Hello to all! My name is Chris Rendall, and in December of 2010 I went to India for 2 weeks with my friend Anup and his family.
The purpose of my visit was to see as much of India as possible, and to learn as much about its culture and people. It had been a dream of mine to visit India for quite some time before the opportunity to go actually came up. I had become quite obsessed with Indian music, and once my wife began cooking Indian food, I was hooked! When Anup, a friend of mine since childhood, told me in mid 2010 he was going to India in December (he is Indian so he and his family make regular visits to India), I jumped at the chance when asked to tag along.
Of course I had some initial reservations (despite the fact that not even a year before I had practically begged Anup to bring me along if the opportunity ever arose), such as the financial cost, medical and hygienic concerns, concern for person safety and wellbeing, and also the hardship of being away from my wife for 2 weeks. But in the end my desire to see India overwhelmed all my concerns.
This blog is a collection of my daily writing while in India, from the time of my arrival to departure. Knowing how bad I am at remembering details of things that I have experienced, I decided to keep a journal of my thoughts and experiences. I kept a paper journal, and then typed up my writings when I returned home (I didn’t want to carry my laptop to India). Because of this, this blog is not being updated real time, but was rather posted all at once after I had finished editing my writings. The purpose of these writings are threefold. First, for my own recollection. Second, to share with my family, friends, and others the things that I experienced and felt while in India. Third, to give information, advice, and inspiration to any who would consider venturing to India.
While the trip to India was an amazing experience, no trip is ever without its hardships or difficulties. I did a bit of editing, but I also tried not to censor times that I was feeling particularly upset or down. I think it will help those who have unrealistic expectations about India, and also those who want an authentic experience from the point of view of an American who has grown up in a somewhat sheltered life in comparison with the rest of the world.
I hope you enjoy this blog, and feel free to leave comments!
Today is the last day in Delhi. I woke up late this morning, around 8 AM. I pigged out at breakfast. You really never know when your next safe meal will be in India.
Below is a video tour of our hotel room here in Delhi:
Our first destination today was the Qutub Minar tower, the tallest tower in India. It was really awesome. The whole place reminded me of Greek ruins.
Our second stop was Humayun’s tomb, a tourist destination created from the tomb of the Mughal Emperor Humayun. Again the Mughals really outdid themselves architecturally, just like with the Taj Mahal. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Mughal’s burial sites receive the attention from their best and brightest, producing some of the most amazing structures in India, and in the world. As I have done and will continue to do in this journal, rather than butcher the history, I’ll give you links straight to the source.
The best part about Humayun’s tomb was the kids I ran into here. There were thousands of kids out and about all over Delhi today, with their backpacks and school uniforms. Apparently it was some city wide field trip day, although Anup says this is just a typical day in India. There had been tons of kids at the Qutub Minar tower, and the tomb was the same story. All the kids who walked by me wanted to talk to me, shake my hand, and ask me questions. A lot of them requested to take pictures with me, which I obliged as often as I could while still experiencing the place for myself. On our way out of the tomb, Anup and I found this large open field, and there were a ton of school kids eating their lunches and playing. When I walked into the field, I was instantly mobbed by about 20 kids. I picked up a ball that they were playing catch with and starting throwing it to them, and once other kids saw this they also came and joined in, and soon there was a whole army of them. Then they started to ask me questions: where was I from, was I married, did I have children, etc. One of the boys, a Sikh, was surprised when I said that I had “only one wife.” It was hilarious. Anup caught most of our time with the kids on video, it is my most cherished moment during my time in India.
Our third stop of the day was Raj Ghat, the memorial site where Gandhi was cremated. It is to Ghandi what the Eternal Flame is to JFK, and it also actually has a permanent burning flame in a glass encasement. It was an extremely peaceful place. The actual stone memorial is quite simple yet beautiful, and is adorned with arrangements of flowers of all different colors. When the flowers start to fade and die, they are replaced by new flowers in a new arrangement. The patterns are constantly changing every few days. According to the New York Times, Raj Ghat sees about 10,000 visitors per day. It did not seem like enough people were coming and going to equal 10,000 in a day, but perhaps that is because my brain has already become accustomed to huge groups of people as the norm.
