How To Get To India:

1.Brave the snow of CB and head over to Eppley Airfield Omaha.


2.Keep cozy in the Minneapolis airport to avoid the snow storm outside.


3.Take the orange line into Chicago. Enjoy the sights and snow in the windy city.


4.Depart your aeroplane at London's Heathrow and relax because you've FINALLY outran that damn winter storm.


5.Wohoo! You're in Chennai now.

Jaipur Again

Since we didn’t really get a chance to see the city while passing through for orientation, we had decided to take the overnight bus back to Jaipur, Friday after class. After staying in for travel recovery the weekend prior, my first weekend excursion was kicked off with a nine hour bus ride back the way I’d come from. For under US$5, I got to ride alongside Devo in an (actually quite comfy) sleeper class double bed. We had two large windows right beside us, but the thirty to fifty minute long stops at every other highway town’s bus stations meant no window air flow AND no AC for large portions of the night. Add in the twenty note (believe it) novelty song horn our driver frequently relied, and you start to see the cruel irony in designating a section of the bus as ‘sleeper’ (though we had a private door so it was actually quieter than the train’s sleeper class).

We got into Jaipur around 6am, a little groggy and a lot lost. There were rickashaw and tuktuk drivers sleeping in their vessels everywhere. Taking care not to wake any for fear of being mobbed by the dozens (“Yes hello! Ok hello! Hello; Where you go? I take you hello tuktuk my tuktuk hello lets go yes”), we walked to our hotel – the one we’d read about in the book (Lonely Planet India Guidebook, “Evergreen Hotel, it’s like a backpacker’s haven meets dorm hall”) – taking directions from a group of very hardcore-looking-travelers from New Zealand who’d overslept on their bus for six hours and ended up at the end of the line, standing next to us in Jaipur.

Once to the Evergreen, I fought the urge to flop, opting instead to read in the lobby. I met two Koreans and another English girl and made significant progress on my book, yet still fell asleep on the lobby couch (incidentally, in the exact same spot the English girl had been sleeping). The lobby staff must’ve been amused. This was like a dorm hall.

Once we’d all rested enough to fool our bodies into thinking they could handle the sun again, we set off for the famous Jaipur shopping scene. There are many Western name brands stores throughout the city proper but the real fun is in the chaotic and crowded (words that can describe anything Jaipur-related) bazaar alleys within the city walls. My haggling skills weren’t quite developed by then and I realized days later (and sometimes instantly) how many rupees I’d go about overpaying all day. I did, however, find an econ book I’d been looking for forever (US$6!) and the prices at McDonalds were thankfully fixed.

Despite deciding against paying the ridiculous ‘foreigner’ charges to enter the main historical sights, we did manage to get a good (and free) view of the city. While waiting at a street corner, a man complemented me on not spending money on a guidebook and drawing my own tourist map (I traced it out of the Lonely Planet, now sitting in Magnus’ backpack) and gave us directions up a back alley spiral staircase leading to a rooftop panorama of the entire Jaipur old city and surrounding forts and mountains.

We were soon joined by three Europeans who’d also caught the local tip. When two Indian men then came up the staircase, I thought we’d just been had and had blindly walked into an elaborate mugging scheme. We were trapped on the rooftop so I decided to talk to one of the guys (cause friendly people never get mugged) who turned out to be a gem dealer, owner of the whole building complex, and not a criminal. He invited us into his office (a big one behind a big jewelry showroom) and we only left after another of his friends entered the office and locked the door behind him, thinking we were probably about to get jumped or sold into the sex trade or both (probably how that guy afforded such nice shoes).

The Jaipur McDonalds was packed each of the four times I visited. By the looks of it, I think eating there is a sort of hip thing to do for the younger generation of upwardly mobile Jaipurians (the girls who wear jeans). Maharajahs are the fifty two heads of the millennium old nobility lines throughout the state, which is why Rajasthan is called “The Land of Kings.” Even today they command great wealth and far reaching influence (though Indira Ghandi stripped them of their nobility titles forty years ago). The largest sandwich on the Indian McDonalds menu is called ‘Maharajah Mac’. Even by the standards of a kid who went to public school and grew up in the microwavable nineties, the chicken on all the sandwiches was horrible, especially the Maharajah Mac. That didn’t stop me from dining Mickey D’s a handful of times, as I don’t not mind fake chicken and it was, after all, the fourth of July so McDonalds just seemed appropriate.

