Sorry for the delay in posting! I've really gotten into my online classes and am actually nearing an end in one of them. Nearing. But most of the time I've gotten on my computer I've used to write essays analyzing poems and U.S. Shipyards during WWII instead of my travel stories. BUT! thanks to Maggie, I'm going to try to fill in on the rest of my India trip!
The first week back in Bangalore from Rishikesh, I relaxed fatty style. Not much got done, a few school assignments here and there and some trips into town, did some shopping.
The second week, after feeling the need to try something new, I enrolled in a C programming course. Not that I have any interest in being a software programmer, I just felt it would be useful to know the basics of the way our computers, which have become so important to everyday life, work. Originally, they told me the class was from 10am-5pm Monday-Friday for one week and Monday-Wednesday the next. So when I went for my first day not knowing what to expect, it wasn't a good sign when they told me, after I'd gotten there, that class was to start the next day. I kind of expected some mishap like this. After all, I'd been in India for 3 months already and I understood the way things like this work. So the next day, as we were turning onto the street of the class, I got a call saying the class will start at noon that day. So I headed back home and go back two hours later. Class lasted half an hour. So by this time I'd developed a very bad feeling about the worthiness of this class. Fortunately the next day, the company owner had called his friend, who was a programmer and gave seminars to colleges and companies all over the globe on programming. So this guy was pretty qualified. A day or two short of two weeks later, I finally finished the class. It was interesting. I still don't think I'll be a programmer. I'm just not programmed to work on a computer all day.
Pumping through my classes, I got a month's worth of work done in 3 days. Granted, my classes are a million times easier than at home, but I was still proud of myself.
In mid march, Jensen returned to Auroville, this time for a full-length stay. For the weekend of his birthday, Mom, Murti, Me, and Pa headed for the land of Ze Mouzaire. The place is scorching hot, and wildly humid. We stayed at a beautiful spa in the middle of the jungle. Auroville is pretty amazing. The Portuguese and British, years ago, burnt down the forests for farming, eventually leaving the barren, red soil in the heat. The Aurovillians, starting in the 1968, have since planted over 200 million trees, returning the land to its natural jungle-like landscape. The first night, we went to an organization called Sadhana Forrest's camp for a presentation on how they restored a forrest and raised the aquifer level. We were also given a tour of the forrest, which had been terribly damaged by a cyclone earlier in December (as were their little huts), and free dinner and a showing of a great environmental movie called "The Man Who Planted Trees." Afterwards, Jensen and I went and hung out with some of his friends in their hut. We borrowed the friends motor bike to get back to the spa, met up with another friend for a little while, and went back to sleep.
The next morning Jensen and I had to wake up to take the friends bike back and get one for ourselves. We saw the kid when we got back to our camp. A girl had freaked out that morning when her bike went missing. The friend told her we had probably taken hers by accident. But how?
He had told us the night before to take his bike, which was parked under a tree out in front of the camp, and told us the license plate number and given us his key. Turns out under the tree is where everyone parked their bikes and neither Jensen nor I could remember the number. So we started sticking the key in ignitions, testing them all. We were surprised when the we got it within about 5 tries.
How could we have taken her bike when we took his bike? Well, the answer is unique to India. Instead of manufacturing bikes with distinct ignition holes, there are only a few possibilities for key holes for this model. So in places like Auroville, where bike rental places rent out only one kind of bike, chances are that your key will work for about 1/5 of the bikes out there. hahaha!
We met up with Janny and the three of us drove to a housing area. They have a nice little meditation center there with a pool of fish. Its the same kind of fish as in Thailand's Erawan waterfalls I think. You stick your foot in their, and they eat off all the dead skin, dirt, anything. Feels so strange but good, and makes your feet so smooth haha. Dad was on his way in the car, so we left to go meet him on one of the main roads. After meeting up with Pa, we drove just a little further down to the beach. A slightly cool beach, it had colorful old boats and lots o' folk. Walking in the sand, I just missed stepping on a rusty cluster of fish hooks. You always have to be on your toes in India. If you are barefoot, you have to watch you step every time.
Being the eve of Jensen's 21st birthday, we had to leave the parents to meet up with some of Jensen's friends at their camp. They had a bonfire going and were just hanging around without a real strong plan yet. Nobody really seemed all that enthusiastic about a big celebratory dealy. The time was tripping me out. Since all of India is one big time zone, sometimes the sunsets and sunrises are at times way early or late. It's especially weird because in summer at home, when it is warm enough to hang around at night at dark, the sunset is around 10. Here in Auroville, it was still plenty warm after the 6:00 sunset, so it seemed like it would be later than it was.
