Cafe Hopping

Mr. Bean - Avatar - Mr. Bean as Avatar, in The Nettle and Fern

     I have entered the last week of my Independent Study Period, which is the period that is suggested for compiling and synthesizing research into your final paper of the semester. As such, many people move locations to treat themselves, or at least get a change of scenery, as they put together the interviews and insights into a meaningful stream of thoughts. I am following the trend and have moved from Gangtok to Darjeeling, a four hour jeep ride away to the south, in West Bengal. Farewell Sikkim!
      I had planned to spend Friday afternoon in The Nettle and Fern, my favorite, wi-fi supplied cafe in Gangtok, just a block or two down from my advisor's office, writing about the good parts of life in Sikkim and wrapping up my time there. Unfortunately life had other plans, and I woke up around midnight on Thursday to vomit for the first time on this trip. It was an unexpected surprise, and somewhat challenging to navigate aiming and balance with the eastern toilet in the apartment. I have a lot more thoughts on that topic, but they are all pretty gross, so I won't write them here.
   Anyways, instead of flitting about town, I stayed in bed all of Friday napping and waiting for my stomach to settle down. By Saturday morning, I had bounced back enough to pile into a shared Jeep with all of my bags and drive and up and down from Gangtok to Darjeeling.
    I am staying in the same homestay as my friend Colleen, and it is really nice to be reunited with a close friend here. She has already begun taking on the role of tour guide, as well as tea guide - her independent project is all about tea and its production here. I have never been so well hydrated or so happy at once. This morning, when we woke up, we looked out from our rooftop room to be greeted by a view of Kanchengjunga, the world's third highest peak. If we can get a view on a clearer day, we will be able to see Mt. Everest, so I am hoping the clouds oblige sometime in the next week.
    Darjeeling is less developed and more mountainous than Gangtok, but I don't think I will miss seeing some of the aggressively westernized options leering out from the storefronts.

A common offering in Gangtok.

 We are settled into the favorite western-style bakery in Darjeeling, a powdered-sugar smelling cafe called Glenary's. They are big into Darjeeling tea here - so I am lapping it up, milk-free. What a nice change!

More Things that Can Scare Me

I have also seen exactly 2 bunny cans, but I haven't been able to take a picture yet.

This what all of the trash cans look like in Sikkim - something like construction monkeys. It's a little bit nice, because at least there are trash cans here. But also, they are pretty scary looking. 

Also, when I first crossed the border, I had to register with the state, and I had a empty soda bottle with me. When I asked where to throw it away, the gruff border patrol man said, "Put it in the monkey..." That was a weird sentence to hear at the time, and it's still weird now.

Gone off the Grid

    On Friday morning, my advisor called me around 7:30 in the morning to tell me to catch a taxi to a village that afternoon. "No - I don't want to go today. I have interviews set up - I need to. go. tomorrow." was my spritely, morning-ready response, but to no avail. I passed the phone to Lauren, in the next room over who is apparently better with mornings, who thankfully got the details about where, when and whom we'd be seeing this weekend. I called to postpone the interview, and a few hours and frantic light-packing later, we headed to the taxi stand in Gangtok to ride to Payung, a few hours south.
    The Jeep packed 14 people into it for the three-hourish ride, including 6 in our row alone. It was a little tight. It was an exciting way to start the weekend, because the daily routine of afternoon downpour began just as we crossed into the district of South Sikkim, obscuring the other side of the valley in a thick mist and adding the extra element of suspense to the drive as we careened up the gravel roads. Often, there is no guard rail between the road and the expanse that is decidedly not the road - a sudden drop off for trees and mist. Also, as it began to rain, the jeep's stereo system finally kicked in. To put it more simply, it was a kick-ass drive.

   I was intercepted in the Jeep by Gitanath, who informed me that my host for the weekend had been in the front of the Jeep the whole time. My traveling buddy got out to go to her new weekend home, while I rode an extra few turns up the side of the mountain and was welcomed through the rain to my new home for the weekend. The Sharmas were a lovely family in Payung, and their new daughter-in-law, whose name sounded something like Prahmela (as far as I could tell, like 'Pamela" with an R lodged in there somewhere) was my in-home translator. Besides Pramela's English, the entire family spoke Nepali exclusively. Even though there was a severe language barrier, I really felt welcomed by the family who fed me very delicious village food - which means piles of rice, leafy greens (various Nepali-named 'saags') and tons of pickles and curd. I also had some really good tea.

Looking out on the back porch, towards the valley.

   When we were leaving for ISP, my friend Kate, who is a biology major and therefore knows everything about the world, observed the amazing extent to which the pop culture part of my brain has developed. Warned that the internet was going to be spotty up north, she asked me what I would turn into with my pop culture muscle cut off. Would I atrophy? Grow intelligent and creative original thoughts? Well, after spending some time in the village without laptop, iPod, or (foolishly) even a book, I can finally answer her - I just struggle even harder to connect my life to pre-existing cultural moments. Balancing down irrigation canals with my guide, I could not help but think of Lost Boys exploring the wilds of Never Never Land.