And what a fourth it was! As the Fore Fathers would’ve wanted, we celebrated by drinking Indian beer on the roof of the backpacker’s hotel with a Japanese guy, an English woman, and a pair of French girls, listening to the music of a nearby Hindu wedding, and cheering some whenever fireworks went off (there were a few). Happy birthday Amurika (and Nolan).


^Speaking of America, there are many of these giant six story malls around the bustling parts of Jaipur. After visiting two, it was discovered that they are almost completely devoid of shops, save for the first one and a half floors. They look nice, at least.


^Took a tuktuk out to Bani Park to see the in-home studio of one of India's late great potters who also won the "Best Indian Citizen" some years back for bringing world class art back to Jaipur.


^The building that's featured on many a Wikipedia page on both Rajasthan and Jaipur (meaning it's a big deal).

The Darjeeling Limited

Breakfast in Jaipur, while tasty, was consumed in relative silence. We received some last minute encouragement from the girls before they sent off to work with classes of their own. Thinking we would be given teaching responsibilities of our own within a day, an air of anxiousness draped our mini volunteering squad throughout the twenty minute ride to the Jaipur IDEX office.

Of course, this didn't prevent us from being able to skillfully pack ourselves, our luggage, AND our translator, Sohan, the newest member of our troupe, into a standard (small) sized tuk tuk. Sporting a baseball cap, tennis shoes, and a pressed collared shirt, the skinny thirty something Jaipur native had been an IDEX guide for some years before meeting us via human tuktuk compacting that morning. The project manager of IDEX Kanjar Camp Jhalawar since the program began accommodating foreign volunteers three years ago, Sohan is a typically quiet, respectful guy with a subtle sense of humor and a love for all sports Indian (cricket, carrom, badminton, etc). The children of the villages his project oversees run out to cheer him whenever his 100cc Hero Honda motorcycle is heard approaching the school house.

After another round of orientations and Hindi lessons, we broke for lunch with the Himachal volunteers (chatted with some punk-hardcore looking Spaniards and a few Dutch girls whose skin had already started to lose the ongoing battle against the relentless Indian sun). As we waited for our transport to the Jaipur train station, the electricity, which had been faulty all morning, went out for good, taking the fans and minimal air conditioning with it. The three of us sat and chatted with the workless IDEX staff, a group of about ten Indian yuppies whom care deeply about the positive work they strive for (running most of their projects year round) and comfortably accommodating the occasional foreign volunteers who can be placed within these projects (and bring with them foreign dollars and publicity). They conceded that electricity in Rajasthan, even in Jaipur (India's hopeful future world class city), was notoriously skecthy.

We also talked about the Kanjar communities, with one of the senior employees letting on that it was one of his favorite IDEX initiatives, the near future expansion of IDEX into South Africa (apparently South Africa and India have many overseas economic ties; think US-Germany), and how earlier work within the Kanjar villages, spear headed by UNICEF, was abruptly called off due to political reasons (the state minister thought the presence of international aid orgs in her districts would negatively reflect upon her leadership and ruin her future aspirations within the national political sphere). And while the communities have clearly suffered from the aid snub, the IDEX staffers noted that UNICEF is terribly corrupt at the grass roots/implementation level anyhow.


The seven hour train ride from Jaipur to greater Jhalawar was not, as I had really really hoped, anything like the movie The Darjeeling Limited (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman play reunited brothers of a dysfunctional family traveling India on a passenger train... a Wes Anderson movie, it's good). As it is with most things here, the train ride was filled with many distinct sights, sounds, and smells that made my first ever train experience, if not Andersonian funny, very enjoyable. The entire ride featured peddlers and buskers walking the aisle of the cramped train car: old turbanned, Gandhi robed, Rajputs singing and beating drums/steel bowls (even though we were traveling in a sleeper class?), ladies selling crappy toys, young men and boys selling tea and all kinds of homemade fragrant snack foods. When we pulled into a station, kids would run up to our windows, begging for money, cows could be seen eating trash, strange and often offensive odors would fill the air, and moping/frantic/tattered/stoic/harried/and plenty of other types of people could be seen filling every bit of floor space on the platforms. After four weeks here, you really get used to all the hustle and bustle, sensory hodge podge, but on my day two train ride it was all just too much for my mind to ignore and I didn't nap a minute the entire trip.


The highlight of the trip was probably the miles I spent standing in the open car doorway, watching the desertous landscape zoom by and wondering if our train would be bombed like in Lawrence of Arabia (the setting was certainly right for it). I talked with a pair of well to do salesmen about China (because I suppose I am Chinese). I asked them who built some of the enormous mountain top temples and fortresses all along the rail lines, and got the half ignorant half obvious answer of 'many people long ago'. I wondered how much poorer or better off the average Indian citizen of today is than his ancestors who carved these magnificent medieval relics but my thoughts were interrupted by a singing transvestite who would not stop pestering the three of us until I gave him twenty rupees not to curse us.