Anywho, after an hour or so of hanging around the fire, we slowly migrated to the youth center to get some food. There was nothing really happening there, so Jensen and I convinced everyone to head down to the beach and hang out there. While leaving, about four other folks decided to join us, and our fifteen minute ride down to the beach consisted of a 13 bike gang. Pretty awesome.
The beach party that some hotel was hosting that night ended up being cancelled, so we drove a little ways down the road looking for a random place to head down to the beach. About a kilometer or two down the way, we found a spot and walked down to the beach. Just 100 yards down the beach, loud music and light lit up the palm trees. how crazy that we pick a random place and it happens to have a big dance party right next to it like we were looking for. We hung out at our spot on the beach for about an hour before we got over to the club that was hosting the party. Unfortunately, they wanted 1000 rupees ($20) per person, which none of us had. Being Jensen's birthday, we somehow slowly got more and more people let through the gate for free. It got down to about 6 of the now only 9 or 10 waiting outside hoping they would let them in. Finally they agreed and let us all in for free. The club served free drinks and played the WORST, I mean the WORST dance mix I'd ever heard. It was actually quite funny. Throughout the duration of the night, they played Back in Black by AC/DC four times. FOUR TIMES. hahahaha!! Of the 100-150 people there, probably 10 were girls. It was a fun party just because it was something new though.
We stayed there for about 4 hours before we got too tired and had to get home. With the rest of the gang dispersing throughout the night, now Jensen and I went back alone. We stopped at the beach to take a quick dip. It got windy and incredibly cold afterwards. The drive back was pretty deep. I was driving, and after about 25 minutes, we were literally within 100 yards of our guest house. I almost took a wrong turn and in correcting it, we lost balance. Sadly, I couldn't pull us out of it and we hit the brush on the side of the dirt road. We fell forwards, me first and Jensen landing on top of me. Fortunately we didn't hit any rocks. But ohh the pain haha. We hobbled back up after a few minutes and got back to our guest house (100 yards away) right after. We took a quick swim and snapped some shots of the pristine pool setting. I couldn't decide if my toe, shoulder, hand, hip or elbow hurt the worst. They all had good competition. Jensen's fractured rib starting really hurting in the morning.
The next morning, Jensen's actual birthday, we had a reservation to go inside the Matrimandir, the meditation center in the heart of Auroville. Right next to a giant Banyan tree, this gold, spherical building is unreal. Inside, no talking is allowed whatsoever. The white marble and breath-taking finish reminded me of the control room of Halo 1. No joke. I was surprised I didn't see any covenant in there. In the meditation room, there is a little hole in the roof, where light is redirected by mirrors into the center of a huge glass orb. That light goes all the way through the center of the building and out the bottom onto another orb outside, underneath it. The place is unreal.
That day we just hung around the guest house for the majority of it. We ate dinner at a dank ol pizza place. They didn't serve beer. hahhaah. Auroville is a dry community, actually. What a place to celebrate your 21st birthday ;) Switched to a different hotel that night and left for Bangalore in the morning.
I was in Bangalore for about two weeks until any other trip. In that time, I worked on my classes, played some soccer, badminton and relaxed smoothly. Met up with a friend from our camel safari for a day before he flew back to London. My guitar teacher taught me a lot of cool stuff. I started playing a whole heap. There was a music festival going on in his hometown of Ooty one weekend, so we made plans to take a bus and go for a few days.
Unfortunately, the day we were supposed to leave, he had to stay to sign some papers for his new apartment. We'd already bought the overly expensive bus tickets and I still wanted to go pretty bad. Steve seemed kind of interested, so he took Mohan's ticket and went with me to Ooty.
Finding the bus was quite difficult. It was waiting right outside this giant bus station. Right outside, but I thought it was inside. So I went through it a few times looking and asking for the bus. When we bought our tickets, Mohan gave the travel guy his number, so about 5 minutes after we were scheduled to leave, the driver calls Mohan and asks where we are. He in turn calls me and asks where I am. Ahh! But we found it right in time!