Kneeling for photo in front of Raj Ghat
Close-up of the memorial, draped in flowers which are replaced weekly
Our last tourist destination in Delhi was the India Gate, the national monument of India which commemorates the 90,000 Indian soldiers who died while fighting for the British Empire during World War I. I will not go into much detail for this site due to the fact that, besides its size, I did not find India Gate all that impressive. Perhaps Indians are impressed by large monuments because for the most part, nothing is built very big here due to the need for space. I did hear that India Gate is quite impressive at night when it is all lit up, and have seen pictures as evidence of this.
We ran into a French college student at India Gate who we had already seen earlier at Humayun’s tomb. Here Anup and I sparked up a conversation with him. He told us he was traveling through India doing research for his masters thesis for graduate school. The thesis was on India’s infrastructure and traffic problems, and possible solutions. He was quite hilarious and suave, as would be expected of any true Frenchman.
I found a street vendor at India Gate selling bamboo flutes, one of the items on my list to buy as a present. Normally you do not find quality items from street vendors, so I was hesitant to approach him. But luckily there was already another person speaking with him and testing out his flutes. She was a music professor from Florida, an Indian from America with absolutely no accent, just like Anup. She was testing out the flutes to see which one she wanted to buy. After talking with her my confidence in the quality of the flutes led me to start bargaining with the vendor for the best price on the full size bamboo flutes. I bargained down from 750 rupees to 350 rupees, meaning I paid less than $10 for a flute worth much more than that in the states.
Me bargaining for the bamboo flute
I accomplished this drastic price decrease with a technique I had begun to master called “bundling.” I may have already touched on this technique, but essentially you conditionally attach your purchase to someone else’s purchase, meaning that if the price is not accepted, the salesperson will lose the business of 2 people rather than 1. Since I knew the woman from Florida already intended on buying a flute, I told the vendor that we would both buy flutes if he reduced the price to 350 rupees each. Of course he initially laughed, but once she got on board with the idea and he saw we were serious, he began counting his way back from 750 to 350 over the course of about 20 minutes. Something along the lines of “750…no…..675?....no, 300….500, best price……no, 300…..475?…..(walking away)…..ok ok my friend, how about 450? This is the best I can do…..no 300…..sir this is impossible….(walking away again)…….ok ok, 400….350 and it’s a deal….done.” It is very effective.
After we left the India Gate, we went to the airport to leave Delhi and head to Jaipur. The flight to Jaipur was only 40 minutes. Flying sure beats driving when you are in India.
Awesome
Jaipur is a city in the state of Rajasthan, founded on 18 November 1727. In 1853, when the Prince of Wales visited Jaipur, the whole city was painted pink to welcome him during the regime of Sawai Ram Singh. After the prince left, the city kept the pink color, and it became known as the Pink City. Even today, it still remains painted in pink, providing a distinctive appearance to the city. Jaipur was also the first planned city in India, and it definitely shows. Let me tell you, Jaipur was a breath of fresh air for me. It was so beautiful and organized, traffic flowed logically, storefronts were lined up in rows rather than haphazardly, and the pink color made everything seem very peaceful.
We landed in Jaipur at about 7:30 pm. We headed for our hotel, the Taj, which turned out to be even more amazing than our hotel in Delhi. When we arrived the hotel staff put a garland around each of our necks, which is similar to a Hawaiian lei, and the traditional Indian bindi, or forehead dot. Then they brought us iced tea while we were waiting for our hotel keys, which were not the modern hotel card key, but large medieval looking metal keys. Here we met up with Anup’s family for the first time since leaving Vadodara. I was very happy to see them again, I really enjoy their company and it was nice to talk with someone other than Anup (no offense Anup). Anup and I ate dinner at the hotel and his family sat and talked with us while we were waiting for our food. It was really refreshing because I had been in a really depressed mood since I arrived in Jaipur. I called Rachel from an STD booth on the way to the hotel from the airport, and hearing her voice for the first time in a few days made me feel more homesick than I have ever felt in my life. I wanted to be home so badly, even though the trip has been an amazing experience. In that moment I felt stupid for making the trip last 2 weeks. After eating dinner, I went to bed.