On the road again

After taking more than forty minutes (though at less than $2 I can't really complain), our roomserviced breakfast finally arrived. I wolfed it down, took time to enjoy my first ever cup of chai tea (what would become a daily ritual), and we rushed downstairs and waited for our IDEX guide to show up with a tiny escourt car at 9:20am sharp.



Packing in the car for the ride to the other volunteer hotel was yet another puzzle with a quite cramped solution. On arrival I paid two US dollars to a walking water bottle sales man and recieved my change in rupees. Based on the semi-astonished look of nearby on lookers, I instantly regretted not bringing along more American cash. Another sort of regret began to set in as Rick, Magnus, and I began to realize that, had we chosen to participate in the 'less hardcore' Himachal Pradesh program- we would have not only saved ourselves of the morning's commute and probably also a turtle or two, but also been able to spend the upcoming days in the tourist favorite cities of Jaipur and Agra, and, as a strange sort of happening, thirty one of the thirty four Himachal volunteers were European girls.

Fighting my way through a crowd of beggers, I was one of the last to board our bus. With the two other Kanjar volunteers already settled, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a Himachal-bound British girl. Born in the Caribbean but fortunate enough to develop that sweet British accent growing up in the UK, my seatmate, prettier than my last neighbor on the Greyhound (that skinny Palestinian dude), had wanted to travel before her senior year of Uni (the Brits go to Uni for two years after finishing two years of College) and so spent a pair of weeks drinking and surfing in Australia, a few days in Singapore, and planned to see Himachal in India before finally spending a month in Thailand.



Along the seven hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur, I learned that:
-All buses here are equipped with novelty horns. The drivers use them liberally.
-There are tons of little retail shops throughout all the small but dense towns strewn across India. People gather around the streets lined with these shops, sometimes spilling out onto the highway (which is just a road like any other but sometimes sporting a median).
-The girl I ended up sitting next to on the bus was the same girl who I'd had to wait for for so long with the guide at the airport, the night before. I mentally forgave her on account of the British accent and all.
-There are many hill top temples and lone mountains along the way from Delhi to Jaipur. The terrain is savannah-like with less tall grass; the land visibly exhausted after surviving the majority of the intense Indian summer.
-Things were still "reminding me of slumdog." They were reminding my seat neighbor of slumdog as well. Must be a westerner first-time-to-India thing.
-I wouldn't be able to sleep while traveling through India during the day, just too excited about all that was going on around the road and outside the window.






Pictures:
-Blurred bus shot: could be a Greyhoud, could be a college STLF trip, could be a bus full of Europeans spending their summer in India.
-Garbage strewn area of a small town along the highway.
-Temple on a mountain.
-Temple on a hill.
-Highwayside town.
-Restaurant/nice rest area we stopped at that sold bottled Coke and Pepsi and trinkets, and was covered in European cellphone company Vodophone advertisements (a common building material around here).
-Grain bin, photoshop out the big hill behind it and it could be Iowa.

Frankfurt am Main

The plan was simple enough: arrive at Frankfurt international at approximately 7am German time, take the train directly from the airport to downtown, step outside, find the Frankfurt Cathedral, reboard the the train and be back to terminal one with plenty of time to spare before my 1:45pm flight to Delhi.



After taking nearly thirty minutes just to find my way out of the terminal, I felt a wave of doubt. I had never roamed an international airport let alone a foreign city, and there were not as many English-translated signs as I had imagined. With constant self assurance that six hours was time enough to at least venture outside, I managed to convince myself that the nearly two hours it took to find and properly board the train system was only a minor hiccup and that I would surely not miss my flight.

An impatient line of business Germans formed behind me as I struggled to buy my tickets from the only partially-in-English ticket machine. I do not know Deutsch. I do not even know what sort of German words are location/city words. I then stood at the airport (Flughafen?) platform, trying to decode the massive Frankfurt train system map. It was a task I would only master by day's end and at 8:30am I was in no position to wait for a eureka; I hopped on the first train that came and prayed it was going into the city.




It was not going into the city. Realizing my train was heading into lands that more and more began to resemble the Sound of Music, I quickly departed and waited for a train back to the airport. The good thing about trains is that if you know the rail direction that is the wrong way, finding the right becomes very easy.