To get to Ooty from Bangalore, you have to go through a animal reserve and jungle that they close to all cars and busses all night until 6am. There are six busses a night that they let through the jungle. And we luckily, got tickets on one of them. Or so we thought. We got to the reserve around 2 or 3 am and then stopped fro 4 hours. I was too dead and actually fell asleep, but Steve got up and walked around. We ended up getting to Ooty at 10am the next morning, 11 hours after we left on the 5 hour trip. Ay yay yay! hahah.
Mohan had given me a few numbers of friends of his that we could stay with once we got into Ooty to save us from the abnormally expensive hotel prices. So we called his rickshaw driver friend Paneer and set off for Melvin's house haha. We were hoping this was all arranged and expected. Luckily it was. We got to Melvin's and were greeted with open arms. His parents were incredibly nice. His dad was a music teacher for most of his life and was a king on the tablas, which was great to watch. They cooked us the dankest indian breakfast I'd had yet, some delicious egg masala. We left Melvin's around noon for the festival, after arranging with another of Mohan's friends to stay at their place for the night.
The festival was awesome. The music was very surprisingly cool. It was on top of a hill in the woods kind of. Trails through the trees connected the two stages. The festival was actually sponsored by MTV, so the production was very well done. The first band we heard was called Peter Cat Recording Company, from Delhi. Their bassist was the funniest looking dude. We saw them after the show and I had to get a picture with him.
We fell asleep listening to the next group. Not that it was boring or anything, but the solos from Sanjay Divecha's classical guitar were too relaxing after a night of back-paining bus ride. A crazy talented harmony group was awesome to listen to. They basically skatted in harmony, all saying the same syllables incredibly fast, while a man drummed with his hands at lightning speed. Next was a great 5 piece show, combing a violin, 2 guitars, a sitar and some drums and wonderful vocals. I pulled out my camera and asked the security guy if I could take a few pictures on stage for my magazine back in the states. He barely hesitated before saying..yes. Pretty tight. I was walking around on stage, getting pictures of these guys playing from all angles. Not too often you can do that in the States!
I tried the same tactics at the next show at the other stage and it didn't work. O well, at least it worked once. But this group was actually from San Fran, and they combined a Hindi singer with a DJ, and the mix sounded pretty cool. The singer was quite attractive, so even though the DJ just stood there with his computer, it was a great show hhaha. The finale was a Nigerian band, the big singer man had a classic costume, complete with about 15 other people playing flutes, drums, trumpets, guitar, all that jazz. Literally. When the music ended we left. The bar was to stay open until 2am, but we were not about to stay up. We called Mohan, who was still trying to work out where we could stay after our original people wouldn't answer their phone. After waiting a little while, he went us to the middle of town. Thinking we had somewhere to go from there, we just waited longer beacause nothing was fitting together. Finally he called with where we could stay and we met the guy out by his apartment. A couple guys from Sudan who were incredibly nice. He actually gave us his bedroom to stay in, a very gracious offer we thought. We joked about sleeping in really late because of how tired we were, but never thought we would actually sleep until 2pm. We slept all day! haha!
That next day, after thanking Yagout and McDirt thoroughly for their hospitality, we headed out towards the tea hills. Ooty has an elevation of about 7000 feet, so it doesn't get crazy hot like the rest of India. Another beautiful thing about it- the vegetation is very similar to what you see in the Pacific Northwest- big pine trees, ferns, and the like. They also grow tea on terraced hills all over Ooty. So we thoroughly enjoyed our all day hike to the top of one of the hills, which proved to be quite far.
We ended up at the top of a big hill at a mosque. The walk down was surprisingly quick, but the search for a guest house was not. Mom and Dad were going to drive drive to Ooty in the evening, so we only had only the next day to walk around aimlessly. And that's exactly what we did! We walked from one end of Ooty to the other, and stumbled on some cool stuff on the way.
I'd seen little street fiestas (as I like to think of them because they remind me of mexican street party dealies) a couple other times throughout India. This one was exactly what I'd been wanting to find for a while now. There was some important Hindu man coming to town that day, so the townsfolk had a little fiesta. They set up real loud speakers right in the middle of the street (but didn't close the street) and had a Hindi band singing. The men were everywhere, and dancing. I hurriedly found my way to a second floor balcony to get a picture of all the dudes. Steve, not expecting the insistance of the men, got caught in the middle of the dancing for about ten minutes. hahahaa. Dudes grinding up on him hahaha. Steve's on the right side in that one.
