General Update, and What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

Yes, I’m still here! Apologies for the long hiatus. My camera broke down in early December, making blog posting less appealing once I had no photos, and then immediately after Christmas I (and Andria and Prashant) left Varanasi for a 2 week holiday. I’m settled back in to work now, I have a shiny new camera, and I certainly owe you all an update!

December was a busy month in Varanasi. I had a lot of work on my plate, finishing up profiles on the 80 (!) children we support at school with scholarships. Meeting all of them was fun, though – I visited those from outlying areas around varanasi in their home communities, met their families and was welcomed in to their houses. The children who live in the Assi Ghat neighbourhood (where I live) and attend our tutoring program at Tulsi Kunj were interviewed at Tulsi Kunj when they came for tutoring. I already know many of these children from sitting in on the tutoring program, and chance meetings around the neighbourhood, so they were especially comfortable telling me about themselves, and it was a chance to get to know them each a little better. I’ll be making a post soon about a couple of these scholarship kids who are particularly special to me. The scholarship profile task was an excellent starting project for getting to know WLC, and the communities and people we serve, but by the end managing computer files of 80 different profiles became a pretty serious bureaucratic headache, and I was glad to be done!

December was also a month of celebration – Christmas, and my birthday two weeks before (aka the birthdaychristmas season). Naturally, this is a time when I expect to miss family and friends even more than usual, and I was certainly homesick, but I did have a really lovely birthdaychristmas. My birthday had the good sense to fall on a Sunday this year, so I celebrated with a leisurely day of doing nice things with Andria, Prashant, and our upstairs neighbours and good friends the 7 lovely Swedes (who have sadly since headed back to Sweden). We had a leisurely breakfast, took a boat across the river to fly kites and picnic (see left), and went out for a yummy dinner. Christmas was also really pretty great. Varanasi has no significant Christian population, so Christmas is pretty much a non-event here, but we made it an event ourselves. In the Ganga Mahal, we decorated a small Tulsi (sacred Indian basil) bush as a Christmas tree, with marigolds, bangles, beaded stings and paper snowflakes (see above). We were celebrating with our one remaining Swedish neighbour, and in Sweden Christmas is celebrated on the 24th, so we spread it out over two days. Our festive activities included a Latke and apple sauce making and eating party (see below), a trip to church (at a tiny unattractive chapel downtown where we lasted through maybe half an hour of the all hindi service before sneaking out), a small but fun dance party at the house of some international students in our neighbourhood, and exchanging gifts and opening stockings on Christmas morning. It was sad not to be with my family, but celebrating like this with friends was the best way to spend the day if I couldn’t be at home.


Then, just two days after Christmas, Andria, Prashant’s and my “Christmas vacation” of two and a half weeks began. We started it off all together, with a 41 hour train trip from Varanasi to Chennai, which is in South India on the East coast. The train ride sounds like a crazy ordeal, but it really wasn’t so bad. We rode in 3 AC class, which isn’t high and fancy, but is comfortable enough to sleep well at night, and the compartments are large enough that you don’t feel too cramped. I slept long and well through both nights, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train, very much in keeping with all of my vague romantic notions about long distance train travel.

Arriving in Chennai was something of a shock. So far, Varanasi is all I’ve seen of India, and so although I knew in principle that this is a tremendously diverse country, to me Varanasi WAS India. Chennai is one of India’s biggest cities, and has some amazing things: beautifully paved roads. Shopping malls. Fancy bars and restaurants. Things I haven’t seen in a while. We spent our first night in Chennai staying with Prashant’s 82 year old, stone deaf, and totally delightful Aunt Agnes, who crammed us full of dosas and grilled fish and other yummy south Indian things, and grandmothered us extensively. The three of us also went for a walk on Marina beach, where we posed with this delightful cut out of Bollywood movie star Shahrukh Khan, and to a very strange bar in a very fancy hotel for a pre-newyears celebration. There was a motorcycle hanging from the ceiling, a separate “gentlemen only” floor, and Prashant was initially not allowed in because he was wearing sandals. Eventually the doorman in the plaid cummerbund and white gloves compromised and let him borrow a pair that they had lying around. So odd. The next day, we three parted ways – Prashant was headed to Sri Lanka, and Andria was catching a flight back to Delhi to meet a friend from Canada and travel in Rajasthan. (If you look at a map of India, you’ll understand just how…unusual… of a route from Varanasi to Delhi this was. I’m very glad she came south with us though!)

So my solo adventures began. I spent a couple of days exploring Chennai and being taken to various cultural events by my mother’s kind friend Devika, who also scored us an invitation to the New Years party at the Madras club, a holdover from colonial times and the exclusive hangout of the city’s Very Important People. There were fireworks, ice sculptures, gorgeous ladies in cocktail dresses (reminder to self: from now on, always pack cocktail dress when backpacking, just in case), a sumptuous buffet, copious amounts of champagne, and a dance floor under the stars. So I rang in the new year with Chennai’s beautiful people, then headed home to get a good night’s sleep before starting the next day for Pondicherry. This photo was taken out of the window of the bus:
Pondicherry is just a couple hours’ ricket bus ride south of Chennai on the east coast, and was once a French colony. It has a lovely seaside promenade, and an odd ashram founded by an Indian mystic and an odd French woman who everyone calls “the Mother” (now both long dead). Many people would say that Pondicherry doesn’t really have a lot of attractions. They would be wrong. What Pondicherry has, and what kept me there for two days, is fantastic French food! I’ve been eating superb home cooked North Indian food for 3 and a half months now, which is excellent (and for which I credit my good digestive health ever since I arrived) but a little variety was welcome. I expect the memories of those prawns and calamari in garlic butter followed by crème caramel to last me for a long, long time. From Pondicherry I continued to Mammalapuram, on the coast between Pondicherry and Chennai. Explored the amazing, ancient massive rock carvings there (including some temples carved out of solid rock, and a life-sized elephant!) and wandered along the beach. My dinner that night was somewhat delayed when the chef was arrested for unknown reasons in the midst of preparing my masala prawns, but other than that my night in Mammalapuram passed uneventfully.

