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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

An Expedition North

I’ll start off by saying that North tour was amazing.  It truly was a fantastic trip full of experiences I will remember for the rest of my life.  Though I feel like I say this quite frequently, that just means I’m having a valuable exchange.  Nevertheless, this trip was above and beyond my everyday life-changing ordeal.  Now that I think about it, I don’t believe I mentioned this trip beforehand so, for anyone wondering, that’s what I was up to for two and a half weeks of late February and early March.

As is the norm, we started off the trip with a long train ride and arrived in Delhi the next day.  Delhi is a lot like Washington D.C. in that it is the nation’s capital and resides in its own state.  We started the trip off with a bang and headed straight to the famous Lotus Temple.  It is the most well-known modern temple in India and is renowned for its beauty and unique shape (you guessed it, lotus flower).  For a building with such a stunning exterior, the inside was remarkably simple – a mostly empty area with chairs and space for quiet reflection and prayer, encompassed by plain, white walls.  This is probably an effort to reflect the minimalist nature of the Baha'i faith, for whom the temple was built.  What I understood of their beliefs is that they focus on the spiritual unity of mankind, claiming that all religions are based on the same God who created the universe and all humans.  I believe they also are pushing for world peace by uniting all countries.  Some interesting ideas at least.


After the Lotus Temple we visited some of the other major attractions of Delhi including the Gate of India and Qutub Minar.  The latter was an interesting site which claims a famous tower as well as the oldest solid pillar in the world.  It is made of a mixture of metals and was created using technology not developed elsewhere until centuries later.  Though it is not too much to look at, you cannot argue that it is not impressive.

The next morning we rose early and took another train to Rishikesh (Roo-she-kesh), a city located on the sacred Ganges River.  Many people come to Rishikesh to wash themselves in the water and line the river to participate in the religious ceremonies each day.   We walked along the shore and could not resist dipping our feet in the holy water (followed by a thorough scrubbing in the shower).  

The rest of our stay in Rishikesh contained slightly less traditional Indian culture and slightly more adrenaline.  We started the next morning off by going river rafting in the Ganges.  In two large, inflatable boats we braved our way down the river daring powerful rapids and waves that covered our entire vessel.  Several exhilarating hours later we finished our adventure sore, soaked, and ready to relax.  Naturally, we took the next day easy with only a little light bungee jumping.  I personally did not jump, but I thoroughly enjoyed the looks of pure terror on my friends’ faces at the moment they began their 83 meter (272 feet) plummet. 

The next day we went over to Agra to see India’s most famous edifice, the Taj Mahal.  Naturally there was a lot of anticipation and hype leading up to this moment, but it completely realized my expectations.  Despite paying 37.5 times more than an Indian citizen to see this amazing tomb, it was incredible.  You enter a tunnel leading through the enormous gate and the Taj hits you – framed by the dark end of the passageway the white marble is illuminated as you gaze on one of the most beautiful structures in the world.  Though everyone knows the Taj is magnificent from afar, only those who actually visit can fully appreciate its intricacies.  The Taj Mahal is built from marble and covered in colorful floral designs and Arabic texts, but the workers did not use any paint.  All ornamentation is composed of semi-precious stones inlaid into the marble.  To wholly give the workers due praise, this means that each small stone was carved by hand to perfectly match the piece of marble cut out and held there with only a small amount of natural adhesive.  However, the most impressive testament to the level of workmanship is that when you rub your hand over the engravings you cannot feel the border between the different stones.  Only where the British carved away stones before fleeing a newly independent India are there any signs of imperfection.  The Taj truly deserves its status as one of the Seven Wonders. 

We stopped afterward at a marble-working store that uses the same techniques employed in the ornamentation of the Taj Mahal.  This increased my admiration of the process considerably.  Here they gave us a small sample of the work that went into constructing such a masterpiece.  Two workers sat on the ground one carving out the marble, the other sanding down the stones.  The store owner told us that even small works take two workers months of dedication to complete and showed us examples of finished products from pebble-sized elephants to entire dining tables.  I still consider this one of the most impressive pieces of culture I have witnessed, along with several other sites we visited during the remainder of this trip.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Catching Up and Slowing Down


I think I’ll skip the obligatory apology for not blogging lately.  I have kept myself busy with a plethora of new experiences and trips, and that is essentially the goal of being on exchange.  However, this does leave me with the arduous task of recording the past month and a half which is daunting.  Nonetheless, I set this task for myself at the beginning of my journey and I am dead-set on seeing it through.