Me, all weekend, but in three dimensions.

Encountering rickety rope bridges and fragile looking suspension brides, I was flashing back to Indiana Jones (but the Jeep rides were priming me for that one). I was delighted by every bizarre instance of Western culture that popped up in Payung, from the Justin Bieber playing off of a cell phone in the Jeep ride there, to the Celine Dion song that Pramela played for me on Sunday night before bed. "I just love this song, na?"

Just like every Indian host I have encountered so far, my own shoes were unacceptable and I was lent a pair of household slippers. In Payung, they were Angry Birds flip flops.

It was a really good weekend for collecting interviews and just walking around. Although that is not to say it went without some hiccups. On the first night, after I arrived, I was making my way through the awkward dinner that inevitably follows when a stranger shows up a family's home. I was mid-bite on a scoop of rice when my weekend 'amma' said something in Nepali that could have either been degrading or very reassuring. Pramela was a little casual in the pace of her translation, so about two minutes later, she told me very enthusiastically "She says... do NOT! feel awkward!" which made me burst out laughing for simply being so warm. Then all of a sudden, some of the bite of rice flew right out of my mouth, making me laugh even harder. I'm not sure if the family saw the rice fly, so it was pretty much just the foreigner cracking up in the corner.

Then there was the incident with this guy:

That thick black line is about 3 inches wide, just to give a sense of scale.

When I was shown my room, a very nice four-walled, 2 twin-bed furnished digs, I sat on one bed while Pramhela sat on the other. And then I looked to the left of her thigh and saw the biggest spider that I have ever seen in the wild. Or in the same bedroom as me. It was not a tarantula, but was of comparable size, in my opinion. I looked at the spider. I looked at Pramela. And I courageously said, "Wow - that's uh, a pretty big spider!" And she went to get a magazine to scoop him up and toss him out. Unfortunately, besides being big, he was also fast, and disappeared behind the bed before he could be evicted. And then Pramela and her husband dropped off my blankets, and left the room. And then he reappeared, on the far wall. I tried to take a picture without the flash so he wouldn't get mad, but I think he still got mad because he started moving before I could take a shot in focus. And then he hid under side table, and (I thought) disappeared under the bed. Then Pramela came back in to make my bed, despite my protests that I could do it fine on my own, and I told her that I was a little scared of that spider. So she and her husband moved the bed away from the wall, away from the headboard wall, and then picked up one end of the bed to shine a flashlight. No sign of the spider, though. So Pramela told me that if it came back, I could knock on her door next-door to get some help. But putting my fears to rest, I took one for the team and just went to bed. When we all got up at 6 the next morning, she asked me about the spider - "Did it come back? I was sooooo afraid all night that you would knock on my door!" She also mentioned it the following night and morning (is your friend back?) so there was just no living that down.

Spring Weekend 2012

Wild orchids, growing on a tree trunk.

So this weekend, I ventured out of the big city in Sikkim to live in a village in South Sikkim. It was absolutely beautiful, but hard to capture on my tiny little camera because it is just so expansive. In San Diego, the science center has an IMAX Dome theater, which is pretty cool because you can watch huge penguins or other natural things literally envelope your entire field of vision, even right past your toes. The view this weekend was a lot like that.

 All of Sikkim seems to take over the mountainsides - it seems like there is barely a flat surface in the whole state besides the roads and houses that have been painstaking carved out. As a result, the view is not just phenomenal looking out and up at the scenery, but down as well. You look down onto a view. On Saturday morning, I spent a little bit of time watching clouds rise from below my porch, across my line of vision, and then above me, only to pour down that night to do it all over again.

Anyways, in an effort to sort my stories, here are some pictures of the nature from the weekend.

More clusters of orchids, on a tree branch overhead. Can you spot them?

One cow eating away on the next level down of the terrace farms that carpet Sikkim.

The view back towards Payung from Kau.

Looking out from Lingi.

Jeep-in-waiting near Lingi.

Reporting from the Field Work

        One week into my project and things are just not going very easily. I thought I had started to pick up some momentum at the end of last week, as I met with a specialist in the field I am looking into who seemed overwhelmingly excited to help me out. I met with him in the morning and by afternoon, he had called his driver to deliver me to the organization's training program... which as I arrived had just finished the training relevant to my project. And then, though I did not realize it at the time, the momentum abruptly stopped. Meetings were set up each afternoon for the following morning, only to find that the office I met in was empty, or the specialist was suddenly out of town. Schedule, cancel, schedule, cancel, and all of a sudden I have lost a full week with what felt like nothing to show for it. So, on Tuesday, my advisor (a different specialist in the field) held up my appointment for a meeting, and felt so badly about the building inertia in my investigation, he started spouting names and phone numbers, and called a cab and someone from the organization to take me to a damaged school across the valley for the afternoon. And so, slowly slowly, I started to get moving.

