I'm not going to write about my time in Sri Lanka before Thailand. It's been too long for me to write about it in a way that would be very interesting. In this email, I'll tell you about: my trip to India, my time on a colonial tea plantation in the mountains of Sri Lanka, my work, and some other random anecdotes that I find interesting. If you want to know more about the month that I'm not writing about, you can call me on skype (lukesanford). This would also make my day to have any of you call me, and I could hear about how you're doing.
India first. India is awesome. I spent this afternoon riding around Chennai on a motorcycle with a guy who I met on the beach. I'm getting ahead of myself again. Starting at the beginning...
I arrived in India on the 30th of March with an official purpose: get a Sri Lanka residence visa. This allows me to stay in the country for longer than one month at a time and allows me to get paid for my work, get a drivers license (no thanks), rent an apartment, and do a variety of other things tourists are not allowed to do. My unofficial purpose was to check out southern India. Here were my very first impressions of India:
Indian people are the worst people at airports and in airplanes. It is one of my travel policies to aim to arrive at the airport 3 hours before an international flight. This gives time for traffic, long emmigration/customs/security/check in lines. This trip, I was through everything except gate security 2:45 before the flight was supposed to leave. at 2:00 before departure, I looked up at the board to see "Jet Airways Flight 281 to Chennai, last call for boarding." So, I got up and tried to board the airplane. "Sorry sir, you cannot board the aircraft at this time." Huh? Did I miss my flight somehow? "We put last call now so that people will start to come to the gate. Otherwise our flight will leave 1 hour late. Sure enough, nobody was at the gate when they started boarding. At 10 minutes to takeoff, I was on the plane, and then people started all rushing on board. Then, they refused to sit down. Everyone just milled about in the aisles. It took 2 announcements from the captain and a lot of shouting on the part of the flight attendants to get people to sit.
One of the things that annoys me on airplanes a little is when people rush to stand up when the plane stops moving. You know you can't get off the plane yet right? On my flight, people were standing up as soon as wheels touched pavement, starting to grab their bags from overhead compartments, and push towards the front of the plane. At least checking in 3 hours early and being 193 cm tall usually gets me a seat with extra leg room in an emergency exit.
Before going to a new city I try to figure out how to get around by public transportation. I discovered that I could take the train straight from the airport to my hotel (one of the reasons I chose that hotel was the proximity to a train stop). After fending off at least 10 auto-rickshaw (auto for short) drivers who insisted that they were much cheaper than the train at only 200/- to get to the city (40 indian rupees to the dollar) I was on the train from the tirisulam station to the kodambakkam station. Indian trains are sweet. They have open doors, so all of the guys my age hang out them to get wind in their faces to ease the heat of south india in the hot season. I quickly joined them, and drew some bemused looks from other passengers. I had seen no other white people in the country yet, and I got the impression that white people generally don't ride the metro trains in chennai, preferring AC taxis instead.
The auto drivers at my stop were much more helpful than the ones at the airport. I asked one of them how much for a ride to the address of my hotel, and the guy told me he would charge me 40/-, but that I should probably just walk. Surprised by his honesty, I thanked him and walked to my hotel. There I was also pleasantly surprised. For $20 per night, I got AC, hot water, free high speed internet, a flat screen TV with cable, and (the best part) a free south indian buffet breakfast. They also had room service meals for about 60/-. I opted to wander around in search of food, found some place that was busy, watched what others ordered, and got myself that. South Indian food is some of the best food in the world, especially when you include their tea. There are tea stations everywhere, and they mix the concentrated tea with hot milk by pouring the mixture back and forth between two cups, but when someone who is good at it does this, it looks like he's throwing the tea back and forth (and they don't spill any).
