God's Own Country

So, apparently I haven't posted in a while...though to me it seems like we just got back from Kerala. We've been saying goodbye to a lot of friends since then. Anne-Julie, the Institute French teacher, went back to Paris last week. Her replacement, Cécile, seems to be enjoying the job so far. Ivan is still here but his parents are visiting, so we haven't seen him much, and he'll be heading to China and then back to Switzerland soon. Valérie and Michel went back to France, but they were only here three weeks, so it's not really the same kind of farewell. Finally Charline is leaving tonight - we just had a farewell lunch for her at our favorite local Continetal restaurant, Baron's Court.

Just last week we were at the engagement ceremony of Charline and her Indian fiancé, Prince. They are both in the same field as Gilles, so he knew them both from France. (Prince spent 8 months working in Paris, and Charline has been to India twice as well). The ceremony was interesting - it took place in an old Catholic church in the suburbs of Ernakulam, which is the big city part of Kochi. We stood up, there was no singing, and we had to take off our shoes, so it didn't seem much like a Catholic ceremony. Afterwards we went to Prince's house and ate tons of Malayali dishes, including a lot of beef. Apparently the Keralites eat beef often - at least the Christians, which make up a large part of the population there. They say that Christianity dates back to just after the year zero, when St. Thomas came to India, but no one can really verify that story. The early Christians were essentially Orthodox, but many became Catholic after the arrival of the Portuguese. Anyway, Prince's family is part of that second group, so Charline converted to their religion (Catholicism). Previously she had belonged to the official religion of France (atheism).

Before we went to the engagement we visited Fort Cochin, which is a very nice part of Kochi. It has a real small-town feel, with a lot of old churches and schools and very few vehicles. The churches themselves were not terribly fascinating, but we enjoyed walking around and eating fish. My favorite part was the old Synagogue, which was the focal point of the Cochin Jewish community, which now seems to number about ten. They also have a story that might be based in myth - that they arrived after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD in boats. The synagogue is not quite so old (I think it was 17th century) and its floor is covered in blue and white Chinese tiles - it looks kind of like it belongs in China, and kind of like it belongs in Delft. We also had to take off our shoes to walk into the synagogue. Supposedly the population of Jews has decreased to nearly zero because of the creation of Israel, but they also may have simply not found enough other Jews to marry. I guess it's easy to disappear in India if your community is not as big as the others.

While we were in Kerala, we also visited the Periyar National Park, which is on the border with Tamil Nadu, up in the hills. We signed up for a trek, which involved walking through the woods for three hours with a very small man who smoked a lot. Actually, before we could walk in the woods we had to check out leech-proof socks and board a not-very-seaworthy bamboo raft that took us from the ranger station to the trekking area. The leech socks came in handy after just a few minutes, when we realized that every time we stopped our shoes and pants were covered in leeches. We poured tobacco powder over our shoes, and that seemed to deter the leeches, though when we finished the trek both Gilles and I found leeches on the tongues of our shoes. No harm done, anyway. The ranger just casually knocked them off his arms when they landed on him.

We didn't see too much in the way of wildlife - a giant squirrel, some nice birds, a sambar deer. We heard some angry elephants in the distance and tried to track them, but the ranger said it could be dangerous to annoy them further so we couldn't get too close. We didn't really like the idea of being trampled by a herd of elephants. After our trek we took a very educational tour of a spice garden - it was interesting to see the plants our spices come from.

The highlight of our trip to Kerala, which they call God's own country, was cruising down the beautiful backwaters. We didn't see much and we didn't go very far, but the environment was beautiful and our boat was none too shabby. I think Kerala is still my favorite part of India - it just seems more laid-back, and the lush vegetation makes it much more pleasant than Bangalore. We also noticed that Keralites seem to sing all the time - on buses, on ferries, on the little bamboo raft. They seem pretty happy to live in Kerala, really. Heck, if God lives there it makes sense...

Tamil Nadu

After a few days back in Bangalore, our friends Sam and Noémi arrived from France. Sam is a researcher at Météo France, and Noémi is a science teacher. We immediately took them shopping and Noémi bought a salwar kameez. Then we reserved bus tickets for Kancheepuram, a temple town about 5 hours from Bangalore. We arrived around 7, which was fine except that the bus driver decided to drop us off in the middle of nowhere, on the highway. We were apparently the only passengers going to Kancheepuram; the rest of the bus was an express to Chennai. So rather than taking a detour to the Kancheepuram Bus Station, we were left by the side of the road. There was one rickshaw but someone else flagged it immediately. He offered to share it with the four of us, but we didn't think that would be very easy. We waited around for a while, until finally a local bus appeared. We hopped on and were greeted with some friendly stares and very simple conversation.

Happily we found our hotel without much difficulty. Most of the hotel employees were 10-year-old boys who took every opportunity to come into our rooms. They seemed extremely tickled by us, and kept coming back to bring soap and towels, dividing up the tasks into as many possible small errands as possible so that they could bring their friends.

In the morning we headed for the temples on bicycle, which was very hot and dusty. The temples were interesting, though not as memorable as what we had seen in Hampi and Halebid, particularly because certain portions were closed off to non-Hindus. We saw a famous tree that is older than my country, as a drunken man from Madurai once boasted, but it seemed to be dead. We also saw more trained elephants; I found one of them particularly charming.

Kancheepuram is renowned for its silk industry; supposedly the first silkworms were smuggled to India in a Chinese princess's hair centuries ago! We could not go without the mandatory silk factory tour, so we visited a saree shop. We were shown different types of looms and visited a weaver's room. The loom took up most of the room, but there was a separate kitchen and bath. It seemed that the weavers slept underneath their loom, possibly on the floor. They had some fancy French Jacquard equipment - this basically involved punch cards with design codes printed on to them: the weaver sticks in the card and voila! they don't need to design anything themselves.