So begins one of the worst and best days of my entire life. Today we left Delhi at 6:30 AM to head for Agra, which is the site of the Taj Mahal, by car. The trip there was pure hell, and there have been few times that I have been that miserable in my life. I’m not sure I can possibly explain it in words, my pictures and video might do it justice. There was endless traffic and people. Everywhere you look, there are people. Imagine driving through west Texas, and every possible nook or cranny or horizon or random place you think someone cannot possibly be, there are people standing there. The distance is equivalent to driving from Houston to Austin, except there are people and cars and camels and carts and tractors literally on the highway, in your way. There is no such thing as right of way here. The fastest we went was probably 40 mph, and that only lasted 10 minutes or so.
Half horse half cow animal
Looking out the window
We had to go through a tollbooth early on in the trip. I have never seen so much selfishness and cut-throat driving in my life. There were about 5 lines to go through the toll, and it was going slow but moving. A man driving a cement truck was waiting in the middle line. To his left, he saw that a car had not scooted up all the way to the next car, and saw an opening. Rather than wait an extra minute to get through his own line, he took his truck and wedged it in the opening, his back end still blocking his original line. Once he did that he realized his truck was too big to fit through, and the man he cut off became angry and scooted up so he couldn’t back up. The man behind him in his original line, which was the line we were in, did the same. Now, even after all this, someone could have gotten out and helped everyone back into their original spots. But instead, the drivers in the farthest left line started pulling in front of the cement truck because he could not move forward to the toll and he created an opening. This kept going for about ten minutes, with each driver trying to be the first through the tolls. Finally the cement truck driver was able to pull through the opening and we moved again. I was so angry and frustrated I nearly screamed. I mentioned to Anup I had never seen such selfishness in my life, and he said that in New York it’s exactly the same. That’s why I love Texas.
Halfway there, we came to a temple that thousands of people were trying to get into. It caused a traffic jam of Biblical proportions, and it lasted 2 hours. Our driver tried to take a shortcut around it, and we ended up in worse traffic than before because everyone tried to take the same shortcut. Then we had to wait in traffic to get back to our original traffic. A car got into a wreck, and a crane had to lift him out because nobody could get to him. A man in the crowd going to the temple died from exhaustion, literally right in front of us. By this time I had begun to zone myself out and had my hat over my eyes, but Anup saw the whole thing. He died and then the people just picked him up like a doll and took him away.
Temple traffic
When we got out of the traffic jam, we had to stop at another toll booth. This was probably the lowest point of the whole trip to India for both Anup and I. Our driver pulled off to the side of the road near the tollbooth, in order to go make change. None of us had the correct change for the toll, and apparently they won’t make any change for you. In India, a common scam is that a person you are paying or buying something from will claim that they do not have change for your larger bill. Since obviously you cannot pay for less than the asking price, they will say that they will have to just keep the extra money since they cannot make change. Do not believe people who say this, and if they still insist on not having change, just walk away. If they actually do not have any change they will not pursue you, if they do they will come after you and act like they suddenly found some money.
Anyway, our driver got out of the car to go find someone with smaller bills. After he had walked a good distance from our car, a group of men approached our vehicle. They looked very suspicious and did not seem to have good intentions. One of the men had a monkey tied to a leash, and as he walked up to the car, the monkey jumped on top of our car. Anup was so amazed that he took a picture of it. Big mistake. As soon as he did that the guy began banging on the windows of our car demanding money for the picture we took of his monkey. When I say banging, I mean he was literally hitting the windows hard enough to bust the glass. We locked all the doors and ignored him, which made him even more angry and he began hitting the windows harder. Anup started screaming at him in Hindi, and then deleted the photo in front of him so he could see we did not want to keep it (I found out later Anup actually did not delete the photo). At this point the man tried to open Anup’s door. When that happened, I saw Anup start to make a fist because I think he had made the decision these guys were going to jump us, and our driver was nowhere to be seen. I just wanted to close my eyes and be home in Texas, I was fed up with India at this point and had reached my “wall”. A situation like this is so much different in the U.S. than in India. In the states I can dial 911 to get police help, I would probably have some sort of weapon on me, and I would not have to worry about being dragged away to some Indian torture camp to never be heard of again (I don’t mean to scare anyone, but these places exist). Nobody will find you if you disappear off the side of some remote Indian highway. Thankfully, our driver finally returned, the men dispersed, and we continued on our way. I would like to apologize in advance as this is the only video that I have posted in which I have cursed.
