It’s been awhile and now I’m kind of overwhelmed in writing this, but I will do my best. It’s almost the half way point of my journey around the world and time has gone by fairly quickly. I imagine it’s going to start going by a lot quicker considering in the next 30 days we will go to 5 countries (Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong –not actually a part of China anymore, China, and Japan) and only be on the boat for 7 days. It should be a good time.
Okay, now for updating. We had 12 days on the ship before reaching India. These days included 11 days of class with the Sea Olympics smack in the middle. Classes were intense, because that’s a lot of straight days of class and everyone had midterms and project due all over the place. Everyone was pretty much over the boat by the end of it and very excited about getting off. The Sea Olympics were a nice break, but didn’t allow anyone to really forget the mounds of work they had waiting for them. Basically the ship is split up “seas”based on where on the boat you live. Each floor is generally split into four different “seas.”My sea is called the Arabian Sea and our color is black. During the Sea Olympics all the seas battle at various games to gain points. The sea that wins first place gets to get off the boat first in Miami in December. This wasn’t that big of a deal to me because my flight out of Miami isn’t until 8 or 9pm. Either way, is was a day of ridiculous games and was pretty fun. I was in the Pictionary team and we managed to get 3rd place. Other of the games included Twister, Pizza Making Contest, Limbo, Tug-of-war, Human Knot, Flip Cup, Sudoku, Volleyball, Push-up Contest, and other games involving mental or physical strength. Again, overall a good time, but only made our work pill on even harder the next day. In the end, the Arabian Sea got 3rd place overall, which gets us squat. Oh well.
We finally docked the ship in Chennai, India last Tuesday. Chennai is a large city on the South East coast of India. It is considered more religious and more conservative than the big cities in the North but less so than more rural India. All and all, if I need to describe India in one hyphenated word, it would be over-stimulating. Every sense and emotion is pushed to its limits and then pushed a little farther still. This is by far the most tiring place I have ever traveled in. The first thing to consider is there is a shit-ton of people in India. It’s really not even describable. You never have more than a couple inches of space to yourself and people are constantly pushing, grabbing, and/or yelling at you. You also had to share your space with the random cows, goats and hundreds of dogs roaming the streets. It’s also extremely dirty in every sense of the word. The streets literally have trash all over them, the pollution and smog genuinely sticks to your skin, and everyone is always sweating from the intense heat. Yet another extreme feeling in India is the weather. The entire time we were there it was 90 degrees with 85% humidity, but about once or twice a day it would start down pouring for 15-20 minutes at a time, at complete random. Then there was the smell of India. I figured that the smell people talk about India having would be similar to that in Indian restaurants…Boy was I wrong. While there are hints of curry and spices, it mostly smells like dead people rotting in the sun…that completely could have been one factor to it. Okay, so far we are hot, overwhelmed by people, and can barely breathe. Now let’s add in the noise. The streets are crazy! Traffic lights and road lines are merely suggestions and rickshaw drivers (the main form of transportation, a three-wheeled scooter with a bench seat…I have pictures…) drive like maniacs and regularly hit each other and cars. They also see no problem in driving against the flow of traffic is they think it will get them somewhere faster. Felt kind of like a roller coaster. The rickshaw drivers were also getting paid off by some really expensive stores to ignore our requests and take us there. That really got old so before getting into one I would tell them if they didn’t take me directly where I asked to go I wouldn’t pay them. Haggling with the rickshaw drivers was really an emotional experience within itself and when you got to you destination they usually changed the price to four times as much and you would have to throw what you agreed on at them and walk away while they screamed at you. Most people spoke some English, but hardly anyone spoke it very well. The drivers knew the key terms. Finally, the poverty pushed every emotion and feeling you had. When driving back to the boat at night thousands of men, women and children slept side by side on the streets and in alleyways. Nothing like I had ever seen before. Families would sleep in the middle of the sidewalks and next to them a cow, then another family, then maybe some goats, etc. Very intense. While all these things were a lot to take in they usually made both the positives and negatives of my experience in India. The smell really always a negative, except in restaurants. That’s my overall description of Chennai, but I haven’t gotten into what I actually did there!
So day one I got off the ship as soon as we were cleared by immigration and got on a rickshaw to get a general idea of the city. This was one of the scariest, but fun rides of my life. We only had an hour till I had to get back to the port to go on a trip organized by Semester at Sea for my Education to teach at a school. After very little exploration we headed back and I left for the school. We ended up going to two schools. One was an all girls public and the other was a co-ed private school. Both schools gave us a grand entrance involving music, songs, and welcome speeches. It was somewhat overwhelming considering we were just teaching them small interactive science lessons. None of the kids we worked with had ever done interactive science in their lives. While they were all under 15 years old, they had only been lectured in science, we could hardly believe it. That evening, we went out to dinner and had amazing Indian food. Most of the restaurants served both Indian and Chinese food, which was kind of weird and the place we went to was called Wang’s. We decided against getting Chinese food considering we were in India…After our amazing meal we went to a hookah bar called Moche. It closed at 11pm, as did just about everything else, and we were home by 11:30pm.
