Things on Bikes (Ongoing)

Here is a list of some of the strange things I see people transporting on their bikes and motorcycles. These are the only wheels for a lot of people so anything that they need to move has to be taken on the bike, luckily people can usually get a buddy to sit on the back and hold whatever it is they need to transport.

- A bike balanced horizontally on a motorcycle

-Two window panes held like a screen between two riders

- Two 6 feet tall sugar canes held vertically on either side

- Approximately 17 water jugs tied to the back of a bike

-4 plastic Milk jugs and one huge metal one

-A crate of maybe 20 loaves of bread

- A wicker basket full of onions

- 71 small packages of cotton candy

- A pile of firewood as tall as the guy riding the bike

- A dozen wooden floorboards

- A window-sized slab of concrete

- The entire contents of a one room house including buckets, two plastic chairs and a few pots

- 20 stacks of clear plastic cups

- A wheelchair

- A bale of hay

- Ten tires

- A tea dispenser

- A table without a top

As I see more funny things on bikes I will add it to this list.

Madurai 2

Just thought I'd post a few more pictures...

The gutter in the middle of the walkway at the Flower Bazaar. Full of decomposing flowers, empty chai cups and most likely crap of some variety. Yes, I walked on it.

Columns in the Palace court.

Ornate ceiling in one entrance of the Meenakshi Temple. It's a bit gaudy for my taste but... to each their own!

The temple elephant blessing a Hindu woman. Photo cred goes to uncle G on this one.

The view out of my hotel window at about 2 in the afternoon. Add maybe 10 auto rickshaws, 5 SUVs, 3 lorries, 17 motorcycles, 9 bicycles and 47 pedestrians to the frame and you have Madurai downtown traffic at 5 pm.

A long exposure taken at dinner time, about 9:30 pm.

Madurai

About 4 hours down the mountain and across the plains in Madurai, a city of over a million people centred around a huge Hindu temple, Sri Meenakshi. The city has been in existence for about 2500 years. It traded with the Romans and is still a major centre for silks and cloth.

Madurai was my first experience with an Indian city and even though it's a relatively small one, it was overwhelming enough. Coming down from 2000 m or altitude into the heat of the plains was the first shock to my system. Even though it's a change

from 20 degrees to 30, it really affects you for the first day.

I've already discussed Indian traffic and I'd like to again. In all of Madurai I only saw one traffic light. This city has insane traffic, once it took us 5 minutes trying to cross a street before we decided it was impossible and tried another route. Driving in the city her

e is like driving anywhere else in the country but with 300 times the traffic. If you're driving north/south and you reach the equivalent of a red light (you can tell

this when going through the intersection would surely kill you) you stop. Then you inch farther and farther into the intersection until all the people cut off the t

raffic going east/west. At this point everyone north/south surges forward and the process repeats. The only merciful thing is that most streets were one-way. Another word about Indian traffic; everyone honks constantly and in the city the noise NEVER dies down. This makes for some difficult sleeping.

The main tourist attraction in Madurai is the Sri Meenakshi Temple built in the 16th century. I don't know a lot about Hinduism but the place seems mostly dedicated to Shiva, or Siva as they spell it. The temple has a thick outer wall with gopurams (tall, ornate and colourful towers) at each entrance, north, south, east, west. The gopurams are all different, one with only brightly painted columns on it, another covered with people with striped

pants. When you go inside the temple there is a courtyard with the Golden Lotus Tank (see picture) at the bottom. Lets just say that the only nice thing about the

tank is the gold lotus statue. The water is brown and smelly. Not even the Hindu would get close to it. The temple itself is a maze of halls with carvings of various gods and phallic symbols that the people pray at, smear with ghee (clarified

butter), turmeric and sandalwood paste. There are quite a few areas that are Hindu only and there is a temple elephant who will bless you (touch his trunk to your

forehead) for a coin. He looks quite bored but isn't chained to anything. His trunk is quite scratchy!

Near the temple is the Tirumalai Nayak Palace, a palace built by the king of the same name. Architecture here was similar to that of the Meenakshi Temple since it was built during the reign of the same king. The palace used to be much bigger but the son of Tirumalai Nayak

robbed 2/3rds to the building's stone to build his own temple in Trichy. Two rooms were open to the public, a huge open air court with ornate carvings of gargoyle-type creatures (in the picture) and a smaller dancing hall. The court was absolutely covered in columns and the scale of the place was awesome.

I also took my first auto rickshaw ride (the only way to travel in India) to

the outskirts of town to the Phu (pronounced,

unfortunately, as poo but means flowers) Bazaar. It was quite small and filthy but it was worth it for the portraits of the vendors, each one with such a

beautiful character about their face. You could tell most of them are having a hard life.

