ok, ok, india's not such a bully

I was sitting at the internet cafe when someone recognized me! From the hotel weeks ago, he remembered my room number even! That was so nice of him. I feel more tender towards the town now. And also, Vinamra wrote on Facebook, and seemed happy that I was back in town, so that also makes me feel a little more welcomed. Now I'm going to visit Ram, who will also make me feel a little less out of place. These are all good things.

india kicked my ass

If you saw me right now, you might wonder, "Who beat up Carrie?" Well, it was India. It's a long story, but I'm ok now, just very tired. My hotel is incredibly loud, and I'm tired of people not understanding me, and I'm tired of having to argue with people just to get the remotely decent price on something, and I'm tired of having to repeat myself and acting like I'm talking to a kindergartener, only to have someone say "Can you say it slower, please?" I'm tired of the traffic, and of not knowing where to get basic things. I'm tired of being thirsty, and never knowing what my digestive system is going to reject. Tired of not knowing where internet cafes are.

But of all those reasons, the reason I look like I have two black eyes is the one where my hotel is loud. I am lucky that Dad gave me those earplug-headphone, so I can use them as earplugs and listen to the Beatles or to my New Favorite Australian Bands (Guild League and Clare Bowditch) and pretend there aren't 5 kids right outside my door screeching, as their fathers talk in strident and unconcerned voices, also right outside my door. Is this a cultural thing? Or is this family just unreasonably rude? It went on all night! Don't these kids sleep? Were they tagteaming?

Rant over. I will feel less stressed out when I have a place to stay. I thought it would destress me a little to look point-blank at my rickshaw driver last night and say "You are dishonest." But it didn't help. And now I'm in the worst hotel ever. Maybe I can fix it. I don't know. I want to stay in the gardens, but no one will answer the phone there.

Delhi Interstate Bus Terminal (ISBT)

[note: it has come to my attention that people may be coming to this page to search wtf the ISBT in Delhi is all about, so I'm adding a pre-paragraph of everything I actually remember about the station. It's at the Kashmir Gate metro stop, and it's about 90 Rs by rickshaw from VasantKunj, way down south. When the rickshaw driver dropped me off, there was someone there asking me where I was going, and he told me which stall to go to, so he must have legitimately worked there. There's a confusing pathway from the road to inside the stall, at least to stall 43, where I was catching my bus to Dehradun/Uttaranchal. There is an information booth, and they may be able to help--I had a guy who wasn't fluent in English, but was at least willing to try to communicate. They will be yelling the name of the desintations usually, and you have to jump on the bus first to claim your seat. I didn't buy a ticket in advance. It was annoying because I had to get a stranger to watch my big suitcase so I could claim a seat, then come back out and get the suitcase under the bus. I lucked out that the stranger was trustworthy, but it's hard to travel alone if you have a lot of stuff. Anyway, a little ways through the trip, they'll come selling the tickets, and you just pay them cash. To Dehradun it was about Rs 275 I think...really can't remember, but it was an AC bus, which I thought was quite comfortable, even in the very back, but maybe I'm used to Indian roads by now.

Now, if you have a question about the Dehradun ISBT, you're out of luck. That one completely defeated me. I just know vikram 5 gets you there, and a taxi can get you away from there to Delhi for about 2500, which is useful when they start auctioning off your bus between Delhi and Jaipur, which is what happened to me. Feel free to leave a comment or send a message otherwise if you have other questions. I'll try to answer them. If I can get any use out of my helpless travel experiences, I will be glad]

Am right now in the most desperately confusing bus station, trying to get to Dehradun. you might wonder how I'm calmly writing in my journal while standing up and standing guard over the World's Largest Suitcase. I assure you it's only to calm my nerves by finding the experience a wacky time, trying by writing about it in the present tense to make it into a fun "remember when" experience in advance, rather than the stressor it threatens to be now. Or something. I'll let you know when this method starts working.

I think I actually have figured out something about when my bus is going, and I might even understand when the bus with AC is going, so I'm waiting for that one, and also waiting to see if my theory is correct. My theory about when the bus leaves. It's like physics--you can prove something with guesses and math, but it's onlly as useful as much as it can predict things in the real world. Ergh. This writing is helping a little bit, but I still think a better theory about what will destress me in this situation is needed. Chocolate also didn't help much ,which may just mean I'm too far gone. And now I'm attracting beggars from standing still so long. Nothing destresses me like Western guilt. Yeah. Great.

But it reminds me of a funny story from the rickshaw ride over here. Every stop had adorable kids tugging at my heartstrings, some selling flowers or latest issues of Cosmo ("number 75!" as they point proudly to the issue and volume number). But at one stop, a lady came up (a well-fed looking lady) with a wad of 10's already in her hand, hit me on the head, clapped her hands very masculinely, and demanded "Give me money!" I actually laughed, but she was dead serious, so I added "Uh, no." And she clapped again and put her hand out: "Give me money!!" Again! I said I didn't have any, did the empty hands gesture, and she leaned to my auto driver and said something in Hindi, which I assume was "Watch out, your fare has no money" said sarcastically because he laughed, and she left somewhat annoyed with me. Some people! But it kept making me laugh the whole rest of the way.