Part of the view from near the school, across the valley from Gangtok.

Today was just too bizarre not to share the intimate details of, so make the jump if you are ready for the opus of April Eighteenth.

Irony

       I have never seen a Mario brand DVD before. However, my father Mario works for an anti-piracy software company. It seems like "Mario" and "pirated movies" come together differently in India than they do in the US.

A City Upon A Hill

      I should be reading about Sikkim's Multi Hazard Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (conveniently abbreviated to MHRVA, which just rolls right off the tongue) but I am feeling lazy and like I need to procrastinate, so here's more photos of what Gangtok looks like. I am saving my verbal skills for critical thinking on that MHRVA though, so I am not going to say a ton about them.

A slice of Gangtok!

It's really pretty out today - this was what the sky looked like when Saru woke me up this morning.

My grandpa Yarmoski would have fit right in here - he separated his dry and set trash for years.

View out my window this morning!

The water supply to the whole of Gangtok city has been cut off, probably by a landslide. It has been out for about three days, I think, and so the military and government are trucking in water to the city center. This is people lining up with water jugs to bring home.

This is me! Candid!

Another view of Gangtok, just past one of the central markets.

Into the Wild

  

 I made it safely to the mountains!

 It is absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous up here - when I look out at my window from any point in Gangtok, I look straight at clouds. That's right, the whole town is literally in the clouds.

For now, two other girls from my program are staying in the same apartment, but they are headed out to a village tomorrow to study sustainable agricultural. It's been lovely to be welcomed here by familiar faces, or I don't think I would believe that it actually exists. 

My camera can't really handle it either - it is having trouble picking up all of the ranges, hills, clouds, sky and really vibrant greenery. Evidence: the following pictures were taken in a 20 second span, but just can't get the full picture all at once.

Homestay No More

Tonight, I gave my host family my end-of-stay gift, which they did not like. It’s not that they disliked the gift, they disliked the giving. In a period of about two minutes, my mumma went through the following outrages:
-What?

-What have you done?!

-You have spoiled your money!

- You must take it with you – you are our daughter, it is not right for a daughter to give us things.

- You are our guest here!

- You already gave us things when you arrived!

- You are so naughty! (but this time she used the extreme version “badmaash” instead of “notcot” which she normally calls me, but is nicer)

Anyways, because I bought them a wooden camel statue with an Indian version of Romeo and Juliet on the back, which is way too big to ever fit in my already packed suitcase, I pushed my way through the protests and found a home for the camel in the living room. Rather, I found a place in the corner to put it, and my mumma and didi suggested that I put it in the middle of the room so, yeah, they like it.

But didi did warn me that if my parents bring presents when they come to visit, then she is going to slap me twice. Forewarned is forearmed, Didi!

Speaking of packing, this morning I woke up for a nice Sunday morning breakfast with the family, and then Mumma packed all of my things for me. I tried to help, but she mostly just had me point to where things were going (America, back to school, or with me for the next month) and then folded things more neatly than I possibly capable of. So maybe it was better to let her take this one.

My last day in my homestay has been really bittersweet – I am excited to see a new part of India, but I am going to really miss my family here. This morning, my softspoken buppa and I had a forty-five minute long talk where he told me about tigers. Where they live, how they hunt, how many places his son-in-law has gone to see them, what they are called in Hindi, and so. He acted out what a tiger hunting a bison looks like, which was pretty interesting.

Feels like Home: Tina Fey was in the Jaipur paper today

The little things about my family, as usual, are exactly what I will miss about them. For example, last night, I think I heard my mumma curse for the first time when she saw that she had forgotten about a bowl of curd in the freezer (“Oh. shit!”). My didi also does a really good impression of what Indian traffic sounds like (“They all honk so much! Beep bonp bloop berp!”). I think the difference is that she incorporates Hindi’s nasalization of certain noises, which really brings her mimic to the next level.

I will have to reunite with them when I get back, because Mumma won’t let me leave my suitcase at school – she will keep it here for me. “And then, when you get back, you will ring us up first. And then you can come and take rest, and then we will drop you with the other students at the guest house.” Didi told her that there is a certain time that we have to check in, and Mumma said “Oh! Just like jail!” Buppa also has told me every night for the past week that he will be very lonely after I go, and that I keep them very busy and entertained. So, yes, I will miss them a lot.