In the train and throughout my eventual three hour hike through the city, I asked about a dozen or so random people for directions; all but one spoke easily understood english. The city and surrounding areas (I went to a small town four train stops from the airport, tried to order lunch in German, and ended up paying 4 euros for a box of french fries covered in spicy ketchup and mayonaise) is very diverse in terms of both demographics and commerce. I saw many stereotypical looking Europeans (ex: Franz-Ferdinand-reject looking fellow listening to loud techno chipmunk music on big headphones) and a considerably large number of middle eastern immigrants (including the guys that sold me the French fries). Downtown Frankfurt is a dense mixture of fine clothing and jewelry stores, Mercedes offices, finance buildings (ex: the German central bank), strip clubs and street access peep show booths, McDonalds, Vodophone, and all kinds of bizarre retail and dining outlets (ex: an Australien shop- complete with stuffed koalas and wooden boomerangs for sale).




After aimlessly walking through the downtown for about two hours, I had decided to give up and return to the subway station- happy enough that I’d made it to am Maim alive, let alone learned to navigate train system in, around, and out of the city with ease. As I walked back, a single spire caught my eye. At least a half mile away, it was too tall to be just another spired apartment/retail building (there are many in Frankfurt) and I knew I had to give it a chance.

Saint Bartholomeus' Cathedral, Frankfurt, is beautiful.








Last Picture:
One of the many street side neons advertising for Frankfurt's finest occupies the foreground, while the German Central Bank (one of the first such institutions in the modern world, an economic and financial wunder monument) can be seen behind.

Chicago

As I stepped on the Greyhound at 1:45am of the late Saturday night I felt a bit of anxiousness knowing I wouldn't be seeing anything familiar to me for the next fifty nine or so days. The fact that two elderly people were having a cross-aisle shouting skirmish over seat position or who's bum outfit was more bomb or god knows what did not soothe this anxiety.

Stepping onto a crowded Greyhound, especially one at night and especially one Chicago bound, is not like stepping onto an STLF bus. People do not smile back to greet you and the microphone is not used for bus idol but to inform you that you WILL be left behind if not back from the station in time. I decided against asking if anyone wanted to start up a round of bus surfing as it was very late and most people were busy focusing on subtly not letting me sit by them.

Like STLF, Greyhound riders must pay to ride (though considerably less so you'd think the latter would be the cheerier crowd.) Also like STLF, there will probably be someone sitting alone that will kindly allow you to neighbor them. I've learned that who you sit next to is crucial to setting the tone for any trip involving buses and I almost always luck out with a good seat partner ("My name is Jill Chan"). Tonight would be no different. I never found out my window buddy's name but he did tell me of the six vehicles he managed to buy despite dropping out of college, his Palestinian heritage, immigrant journey to the states, and a bit about his city (KC) and his destination (Kalamazoo). Interesting guy. I fell asleep promptly by the quad cities.

After getting to Chicago at 6am, I walked outside and recognized the neighborhood I was lugging my stuff through as the one I'd stayed at early in high school for NYLF camp four years before. That was the last big multi-week adventure I went on and began with only the second of four times ever my mom cried when I left for something so you know it was big.

I asked a homeless man sitting by a stop light for directions to the subway. In my 40 hours of travel time from Chicago to Germany to India (three continents), only two of the fifteen people I asked for directions spoke incomprehensible English. One of them was in downtown Chicago. To his credit, he did come running and shouting at me to "ghaweljasfn" the other way when he saw me misfollowing his walking instructions.



I got on the blue line subway, then had to transfer to a bus for forty minutes due to CTA construction, then had to transfer to the L and rode into O'Hare. After waiting four hours to check in (eating a $28 breakfast at the Hilton I somehow managed to not pay and taking my sweet time on a McDonald's double quarter pounder Value Meal).



On the plane to Germany, I sat next to a Californian native who studied physics on the coast and now works as a lumberjack manager in southern Missouri. If your hard wood floors say 'Ozark Logging Company' or something like that on the underside, he probably oversaw their production, (this was told to me with a bit of over enthusiasm and I suppose I was impressed). Interesting guy. I fell asleep before the seat belt light dimmed.

Pictures:
View of the Sears Tower from near where my old NYLF dorm was at UIC.
The pigeons on the street I think the homeless man was using as a directions reference.
One of the many airport pictures I took while being bored for six hours.


That 5oz. glass of orange juice cost $5 at the O'Hare Hilton restuarant (didn't know that at the time of ordering). As I didn't actually have a room at the Hilton, John Gibbs of room 218 was kind enough to cover my meal.