We got a sweet pirate looking glass thang in a cool shop. Further down the road was the beginning of the parade. The street cleaner (a truck with a huge tub of water and a big hose that drained onto the road, which then 'swept' the dirt off) to clean the street for the precessions. The horns and trumpets were super loud. We found our way to the railway station, and got tickets for everyone for the little train we were taking a few days later that goes through the countryside and back.
We found a little lake and rented a paddleboat. With the looking glass and an overly frequent 'Yarr!!' the indians in the other boats on the lake were quite amused by us. We met the parents at that place in the evening like we thought we would. They were still in shock from the sketchyyyy drive up the sketchyy road up the sketchyyy hill.
The next day, with the help of the car and Murti, we were able to cover a lot more ground. We took a little tour through a tea factory (which was quite delicious) and a few other places. We took Murti to try bumper cars, which he really did not seem to like in the end. That night before dinner was the first time I felt like home was getting so far away. Sitting next to a fire in an over 100 year old house made of wood (first wooden house I'd been in for a whileee) made me feel like I was never going home. It was weird.
We got the cute little train at 9 the next morning and were on our way home by 2. Right before leaving we ran into McDirt, who's house Steve and I stayed at a few nights before. Weird! Ooty was really cool. Like a little home away from home almost, it was a nice break from the typically overcrowded, flat, hot India I'd gotten used to.
I stayed back in Bangalore for just over a month after Ooty. I got back on April 11th and left again on May 15th. While at home base, I got tons of work done for my classes. Though I could have done a lot more, I'm very proud of myself. When you always have the choice of 'Do I do this today or tomorrow?' it is very hard to say 'Today!' and it's something I've learned to teach myself to do. I met a friend or two while playing soccer on the rooftop of the gym building. I went to a party with Mohan one night. The guy who's birthday it was turned out to be the guy we were supposed to stay with in Ooty. The truth came out a month later! haha. That night when they weren't answering their phones, Mohan had no clue what to do. He was on Facebook and saw an old friend of his, from Ooty, that he hadn't talked to in a while. He randomly asked for him phone number, called him up, and asked if a couple dudes could stay at his place, and Yagout didn't hesitate to say yes. Now that shows the mentality of India. How cool.
And so April came and went quite fast. May, however, was quite a different story. For organizational purposes, I'm just gonna put that in a different post.
YAR!
The first week back in Bangalore from Rishikesh, I relaxed fatty style. Not much got done, a few school assignments here and there and some trips into town, did some shopping.
The second week, after feeling the need to try something new, I enrolled in a C programming course. Not that I have any interest in being a software programmer, I just felt it would be useful to know the basics of the way our computers, which have become so important to everyday life, work. Originally, they told me the class was from 10am-5pm Monday-Friday for one week and Monday-Wednesday the next. So when I went for my first day not knowing what to expect, it wasn't a good sign when they told me, after I'd gotten there, that class was to start the next day. I kind of expected some mishap like this. After all, I'd been in India for 3 months already and I understood the way things like this work. So the next day, as we were turning onto the street of the class, I got a call saying the class will start at noon that day. So I headed back home and go back two hours later. Class lasted half an hour. So by this time I'd developed a very bad feeling about the worthiness of this class. Fortunately the next day, the company owner had called his friend, who was a programmer and gave seminars to colleges and companies all over the globe on programming. So this guy was pretty qualified. A day or two short of two weeks later, I finally finished the class. It was interesting. I still don't think I'll be a programmer. I'm just not programmed to work on a computer all day.
Pumping through my classes, I got a month's worth of work done in 3 days. Granted, my classes are a million times easier than at home, but I was still proud of myself.
In mid march, Jensen returned to Auroville, this time for a full-length stay. For the weekend of his birthday, Mom, Murti, Me, and Pa headed for the land of Ze Mouzaire. The place is scorching hot, and wildly humid. We stayed at a beautiful spa in the middle of the jungle. Auroville is pretty amazing. The Portuguese and British, years ago, burnt down the forests for farming, eventually leaving the barren, red soil in the heat. The Aurovillians, starting in the 1968, have since planted over 200 million trees, returning the land to its natural jungle-like landscape. The first night, we went to an organization called Sadhana Forrest's camp for a presentation on how they restored a forrest and raised the aquifer level. We were also given a tour of the forrest, which had been terribly damaged by a cyclone earlier in December (as were their little huts), and free dinner and a showing of a great environmental movie called "The Man Who Planted Trees." Afterwards, Jensen and I went and hung out with some of his friends in their hut. We borrowed the friends motor bike to get back to the spa, met up with another friend for a little while, and went back to sleep.