In between visiting these places we walked around the streets. This is never a boring activity here. You have to dodge beggars, traffic and poo of every sort. The streets smell like incense, stale pee or frying oil, depending on the moment. I got asked a lot 'What country?', people are just really curious when they see a foreigner.

Finding fabric was surprisingly hard, considering Madurai is famous for it. I learned that all the money is in saris so there is virtually no by-the-metre stuff around. The saris were mind boggling though. Incredibly ornate in any colour you can imagine, I have no idea how women ever choose one! I also learned about the 'matching cenre'. This is where women go, after buying a new sari, to buy fabric for their choli the little blouse that is worn underneath... usually. I've seen old women who just wear the long cloth part with nothing underneath. These matching centres have literally every colour of plain cotton man has ever invented. Again, how do you ever choose?

Other curious things I saw were a disembodied goat head at a butcher shop, complete with black fur and ears. A funeral procession, an ambulance crammed with people shouting, whistling and scattering flowers on the road. And quite a few people who are losing pigment in their faces. This is apparently a genetic condition that is quite popular in this area. One man on a bus looked Caucasian except for some blotches on his cheeks.

Photos

Here are some recent pictures, taken in Pallungi, about 500m down the mountain. It's noticeably warmer down here and plants grow much better.

Happy Pongal

For the last few days (and possibly tomorrow) the festival of Pongal has been celebrated in South India. Pongal is the official start of spring and the beginning of the next harvest season. It's a bit like Thanksgiving... people travel home to see relatives and Tamils celebrate well, the harvest.

For days now I've been passing people selling 6 feet high stalks of sugar cane that people will carry home on their heads or balanced precariously on their motorcycles. The sugar cane is then attached to either side of the main doorway of your house, or the occasional store entrance.

All the women are wearing their nicest saris (the men look the same as they always do!). Women also have garlands of flowers tucked into their braids and all the little girls are wearing their frilliest dresses.

Grocery stores are also selling this weird root plant with its stalk still attached that people put on the hood of their cars along with the obligatory garland of marigolds. Another traditional part of Pongal is having an intricate design painted on your front stoop with rice flour paint. These are called kovalam and unfortunately I've only seen two small ones today.

Today is the part of Pongal when the cows are celebrated. They all get to stay in the pasture (on a hill, beside the road etcetera) and relax. Apparently they get fed a special mixture of pongal and sugar as a reward for their work or something. Lucky cows!

I also wanted to include the picture of this sign I saw today. Not only is the wording of the sign funny, NOTHING in India is clean. Cows crap into the streams, people use detergent and wash their clothes right in the stream. Can anyone say phosphates? I'm not even gonna go into the peeing at the side of the road...

School Kids

Today I was walking across town to have lunch at a friends and I passed the elementary school. The kids had a half day today because tomorrow is Pongal the South Indian harvest festival. All the kids were walking home in little groups and every single one wanted to say hi to me. I must have been asked 'How are you?' like 20 times and some of them even asked my what my name was. One group asked me where I was going and whether I spoke Tamil or Hindi. It was really odd to be of such interest to all these young kids!

This is their school uniform: red pants, a pink and red kurti and the two braids. Boys wear pink shirts and red sweaters.

Cows at the Bus Terminal

Nobody stops for anything here. While walking through downtown to find the ladies' tailor (which was closed at 3:30 on a monday afternoon) we came across some road repaving. This is desperately needed on just about every road in the country and today this corner of road was being done. Now instead of closing the road for a day or two like we would do in Canada, there was a brown rope preventing any cars from going through but pedestrians just kept on going. We had to pick our way through harding asphalt, past the roller belching diesel fuel in our face, around the guy wearing plastic bags taped to his feet pouring hot tar and through a giant pile of gravel.

This, for me, is the fundamental difference between India and the west. At home everything is done carefully and 'by the book'. People are worried about safety and detours. Here they just go for it with the firm belief that everything will work itself out. I think this is what foreigners either love or hate about this place. You either embrace the chaos or you fight it and that's the difference between loving India and hating it. Me? I seesaw in between but mostly I love it!

Now, how about some pictures?

A VD sign.

A market vendor.

The Sunday market.

Terraces and two-room homes.

A Sunday market vendor.

Stainless steel pots for sale.

Fuchsia flowers.

Clouds below Kodai.

Oh yeah, and there were cows at the bus terminal.

Kollywood

What Bollywood is to Hindi moviegoers, Kollywood is to Tamils.

The Jesuits who own the property my aunt and uncle rent will also rent the pear orchard to Tamil movie crews for the day.

On Friday, I woke up to an blaring Tamil song and I'd heard it about 15 more times before I had showered and eaten breakfast. By mid afternoon my aunt and I were curious enough to go down to have a look at the filming. We didn't want to get too close but we sat up the slope from the activity and just observed. This is something I would never do back home but here no one minds.

