 |
| Practicing the Hindi alphabet |
I’m sorry again that this blog post has been so long in the making. Believe me I’m not forgetting about all you wonderful people back home. I will try to make up for it with a complete update.
Since my last blog post I have been busy with school and exploring the area around where we are staying. I have to admit though that my life has been a lot less adventurous since we settled down in Mysore for the first half of our classes for the semester. I am glad to be done exams (my last one was yesterday) and I am excited to hit the road again for some more travelling!
My home for the past few weeks
The place where we are staying is called ODP (Organization for the Development of the People). It is a Catholic Mission but it doesn’t really feel like one. The compound we are staying in is used most often as a conference center. Groups of people involved in agriculture or other things come here to get training or participate in conferences. This means that there is a constant coming and going of people who we have to share out dinning hall and hallways with. It has been interesting to have so many Indian people around from all different walks of life. Last week I got to try to explain to a group of farmers what you would eat peanut butter with when they asked to try some of mine. They asked if it was salty or sweet and I didn’t know what to say. Just now a group of women in sarees walked by my open door, came to say hi and ask where I was from when I smiled at them and then laughed at me good naturedly when they saw the bangles I just picked up from the market today. Sharing our living space has also had its downsides. The language barrier is usually too tough to get into any kind of real conversation and it took me a while to get used to all the blank stares I get when I walked out the front hallway (I find Indian people have a totally different sense of privacy and personal space than us. For them it is acceptable to stare at people and not even smile or look away when you catch them staring at you). Another downside is the noise, especially in the early mornings. First I am woken up by the often out of tune call to prayer (we are staying in a Muslim area of the city) and have to struggle to get back to sleep with people talking, horking and moving around outside. The building where I am sleeping is set up with a round open hallway that surrounds a courtyard in the middle and it is amplifies sound like crazy. Thankfully the cooks have stopped playing loud Bollywood music in the mornings.
But I really do like ODP. It has many redeeming features such as the pagoda where we can go to study, the rooftop where we do yoga classes some mornings (also a great place to read a book or listen to some music) and the fantastic department store (and joined restaurant) only a 2 minute walk away that sells everything we could ever need including Indian sweets, peanut butter, delicious milk shakes and cardamom flavoured green milk in a jar. Even the pond with the life-sized statue of Jesus outside of my bedroom door is growing on me (especially since we got back from our weekend trip and found a bunch of slices of bread floating in it). I will miss having such a nice, homey, and calm (or at least relatively calm compared to the Indian city on the other side of the walls) compound to hang out in and I will especially miss having all of the students on the semester living so close together.
 |
| Yoga classes on the roof (I can do a headstand now!) |
School
The classroom where I have all of my classes is inside the compound only a 1 minute walk from my bed. One day our class was forced to start late because there were 3 or 4 big monkeys that had gotten into the garbage in the washroom and were blocking our way into the classroom. The monkeys can be very dangerous and these ones were giving us terrifying glares and snarls whenever we got close. The monkeys were not going to budge until an employee showed up with a pellet gun over his shoulder.
Everyday classes start at 9 and go until just after 5 with an hour break for lunch. Most days I will have at least a couple hours off during the day when classes are being taught that I am not enrolled in. The way the semester is set up we take one set of courses here in Mysore and then another set of courses while we are staying with host families in the North.
These are the courses I just finished writing exams for:
Indian Culture and Civilization: This course was really interesting (apart from the 6 hours of architecture that dragged a bit). We learned about the Indus valley civilization, Buddhism and Jainism, Indian philosophy (“probably it is and it is not and it is indescribable” this is what the Jain philosophers had to say about life the universe and everything). We also learned about the two epic stories of India which I had been hoping to hear ever since I watched the first of BBC’s guide to India and they talked about them. Probably my favourite part of the class though were the characters who taught it. One was a large mostly bald man who always wore white robes and had white lines and the third eye of Siva painted on his forehead. You could tell that both of our teachers were absolutely in love with the aspects of Indian culture that they were teaching us about.
Hindi: This class has been hard but a lot more fun than I expected. I am not good at the memorization, oral or spelling aspect of it…so basically that doesn’t leave very much that I am good at – haha don’t expect me to me able to say much more than “my name is Abby, I study. I have an older and a younger sister” by the time I get home.
Science and Technology (sustainable development): This class covered everything from traditional medicine to alternative energy sources to urbanization to the “Politician, Bureaucrat, Corporate Nexus”. Although it sometimes felt like I was sitting through a very left wing ideological rant I liked hearing about many of the things I had learned about from my International Development classes (like the green revolution and grassroots environmental movements) from an Indian perspective.