The next morning Jensen and I had to wake up to take the friends bike back and get one for ourselves. We saw the kid when we got back to our camp. A girl had freaked out that morning when her bike went missing. The friend told her we had probably taken hers by accident. But how?
He had told us the night before to take his bike, which was parked under a tree out in front of the camp, and told us the license plate number and given us his key. Turns out under the tree is where everyone parked their bikes and neither Jensen nor I could remember the number. So we started sticking the key in ignitions, testing them all. We were surprised when the we got it within about 5 tries.
How could we have taken her bike when we took his bike? Well, the answer is unique to India. Instead of manufacturing bikes with distinct ignition holes, there are only a few possibilities for key holes for this model. So in places like Auroville, where bike rental places rent out only one kind of bike, chances are that your key will work for about 1/5 of the bikes out there. hahaha!
We met up with Janny and the three of us drove to a housing area. They have a nice little meditation center there with a pool of fish. Its the same kind of fish as in Thailand's Erawan waterfalls I think. You stick your foot in their, and they eat off all the dead skin, dirt, anything. Feels so strange but good, and makes your feet so smooth haha. Dad was on his way in the car, so we left to go meet him on one of the main roads. After meeting up with Pa, we drove just a little further down to the beach. A slightly cool beach, it had colorful old boats and lots o' folk. Walking in the sand, I just missed stepping on a rusty cluster of fish hooks. You always have to be on your toes in India. If you are barefoot, you have to watch you step every time.
Being the eve of Jensen's 21st birthday, we had to leave the parents to meet up with some of Jensen's friends at their camp. They had a bonfire going and were just hanging around without a real strong plan yet. Nobody really seemed all that enthusiastic about a big celebratory dealy. The time was tripping me out. Since all of India is one big time zone, sometimes the sunsets and sunrises are at times way early or late. It's especially weird because in summer at home, when it is warm enough to hang around at night at dark, the sunset is around 10. Here in Auroville, it was still plenty warm after the 6:00 sunset, so it seemed like it would be later than it was.
Anywho, after an hour or so of hanging around the fire, we slowly migrated to the youth center to get some food. There was nothing really happening there, so Jensen and I convinced everyone to head down to the beach and hang out there. While leaving, about four other folks decided to join us, and our fifteen minute ride down to the beach consisted of a 13 bike gang. Pretty awesome.
The beach party that some hotel was hosting that night ended up being cancelled, so we drove a little ways down the road looking for a random place to head down to the beach. About a kilometer or two down the way, we found a spot and walked down to the beach. Just 100 yards down the beach, loud music and light lit up the palm trees. how crazy that we pick a random place and it happens to have a big dance party right next to it like we were looking for. We hung out at our spot on the beach for about an hour before we got over to the club that was hosting the party. Unfortunately, they wanted 1000 rupees ($20) per person, which none of us had. Being Jensen's birthday, we somehow slowly got more and more people let through the gate for free. It got down to about 6 of the now only 9 or 10 waiting outside hoping they would let them in. Finally they agreed and let us all in for free. The club served free drinks and played the WORST, I mean the WORST dance mix I'd ever heard. It was actually quite funny. Throughout the duration of the night, they played Back in Black by AC/DC four times. FOUR TIMES. hahahaha!! Of the 100-150 people there, probably 10 were girls. It was a fun party just because it was something new though.
We stayed there for about 4 hours before we got too tired and had to get home. With the rest of the gang dispersing throughout the night, now Jensen and I went back alone. We stopped at the beach to take a quick dip. It got windy and incredibly cold afterwards. The drive back was pretty deep. I was driving, and after about 25 minutes, we were literally within 100 yards of our guest house. I almost took a wrong turn and in correcting it, we lost balance. Sadly, I couldn't pull us out of it and we hit the brush on the side of the dirt road. We fell forwards, me first and Jensen landing on top of me. Fortunately we didn't hit any rocks. But ohh the pain haha. We hobbled back up after a few minutes and got back to our guest house (100 yards away) right after. We took a quick swim and snapped some shots of the pristine pool setting. I couldn't decide if my toe, shoulder, hand, hip or elbow hurt the worst. They all had good competition. Jensen's fractured rib starting really hurting in the morning.
