Dwali Mubarak ho!

So today is Diwali, which is, as far as I can tell, the Christmas of India. Last night at the program house we had a puja, before which I volunteered to be the culturally clumsy white kid to perform. I offered a lot of food to Ganesh and Lakshmi, though I almost put the sweets behind the figures instead of in front of them. It was a significant faux pas, and the stupidest thing I did.

However, before the puja, I was put on the task of painting little feet throughout the house. The paint was made of spices and water and we had to put little feet in every doorway. They were so cute and tiny. In the next post, I'll put together a bunch of pictures from the night.

Post puja we went outside to set of fireworks, and I stepped on a sparkler(just like that time in 4th grade. Remember, Mom?) and it hurt, though it by no means ruined my night. It was a fun time. Tonight, apparently the fireworks will be crazy ridiculous and seen throughout the city. Diwali is also called The Festival of Lights, and apparently it's incredibly beautiful. I have no doubt that it will be.

I, however, am going to a special Diwali dinner with the woman I will be interning for at the elementary school. I am really excited, though entirely sure I will make a fool out of myself somehow. It's only a matter of time, really.

Okay well I'm off to clean my room. Happy Diwali everyone!

-allison

My Roommate Chris: The Iron Chef of Sweets

I had deep fried cookie dough last night. With a Cadbury chocolate center.

That's all.

Survey Post

In the last week, number of times seeing...
A dead dog: 2
A dead mouse: 1
A dead cricket: 80 billion
A mouse in my room: 6
A mouse in my bed: 2
Ants carrying other dead ants: 80 billion
Two men making out: 1 (It blew my mind)
The biggest spider in the world: 2

In last week, number of times eating/drinking...
Bugs by accident: 3
Food that I knew had bugs in it: 2
Amazingly delicious food: 2
Tuna melt: 1
Homemade mango juice popsicles from our freezer: 4
Chai: 40
Lassi: 4 (The lassiwalla on my corner and I are best friends. For real.)
Free meals: 11

In last week, number of times feeling like a complete fool...
In front of my Urdu professor: 30 (Sub point: Number of times Urdu professor has put his forhead on the table in what I can only guess is frustration: 8)
In front of my Hindi professor: 10
In front of any Indian: 200

In last week, number of...
Children talked to: 10
Misconjugated tenses: 75
Overeager rickshaw wallas: 20
Teenage boys that gawked at me and whispered in Hindi (during interviews): 36
Teenage boys that gawked at me and whispered in Hindi (outside of research): 50
Number of kids who speak better English than I do: 22

That's all I have to say. I thought of this list when I was riding my bike by dog carcass number two. I figured it was a susinct way of communicating to you all what my current life is like.

As a side note, I want to congratulate my brother on getting a job as a contributing editor at WIRED Magazine. In addition to being employed, he's like the coolest guy I know.

-allison

Super Shiny Flickr Page

Hey everyone, so there's that nifty slideshow thing I added (after an uncharacteristically significant amount of time spent yelling at my computer) in the top right corner of my blogger page. It's great, right? Well, there's more where that came from!

If you click on it it should send you right on over to my Flickr account page, whoes URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahcarney/.

Good luck getting there and understanding my organization method. Flickr only lets you have three big groups of pictures with labels, so you're going to have to sift through everything. Have fun!

God, I hate formatting.

-allison

Everything in India Either Doesn't Work or is on Fire

So I'm going to have to go over lots of things in this post. Here is a quick table of contents:

Chapter One: Mussoorie
Chapter Two: The Train Back to Banaras
Chapter Three: My New Apartment
Capter Four: Motorcycle

Chapter One: Mussoorie

After a few days in the town, we discovered a restaurant named Kalsang's.

Before I really delve into Kalsang's cuisine, I need to make something very clear. I don't think when I say this it will have the weight it deserves, but I'll give it a try. There isn't cheese in India. Take a moment with that sentence. In India, there isn't cheese. Think about the implications for almost every meal Americans eat.

Yeah. It makes me hate everyone in the States, including my former self.

Okay, so in this restaurant, which had Tibetan and Chinese food, there was one dish that I got every time. It's name was Spinach and Cheese Momos (to get them fried was a 5 rupee charge- needless to say they were always fried). Was the cheese definitely Velveeta? Yeah. Have I had better momos? Sure. Were they the best godamn thing to grace this planet? Definitely. I ordered them to the hotel three times, and ate them at the restaurant at least six. This means that out of the 15 days I was there, I ate them on a total of nine days; If you had caught me on any day, the chances that I had eaten or was planning on eating Spinach and Cheese Momos (fried) would be 60%. Sadly, I have no photos of them, and I apologize for that.