Natural Chemicals and the Environment: This class is taught by Chris Hall, one of the Professors who came with us from Guelph. It has been a nice mix to have a really science based class for a change. I just wrote that exam yesterday and my brain is still full of the names of neurotransmitters, and hallucinatory mushrooms.
Mysore
Sitting in a classroom for long hours and being restricted to the ODP compound for a lot of the day was pretty difficult after being on the move for the first few weeks of our trip. Luckily Mysore is a beautiful city and we found ways to keep ourselves from getting too restless. The easiest thing was exploring the neighbourhood outside off our compound. It is a Muslim neighbourhood full of some pretty fancy and colourful houses. It’s cool to see the women in burkas with only their eyes showing and their fancy high heeled sandals poking out from under their long black skirts. There are also a couple of fields nearby where we can go to play frisbee. I don’t think that any of the Indians know what a frisbee is so we get a few weird looks from the soccer and cricket players around us.
Downtown Mysore is a 60 rupee (just over a dollar) rickshaw ride away from where we are staying. Mysore is a little bit calmer and less dirty than other Indian cities that I have seen so far. It has a really awesome market full of rows and rows of people selling fruits, vegetables, onions, flowers and nicknacks. Of course as soon as the shopkeepers or kids running around the market spot us white tourists they start smiling at us, playing titanic on their flutes and asking if we want to buy silver anklets or watch them make incents. Mysore is famous for its sandal wood, silk and essential oils. I have been trying to save most of my shopping money for Rajasthan but it has not been easy.
We have also got the chance to get out and see some of the tourist sites of Mysore. The most famous is probably Mysore Palace. The first time I went to see the palace was at night and only from the outside to see it all light up with thousands of little bulbs. It was spectacular and the palace grounds were full of other tourists. It kind of felt like going to an outdoor concert or festival (minus the music). I also got to see the inside of the palace which was gorgeous, especially the bright turquois domed ballroom. There were peacocks (India’s national bird) in the stained glassed windows.
 |
| Mysore Palace |
Another of Mysore’s famous sights is Chamundi Hill. This is a pilgrimage site at the top of a hill that overlooks the city. I went into the temple at the top and got hassled through along with a whole lot of Indian pilgrims. In India pilgrimages are a religious activity as well as a recreational one. People go on pilgrimages here kind of the way we would go on vacations. Being in the temple with all these crowding tourists and people asking me for money was a not the calming reflective experience I was hoping for. It was much more fun to walk down the 3000 stone steps back to the city. Another highlight of Mysore for me was the zoo. It was a huge zoo full of all kinds of animals that were surprisingly well-kept considering that it is a zoo in India. I was happy to see that the standards (in terms of animal compounds and information) were almost as good as zoos I’ve seen in Canada. I got to see lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), but my favourite were the giraffes.
 |
The zoo was full of signs like this one. I never knew zebras could be so ferocious!
I hope that this photo is big enough that you can see the grin on the zookeeper's face |
Probably my favourite place in Mysore though is the rooftop restaurant that we found downtown. It is a great place to sit back, have a beer (or bear :P whatever you prefer) and watch the hustle and bustle on the street below. There are always lots of huge (eagle sized) bats flying around above the billboards too. Eating out every once and a while was a nice change from the food we got at ODP. The food was good (especially the breakfasts - spicy curry first thing in the morning is really growing on me) but it was the same thing every day. There are only so many meals in a row that I can enjoy eating rice, chapattis (flat bread kind of like a roti), watery curry, boiled eggs and cucumber slices. Today though they are putting on a special lunch in honour of our last day, rumour has it that there may be chicken for the occasion!
 |
| Hanging ou at the rooftop restaurant drinking our Kingfisher beer |
I want to tell you all about the NGOs that we have been visiting and the amazing weekend that we had in Hampi, but….once again I am running out of time and I still need to try to squish everything that has spread over my room in the past month back into my bag before we leave for the train this afternoon.
A bientot!
Ps.
Check out the article about the India semester on the homepage of the University of Guelph Website! If you are wondering why I am not in the group photo at the arboretum in Ooty it is because this photo was taken during my only sick spell of the trip so far (that I talked about in my first blog post). While this picture was being taken I was laying on the grass with another girl who wanted to stay close to the washrooms as well. We were trying to avoid acknowledging the friendly families of Indian tourists who kept asking us if they could have their picture taken with us (I was certainly not feeling my most photogenic that day haha).