That said I am going to work backwards and start with my recent trip to Hyderabad.  Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of Rotary’s exchange program is the amazing connections made, and it is on one of these connections that I relied for this chance to experience a different piece of India.  As you may know, my family in Northfield hosted Rachael for the first three months of her exchange.  Though I have never met Rachael in person, we have grown quite close through our shared experiences and this has extended to her family as well.  I mentioned in an earlier post that I spent a weekend with her parents when they visited Pune, and they offered to host me for a week if I ever wanted to visit Hyderabad.  New experiences are kind of the entire objective as an exchange student, so I found a free week and booked the tickets.  I had visited Hyderabad before on South tour and I have visited the majority of India, but the way you truly get to understand a place is to spend time there, not just to see the sights.  Obviously a week is not long enough, but I did get a look into a very different India than what I have experienced in Pune.  Unlike both of my Hindu host families here, the Dawsons are Christian and in India your religion has a much more significant influence on company you keep.  Staying with a Christian family also helped distinguish for me some of the differences between being Hindu and being Indian-which things are universal to all people living in this subcontinent and which apply to Hindus in India and around the world.  You might think these are easy distinctions to make, but my exposure to people of other religions has been limited to say the least due to the religious segregation that seems to permeate all aspects of people’s lives.

Back to my point.  Apart from the religious differences, Hyderabad is in the state of Andhra Pradesh whose history and culture are quite different from those of Maharashtra, primarily a much larger Muslim population.  My week was both interesting and extremely enjoyable.  Apart from plate after plate of mouth-watering meaty dishes, I met so many friendly and outgoing people.  Ok, I cannot in good conscious go on without giving further praise of the food.  I ate dozens of preparations of pork, chicken, sausages and, most importantly, BEEF!  Seriously, I never considered how great beef tastes until I was weeks into my exchange but it is magnificent.  I had fried bacon and eggs for breakfast, barbequed sausages into the wee hours of the morning, and had beef so spicy it could make a jalapeno cry.  Also, I had the famous Hydrabadi biryani (Indian chicken/mutton and rice mix) which was fantastic.  Simply writing about the heavenly smorgasbord I experienced recalls all the glorious tastes and makes me really happy.  It made up for all the meat I have been missing for the past eight months and I do believe it will hold me until my first Chipotle burrito/hamburger and milkshake in the Newark airport in a short two months.

The Dawsons are an extremely welcoming family and it took a matter of minutes for me to feel comfortable in my new home and claim Rachael’s room as my own (a little revenge for the three months she spent in mine).  In the first day I met David, Rachael’s older brother, and his Iranian wife as well as the neighbor in the apartment facing the kitchen who shares a great-grandmother with Rachael.  David took on most of the responsibility of driving me around, and took me to the Qutub Shai tombs and this enormous tree outside of Golconda Fort.  Though I have seen taller, I am fairly certain this is the largest tree I have ever encountered.  It came from Madagascar somehow, and its circumference is 25 meters!  I am a little unclear on how it got there, but there is also a seven by seven foot room inside the tree.  Yep, a tree with a room in it.  There is a gate around the tree but a nice guard allowed us to climb up and go inside the hollow space.  It was definitely one of the cooler natural things I have experienced in India.  I’ll try to upload a picture later, but my internet is pretty slow right now.

In between seeing parts of the city and eating I talked a lot with Jasper, Rachael’s dad.  He told me about the history of his family, talked about his kids and what they are doing, and explained some important life lessons to keep in mind.  We also watched the end of the Mumbai v. Bangalore cricket match which was the most exciting that I have ever seen.  I enjoy watching the occasional bit of cricket on TV but it does tend to get a little boring after a while so I generally take a peek every 20 minutes to check the progress.  Most matches have a clear winner about halfway through the second team’s batting time, but this one was anyone’s game.  It literally came down to the last ball and Mumbai lost by one run.  For perspective, that’s one run out of about 200.  Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and the fly ball gets caught at the fence.  It was really fun.

I enjoyed my stay so much I was a little sad to come back.  However, I have a lot of blogging to catch up on and friends to see and festivals in which to participate, not to mention other trips on which to go.  The time seems to be running out so quickly that I have to just slow it down sometimes and take a walk to simply collect my thoughts on where I am and where I want to be by the time I return.  A lot to think about.