The next day I got up early and set for Chennai, caught a train from there to Bangalore and then a second overnight train to Hospet, followed the train with a short rickshaw ride, and arrived in Hampi the next morning by 9 o’clock. Hampi was absolutely breathtakingly amazing, and the highlight of my trip.

Hampi was the capital of the Vijayanagar empire (which was apparently one of the larger empires in India’s history) for a couple of hundred years before its sacking in the 1500s, and the remaining ruins which dot the landscape are what have made the place so famous. There is a seemingly endless string of interesting ruined temples and palaces to be explored, but what really makes Hampi worth spending time in is the landscape. I have no idea what the geological explanation for that landscape is, but it’s amazing. All around the town are hills heaped with huge red boulders piled in the most unlikely configurations. Amidst the boulders, various ruined temples nestle here and there, and at the bottom of the hills runs a river surrounded by green farmer’s fields on both banks. It’s a gorgeous place just to scramble up a hill and (and I’m afraid I’m quoting the lonely planet here) “boulder watch”.

The ornate stone temples are amazing too, and I had one good day exploring them on foot on my own, and another ranging further afield with a fellow Torontonian who I met serendipitously at my guesthouse’s rooftop restaurant. Hampi was also an excellent place for leisurely lunches at the terraced Mango Tree restaurant (named after the giant tree it’s under), with a fantastic view down over the river, and generally taking things slowly. I had 4 fantastic days in Hampi.

From Hampi, I took a rather painful overnight bus (on a bunk that was probably a foot and a half wide and maybe 4 and a half feet long, with no room to sit up)to Goa, one of India’s smallest states, which is on the West coast south of Mumbai, and The Place to go to the beach. I arrived in Baga, generally in the north end of the state, stiff and ready for some R&R. Unfortunately Baga probably wasn’t the best place for R&R – it happens to be The Place for Europeans on package tours, and so the beach was wall to wall sun beds with pale skin roasting on them. Lots of hassle and hullabaloo, but I stayed somewhere fairly nice, had some more excellent continental meals (including one absurdly gourmet one with beef carpaccio, prawn ravioli in pesto, and earl grey tea icecream… *drool*). Also a home made buffalo ham sandwich from a German run café. Those Germans apparently know what to do with a buffalo!). Sorry, all this talk about western food is probably of no interest to those of you reading from home, but I feel like it’s important to record the experiences that were significant to me at the time, and buffalo ham? Very significant. Also, I had the peculiar experience of visiting my first night club in India, with another Canadian girl I met at my guesthouse. Fancy lounge chairs, a black lit dance floor and lots of trance music. Much of Goa feels more like your basic tropical vacation destination anywhere in the world, and it’s easy to forget you’re in India. I bought and wore a knee length spaghetti strapped sundress, and felt comfortable drinking a beer in public – two things I would never even consider doing in conservative Varanasi.

On my second last day in Goa I somehow got up at 7 the morning after going to the nightclub, and went to Palolem, more or less on a whim. Palolem is in the south of Goa, and while there’s lots of tourists there in high season (which it was), it’s much prettier and calmer. I stayed in a platform tent by the beach, made sandcastles and played and floated in the (rather small, but very warm) waves. That’s me on the last night of my trip, in Palolem, having a Kingfisher and reading The Brothers Karamazov on the beach.

I did the bulk of this trip completely solo – not totally new for me, but not something I’ve done a huge amount of before. I loved it! It’s seldom lonely – it’s easy to meet people along the way, especially when you’re on as much of a tourist circuit as I was on, and being a solo traveler means you can follow your own whims. Feel like splurging on a fancier hotel room? No guilt from your more responsibly frugal co-traveller. Want to extend your stay somewhere just so you can try something else you were eyeing on the menu of that cute restaurant you went to last night? No need to justify. Want to drop something ambitious from your itinerary because lying in the sun just sounds more appealing? Do it. Spending as much time as I wanted reading good books, listening to music, journaling or just staring in to space was also fantastic, and to use a Prashantism, “replenishing”. The warmth of the South at this time of year was also absolutely perfect after the chill of the North Indian “winter”. In spite of all that, though, I was pretty excited to see Andria at our rendezvous point at the Delhi train station. My flight from Goa to Delhi was uneventful and not particularly late, which meant I’d spent two hours shivering and alone in the train station, warding off annoying strange men by pretending to speak only French, by the time we were supposed to meet. There were lots of stories to tell, but I think we both passed out pretty quickly once we settled in to our bunks and the train started to move.

So, now I’m back in Varanasi – I have been for two weeks – and the time is flying by. I’m on to new projects with work, and can’t believe how soon this whole amazing experience is going to be over! We’ve just celebrated Republic Day – the anniversary of the date on which India adopted its constitution – with the kids at Tulsi Kunj. The kids put on quite the program of song and dance, from the 7 year old girls dancing to a song about a small cow, to the older boys shaking their hips to a popular bollywood number, and the teenaged girls dancing and marching in military garb to a popular patriotic song. Lots of fun, and as always it feels great to take part in celebrations with our community of staff and kids.

In other news, I’ve just purchased my first sari! Now all I need is an excuse to wear it…

Much love,
Emily

p.s. as per usual, there are lots more photos on my flickr page! www.flickr.com/photos/changelingx