But, I am also glad to be on the move! My program is divided into 4 academic classes, 3 of which take place simultaneously. Those just finished on Saturday, so my hours of enduring Hindi classes taught by 4 teachers at once is over, as is the corralling of 20 American students into one house 5-6 days a week. I’ve learned a lot while here so far – which is why I could tell how surprised Didi was when I gave the camel, but also that she wasn’t telling Mumma why when she called her to the room to see – but now I start a totally different type of learning. The remaining class is our Independent Study Project, a hallmark of my program’s method in all of its sites. They prep you for two months, then send you out on your own.

Tomorrow morning, I leave at 6 am on a train to go study disaster relief and risk reduction in Sikkim, a small state in the north east of India. I am going to be cool once again – Indians flock to the mountains in the summer so that they can get out of the heat. I will be on my own! Daunting but exciting.

Treat. Yo. Self.

Okay - pop quiz. The semester is racing by. Pretty soon you will get kicked out of the house, and told to fend for yourself for a month. For now, you live one train ride away from the City of Lakes. What do you do?

The answer is a simple three words - Treat. Yo. Self.

Inspired by modern day heros on the staff of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation department, I decided to go for it, and treat. my. self.
      So a trip to Udaipur it was!

Long story short: The weekend went fabulously. I feel as though I have done very well by myself.

Long story medium-length: There were almost no bad moments in the whole weekend - from watching the sunrise over the train after arriving in Udaipur while drinking a freshly made chai, discovering chocolate balls and other quasi-european baked goods at lake view bakeries, driving a rickshaw along the lake while singing along to Bollywood songs played off the rickshaw walla's phone, walking around a spice market, seeing too many "Octopussy" signs to count, accidentally eating lunch next to the GM of the Lake Palace Hotel, relaxing on a pre-sunset lake boat tour, and so on.
     It just felt telling when we finally arrived to our last lakeside T.Y.S. restaurant on Sunday night, and as we walked in fireworks went off over the lake. And then as we sat down at a table, we watched a rehearsed dance go off across the water in the lit up City Palace.
    One week left before I am heading off on my own way, and I feel so contented.


Long story, in photos:

Our first view as we arrived.

"This shirt? This shirt was a gift from a rich man!"

They're already ready for my big sis!

Sold me some juice!

Apparently this learnin' school teaches elephants to paint.

Udaipur's City Palace

This sign was on the verge of causing an existential crisis.

The iconic image of Treat. Yo. Self.  --  Just hanging out, laughing and relaxing.

Final Field Trip

    We closed out class time last week with a field trip out to Laporiya, a village three hours away from Jaipur that has had success with reintroducing indigenous water saving methods. While their work was really interesting, it is also getting hot, and I stupidly drank most of my water on the bus. So instead of learning lots and lots of indigenous culture, I learned some. And I took lots of pictures.

Glasses. Turban. Necklace. What a Ji.

So... Rajasthan is a desert.

This guy rolled past our introductory lecture just after the ugliest goat I have ever seen left. No joke - it looked like part mule, part goat, and it baaahed really oddly. It was terrifying because it also had a small case of the crazy eyes. But this guy was pretty normal.

This frog was absolutely huge. It lived in the small cement 'pond' the village keeps for wildlife - the whole village has adopted a no-killing-of-anything policy, so they help these guys live.

Things are getting a little 'Survivor' out there - Peter found a beetle. And he just started to go for it.

Flowers!

6 Foot, 7 Foot, 8 Foot...

Yes, this man is holding a very close model of a human foot.

     We our entering the last third of our time here - which means that the formal classes (aka in a classroom) are winding down. In somewhat of a frustrating turn, that means that our Sustainable Development and Social Change seminar has turned from the theme of "What are the problems with everything in the world, and why can't people fix them well?" into asking the question, "What works?" So we are finally taking some field trips that have a positive spin instead of learning about female infantoecide, lack of education, inequality, etc.
    What that means is that on Thursday of last week, we went to Jaipur Foot.

Foot mold. Obviously.

    The organization was certainly a change of pace from when we roll into villages in our "Tourist" bus, and ask people to tell us what is wrong with everything in their lives. Instead, we were welcomed by D.R. Mehta, the director of the organization, who was full of inspirational sayings  and impressive magazine clippings about how awesome his organization is. Like this one, for example.
   It was so lovely to have someone talk to us who so clearly knows what they are doing, and is full of things like "Do you know what E = mc^2 really means? Effect is equal to money times compassion squared!"

Feet in the making! This whole day felt like the alternate, nice version of Frankenstein's laboratory.

    Basically, Jaipur Foot gives prosthetic limbs fitted to each individual who comes to them for free. Everyone. And they also make wheel chairs. And they also designed their own artificial knee.
  We walked around to the waiting room, and saw amputees and accident victims waiting to be met with, and other people in the middle of the half hour casting process to get their new limbs.

Men working on piles of limbs outside of the factory.

     And then to show off how good their limbs are, this man jumped out of a tree with his Jaipur Foot.