We saw the end of one 'scene' (which was only like 30 seconds) and then the crew packed up and moved to a spot a few metres away. We watched as they set up the camera and other movie-making paraphernalia while the actors chatted in lawn chairs.

When the camera and such had been set up in the new location, these two actors who we called the stand-ins started to rehearse the next scene (also less than a minute long). The stand-ins were dressed similarly to the real actor and actress so we supposed they were there to set up the lighting and the shot while the real actors saved themselves for the real thing.

The stand-ins played around with the scene that they were supposed to film- some sort of flirtation under a tree involving a chaste leg rub and a mock fight. They seemed to be able to make decisions about how the scene was acted out and when the real actors stepped in, they actually made suggestions to them about how to move and which way to face.

After about half an hour of setting up and rehearsing, the real actors (the pic in the middle is of the real heroine getting her hair brushed) stepped in and in two takes, the clip was filmed! It seemed like a really long process for only 30 seconds of film!

Today we did some shopping- I'm going to get some awesome salwar pants made for when we go down to the plains. Salwar pants are really nice and baggy, they're going to be nice and cool. And we also had thali for lunch. Thali is served on a banana leaf and it's rice with a bunch of different curries, sambar and/or dhal that you dump on the leaf and mix with the rice as you eat it. Yum...

A Biology Lesson

I've already mentioned Biff, our friendly resident beastie. Well now let's learn a bit more about him.

Biff is a gaur, some sort of cow species but he looks more like an American bison. The gaur are a protected animal in India and there is not a huge population of them left in Asia anymore. They love Kodai though and the town seems to have quite a few of them living in and around the 'suburbs'.

Biff is an older male who wanders by himself- females and young live in a herd together. Biff probably weighs about a ton and he likes to hang out here during the day. When it's hot he lies in the shade, usually near this little shed by the house. Any other time, he's eating millions of tons of grass around the house.

Apparently gaur are incredibly nimble. They can jump an ordinary fence and when they're lying down they can stand up in an instant. They kill a couple Kodai citizens every year. If they're surprised they can easily charge you and gore you to death.

Biff is a gentle giant though, we leave him lots of space and he doesn't bother us. The dogs will though. They will often run across the lawn straight at him, barking their heads off. Biff always ignores them though and later you usually see him grazing peacefully with the dogs sleeping just metres away.

Pictures and Observations

Here are some funny and interesting things I've heard so far.

A cookie package: Supper Fine Cashewnut Macrons

Phone booths here have the sign STD: Subscriber Trunk Dialing

Motorcycles have sari guards

When kids see us walking, they say in very nice english: 'Hello, how are you?' they get it from watching American movies. The adventurous ones will come up to you and shake your hand. One group of girls ran up to me and started shaking my hand and wouldn't let go! And then when we were walking away, they yelled 'Bye' for about 5 minutes. SO cute!

My Aunt and Uncle's housekeeper's granddaughter's name is Christina Spencer-Jones. I'm pretty sure they just picked the most American name they could think of for her. She's extremely cute though!!

A man I saw today carrying a basket of produce on his head to market stops for a rest, pulls out his cell phone and starts texting.

If you're in need of some extra cash, a big corporation will be happy to pay you to turn your two-room house into a billboard.

People here are really afraid of 'hair fall' (when you lose hair in your brush etc). All the shampoos that you can buy proclaim that they are anti hair fall.

There's going to be a Tamil movie shot on my Aunt and Uncle's property tomorrow. Quite a few get shot here. Apparently there's some free food involved!

Ode to the Mustache

At some point this winter, I read that the mustache has been losing popularity. Well, in India, every month is Movember. Pretty much every man I see here sports a mustache just like this guy here.

Today was my first attempt at eating with my hands. It's a bit harder for me than most because I'm left-handed. In Indian culture it's rude to eat or offer something with your left hand because it's used for more unsavory actions like taking off shoes and wiping your bum. Anyway, eating with your right hand is much easier than it looks and actually quite fun. Kind of like playing in the sandbox...but delicious! The technique is quite easy, you grab a bit of the food and form it into a bite sized pile and pack it into a ball. With your first three fingers you lift the food to your mouth and push it into your mouth with your thumb. Eating this way gives you more control and lets you pick out any bits you don't like. Or spices that you aren't meant to eat.

Market Day

The call to prayer is being chanted right now. There is a mosque across the valley the amplifies the call so you can hear it here really loudly. There's one early in the morning that always wakes me up.

Today we went into town for Tibetan food. There's a fairly large Tibetan community here and you can buy Tibetan jackets as well as eat a a selection of Tibetan restaurants. The restaurants are popular with the International school students, mostly those from Korea.