After this ordeal, we went to a diner off the highway that is known to be safe for foreigners. We were shell shocked from the previous experience, and needed to regroup. We ordered vegetable sandwiches and chai teas, and Anup called his dad. He did not tell him what had just happened because he did not want him to be worried.
We left the diner and continued on our way. The “3 hour” trip to Agra took almost 7 hours. It was the most terrible car ride I have ever been on. I reached a point closer to Agra where I just let go. I had no fight left in me to keep battling against this place. I put Bob Marley on my iPod, pulled my hat over my eyes, relaxed myself and I closed my eyes. When I woke up we were in Agra. It was a very powerful experience to go from feeling so incredibly overwhelmed, homesick, and just sick of everything around me to feeling this overwhelming sense of peace and acceptance. I think every foreigner who comes to India will agree that once you reach the “wall”, you either have to go home, or you have to let go and change as a person. I would love to say that this was the only “wall” I hit in India, but there were at least 2 or 3 times during my trip that I experienced this, each time having to go through the same process.
As hellish as the ride to Agra was, the Taj Mahal made the whole thing worth it in my mind. The sheer size, beauty, and intricacy of the Taj Mahal cannot be justly described in words. Everything you see has some sort of symmetrical counterpart, everything is built out of beautiful white stone with mosaic designs carved into them and filled with beautiful gemstones. Honestly there are just not words, so I will not spend much time on the place. All I can say is, if you go to India, please go to this place. I found out that there is a train that goes from Delhi to Agra, so as long as you can get a first class ticket, I highly recommend this over driving. No traffic to worry about when you are on a train, and it’s much more comfortable.
Entrance gate to Taj Mahal
Passing through the gate
Me and Anup
Money shot
Close up
Looking up at one of the 4 towers
Behind the Taj Mahal
Entrance to the Taj Mahal
After spending a few hours at the Taj Mahal, we left to go to the workshop where the original stones for the Taj Mahal were made, and where the same stones are still made for private sale. The place was amazing and we videotaped one of the workers carving out the white stone called Macrana and cutting the gemstones to match. Afterwards the factory owner gave us a tour of his adjacent shop where they sold the items they were producing in the factory. They had an amazing, but overpriced selection. While the prices were too high in my opinion, I knew that I would never again have a chance to buy carvings of that level of skill or authenticity in my lifetime. I bought a bird carving for my mom. The shop owner was incredibly pushy, first acting like our best friend, then all of a sudden asking us to buy things incessantly. As I said, I only bought due to the once in lifetime opportunity. Anup also bought a carving. We bargained down the price quite a bit before agreeing to buy.
We went to 2 other shops after the stone factory, our tour guide took us there. We did not buy anything else, the shops were extremely touristy. I had read before coming to India that tour guides work with shop owners, they take tourists to certain shops to get the foreigners to spend their money, and in return they get a cut from the shop owners. This was obviously happening to us, so we said we had no interest in buying anything else in Agra. We tipped our tour guide, grabbed some food, and left Agra. On the way out we saw another dead person being carried through the streets. This man was wrapped in cloth and was carried on a stretcher, I’m guessing it was a funeral service.
The trip back to Delhi took about 5 hours and was much less eventful than the trip to Agra. I slept and/or zoned out almost the entire way back. Zoning out is quite an amazing skill I’ve learned here, almost meditative in nature. I can literally make my brain lose track of time by focusing on nothing. It really became a necessary skill for my sanity. The sheer number of people and the bustling activity around me is mind boggling.
When we got back to the hotel I took one of the best showers of my life, and passed out cold. My video reflection of the day is below (warning, I am very tired and unshaven....aka not at my best)
Today was the day me and Anup split up from his family to go traveling on our own, heading to New Delhi as our first stop. This morning we had breakfast at our hotel then packed up all of our things to head to the airport.
