Well, it’s official. Your
favorite exchange student in India is also the world’s laziest blogger. It has been over two weeks since I got back
to Pune, and I have a lot of catching up to do.
Let’s go back one month.
I woke bright and early on November 18th and met the other
nine exchange students at the Pune train station. This was my first real train ride ever, so it
was an exciting 15 minutes followed by a boring eight hours to Hyderabad. On arrival, took a bus to our hotel and were
able to see some of the city. This was
the most attractive city I had been to so far in India: the streets were
relatively clean, there were many modern buildings, and there was a lake with a
cool island statue of some important-looking guy. We were all fairly impressed, and no one
objected to spending three days there.
After settling into our rooms we got back on the bus with the other
eight exchange students from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu and got acquainted as we
toured this really cool white temple. It
was truly beautiful, but it seems all the best buildings in India have invoked strict
rules against photography. Bummer.
The second day was a trip to Ramoji City. Ramoji is sort of like a Bollywood version of
Universal Studios with some rides and stuff about filming movies. I do not know whether there are fewer
foreigners in South India or whether it is just a cultural difference with the North,
but nearly every person in the park wanted a picture taken with us. It was fun at first but it got weird pretty
quickly, and one family got me to pick up their daughter for a photo. The park itself was not that impressive, and
the one thing that sticks out in my mind is the Wild West Show they put
on. It was a bizarre mix of a few
misplaced stereotypes of the Wild West and some pretty bad Bollywood/Kung Fu
style fight scenes. All of the Americans
assured the other exchange students that it was 100% accurate. On the whole, Ramoji was rather ridiculously
touristy and we all agreed that we would rather have seen some more temples or
authentic pieces of Indian culture.
The rest of our time in Hyderabad was more enjoyable and included
street shopping and several cool traditional places like an amazing fort called
Golconda. This fort on a hill had a
captivating history that tied in with the founding of Hyderabad.
Our stay in Hyderabad was followed by an overnight train ride to
Bangalore. For those of you who have not
had the unpleasant experience of traveling via three-tier Indian sleeper coach,
it is cramped and lacks the luxury that the European exchange students expected
of a train. Luckily, we were all in the
same ‘rooms’ of six beds so did not have to deal with strangers. Regardless, it was a long and boring
journey. Essentially the only positive
aspect of sleeper coaches is that they are economical.
We spent only one day in Bangalore and saw very little of the city,
though we made up for it in animals. We
visited the Bangalore zoo and rode on an animal safari of sorts. It was cool.
We saw a bunch of animals. Your
typical lions, tigers, bears, you get the picture. After this, we departed for Mysore and enjoyed
a garden and Muslim temple along the way.
On arrival, we visited a beautiful garden area that featured hundreds of
fountains that lit up at night. It was very
pretty, and quite difficult to do justice with a photo. We even met an American couple at the
restaurant who were about to return home after their two month stay in India. It was extremely enjoyable.
That’s a good start on the trip so I’ll stop there for now. It is only about a third of all the
experiences I had, but a lot has happened since I returned that I need to talk
about. For the next few blog posts I’ll
do a two parts South tour and one part recent events in Pune kind of deal. Skipping ahead to the end of the trip on
December 5th, our train arrived at 5:30 am and my host father
promptly picked me up and drove me back home, where good and bad news awaited
me. Good news: my family finally
installed wifi! Bad news: I only got to
enjoy it for one day because I would move to my next host family on the 6th.
That’s the big news of the month; I have now moved in with my second host
family and am well-settled. I now stay
on the outskirts of Pune in a roomy bungalow with the Deshpande family, where I
have a younger brother, Parth in 11th standard, and a younger
sister, Priya in 9th, along with a host grandmother and a lovely 110
pound German Shepherd guard dog named Daisy.
Daisy was at first very territorial, but quickly became accustomed to me
and we became fast friends. I am
extremely comfortable in my new setting and my new family has made me feel welcome. I live pretty far from the heart of Pune, but
I am only a few minutes from Axel so we share a rickshaw whenever we need to go
anywhere.
I have been staying relatively busy this month between my new host
family, hanging out more with my fellow exchange students, and daily dance
practice. Yep, dance practice. In order to show off our culture-fulness, all
the exchange students will be performing two traditional-style dances at the
Rotary district conference in January.
We are working hard and improving quickly, and it is sure to be a
crowd-pleasing performance. I will try
to get a hold of the inevitable video footage.
I think that is enough for this post.
I apologize for the extremely long wait, and I promise the next update
will come sooner. Also, congratulations
on surviving the apocalypse.
