Notoriety

Indian people like to tell us that when other Indian people see us, they also see a huge dollar sign stamped to our faces. We don't notice this phenomenon too much in Bangalore, where it would not be unlikely for an Indian person selected at random to make more money than we do, but we sure do notice it when we travel.

This weekend we set off for Madurai, which as I mentioned before is older than my country. Perhaps you remember the story I told a few months ago about the drunken man on a railway platform who told us that the temple in Madurai was older than my country (not difficult) and older than Gilles' country too (slightly more difficult). He went on to tell us how he was selecting a nice boy for his daughter to marry and to ask me the age at which I first had sex.

At any rate...

We traveled by 3rd class AC train, which we have discovered is a much more social experience than 2nd class AC. People actually talk to us in 3rd AC. They ask us where we're from, they make jokes. The train was quite nice except that I somehow lost my cell phone on it. Ah well. I seem to have a penchant for losing things in improbable ways.

The temple in Madurai was extremely large and contained a shopping mall. The funniest thing about it is that visitors are no longer allowed to climb its highest tower because someone once committed suicide from it, so now the souvenir shops outside it have built roof terraces from which once can enjoy the lovely view. They sometimes have elevators going up, but they only have staircases going down. These staircases conveniently lead to elephant statues, silk carpets, and all the other things that foreigners like to buy, apparently.

While the temple in Madurai had a nice atmosphere, we preferred nearby Thanjavur, where a smaller but more attractive temple is situated. The only problem with this small town was its rickshaw mafia. When we were leaving the bus station, no rickshaw would take us for less than 50 rupees, even though we knew that this was far too much for the distance. They held fast to their price, so there was no choice but to go with them and pay the 50 rupees. The next day, we walked to the train station, which was less than 300 yards from our hotel, and took a rickshaw from there to the temple. We were charged 25 rupees, which seemed slightly high but acceptable. On the way back, however, we tried to get another rickshaw. The driver said 30 rupees. We told him we had just paid 25 to come to the temple. "No," he replied, "you paid 25 to come to the train station. That's a kilometer difference." Our guide at the temple had explained the ancient Tamilian numbering and measuring systems to us. They seem to have been fascinated by the number 9 because of its "magical qualities" (if you add up the digits from 0 to 9 starting with the smallest and largest and moving inward, each pair adds up to 9, the digits of numbers divisible by 9 add up to 9, etc). Apparently the human body has 9 "holes." Our guide, incidentally, seemed to have just 9 teeth. At any rate, the rickshaw drivers seem to have their own math system.

We noticed it again on our third stop, Trichy, where we saw a woman rickshaw driver for the first time. Unfortunately, she also wantd to rip us off. When a different driver broke away from the crowd and offered to take us for 20 rupees instead of 30, he was chided by the other drivers. Of course, they thought it was okay to do this in front of us since they were speaking Tamil; they seemed not to mind that we could understand them saying "foreigner" several times in their sentence.

We were not happy to have to take our shoes off to visit the temples in Trichy, because the ground was so hot that we had to race across it in order to keep our feet from burning. We acquired a few schoolgirl friends inside one temple; they followed us around and kept speaking to us very slowly in Tamil in the hopes that we would understand. I figured out "you" and "me," but I was stumped as to what the rest of the sentence was about.

Anyway, I'll upload the pictures before too long...

Madurai

If anyone comes looking for us, we will be away in Madurai (the city that's older than my country!) until Monday morning. Have a good weekend!

India or Death?

The new French teacher Cécile made an interesting comment the other day: "When you tell people you're going to India," she said, "you might as well be telling them you're going to commit suicide." There's definitely some truth to that - some people are highly enthusiastic by the idea of visiting India, or knowing people who are about to visit India, while others think it's a pretty crazy place to go.

There's a funny commercial on television right now, for a shampoo that adds body to hair. A sweet-looking Indian girl gets harrassed by an East Asian customs official saying "Not your picture!" in a strong Chinese accent. When they search the Indian girl they find her shampoo and realize that it really is her picture, she just improved her hair a lot since it was taken. We find this quite amusing, because it implies that the Indians see other countries in Asia as having scary immigration personnel.

The big movie in the cinemas right now is Salaam Namaste, a story about an Indian couple who lives together before getting married! We are going to try to see it tomorrow, if we manage to get in. I haven't been to a Hindi movie since "Black," which was a remake of "The Miracle Worker." But Bangalore seems to be boycotting US movies at the moment - all we have is "Cinderella Man" and "The Interpreter."

Continuing our water saga from last time, our shower has begun to leak into the apartment downstairs. So the neighbors chased me down in the stairwell last week and asked if they could take a look at our bathroom. They determined it was the shower and said they would send a plumber and talk to our landlord. We said fine, but no plumber ever came. So this Monday, they rang our doorbell at 8:30 am to tell us that their ceiling was still leaking and that we'd better stop taking showers. I guess that's one solution, but not the cleanest one...

Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink

It has been raining nearly continuously for the past few days, and coincidentally our shower has started leaking into the ceiling of the apartment below us.

Last Wednesday I flew to Pune on the new low-cost airline, Spice Jet, which proved to be as efficient and bare-bones as you might expect. None of the delicious food and cloth napkins of Jet Airways, for one thing. I didn't get to try out their baggage-losing capabilities.

Pune was rainy - they didn't receive as much rain as Bombay in this year's monsoon, but they did lose one bridge, apparently. The hotel that I checked into was moldy if not exactly seedy. I was trying to blend in, so I didn't ask too many questions when the nice child laborer offered to fill my thermos of "pani" (water) for me. He brought back the water, I assumed it was from somewhere other than the faucet in the bathroom, and I was thirsty so I drank. I should mention that I have not had food poisoning very often in India - I think that before we went away in April I had been sick twice, once from cooking at home and once from eating at an expensive expat restaurant. Meanwhile, Gilles has been sick from eating at an expensive expat restaurant and an expensive Chinese restaurant. Go figure. Maybe it's the meat and the salad; maybe there just isn't enough chili in Western/Chinese food. Anyway, I have been so healthy in India that I even bragged to my professor at the Film and Television Institute of India that I can handle Indian food and filtered water (which is what they serve in restaurants, and actually what we drink at home). And only four hours later I was sick!

Well, suffice it to say, food poisoning in India is a dramatic but short-lived affair. Both Gilles and I seem to have a fever at the beginning and then feel relatively okay the next day. I regretted having chosen a moldy and seedy hotel, but at least I had cable. I watched "Cast Away," "Love Actually" and several episodes of "Will and Grace." I'm still surprised that they show it here. Of course, in the ads for it they show someone from some other show talking about and saying that Will is cute and "not that gay."

Anyway, I didn't get to visit the Indian UWC on Friday as I had intended, but by Saturday I was well enough to fly back to Bangalore and have a six-course meal with friends at a posh restaurant outside Bangalore. We got soaked on the way and paid far too much for the autorickshaw, which was so open to the elements that we needed an umbrella inside it.

In other news from Pune, I told my advisor, who is very nice but not that familiar with my subject, about the fact that the subject doesn't actually exist. He told me about other "village myths" in India. Apparently there is also a village in South India where everyone speaks Sanskrit, and one where everyone speaks Polish (shipwreck). I am really going to have to write an article about mythical Indian villages.

I toured the Film Institute itself, which has nicer facilities than UCLA, of course. The students look rather familiar, except that there are very few women. Apparently filmmaking not really considered an acceptable career for women. Really, is it an acceptable career for anyone? I asked the FTII professor about "Born Into Brothels" but he didn't see why they would want to ban it. Prostitutes have children, he said, and they have to grow up somewhere.