Friday last week was our home stay mother's birthday. We had a lovely time getting to know the family. Apparently in India you socialize and drink, then you have desert, then you have dinner, then you leave. So we got dressed up, had drinks constantly in our hands (and refilled before we could finish them). Maybe it was because we haven't drank anything since we arrived or maybe it was because they mixed particularly strong drinks, but we got tipsy rather fast. We watched Indian Idol for awhile, which apparently is like a huge deal and they were in the final three. Then Soha sang for a bit, and we were quizzed on translating the songs from Hindi (we didn't do that well). Then we fed Mama bites of chocolate cake and then went to a yummy Italian restaurant where I had homemade raviolis with pesto., however we arrived at 11:00pm, so it was a long long night. I am not getting sick of Indian food per say, it is still tasty, I am just noticing that I am really used to have a wide variety of food at home. The next morning, we woke up (still drunk) at 4 am to catch our 5am train to Gwalior. It was a bit of a rough day.
I got some sleep on the train and felt better. We had to all get off the train in 2 min which was a bit of a mad rush. We saw some nice museum with some beautiful sculptures and some forts that featured blue and yellow duckies in the tiles. We also saw some awesome stone screen carvings. Every place felt really rushed though. Storm-Ji takes us to her favorite pieces at the site/ museum and then gives us 5-10 min to "explore."The next day we went to Orrcha by car. On the way we stopped at a fort in Datia which was structured like a mandala. The forts here are really palaces for the royalty. However the Datia fort was never inhabited it was a purely symbolic structure. By this time I had come down with quite a cold, so I was rather miserable for the Gwalior/ Orcha leg of the journey, so I will skip over this part and just saw we some some cool temples and staying in really nice guest houses.
Leaving for Khajuraho i watched a bit of the Oscars playing live in the morning, which felt sooo nice! Thought the 8 hour car drive we got updates from Strom-Ji's blackberry about how many Oscars Slumdog Millionaire got, we also got updates from the radio interrupting songs. I don't think I have never heard so much about a movie abroad, it is part of daily conversation here. India is soooo proud of the movie, though there is also considerable controversy, mostly around the name "slumdog." Anyways, I saw best supporting actress and best screenplay. After we arrived at Khajuraho, we checked in and saw some temples in the evening.The day we were in Khajuraho was Shivnatri, which is the celebration of Shiva's wedding with Paravati. We had the evening off since most nights we had Hindi class. We went into town, had to almost crawl though this tiny alley way to get to this fair with ferris wheels. We decided to tempt fate and get on one, it was quite fun but a little scary, and getting on the Ferris wheel this guy slyly touched four of our asses. We eventually told him off, but dealing stares and groups of men was much more of an issue here than any other place we had been too so far. It might have been due to the festival and everyone being high. We then went to an restaurant to have Pizza and saw the parade for Shivnatri from the rooftop of the restaurant. In the evening we indulged in TV and watched the Oscars that were being replayed, and when MILK won for best screenplay I was excited to hear the speech again, but as he came up to accept the Oscar they cut out the speech entirely! I was so mad. An insight into Indian censorship around homophobia. The next day we stayed and saw the more popular temples. We also went out exploring on our own to do temple/ site sketches. I found drawing (something I never really do) was a really cool exercise in observing.
The next morning we went to Bandhabgarh to see the Tiger Sanctuary. It was a really really long drive, but a beautiful reserve. After we arrived we went in open jeeps and basically just drove around for about 2 hours. I almost gave up after seeing deers, birds and monkeys over and over again but no tigers. In fact there were a few times I even forgot we were looking for tigers. But then at the very end we was 3 different tigers!!! I unfortunately don't really have any photos, but I have some AMAZING footage. We came back in the morning to look for tigers again and told we could also ride elephants, though this never happened. It was quite breathtaking to see these Bengal Tigers in the wild, and it was hilarious how all these tourists in open jeeps were fighting to get closer and take pictures, and trying to be quiet. Anyways, we were sad to leave to get on to a 17 hour train after a 3 hour car ride back to Delhi.
After arriving 2 hours late in Delhi, Kathrine and I high tailed it back home to take a quick shower and change into our Saris for the wedding. The wedding was of an Australian woman and a Indian man who decided to have a traditional Indian wedding. We never really knew what was going on, but it was cool to watch. There was some ceremony of putting a veil on the groom to shield him from the evil eye. Then there was a ceremony with the groom on a white horse with everyone dancing in front of the horse. This was quite awkward just because it looked like none of the Australians knew what was going on either, so there was very little dancing actually happening and instead a lot of standing around. Then there was a garland ceremony as the bride came, and longer beautiful ceremony where the bride and groom made 7 promises to each other and walked around the fire with a priest, after this they were "man and wife." After we sat down with the brides family, and wow were they in culture shock. They could simply not wrap their heads around why we liked India, how we could deal with getting around in rickshaws, how "disorganized" India was, ect. It was kinda a shock to hear all these things since I don't think we experienced judging here in the same way. It was also just strange because they had only been here for 5 days and staying in very very nice hotels with private drivers etc, we were just kinda looking at them like "you have no idea." We got home at 12:30 am and slept well, sleeping in for the first time since arriving in India.
Yesterday we woke up and were informed we were spending the day with the family. It was the last day of exams for Mama's granddaughter, so we picked her up, had a nice celebration coffee, a wonderful Kashmiry lunch with the family and then went to see our first Bollywood film called Delhi 6. It was a really interesting experience watching a movie without subtitles in a language we didn't understand. We got most of it and our family helped translate the parts we were confused. I actually really enjoyed it, Indian films really love to overtly play with cinematography and editing, which is fun because the narrative is really simple and remains very similar across films. We later went to an Indian barbecue at our "cousin"'s house, his name is Amrit. It was a birthday party of Amrit's friend. There were a bunch of people there, all perhaps in their late 20s. When we arrived though we were the only ones wearing traditional Indian clothes, everyone else was wearing skinny jeans and fitted tops, we felt pretty ridiculous. We explained that we were educated to ONLY wear these clothes here, they laughed out loud at us and spent a while explaining how ridiculous that was. feel like I have so much more to say about this weekend. It was just such a whirlwind to go to these smaller villages where we were constantly stared at no matter how conservatively we were dressed (which became a issue in dividing up the boys to accompany us places), then to go to this opulent wedding where these foreigners were completely overwhelmed with India and had nothing to say but complaints, to hanging out with locals and seeing the new clash with the old.
Ok enough for now, Hindi midterms coming up and going to Udaipur (city of lakes) this weekend. Love you all!
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