The view from our hotel room window in Vadodara
The hotel lobby, our luggage all packed up and ready to go
Anup’s parents rode with us to the airport. His dad is really funny, he was in the front seat in the car with us as we were about to leave the hotel, and says “Ok have a good trip”, and then got out of the car and walked away. About 30 seconds later, he comes back, gets in the car and says “Ok I’m ready let’s go.” Turns out he wasn’t saying goodbye, just commenting that we should enjoy ourselves. We were wondering to ourselves why he gave such an abrupt goodbye.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but we have had thus far, and will continue to have, a personal driver taking us everywhere we want to go. He is in the car 24/7 at our disposal. When we don’t need him, he sleeps in the car until we call him. It sounds cruel by American standards but it is a good job in India, and people do not complain about their jobs in this country. When we arrive in Delhi there will be another driver waiting for us. Atul booked all the drivers through a travel company before we got to India.
We waited at the Vadodara airport for about 1.5 hours then boarded our flight for Delhi. We made a perfect landing in Delhi, thank God.
The Delhi airport is brand new and beautiful inside. It sounds bad, but I was so happy it didn’t smell like India (spices, dust, armpit). It smelled clean, like the states. The inside of the airport was so huge, and most of the space wasn’t being used. It was really bizarre, walking through these enormous open hallways that could have fit thousands of people. It almost seems like they built it that size just because they could.
When we got our bags and left the airport, we were picked up by our driver, his name is Sham. He speaks only Hindi, so Anup had to put his limited Hindi into practice to get around. When we were in Vadodara, which is in the state of Gujarat, everyone spoke Gujarati. Now that we were in what is called National Capital Territory of Delhi, the most common language was Hindi. Americans cannot really appreciate this fully until they’ve been to India, but it would like driving from Texas to Oklahoma and all of a sudden not being able to understand anyone. Sham is a pretty cool and relaxed guy, which is pretty hard to accomplish when you drive in India for a living. He lives with his wife and kid in Delhi, so he can go home at night when we don’t need him. The driver in Vadodara had to sleep in the car since he lived out of town. He wasn’t particularly talkative and so I never learned his name.
Sham drove us to our hotel. Even as a passenger, Delhi traffic is like hell on earth for me. Someone had the bright India to combine Indian style driving with western style stoplights, and it’s a horrible combination. In Gujarat, there was traffic everywhere, but it was very relaxed. Here the road rage is so bad that yesterday a man was stabbed during rush hour, which lasts from about 8 AM -10 PM here, with no relief.
We drove by a beautiful hotel, and I said to Anup “Wow, it would be cool to stay at that hotel.” Just as I said that Sham pulled into the parking lot of that hotel and I realized that was where I’m staying. It is called the Jaypee Vasant Continental hotel. It is extremely nice inside. The rate for the hotel is about 11,000 rupees per night for a room, which is about $240 per night. I would not have been able to stay in such luxury on my own, Atul was generous enough to cover the hotel rooms for both me and Anup. He said that because he would have paid the same price if Anup had gone alone, he did not want to make me pay since it was not costing him any extra. It was very thoughtful and definitely made the trip much more manageable, since even at the end of hectic days I had some comfort and cleanliness to return to.
The exchange rate is better at this hotel than it was at the airport, here I can get 44 rupees per dollar.
Our room has 2 beds, which is nice because previously we were sharing a bed in Vadodara. We had a flat screen TV, wood floors, desks, chairs, a very nice bathroom, and a water boiler. I used the water boiler the first night but I still ended up not drinking the water I boiled. I am that paranoid, I drink bottled only in this country.
After taking some time to rest in our hotel, Anup and I went to the Lotus Temple, which is a temple of the Baha’I faith, which I learned sometime after that Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight in The Office, is a part of. The Baha’I faith is a relatively new, monotheistic religion started by someone named Bahá'u'lláh', whom they consider a prophet. The temple itself is used for services of other faiths as well. In fact, on Fridays the temple is open only to Muslims.
The walk up to the temple was pretty breathtaking. The area surrounding the temple is beautiful and the temple itself is enormous and architecturally stunning. There were thousands of people coming and going from the temple. We moved close the temple and joined the line that was going into the temple. We had to take off our shoes to enter the temple, and there was a storage area underneath the walkway we were on where they were storing our shoes. Once inside, we were not allowed to talk or take pictures. There was a 15 minute prayer service that included readings from different faiths, the acoustics inside were pretty amazing. As soon as the service ended we were shuffled out and a new group was brought in.
