buildings, except, notably, the Indian Center for Planning, was like what we would call a Southwestern, stucco style. This may explain my sand association?

People have built homes in every enclave—you can see the slum districts from the plane as you’re landing. Clothes and cloth are draped over trees and random outcroppings, and metal siding is built up to make multi-story shacks. It’s actually exactly like what you’d seen in Slumdog Millionare or in pictures or a documentary of Bombay (which is probably why I wasn’t that surprised or interested). The people on the street were much more interesting than their houses. I saw two boys swimming (?) in a deep pothole on the side of the road. Two small boys and a little girl in a pink dress spun tops in an alleyway that must have been 3 feet wide. A small gang of teenagers dressed in mismatched collared shirts and long shorts were walking down the street with cricket gear away from a dusty park (complete with basketball hoops???). However, those people seemed like the buildings… they’re not dirty, just gritty. They live gritty lives, but it doesn’t seem as dark as the movies portray it because they’re used to it, it’s what they’re comfortable with. People looked happy.

I couldn’t decide whether it was helpful or hurtful to know what little Hindi I do. I can read the Devanagari script, but still very slowly and not very small type fonts. I can also pick up a couple of words people say and simple commands, but not complex sentences. Therefore, I had to keep telling myself to stop reading or listening in order to keep from getting a headache as we were driving! There were so many signs on all the shops, so I would try to make sense of them all. I would start to read and get halfway through before we started moving again. Either that, or I’d hear something on the radio, remember the word, and then they’d be on to the next sentence before I’d deduced anything useful. My brain hurt from the constant effort! ☺

Food food food, what else?
Slept for 6 hours after lunch, which was my first Indian food, provided by Mehek’s mom and the servants. I’ve decided that there’s no way I’m not going to lose some weight on this trip. The food is great, but it is very rich—there is a lot of spice in just a small bit. I was eating everything in very small portions in order to take it all in. I feel full after eating barely anything! :P I’ll have to keep track of dishes that I like the best. Indian mangos were a little tart for me (like sour green apple tang x7 plus sweet), but I really liked the vegetable and potato dip (?) that we ate with the roti (Indian bread) for lunch. My favorite part of dinner was the homemade yogurt. I NEED to learn how to do that. I tasted just like plain yogurt from the store, but it came out of a pot! Rest of dinner was actually “Mexican” – rice and beans on open face hard taco shells with salsa and sour cream. Was relieved that this dinner was more mild in taste (I liked the tomato soup and was just about to say so when Mehek goes, “There’s not enough salt in this soup. Can we have salt?). Something I’ll have to get used to… though I don’t mind getting used to new food! I also didn’t even think about it until now, but I had two all-veg meals and didn’t mind a bit. Interesting how that works…

Mehek and I watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix online after dinner—she is as obsessed with Harry Potter as I am, which is cool. We’re going shopping tomorrow so I can buy some real Indian clothes—so excited! I’m glad she’ll be there with me to help me find what I like at a good price ☺ I will take some pictures so I can get to more posting.

…

I still can’t believe I’m in India.

ps. Mom, there are cats in India. I saw a (very) scraggly version of Boo walking down the streets. I also saw a little black chiuwawa dog… ???

pps. There really are cows in Bombay. I saw about five of them on a street corner. They are huge! Not fat… just very tall. They are like ox-cows!