Another culinary experience we had was ordering Domino's in Mussoorie. Domino's in Mussoorie wasn't always bad, but it was definitely not always good. The first time we ordered it we decided to go out on a limb and order the "Cheese Burst" pizza. It was 20 more rupees, and everyone was hoping that it meant stuffed crust. The following is what it actually was.








Now, this was straight-up melted white Velveeta cheese (same as the momos, except this is disgusting) poured on the pizza. And though we ate it, we also admitted it was a grave error in judgement. As of right now, it's sort of a sore spot in the group and whenever anyone brings it up it's more in remorse than anything else.

Despite the culinary highs and lows, the view from Mussoorie were amazing. Here are a few photos to sift through.

That final picture is the view from where we had class every day. It's okay with me if you hate me for a minute while you click on that and maximize the window.

Chapter Two: The Train Back to Banaras

The train itself didn't have much special about it. I, obviously, spent a lot of time sitting in the doorways and listening to music. Though, I will say that this time I got two very extreme reactions. One woman, after giving me a stern talking-to in Hindi about, I can only assume, the danger involved in sitting there, left in a motherly huff. After about ten minutes she came back, but with candy. I gladly took the candy, a kind of spicy tamarind candy that vaguely reminds me of whiskey, and thanked her, telling her it was my favorite candy. The first time I had it, by the way, I was disgusted by it. Now I think it's delicious. It's also two for one rupee, which is great. The other reaction I got was full on screaming by a man who was personally offended by what I was doing. He, like the man on the train to Mussoorie, told me he would be back in five minutes. Like before, I didn't move, and I never saw him again. I'm starting to think India's made up of garbage, goats, and empty threats.

The one truly amazing thing to happen on the train was the fact that Virendra, my Hindi teacher, was given a puppy in Mussoorie, and he had to take it back on the train. He named it Woody. the first picture is of the three boys and the puppy, with the second being the puppy lying on Sam's tummy. I can't even talk about how cute this dog was. It was incredible.

Indian trains are absurdly crowded. The tickets usually get messed up and people usually get on earlier than they are supposed to. The result of this is that many people don't have a place to sit, so they stay in the connections of the train and everything's very crowded and uncomfortable. But, that all changes when a white girl walks through carrying a small animal wrapped in a blanket. Everyone thinks it's a baby, and every single person clears out. It's incredible. I will use this technique on every train ride from here on in.

Chapter Three: My New Apartment

Due to a variety of reasons, chiefly the fact that my old apartment didn't have a kitchen and my room had three doors, I decided to move out. I got an apartment in Assi Ghat (the Western part of Varanasi) which is a lot busier than my old neighborhood, and overall more fun. Here are two pictures of my apartment: my bed and my bathroom respectively.

My first move in my kitchen was to make Macaroni and Cheese, due to the lack of cheese problem previously mentioned. Here is the glorious (yet fuzzy) picture of that.

The next day I made salsa with Ed and then added it to a batch of scrambled eggs I was making. It sort of looked like tabouli, but it was totally delicious. I have three people who can attest to that. I make damn good Indian salsa.

My new apartment is pretty perfect. I love the kitchen and the refridgerator and my bathroom and even my mouse roommate. I haven't named him, but I've seen him about four times in three days. So far, he's been okay. The biggest problem with roommates is a ridiculous ant infestation reminiscent of a story my brother told me a few years ago about his ants carrying a gecko up the kitchen wall to their lair.

Yeah, it's a lot like that.

Chapter Four: Motorcycle

So Pandit-Ji (he runs errands for the program and is generally awesome. For the purpose of this story it is important to know that he speaks no English.) fetches me a Royal Enfield mechanic and brings him to my house. The man and him talk for a few minutes in front of me; I understand about 1/5th of their conversation. Pandit-Ji then finesses me and the mechanic into a rikshaw and we go to my old apartment. Before we leave the mechanic asks Pandit-Ji if I know Hindi. He says yes. This is the first mistake made.

It takes about ten minutes to get to my house, and I ask the mechanic what his name is. He says Rajesh. He asks me my name, and I say Anamika (my Hindi name that everyone loves). We don't talk for the rest of the ride.

At the apartment Rajesh fiddles with the bike, but mostly just talks really fast with a lot of pan in his mouth. Pan can be found in two forms in India, a leaf wrapped around a betel nut and some other goodies, or little packets found on carts on the side of the road that look very much like strips of condoms. In any case, I can understand very little Hindi, and even less when there are two ounces of red mush in someone's mouth. We have a brief conversation, and he tells me I need a new battery. I ask him how much it is, and he says it costs 1700 rupees. That's about 1500 more than I am willing to spend on this 30-something-year-old bike. I ask him to charge the battery first, and he agrees. We then walk to his shop. His shop is a 15-minute walk away without a 400 pound motorcycle that won't turn on. He laboriously walks my bike there, and I, still getting stared at by everyone, walk next to him feeling terrible the entire way.