I woke up the next morning and headed down to breakfast, where I was helped by a guy by the name of Ashok (easy to remember because half the buses in Sri Lanka are made by Lanka Ashok Leyland) who taught me how to pronounce some words that I was learning (yes, no, where is, how much, thank you, hello, etc.). I was joined at breakfast by a woman of about 30 who I started talking with. She asked me where I went to college. "um, Whitman College?" is my normal response because people usually haven't heard of it. "No way! Me too! When did you graduate?!" What are the odds of meeting another Whitty at breakfast in a random hotel in Chennai? We both had errands to run, but we decided to meet back up that afternoon to go explore the city a little.
I headed off to the Sri Lankan High Commission for visa battle round 1. When I arrived at the gate, the guard told me I wasn't allowed in because I had short pants on. Damn. "Also, we close in 30 minutes." Not enough time to go back to the hotel. Instead, I sped off to the nearest clothing shop. After convincing the guy working there that I didn't want a pair of tailored pants, and I didn't want them hemmed to fit me, and I didn't want to try on a bunch of pants, he handed me a pair of jeans, which have turned out to be maybe the most comfortable pair of pants I've ever worn. Back to the High Commission. I sat next to a 21 year old animation student at the commission, who filled me in on how life is different in India and Sri Lanka. He told me about how he had learned sinhalese so that he could avoid the police as a tamil kid during the war, and how his whole family has now moved to India. After an hour (I thought they closed in 30 minutes?) I got to meet with the high commissioner. After asking for my “good name” and speaking with a constant head-bobble, the high commissioner shot a few questions at me, and then told me the cost would be 8700 /-. I didn’t have the money with me, so I agreed to return the next day at 9 am.
I headed back to my hotel, got a delicious lunch delivered to my room by a very nice guy who forgot to bring a bottle of water the first time (apparently this comes with lunch), and then rushed back into my room with a fork after I was nearly finished eating, informing me that he forgot that western people “don’t know how to eat with their hands.” I assured him that I did, and showed him my almost finished lunch to prove it. After lunch I went to the Pondy Bazaar with my Whitman friend, which I thought was going to be a bunch of street shops. It turned out to be a 6 story air-conditioned building that mostly sold saris and other clothing. I picked up a new wallet to replace my falling-apart old one. The new one is fake Gucci. Score.
We then hopped on the train to the beach, which I had heard was enormous. It did not disappoint.
It's a little hard to get a feel for it from the picture, but its a flat stretch of sand that is over 300 yards wide, and about 5 miles long. We wandered around there for a while, and then started walking back into town towards the train station. I had noticed a few signs encouraging good driving before, but this time I started to write them down. Here's a picture of one of them:
Others were:
Drive slowly and you see the world, drive quickly and the world sees you
Slow down, speed arrester ahead
Please obey lanes
Please drive carefully
Please obey traffic rules
These were almost everywhere I looked. Perhaps the strangest one was a sign in the same color and font as street signs was a sign that said "Please Collect Rainwater." The really funny part about all of these signs is that people in India are by far the craziest drivers I've ever seen. They never drive slowly, swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid "speed arresters" (speed bumps), completely ignore traffic lights and lane lines, and generally don't believe in traffic rules at all. One guy I met told me that he doesn't follow traffic rules because there's not way the police could catch him if they did see him breaking some rule, because they don't have cars.
It was really interesting talking with another Whitty who is traveling the world. We had dinner together and were served by the same charming guy from lunch, who again forgot water and eating utensils (in that order again), and then she jumped in a taxi and flew back to the US. I feel like I see Whitman people wherever I go.
The next day, I woke up early to go get my visa finished. Unfortunately, my auto driver got really lost, and it took almost 2 hours to get there. Fortunately, when I did arrive the high commissioner recognized me, ushered me into his office quickly, and we got down to business. He said "welcome back to my office good sir, I can see that you are wearing a very nice blue shirt today, you are looking very smart." I thanked him, and told him he was also looking very smart. He asked about my degree, and then said that he is also a student of political science, and that he is very interested in US foreign policy because of its effects on Sri Lanka and the rest of the world. Just as I felt us on the verge of a fopo discussion, he said "well, I can see that you are in very much of a hurry, so I will let you go. Thank you very much good sir for your time." Ok. He also instructed his secretary to get me through the rest of the process very quickly, so whenever anyone told me to come back at 4:00 that day, or tomorrow, or in one week she ran over and told them to just do it now. After an hour of waiting, I was handed my passport with a nice big stamp in it that makes me an official resident of Sri Lanka. Woohoo!