The next day I traveled around with this guy named Brooks who is also from the Bay. We started out at a famous local silk shop to look around. They had amazing silk saris for less than 1000 rupees (it’s about 50 rupees to 1 American dollar), and although a lot of girls bought them, I just didn’t see a sari fitting into my life. We then walked around the streets and tried this crazy fruit that was nothing like anything I had before. On the outside it was green and kind of bumpy. The inside, the part you ate, was white and sweet and broke up into pieces with individual seeds. They told us not to eat fruit or anything from street vendors, but we were feeling brave so we ate this fruit from a street vendor. Hah. Then we went to this really good lunch and had a fest for $2 American each. Brooks accidentally ate a pepper and almost died, but managed to get through it. All the food here is pretty spicy in general, but this pepper looked particularly bad. After lunch, we got into a rickshaw and went to the Pondy Bazaar. This was yet another extreme situation. It’s a street market where the sidewalks have shops and vendors on both sides, leaving a very narrow space to walk. Everything was super cheap and anything you could ever want from India was pretty available. There were also really bad fake bags and wallets and belts, like worse than in Mexico bad. We spent a couple hours there, shopping and went back to the boat to shower and nap. That night, we met up with a few other people and went out to dinner for more amazing Indian food for $2 American each. Then we went to a Bollywood movie. Bollywood is the film industry in India, which is super big. They make like 800 movies a year. It’s not a physical place like Hollywood, but the name for the general industry. The movies are often in either the most common language of the area of in English with Indian accents. The movie we saw was in Tamil, which is the most common language of South East India. We got the deluxe seat because they were only $2.15 and got super fancy leather seats that reclined and balcony seating to better see the giant screen. The movies play so loudly! It kind of hurt my ears at first, especially considering we couldn’t understand what they were saying. Even without understanding any of it, we got what the movie was about. It was an action film about the important government official whose daughter gets kidnapped. At the same time these four guys are on a road trip but because of a series of unfortunate events end up at this abandoned factory that just so happens to be where the bad guys are keeping the daughter. After a lot of really fake but hilarious fighting and bad things happening they save her and kill all the bad guys. It was a three-hour movie, but there was an intermission in the middle. It was pretty funny.
The third day in India I spent my whole day at an orphanage that Mother Teresa opened. I didn’t know this until I got there, but it turned out to be a home for children with disabilities. They had a far range of disabilities and most of the kids weren’t actually orphaned, but rather just dropped off when their parents realized they weren’t “normal.”The orphanage was extremely dirty and had almost no toys anywhere. Many of the kids were both physically and mentally disabled. There was a couple with what seemed to be Autism too. I spent most of my time in the room with the severely disabled kids. They all were just laid down on a blanket on the cement floor. They were all extremely skinny. When feeding time came around I saw why they were all so skinny. If in the U.S. everyone one of the kids I was with would have been on a feeding tube, probably since birth.; none them had one. Even if they did have feeding tubes they would probably get infections from the unsanitary conditions. So to feed these kids they would make a liquid meal and just fill there mouth with it over and over again in hopes that most of it ends up in their stomachs. For sure this was the most shocking and emotional day I had in India and it really made me appreciate everything we have in the U.S. to help kids in those situations. I stayed in that night; I was pretty exhausted after that experience.
The next day was my last full day in Chennai. I got an early start going out with a friend for our last bits of exploring and shopping. We grabbed a rickshaw driver who offered to let us drive the rickshaw. Of course we jumped at the opportunity! He brought us down near the beach and let us each drive around for about 15 minutes. The actual rickshaw was a lot of fun to drive, but it was a little weird to be driving on the opposite side of the rode then we do in the U.S. and scary avoiding all the other cars and people. It wasn’t as crowded near the beach, but it wasn’t empty at all. After our driving lessons, we decided to go back to Pondy Bazaar. We had really only gotten through half of it the first time before we got overwhelmed and tired. We shopped the rest of the morning and had one more amazing lunch. After lunch we went to this mall like place called Spencer’s market (I thought of you while there Spencer). Did some more shopping and tried to go to an Internet café, but about 5 minutes after we got on computers the power of the entire mall went out. I guess the government will randomly shut down power of different areas to control usage. So I didn’t get back to a lot of people, but I promise I will try again in Malaysia! We got dinner and headed back to the ship for the night.
My last day in India I had to go hear a speaker for my class, she spoke about the organization she works for that deals with Women’s and Children’s rights. Interesting topic, but the speaker was not very good and presenting or organizing her ideas and it went on kind of long. We had to be back on the boat that afternoon and we set sail that evening.
Another long one I know, but there was a lot to say. I’m now 14 hours ahead of the West Coast and will be 15 hours ahead when we get to Malaysia the day after tomorrow. I have a few tentative plans in Malaysia to see a couple of temples and possible fly to this city called Kuala Lumpur that is supposed to be cool. As always, we will see where the wind takes me!
I love and miss you all!