Today was also market day. The riot of colour and sound was amazing and I wanted to work on my portrait photography. At first I was quite shy, I'm not used to taking pictures of strangers at home let alone in a foreign country where I don't know the customs. But with a little encouragement I started snapping. There was no end to the subjects- goats, people, food... The faces of the people selling their wares were so full of character that it was hard not to get good shots. And it turns out that people love getting their pictures taken. I'd just smile really big and gesture to my camera and snap away. Some pictures from the market are above.

Kodai is at over 2000m elevation and the temperature fluctuates alot. At night it will go down to 10 degrees but during the day, as long as there's sun, it can get up to 25. Today was a beautiful sunny day with a temp of about 20. I am wearing jeans and a light sweater and I was walking around perfectly comfortably. The locals were walking around with their earmuffs on! At first I thought that the earmuffs were for sound or something but no, they think it's so cold that they have to keep their ears warm with fleece earmuffs!!

Food

Today was totally about food.

For breakfast I sampled passion fruit for the first time. It's a smallish yellow fruit with a hard shell that you cut open. Inside is a clear jelly with edible black seeds. It tastes fantastic but the jelly is a little slimy and the seeds- which feels weird to eat- are crunchy.

After breakfast we took a two hour hike in the forest outside town. These forests look like BC or northern Ontario- very beautiful and comforting! As you walk along the trail you see groups of half a dozen cows grazing and sometimes women who are gathering firewood to sell. These women carry bundles of wood that weigh as much as they do down the mountain to sell for the equivalent of maybe 5 dollars. It's a hard life.

For lunch we had a South Indian breakfast. Pongal and tamarind rice with two chutneys. I'm trying my best to use my right hand although I haven't attempted eating with my hands yet.

In the afternoon we went into town to do some groceries. I shopped with my aunt for tops to wear. I ended up buying two tops for about 9 dollars. The bargaining process is a bit intimidating. I haven't attempted it yet, luckily my aunt took the lead. Then we looked for groceries. There were red bananas, tiny cloves of garlic and something called snake gourds.

Tonight there's pizza for dinner.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!

Wow, I've only been here for a day and a bit but it feels like I've been here for so long. It's not like I feel at home necessarily, it's just that India takes up so much of your attention. This place is mind-boggling. Everything is louder, busier and dirtier than in North America. I never realized how structured Canadian society is until I landed here where there all seems like chaos.

It took about 30 hours of travelling from home to Kodai with 18 hours in the air. Some highlights of my plane trips:

- a one hour delay thanks to Air Canada forgetting to fill up their water tanks for the washroom

-meeting a very chatty French guy in the Colombo airport- he was going to Goa

- being the only white person and one of 3 women in line for a flight from Colombo to Trichy. To my relief an American couple showed up later. It was a very weird feeling to be such a minority.

- And losing my luggage in Colombo- it's scheduled to arriving tomorrow

After waiting for my luggage not to appear in Trichy, I drove with V and G (my aunt and uncle) to their home in Kodai with a short stop in Dindigal to pick up a friend of theirs. Let's just say, driving in India is not for the faint of heart. Basically there are no rules, you can drive as fast as you want all over the road. There are potholes everywhere, the roads are really narrow and virtually no one wears seat belts. There are also cows, goats, dogs and pilgrims on the roads that you have to dodge and in the mountains there are ridiculously steep roads and hairpin turns. At first I wondered how anyone could drive here without immediately dying in a horrible fiery crash but by the time we arrived in Kodai, I didn't wonder anymore. This is India- chaos is the norm.

On the road between Trichy and Kodai we saw water buffalo with egrets on their backs and we stopped for some fresh coconut water and chai. We saw monkeys at the edge of the road who just stare at you as you pass by and the temperature changed from about 25 degrees to 10.

V and G's house is like a cottage, no central heat (which would be helpful in the mountains), limited hot water and unsafe tap water. They rent a house on a beautiful 18 acre property owned by Jesuits. The property has a Bartlett pear orchard and dips into a valley with a swamp at the bottom. This morning we saw a gaur, a wild bison that can quite easily gore you to death. It's a rather old male who frequents the property and whom they've nicknamed Biff. Biff is huge and will simply graze or rest in the shade.

For New Years we went to a party at a neighbour's. We sat outside at a campfire and shot off firecrackers at midnight. Fireworks in India sound like explosives you'd use to demolish buildings- like I said, everything is louder in India.

Everyone I've met are so nice but I'm having trouble getting used to being stared at. In Dindigal, a little girl actually stared at me through the window of the car for a good minute. Then of course there's the people who stick their head of their car window to stare as they drive by. There isn't really any concept of personal space.

India is nothing if not overwhelming and I've already had a lots of moments of brain overload but I'm starting to really enjoy it here. I can't wait to experience more!