I got back to the hotel, and immediately was afflicted with a headache and stomach ache. I drank a litre of water, which didn't help. I lay in bed, fell asleep for a few hours, and woke up with a migraine. I hugged the porcelain toilet for an hour, and then finally began to feel better after emptying my stomach. Weird. I opted to stay in that night, and start writing you this email. (Aside: I'm in Sri Lanka finishing this email, which looks like it will need to be in 2 parts because its already too long to read over breakfast, and a HUGE thunderstorm just hit. It was the most intense lightning storm I've ever been in, with lightning bolts visible at a frequency of greater than one per second. I unplugged everything, and went downstairs where two dogs and two cats all tried to climb into my lap. Cheyenne of the dogs is a great dane:
)
The next day I resolved to go make up for being sick, so I headed out early to check out what was touted by wikitravel as "the second largest mall in India." I think that you can learn a lot about the character of a place by its shopping malls, so I opted to spend an hour there. Spencer Plaza was not what I was expecting. It was smaller than most malls I've been to in the US, though it did have 3 stories and 3 "phases." It was sort of air conditioned, but still hot enough that everyone was sweating. In Bangkok, there were multiple malls that dwarfed even the biggest malls I've been to in the US, and were much more high end too, with multiple Gucci, Prada, Armani, etc. stores that I was too intimidated to go into. Sri Lanka only sort of has malls, and when it does they are usually dominated by one large store that fills more than half the area of the mall. I was expecting a mall in Chennai (one of the financial capitals of India with a population of over 6 million people) to be much more like Bangkok. The best (and largest) shop in Spencer Plaza was a bookstore called "Landmark." I decided to check it out. I quickly discovered that whatever section of the store I was in, I would always find self help books or books about business that barely matched the description of the section. I found only 1 book by Salman Rushdie (this was very surprising to me), but hundreds of copies of "The 4 Hour Workweek" and other books about how to do well in business, how to market yourself effectively, and many other areas. Even the "Classic Literature" section had these titles alongside books like "Ulysses" and "Sherlock Holmes."
At the bookstore I remembered that it was my Aunt's birthday, so I made my way to the greeting card section and began searching for an appropriate card. I found the perfect one: larger than an 8.5X11 piece of paper with an apologetic sounding birthday congratulation.
I then went to the food court, because someone had advised me that they had excellent food. I sat down and ordered my favorite south Indian dish: a paper masala dosai. This is what came:
It's again a little hard to get a feel for how big this thing is from the picture, but it was over 3 feet long. After a 45 minute battle with it and all the curries that came with it, I surrendered, leaving almost a third of it left on one of the three plates it was served on. Next stop: the beach.
Almost. I went outside and bargained with an auto driver to get to the beach, but quickly discovered that being white and leaving a mall puts you in a bad position for bargaining. After failing to reach a consensus on a price, the driver offered a solution: if I go inside a touristy wood carvings shop for 5 minutes, he'll get a commission, and I won't have to buy anything. This will offset his cost, and he'll reduce my price by half. Perfect. I wandered around for a bit, and then asked about the price of some large wooden statue. They told me, I said that was the only thing I was interested in, and that it was about $150 out of my price range. Then I left, despite their best attempts to keep me around. Problem solved.
