India Part 8: Final India Round Up

As I write this I am currently chilling out in Singapore. I don't think it's possible for a place to be anymore different from India.

Here's one last blog to round up my India trip. It's basically made up of random tidbit that I wanted to mention but didn't have a place for it in the other blogs.

The Chaos

India is like an assault on ones senses. Where ever you go, there's going to be a ton of people and their going to be doing a variety of different interesting things. Not only that, it's going to loud. There are going to be people yelling and horns bellowing all over the place. But you can't get distracted because your going to need to dodge people, vehicles and the odd dog/cow.

There's so many people and things happening all at once that it's pretty easy to get over whelmed. When we first got to India I found that I had to sleep a lot just to adjust to the madness.

But after about a week in India it was surprising how used I got to it all. Now it feels weird if we go anywhere and there's not a 1000 things happening at once. It's going to make going back to the suburbs in Calgary an odd experience.

Money

The India currency is called rupees. It's about 35 Rs. for every $1 Can.

I want to emphasis that India is really cheap. The flight to India probably cost more than 2 times the price of 40 days. I can definitely see why lots of hippies go to India. With the conversion you live there a long time for very little money.

One thing that surprised me is how little bartering I do. With the exceptions of autorishaws and some souvenirs, everything pretty much has a fixed price. This is nice since it would be annoying if I had to barter every time I wanted to buy a bottle of water.

The Touching

In North America we're very protective of our personal space. Sure we touch each other, but for the most part unless we're a couple we don't spend much time touching each other. The opposite of this is true in India as the culture does not seem to respect the personal space rule.

This is most evident when looking at men. There is no social stigma to men placing there hands on each other. Much to Kiran's dismay (and therefore my delight), it is quite common to see men holding hands walking down the street. It's not that there's anything sexual behind holding hands, it's just that they're friends

It should be noted though that this seemed much more predominate in Northern India. In Mumbai or Goa, it was much rarer to see men holding hands.

The Food

India has a huge variety of foods. To be honest though, I wasn't a huge fan of most of them. Not that I didn't like them, it's just that most of them generally did not appeal to me. By the end of the trip I was eating a lot of pizzas.

Two things were true of Indian food no matter where you went, they would be spicy and they would have a ton of carbs. By spicy I mean they would have a lot of spice, not necessarily hot spice though (even though hot spice was pretty damn common).

The spice actually added a lot to the vegetarian food. It was often easy to forget that you weren't eating meat.

Richard & Kiran could do a much better job describing the food of India then I ever care to.

The drinks on the other hand was something that I could get behind. There were two in particular: chai and fresh lime soda.

Chai is the fancy term giving to a blend of tea and milk that is often served sweetened. It was easy to obtain and cheap. It quickly became my caffeine hit of choice.

Fresh lime soda was even simpler. It consists of lime juice and club soda. It can either be served salty or sweet. I never thought I could enjoy a salty drink but fresh lime soda showed me the error of my ways.

Kiran and I loved the fresh lime soda so much that we bought these awesome lime juicers and plan to make our own in Canada.

Street Food

Now the food that one could buy off the street, I found that way more interesting. Here's a roundup of some of my favorites.

Sugarcane juice: They take a reed of sugarcane and grind it up. A juice comes out and they add ice and serve it to you. It is both sweet and refreshing

Pav Rhaji: They take tomato, potato, peppers, onions and water and mix it up on a wok. After a while the mixture becomes a fine paste. You then eat the paste with bread. It's actually really good and my favorite way to fill up cheaply in India.

Lasi: A sweet yogurt drink. It's usually blended with banana's or another fruit. Delicious.

Bhel Puri: Now this stuff is extremely elaborate for street food. It consists of multiple layers of rice, noodles, vegetables and sauces. The other thing about this stuff is that it is damn spicy. When I ate it I felt like I entered a form of delirium.

Religion

One thing that leaps out at you is how much religion is woven into everyday life. This is especially true for Hinduism, which most of the Indian population follows.

Hinduism is an odd religion because it's fairly different then what we're used to. It doesn't have a primary leader or even a primary book that outlines it. To complicate things further, it also has a huge amount of gods. However, each God is just an incarnation of an aspect of the primary god. So therefore, it doesn't matter which particular god you pray to.

Throughout India it's common to see random Hindu shines and temples along the side of the street.

One thing about Hinduism is that unlike western religions, it has no drive to convert others to it. For this reason Hindus aren't know for imposing their beliefs on others. Of coarse this isn't always true though. Like all religions there's going to be the radicals who make life difficult for everyone else.

Even though Hinduism is the predominate religion, it's still pretty common to see followers of Islam. No matter the city, you can often hear the Muslim prayers being played on mosque load speakers around prayer times.

Poverty

No matter how you look at it, there are lots of poor people in India. It's depressingly common to see families living openly in the side of the street with little or no shelter/possessions.

It's an odd site when contrasted against the wealth and comfortable living of many people in India. I now understand what the news means when it states that the very poor are not benefiting from India's economic success.

It also makes one wonder what can be done.

Autorickshaws

These are one of my favorite aspects of India. An autorickshaw is basically a little 3 wheeled buggy. It has a driver in the front and about 3 people can squeeze into the back.

Autorickshaws can come is slightly different sizes. Sometimes there's space for luggage/passengers in the back, sometimes there isn't. I've also seen them run on disiel, gasoline or even methane. Every so often you even get to see one that the owner has pimped out with lights, decals or a sound system.

Where ever you go your bound to see a lot of auto's, which makes getting around quite easy. Their cheap too (especially when split 3 ways).

Arranged Marriages

Of all aspects of Indian culture, I find arranged marriages to be one of the concepts most foreign to western culture. Here's a bit of info that I've gathered about them

First off they're a cultural thing, not a religious thing. All groups in India have arranged marriages.

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of arranged marriages, is that for the most part, the couple is not forced into the marriage. They have the final choice if they want to get married,

The way to think of arranged marriages is the parents are acting as the match makers. They try to find a mate which would good for their child and arrange a meeting. If the couple hits it off, a marriage is arranged. If the couple doesn't click, then they try again.

So I guess a lot of it has to do with how much you trust your parents to find you a good husband/wife.

Sports!

The sport of choice in India is undoubtedly cricket. It's extremely common to see kids playing it and any development in the professional league makes front page news. I even learned how to play it. Trust me, even though it looks like baseball, it's completely different.

Power Cuts

Random power cuts are a part of life where ever you go in India. It's almost expected that the power will go out for about 30 minutes everyday.

It's actually not as disruptive as you'd expect since everyone is pretty good at adjusting to it by now. Any vital things that require power usually have a handy back up generator to avoid problems.

The worst thing about the power cuts is that the fan/air conditioning is shut off. I don't know how anyone lived in India before these two inventions.

Language

Language hasn't been much of a problem. Due to the British influence, most people can speak some form of passable English.

However, that being said, Kiran's Hindi has made this trip way easier. Many of the minor difficulties can be quickly sorted out with much less hassle than if we couldn't speak the language.

This is especially noticeable when we are hanging out with other travellers. Kiran's ability to quickly sort out the issues with the waiters/buss driver/etc quickly makes him a hero.

Conclusion

India was an amazing trip. It was everything I expected and even more.

I was also surprised how problem free our trip was. Our only problem (getting the wrong train time) was completely our fault and easily fixed.

I enjoyed every city that we went, but I will have to say that Udaipur was my favorite. Not that the other cities weren't awesome, but I could have spent the rest of my summer chilling out at the roof top of our hotel.

Ok that's all for India.

Next Time: Singapore