We get to the shop, and he proceeds to take apart the headlight, the undercarriage, the seat, pretty much everything, while this battery is charging. After three hours (I left and came back) the bike can turn on. I make excited-white-girl noises and him, his guru-ji (Dinesh) and four children stare at me. I smile and promptly look away. He revs the engine a few times and things are looking up. Then the clutch falls off. Just clean off the bike. It's just really great.

He says he can repair it in five minutes. He leaves on his bicycle to get the part and I stay behind with Dinesh, talking to him about his family and where he lives. From what I gather, Dinesh is Rajesh's uncle (the son of Rajesh's grandma) and though they don't live together, they eat together. I dont understand, but he thinks I did.

Rajesh returns and after another 15 minutes he's back. I pay him with all I have, but I need to get more rupees. I tell them that I will leave, alone, and then come back in ten minutes. I say alone because it seems as if they really wanted Rajesh to come with me, but I felt that I would be better if I traveled without someone on the back, seeing how inexperienced I am. In retrospect, I probably should have taken them up on their offer instead of deciding to go alone. However, this is the first time I have driven on Indian roads and I will say that I did a damn good job. I didn't hit anyone or thing, and I only stalled out once. When I got back to my apartment, however, it was a completely different story.

There is a little ramp (at a 45 degree angle and about 2 feet high) to get up to the apartment, and I thought I could ride up it. That, after try two, was apparently incorrect. After try one, I'll take a gander that only six men were around me. After try two where I almost fell off the edge of the ramp into a gully, I'll guess somewhere around thirty. After a few minutes of watching the white girl with the kickass bike, one Indian man handed someone his baby and walks it up the ramp. Was I ashamed? Less so than when I was hit by a motorcycle, and not much more than I am on a daily basis. So, I get my money from inside and then I have to bring the motorcycle back down the ramp. At first I walk really slow with it, and everything seems okay. Then the motorcycle starts going faster than I want and almost falls over. Five children run over to hold it up and straighten it out. I am absurdly grateful. The same men from before are still there. They are actually rolling on the ground laughing.

I get on the bike and one thing is clear. I don't have a clutch. Somewhere between getting to my house and leaving my house the part totally snapped. I instantly blame the mechanic until I see that the cement of the part snapped. The cement. When I almost fell into the gully, I must have hit the clutch on the gate and boken it. Anyway, I was pissed. Then I walked it back to the mechanics, incredibly angry. It took so long and I was sweating more than any analogy I can make. I get there, he replaces it, I meet an Israeli who's greatly impressed with my bike, I pretend as if I've had it for ages, I pay Rajesh, and I take off. I get back to the house and walk it up the ramp, revving it the whole way, without incident. It takes one try and I even do it with some limited agility. After all this, I'm feeling pretty good about my skills.

This morning I walk it down the ramp also without incident, and try to start it. The battery is dead again. I try a few more times, but give up rather quickly. An Indian man (they love helping white girls with their motorbikes) tries to start it, but can't. He shrugs and starts to walk off. Before he does I yell to him to ask him to help me walk it up, for without the bike on I don't have the engine to help me. He does it deftly and quickly, and the men who work across the street are still laughing, but I have an in tact clutch and somewhat in tact pride, so I feel like I won.

In short, I'm over the bike. It's too expensive and I can't deal with it. I think I'm going to give to Daya, who's the guy who helped me retrieve the bike from the rail station, sometime in the next week. It's too bad because the bike's totally badass, and I really do love driving it. But frankly, I'd prefer one that works. In any case, I think this might be the final chapter for me and the bike being together. I'll miss it, but I can make do with my bicycle.

Well, that's about it for now. For the next few days I think I'm going to spend a lot of time in my apartment watching movies and reading. I plan on avoiding all the Indian men whom I've met recently. They've all been friendly and therefore very disconcerting.

-allison

Hot Dogs in India: Yay or Nay?

I am getting on a train to return back to Varanasi in a few hours, and I will be back and settled in a few days. I am so excited for the train. Oh man, so excited.

This entry will not be an epic one, but I do promise return to my absurdly long, photo ridden entries soon. Therefore, I will not be writing a very long entry about Mussoorie quite yet. I will, however, include one very important note.

I have heard more Enrique Iglesias in the last two weeks in Mussorie than I have in my entire life combined. And I'm including 8th grade.

I'll write soon.

-allison