After wandering around the beach a bit, I sat to watch the waves break for a bit, and was soon approached by a group of three Indian guys about my age. They asked why I was sitting alone, didn't I have a girlfriend? I said no, I don't have a girlfriend, and that I was visiting India alone, so I didn't have anyone to sit with. They all sat down, and after a brief conversation asked if they could take their pictures with me. I agreed:
and
They decided to take off, and I asked if I could come hang out with them for the rest of the afternoon. They agreed, and I hopped on the back of David's motorcycle, and we sped off. They first decided to show me St. Thomas Basilica, and on the way there I realized that it was Good Friday. St. Thomas was one of Jesus's disciples, and he was buried in Chennai after going to India to spread the word. It was interesting to be at the Basilica on Good Friday and listen to sermons and see St. Thomas' grave. We then cruised onwards to the City Center Mall, where these guys wanted to hang out and look for the ladies for a bit. David (guy in red shirt) told me that Vasantha (guy in brown shirt) has lots of girlfriends. I told them that I could see why, which made them laugh a lot. I made it a running joke for the rest of the afternoon, which the other two guys thought was really funny. While we were at it, they decided to interrogate me about my love life. They were shocked that I had 0 girlfriends currently, and that I haven't been in a long-term relationship. They said, "but you look so smart [this means good], how is it that you cannot have a girlfriend?" I rallied off the normal set of excuses-- "I'm too non-committal, I'm too picky, I travel around too much, I'm too interested in other things right now, etc." They told me that it's good to not have a girlfriend, "in our culture, girlfriends are bad. Wives are good." "Then Vasantha must be a very bad man." Laughs. They offered to find me a girlfriend tomorrow if I wanted, but I told them I had a morning flight back to the US. whew. In Sri Lanka and South India, guys who are close call each other "Machong," which is sort of like "bro" except without the fratty connotation. It's a way to address your close friends. By the end of the evening, we were all "machongs," which made me pretty happy. As we left the mall, we spotted a crowd of people, and decided to investigate. Some TV channel was doing a contest where you had to unwrap candy bars with cricket gloves on (like hockey gloves). The host saw me and pulled me in to participate, so I strapped on the these cricket gloves which were way to small, and started unwrapping candies with my friends cheering me on. I unwrapped 2, and the announcer told me that I'd probably be on TV sunday at 3pm on VR plus. Unfortunately, we don't get that channel in Sri Lanka, so I'll never know.
We headed grabbed a cup of tea, then headed back to the beach were we played a carnival style game where you shoot balloons with a bb gun from about 10 feet away. My friends were amazed that I got a balloon on every shot (thanks for getting me that bb gun for my birthday mom and dad). After wandering around some more, they decided that they had to go home, and took me to the railway station, which was right by the Chennai Super Kings cricket stadium. You could see the game from the top of the railway platform, so the three of us watched for a bit before my train came. I said bye to my friends, and hopped aboard. I had to take a train to the central station and then a different train out to my hotel, and when I arrived at the station and asked which was the platform I should wait on, and my train was already there. So I sprinted off, and my train started to roll away. I managed to catch up to the train right as it accelerated to faster than I could run, and I leaped through the door of the last car. The car was packed with people, so I spent the rest of the ride with a foot and a hand inside the car hanging on, and the rest of me flying in the wind outside the door. Woohoo!
I want to include one more thing in this email before I let you go off to do whatever you're undoubtedly procrastinating on. India just passed a law that gives its citizens a universal right to education. This is really cool. The bill passed while I was there, and newspapers and television were immediately filled with advertisements informing people of their new constitutional right (a constitutional amendment passed earlier that year). Here's a picture of a newspaper advertisement:
I thought that it was really cool that India was able to do something like this, and that it was being advertised in this way. One of the provisions of the law is that private schools have to have 25% of their students from low-income families. What's more interesting is that the conservative party did this, and the liberal party is criticizing the act for not being enough! If only politics in the US were like this...
I have lots more to write about, but this email is already too long, so I'll let you go for now. Write me back, please.
Namaste, (they don't say this in Tamil Nadu)
vanakkam,
Luke
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