The next morning, Jensen's actual birthday, we had a reservation to go inside the Matrimandir, the meditation center in the heart of Auroville. Right next to a giant Banyan tree, this gold, spherical building is unreal. Inside, no talking is allowed whatsoever. The white marble and breath-taking finish reminded me of the control room of Halo 1. No joke. I was surprised I didn't see any covenant in there. In the meditation room, there is a little hole in the roof, where light is redirected by mirrors into the center of a huge glass orb. That light goes all the way through the center of the building and out the bottom onto another orb outside, underneath it. The place is unreal.
That day we just hung around the guest house for the majority of it. We ate dinner at a dank ol pizza place. They didn't serve beer. hahhaah. Auroville is a dry community, actually. What a place to celebrate your 21st birthday ;) Switched to a different hotel that night and left for Bangalore in the morning.
I was in Bangalore for about two weeks until any other trip. In that time, I worked on my classes, played some soccer, badminton and relaxed smoothly. Met up with a friend from our camel safari for a day before he flew back to London. My guitar teacher taught me a lot of cool stuff. I started playing a whole heap. There was a music festival going on in his hometown of Ooty one weekend, so we made plans to take a bus and go for a few days.
Unfortunately, the day we were supposed to leave, he had to stay to sign some papers for his new apartment. We'd already bought the overly expensive bus tickets and I still wanted to go pretty bad. Steve seemed kind of interested, so he took Mohan's ticket and went with me to Ooty.
Finding the bus was quite difficult. It was waiting right outside this giant bus station. Right outside, but I thought it was inside. So I went through it a few times looking and asking for the bus. When we bought our tickets, Mohan gave the travel guy his number, so about 5 minutes after we were scheduled to leave, the driver calls Mohan and asks where we are. He in turn calls me and asks where I am. Ahh! But we found it right in time!
To get to Ooty from Bangalore, you have to go through a animal reserve and jungle that they close to all cars and busses all night until 6am. There are six busses a night that they let through the jungle. And we luckily, got tickets on one of them. Or so we thought. We got to the reserve around 2 or 3 am and then stopped fro 4 hours. I was too dead and actually fell asleep, but Steve got up and walked around. We ended up getting to Ooty at 10am the next morning, 11 hours after we left on the 5 hour trip. Ay yay yay! hahah.
Mohan had given me a few numbers of friends of his that we could stay with once we got into Ooty to save us from the abnormally expensive hotel prices. So we called his rickshaw driver friend Paneer and set off for Melvin's house haha. We were hoping this was all arranged and expected. Luckily it was. We got to Melvin's and were greeted with open arms. His parents were incredibly nice. His dad was a music teacher for most of his life and was a king on the tablas, which was great to watch. They cooked us the dankest indian breakfast I'd had yet, some delicious egg masala. We left Melvin's around noon for the festival, after arranging with another of Mohan's friends to stay at their place for the night.
The festival was awesome. The music was very surprisingly cool. It was on top of a hill in the woods kind of. Trails through the trees connected the two stages. The festival was actually sponsored by MTV, so the production was very well done. The first band we heard was called Peter Cat Recording Company, from Delhi. Their bassist was the funniest looking dude. We saw them after the show and I had to get a picture with him.
We fell asleep listening to the next group. Not that it was boring or anything, but the solos from Sanjay Divecha's classical guitar were too relaxing after a night of back-paining bus ride. A crazy talented harmony group was awesome to listen to. They basically skatted in harmony, all saying the same syllables incredibly fast, while a man drummed with his hands at lightning speed. Next was a great 5 piece show, combing a violin, 2 guitars, a sitar and some drums and wonderful vocals. I pulled out my camera and asked the security guy if I could take a few pictures on stage for my magazine back in the states. He barely hesitated before saying..yes. Pretty tight. I was walking around on stage, getting pictures of these guys playing from all angles. Not too often you can do that in the States!