After the temple, we went to the Dilli Haat market. It was a strange place, and very overwhelming. Americans feel very pressured in Indian markets because in the U.S. we can freely browse without harassment, and in India you are constantly hounded and as I said previously, anything you look at is immediately taken off the shelf and brought to you. You just have to get over it or it will drive you nuts and stop you from shopping altogether. The only thing that seemed worth buying in the whole place were these handmade silk and Kashmir scarves, but they were too expensive for me. They were about $40 each. Now, they were extremely high quality, handmade scarves from the Kashmir region of India, but I didn’t need one and I wanted to get out of there so the salesman would leave me alone. Anup bought one for his mom. It’s funny that people think that everything is cheap in India. I thought the same thing when I came here, and have learned this is not true. For quality items you pay quality prices. It might be much cheaper than the equivalent in the U.S., but it s not going to be dirt cheap. Also your likelihood of being scammed goes up exponentially when you try to buy something of quality in India.
The difference between the spending habits of Anup and I are starting to clash. Anup hates to think about what things cost, especially once he’s decided he wants it. When we are thinking about buying something, and I convert the price in rupees to dollars in my head, he gets upset because he doesn’t want to know. When Anup wants something, he buys it, and I’m just not that way. Also our whole mindset about spending differs a lot. His view on buying seems to be “If you have the money, why not?” We saw an extremely expensive car on the streets in Delhi and I commented that it seemed wasteful, and that was his reply, Why not? I am not saying that either of us are right or wrong, I just wanted to point out the differences. To me, luxury has no appeal. I will not dive too deep into it, but at my very core I see luxury as a liability, as something to worry about, to distract me. It’s just how I feel, I don’t know where it comes from because my parents also do not agree with me completely. I know I drove Anup crazy during the trip with my spending habits, sorry about that Anup.
After we left the market, we headed to the Red Fort. On our way there we stopped at the Chandni Chowk market, which is directly across the street from the Red Fort and named after the street it sits on.
I have never been in such a chaotic place. Everywhere there are people, buying and selling, yelling, spitting. Lights are blaring from blinking gadgets and shop fronts. Camels, scooters, motorcycles, and cars all pushing their ways through the crowds up and down the street. Besides a convent I saw in Vadodara, I saw the first operational Christian church so far on my trip in this market. It was a Baptist church, being run out of a storefront. It was quite strange to be honest, but I give much credit to those who were willing to do mission work in that chaos and set that place up.
We crossed the street to go to the Red Fort. We took an out of the way path to get to the entrance. To be honest I’m not sure the path we took was entirely legal but nobody stopped us. It was about this time I encountered my first cold night in India. Unfortunately I had no jacket and I hadn’t eaten much at all the entire day, so I was pretty numb. From the outside the fort looked amazing. Even though it was night time its red hue was striking, almost better than it would have been during the day.
We bought tickets for the “light show”, which we had heard so much about, and went into the fort. The fort itself was pretty amazing, but everything else inside, such as the marketplace, was pretty crappy in my opinion. I would not have even stopped in any of the shops, but I knew that opportunities to buy gifts for people would be rare. I bought a marble pipe here for my dad. We used the “walk away” technique to get a good price, and Anup bought one too. We walked the path through the fort, and made it to the light show on time.
I’m not going to lie, the “lightshow” was literally one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. I have no idea why people said it was good. Most people, including me and Anup, walked out after about 5 minutes. It was not a “lightshow” at all, at least not how Americans envision one. It was just a recorded speech played over a loudspeaker, and when a certain building in the fort was talked about, a light would shine on it so you knew it was the right building. That was literally it. Stupid.
Today was a relatively relaxing, uneventful day. We went to Miayagam Karjan, the village where Anup’s dad grew up. It was a small, overcrowded rural village. We saw the shop where Anup’s dad Atul used to work and where his father, Anup’s grandpa, still works and which he owns. We took a tour of the shop, where different types of oils and grains are sold. They still calculate on and keep records exclusively on paper, and there are receipts everywhere it seems.
They keep the byproduct of the oil they produce, which looks like patty made out of crushed grass, and feed it to cows. There were always cows waiting outside the shop to be fed, and I fed 2 cows by hand. When the first cow was feeding, the second one was behind him waiting his turn, and when he felt that the first one had enough to eat, he scooted forward and stuck his horns into the side of the first and moved him out of the way.