After another journey on a local bus, we arrived in Mamallapuram, on the coast of Tamil Nadu. This is a small town that relies heavily on tourism, though they also have a local stone-carving industry. In the morning we ate at a beachfront restaurant and spoke with the waiter, who told us how most of the structures on the beach had been damaged by the tsunami. His restaurant seemed to have been recently repainted and perhaps refurbished. We watched ten brand-new boats being lowered onto the beach, all with names painted in bright colors on the side. They had been donated to the fishermen by businesses and foreign individuals, which seemed like a nice idea to us: buy a boat for a fisherman, and it gets named after you.

One of the more famous sites in Mamallapuram is the Shore Temple, which was somewhat disappointing, especially since it cost $5 to enter. I prefered this temple, which was hidden in the sand for centuries until it was excavated by the British. To me, it looked like a sand castle. Its elephant statue is apparently one of the most realistic in all of India. I suppose it must be life-size.

After one day in Mamallapuram, we took a bus to Auroville, an international intentional community north of Pondicherry. We arrived just before dinner, and were greeted by a small blonde girl who spoke to us in perfect French. We realized later that she also spoke Tamil and English, and as we sat down to eat dinner with her and her father she pulled out her cell phone to call her mother and started speaking German! Auroville is apparently quite a multilingual community, though it is dominated by French, German and English, plus the local language, Tamil. The father, who owns a very beautiful house and guesthouse in Auroville and was one of the 6 original settlers, was happy to meet us, since he had questions about wind speed for Gilles and Sam and was also invovled in filmmaking. He might be contacting Gilles to help him measure the windspeed and construction requirements at an ecotourism site he is building in Coorg.

The next day, we visited Auroville on scooters, including the Visitor's Center at the giant Matrimandir, a huge golden sphere. Auroville was started in the 1960s by a female guru called The Mother. She came from France to help Sri Aurobindo, an early revolutionary and spiritual leader, in his work in Pondicherry. The community is supposed to welcome all spiritual, peace-loving people in the world, and they are supposed to work together in harmony and without exchanging money. The community is quite successful at producing cheese and jam, which we find for sale here in Bangalore. We were interested in learning about the education system and community projects in Auroville, but we were equally drawn to the beach maintained by Aurovilians, which is unusually clean. Anyway, we had a good time and a nice rest in Auroville, and it was fun to be in a French-speaking environment and to see lots of white people riding motorbikes.

Our next stop was Pondicherry, which is not really all that French, though it used to be a French colony. The small French quarter, where the Europeans once lived, is actually nice and colorful, unlike the rest of the city, which is as noisy and crowded as other places in India. We had a good time walking around and even ate some wood-fired pizza. We didn't get to visit the Aurobindo Ashram, which is the attraction for many foreign people visiting Pondicherry, since we had to leave the next morning at 7:30 to make it back to Chennai for our afternoon train. But we did get to sleep in one of their guesthouses, with portraits of Aurobindo and The Mother staring at us.

Hampi

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted, and we've been on the move. First, we went to Hampi, an ancient temple town, with Lauren from Macromedia and Harish, who's also in software here in Bangalore. We took the night train, which was a new experience for the two of them, and arrived early in the morning on Saturday. Lauren had to fly back to the US on Monday, so she and Harish left that evening on the return train. We still had time to visit many of the sites, mainly the Royal Center, on bicycle. It was beautiful and very striking from a geological point of view, but we were pretty hot. It is the low season now and there were not very many tourists, which was nice. Only a few brave (and sweaty) French families and German hippies were walking around. The city is clearly set up for tourism, with tons of signs in Hebrew and European languages, strange menu items like nutella chapatis, and people asking if we want to smoke various things.

Saturday night we stayed at the not-very-charming state hotel, but on Sunday we moved to a little cabin next to a rice paddy. It was on the North Side of the river, and we got there by riding in a motorboat for 10 rupees each. Apparently the river crossings used to all be done in coracles, the round traditional boats that look like floating baskets -- they don't seem particularly seaworthy but we had a good time riding in one in Srirangapatna. We rode across with a group of obnoxious American students - I'm guessing that they were some sort of Jewish youth group, though I'm not sure why. A local told us that the people who live in Hampi are annoyed by this new boat because it is twice as expensive as the coracles and has somehow driven the coracles out of business through a government contract.

We spent Saturday visiting the Sacred Center of Hampi, which was not that exciting, except that we got to see our first trained elephant: it accepts rupee coins in its trunk, hands them to its owner, and then "blesses" the person who gave him the coin with its trunk.

We were a bit concerned that we wouldn't find anything to eat on the North Side of the river, so we stopped by a place that advertised itself as a French Bakery to ask how late they would serve. A man in his 50s told us to come anytime. He had clearly studied English for Specific Purposes with some of the Hampi tourists, because he added "man" at the end of every sentence. When we arrived around 8 the family was watching Indian movies on television. There was no menu, just the friendly man we had already met asking us how spicy we wanted our dinner. It seemed that the French part of the bakery was closed for the low season, and instead the owner's wife served us what the family had eaten that night: dal, rice and chapatis (no nutella). It was nice, except for the mosquitos. When we were leaving we saw four frogs clustered beneath the same streetlamp, waiting for their dinner of mosquitos and flies.



Back at our cabin, we were treated to a beautiful show of fireflies over the rice paddy. The sky lit up with bright sparks of light dancing against the dark sky. Definitely the best fireworks show we've seen so far!