india

I think that India delivers a strong dose of culture shock to anyone who visits it. Its chaos is truly unmatched. While traveling here is exhausting, I think it is as rewarding as it is bewildering. As soon as we decided that we were going to come here for a few weeks my eye would spot any woman in Egypt or Dubai that was wearing a sari, and my heart would start to beat faster. When our plane was landing here I thought I might cry. Which is funny, because the first time we came here, as our plane was descending and they turned on the fans the smell made me want to cry. I am not sure if we have changed, or if India has in the last few years, but it feels different here. It is a little bit of both. We love it just as much, but it doesn’t feel as extreme as it did our first time around. We traveled differently this time. Last time we showed up with no idea what we were getting into, we stayed at the scariest, cheapest places in town, carried our backpacks with us all day every day, gave every person as much money as they asked for, got poisonous henna stamped on our bodies, and ate really gross food. In fact, we could not even smell Indian at home for a couple of years after our trip without getting sick. I am not sure how we managed to eat bad food for an entire month before, but we really made up for it in the two and a half weeks we had here this time. You know that fable about the boy that spread rumors? It has been told a number of ways, and all of them better than my rendition, but it goes something like this: A boy told rumors that weren’t true about someone in his village. He went to a guru of sorts to seek advice on how to make his wrongdoing right. The guru told him to go to the top of a hill and pluck a chicken, letting all of its feathers fly away in the wind, then come back to him for the next directions. When he went back the guru, he was directed to go back and collect all of the feathers that had blown away in the wind. The boy replied that it simply could not be done. The guru explained that rumors and untruths also couldn’t be taken back. People constantly ask us if we liked the food in India. We have been telling everybody for years that we like Americanized Indian food, but all of the food we actually had in India was gross. This time around was such a different story. I am so inspired to cook. I find myself taking notes at the end of every meal. So if I have told you that I hated the food we had in India, will you help me find a feather? I take it back.

Mumbai is the most densely populated city in the world. Last time we were stranded here for a while and the city was just too overwhelming for us. We vowed never to come back to Mumbai if we were in India again. I am also glad that we gave Mumbai a second chance. We do feel that Mumbai has changed a bit though. It felt cleaner, and more developed in parts, like the airport-its had a facelift. It sounds like there have been giant efforts to clean up the city in the last few years, and we noticed a difference.

Flying in to the airport is such an incredible experience. The poverty here is really rough to see. Perhaps I wasn’t emotionally ready for it last time and that is what made me dislike the city. This time I knew to expect it and it has been easier to handle. The kids in India really pull at your heartstrings. It doesn’t matter if they are ones knocking on your window asking for food, or the well off ones that wave at you from their mom’s arms and say “hello!” David especially likes it when the little babies have black eye liner on. I love all of them, any interaction we have with them sticks in my memory. David is especially good at cracking jokes that they think are just hilarious. One thing I really regret about this time around is that we didn’t go to any rural areas and spend time with people outside of the city. That wasn’t entirely our fault though…

It seems that everywhere we go recently political turmoil flares up. We thought we would be all right in India before we headed back to the Middle East, but we were wrong. Just before take off on our flight to an area near Darjeeling we opened the newspaper. In the newspaper we read reports that there were riots in Darjeeling and that several parts of the city were being set on fire by a political party that was trying to delay the elections. I am thankful that we weren’t there yet, but talk about bad timing. I wanted to jump up and ask the pilot to let us off on the runway. The whole area was shut down and as soon as we landed we had to turn around and come back. We were craving leisure time next to the Himalayan Mountains to drink Darjeeling tea and maybe spot a tiger or two. So our plans changed a bit, we wasted several days being stranded one place or another, and three out of the four places that we visited while we were here were places that we had been before. Initially I regretted that, but it was fun to see the changes that had taken place in both the cities and us.