We didn’t stay long in the village because Atul is very popular in his village and causes quite a commotion when he returns. Coupled with the fact that he was with a tall blonde white guy and we were worried about getting mobbed. Word was already starting to spread and people were gathering around us. The village was already so crowded and hard to navigate we didn’t want to get stuck there, so we took off, stopping by Atul’s old house on our way out.
That night we went to a restaurant called Barbeque Nation for dinner. It is an upscale restaurant in Vadodara that wealthy people and foreigners eat at, because the food is good and the place is clean, and they serve meat that won’t make you sick. I ate the first meat of my entire trip here, a chicken shish kebab. I felt food deprived and really stuffed myself here.
To end the day, here is a funny video of Lopa. Backstory: she is terrified of birds. Just hearing them or seeing them flap their wings makes her nauseous. So, as any good brother would, Anup likes to make bird noises to make her sick. Probably one of my favorite videos of the trip.
Woke up late this morning around 9 or 10 and went down for the free breakfast buffet. I had Pav Bhaji, which is the equivalent of sloppy joes but with vegetables and naan instead of meat and white bread. They served chai but it was terrible, nothing like the homemade chai I had the day before.
After breakfast we decided to go to a shoe store, to see how the store employees would react when I asked for a shoe size of 13. My theory was that they would freak out or laugh, but Anup guessed they would get the biggest size they had and then try to convince me it was a good fit. He was right. When I said size 13, they said “Ok sir, no problem” and brought me a size 11, which is the biggest size they carry. He squeezed my foot into it and said it fit very well. I laughed, told him no, and took it off, and so he took me over to the foot measuring tool. They measured my foot and my toes went to the very last measurement notch they had on the tool. At this point he gave up and started helping Anup who was buying some sandals. Anup bought some really nice leather sandals for about $25. They don’t even make sandals of the quality he bought in the U.S., at least not for less than $100.
In India, real estate is very limited in the cities due to the high population, so it forces people to build upwards rather than spread out. In shops and stores in India, rather than keeping inventory in the back of the store like we do in the U.S., they keep it on a floor above the store in order to save space. There are holes in the ceilings and when the store clerk needs something he yells up through the hole and whatever he asks for gets throw down. There are employees who just work on the upper floor and are ready to grab whatever the guy on the bottom floor asks for.
After looking at shoes we bought some roasted peanuts from a street vendor and went back to the hotel. We all try to take somewhat constant breaks at the hotel to regroup and refresh. India is overwhelming.
After resting a bit we went back out and headed for the market in downtown Vadodara. It was so incredibly crowded and hectic, people buying and selling as far as the eye can see. I went into one of the hundreds of sari shops to buy a sari for Rachel. Inside the store there were hundreds of saris folded on the shelves. You tell the clerk what material, color, and pattern you like and he starts pulling saris off the shelves that are similar to what you asked for. Usually the method to buy one is to look at about 20-30 saris, which sounds like a lot but at the pace they pull them it only takes about 15 minutes. Then you separate about 5 of them that you like the most, then pick the best from those 5. They will keep pulling saris until you tell them to stop, and if you don’t, they will literally do it for hours. Anup told me that he went into a sari shop with his grandmother when he was a kid, and she spent 4 hours looking at saris while he sat there and waited. At the rate they pull saris, she could have looked at almost 500 saris!
You have to learn not to feel bad when people pull merchandise off the shelves when you are in India. If you are in a store, you don’t even have to say anything. If they see your gaze on something for more than a second they will grab it and bring it to you. They know that it makes foreigners feel guilty and that they might buy it out of guilt.
After we had walked around in the market, and realizing it’s nothing but the same crap being sold in store after store that look exactly the same, we left and went to Anup’s mom (Nita’s) old house that she grew up in. While she left India for America, her relatives still live in the house. We talked to the people there and then took a tour of the home. We took a lot of video here, as you can see below.
Next we went back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding reception, the 3rd and final day of the wedding. Now the attire was business casual rather than traditional Indian. I am told this is a relatively new development in Indian weddings and that in the past it was always traditional dress.
Went to the reception, which was similar to the ceremony. Just eating and taking pictures. At the wedding ceremony there were 2000 people, and at this reception there was a different set of about 1500 people, who were all from the grooms side. The actual ceremony was mostly composed of the brides side I came to learn. When it was over we went back to our hotel to sleep.