I tried the same tactics at the next show at the other stage and it didn't work. O well, at least it worked once. But this group was actually from San Fran, and they combined a Hindi singer with a DJ, and the mix sounded pretty cool. The singer was quite attractive, so even though the DJ just stood there with his computer, it was a great show hhaha. The finale was a Nigerian band, the big singer man had a classic costume, complete with about 15 other people playing flutes, drums, trumpets, guitar, all that jazz. Literally. When the music ended we left. The bar was to stay open until 2am, but we were not about to stay up. We called Mohan, who was still trying to work out where we could stay after our original people wouldn't answer their phone. After waiting a little while, he went us to the middle of town. Thinking we had somewhere to go from there, we just waited longer beacause nothing was fitting together. Finally he called with where we could stay and we met the guy out by his apartment. A couple guys from Sudan who were incredibly nice. He actually gave us his bedroom to stay in, a very gracious offer we thought. We joked about sleeping in really late because of how tired we were, but never thought we would actually sleep until 2pm. We slept all day! haha!
That next day, after thanking Yagout and McDirt thoroughly for their hospitality, we headed out towards the tea hills. Ooty has an elevation of about 7000 feet, so it doesn't get crazy hot like the rest of India. Another beautiful thing about it- the vegetation is very similar to what you see in the Pacific Northwest- big pine trees, ferns, and the like. They also grow tea on terraced hills all over Ooty. So we thoroughly enjoyed our all day hike to the top of one of the hills, which proved to be quite far.
We ended up at the top of a big hill at a mosque. The walk down was surprisingly quick, but the search for a guest house was not. Mom and Dad were going to drive drive to Ooty in the evening, so we only had only the next day to walk around aimlessly. And that's exactly what we did! We walked from one end of Ooty to the other, and stumbled on some cool stuff on the way.
I'd seen little street fiestas (as I like to think of them because they remind me of mexican street party dealies) a couple other times throughout India. This one was exactly what I'd been wanting to find for a while now. There was some important Hindu man coming to town that day, so the townsfolk had a little fiesta. They set up real loud speakers right in the middle of the street (but didn't close the street) and had a Hindi band singing. The men were everywhere, and dancing. I hurriedly found my way to a second floor balcony to get a picture of all the dudes. Steve, not expecting the insistance of the men, got caught in the middle of the dancing for about ten minutes. hahahaa. Dudes grinding up on him hahaha. Steve's on the right side in that one.
We got a sweet pirate looking glass thang in a cool shop. Further down the road was the beginning of the parade. The street cleaner (a truck with a huge tub of water and a big hose that drained onto the road, which then 'swept' the dirt off) to clean the street for the precessions. The horns and trumpets were super loud. We found our way to the railway station, and got tickets for everyone for the little train we were taking a few days later that goes through the countryside and back.
We found a little lake and rented a paddleboat. With the looking glass and an overly frequent 'Yarr!!' the indians in the other boats on the lake were quite amused by us. We met the parents at that place in the evening like we thought we would. They were still in shock from the sketchyyyy drive up the sketchyy road up the sketchyyy hill.
The next day, with the help of the car and Murti, we were able to cover a lot more ground. We took a little tour through a tea factory (which was quite delicious) and a few other places. We took Murti to try bumper cars, which he really did not seem to like in the end. That night before dinner was the first time I felt like home was getting so far away. Sitting next to a fire in an over 100 year old house made of wood (first wooden house I'd been in for a whileee) made me feel like I was never going home. It was weird.
We got the cute little train at 9 the next morning and were on our way home by 2. Right before leaving we ran into McDirt, who's house Steve and I stayed at a few nights before. Weird! Ooty was really cool. Like a little home away from home almost, it was a nice break from the typically overcrowded, flat, hot India I'd gotten used to.
I stayed back in Bangalore for just over a month after Ooty. I got back on April 11th and left again on May 15th. While at home base, I got tons of work done for my classes. Though I could have done a lot more, I'm very proud of myself. When you always have the choice of 'Do I do this today or tomorrow?' it is very hard to say 'Today!' and it's something I've learned to teach myself to do. I met a friend or two while playing soccer on the rooftop of the gym building. I went to a party with Mohan one night. The guy who's birthday it was turned out to be the guy we were supposed to stay with in Ooty. The truth came out a month later! haha. That night when they weren't answering their phones, Mohan had no clue what to do. He was on Facebook and saw an old friend of his, from Ooty, that he hadn't talked to in a while. He randomly asked for him phone number, called him up, and asked if a couple dudes could stay at his place, and Yagout didn't hesitate to say yes. Now that shows the mentality of India. How cool.
And so April came and went quite fast. May, however, was quite a different story. For organizational purposes, I'm just gonna put that in a different post.
YAR!
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