Survey of India

Survey of India

This was a bit of a disappointment. We waited so long for Dr. Zonn to come back while we were at the map shop, and knowing how hard Dr. Eaton had worked to make it happen, I expected full military clearance to the darkest secrets of the government. But we wended up in some museum of archaic sextants and tide predictors (looked like a giant multi-eyed fly). The tour guide did come up with some interesting tidbits about the explorers who first measured a lot of the world, or at least the Himalayan region. I was kind of shocked when we were all done so early. I tried to hit them up for GIS data, but they foisted me off on the Institute for Remote Sensing, which we visit later. So that was that. I didn't buy any maps because I didn't have any money on me. I was the only grad student that went today, but I didn't even notice till later because I get along with the undergrads so well.

Dr. Gamkhar arrived today.

Tibetan Cultural Center

This was an odd little jaunt after the Survey of India. A Buddhist temple with a lot of construction sucking away all the Zen the place may have had. A lot of people found it very interesting, but I found it thoroughly unspiritual and had trouble finding anything to plug into besides the child-monks working on a scroll drawing with their master-guy. It was indeed beautiful (the parts not being hammered away on), but I can only take so many pictures.

Wildlife Institue of India & Rajaji National Park

Two wildlife excursions I neglected to write about were in the first week. The first day we visited the Wildlife Institute of India. First of all, they gave us all Pepsis, so that was an auspicious beginning. There were three presentations-first on the overview of the institution, then the best one on statistical methods for tiger counting (my dream job!) and a third less interesting one on the history of India's environmental legislation. Dr. Eaton may have dozed a little during these, which made the rest of us feel better about subsequent days' presentations at various institutes when we wanted to do the same thing. We then went on a nature walk with a few stops to point out interesting flora or the occasional fauna. There were very cute and very angry monkeys. One shook his tree at us menacingly, but he was adorably impotent and knew it. Still, glad I got those rabies shots. After a good bit of flowers and herbs, we made it to the guest house for samosas, chips, and a bit of cake, and really good tea. The following weekend we went to Rajaji National Park. When we got there, we learned a bit about the elephants that were chained up around and being ridden around with lots of straw on their backs. Most, they said, were younger and/or being rehabilitated. After standing around a while, waiting for a group to use the guest house's single bathroom. During the wait we found a couple of chained up elephants and Dannie wanted desperately to touch them, but we persuaded her not to. I know the agony of not being able to touch though-I still want to pet every dog I see, even the mangiest, most pathetic. Especially them. Eventually, at Rajaji, we piled into jeeps and a safari bus (very Jurassic Park of us, which was way awesome) and roamed the roads, through mud and rocks we got jostled more than a bit, and many of us ended up with a headache. One of the muddy rivulets had that smooth-looking mud that then made me think of the Swamp of Sadness, and through subsequent talk of the Neverending Story, it was revealed Sarah and I are the same age. I had a weird knowledge of all the child actors' "where are they now"s, which I shared. Our guide had an amazing eye for animals, and even animal prints-he somehow spotted tiger pawprints in the mud, which was weirdly, very tangentially, exciting. I was glad to be on the bumpy bus with that amazing tour guide. The next day I was covered in welts from what must have been insect bites. Wouldn't it make more sense for the bites to hurt while they're being delivered?

Central Soil and Water Conservation Res...CSWCRTI

The presentation at the museum was very difficult to understand because of a heavy accent. The parts I understood with the help of the museum's visuals were pretty interesting. I had been wondering what the terrace farming was supposed to do-they decorated the view from Mussoorie and looked quite nice. Turns out they also help with soil erosion, which became my "humanity's emergency" du jour (concurrent with supervolcanoes and sinkholes). Deep Thought: "Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared." True.

Anyway, we were able to speak with the somewhat reticent director about getting some help for me in translating-people during my journey. We'll see how that pans out, but I need to write a followup letter.

forest research institute

Wasn't feeling well today. I could tell everything was interesting, objectively, but I had trouble standing for such long periods of time. In the wood museum, I remembered a lot about my time working at the lumber yard at Twin Oaks-the way to stack the wood to cure it, specifically. But also the fun of lifting entire logs to the sawmill and impressing others with my might! I missed the organic garden part of the tour because the chemistry department finally did me in, and I joined Tabby in the bus. Other departments we went to was the genetics department (which, according to the video, does something with hashish. Awesome, said those of us still awake at that part of the video, which literally was not all of us), where a woman in the lab showed her ice-cold samples and some of what she does with them. They showed us a family of eucalyptus trees that had concomitant generations and clones so really scientific control groups could be experimented on from initial growth. A man in another department (herbology? Or is that just in Harry Potter?) was very enthusiastic about the many samples of leaves and flowers he had pressed and recorded on yellowing papers throughout his library. The buildings in general were beautifully designed, but we found it odd that everything was wood, and they had obviously cleared the surrounding area of trees to build the place.

dehradun

Last Sunday we went to the National Museum. Same old-cultures, eras, broken pottery and frayed textiles of these cultures and eras. It was moderately interesting, but we mostly went to get out of the heat. We went into the theater and dumbly watched a baffling film about a golden statue of Buddha (I think) before Jenny said to me "What are we watching?" which surpassed my favorite thing she said-the first morning, sleepily before we'd said anything else "So...the beds are hard." I may not have mentioned this, but none of the mattresses are at all springy. You land on them with an unexpected thud. Monday I reuined a haggling session of Jenny's for a couple of salwar-kameezes by naively piping up "Gee, that sounds like a pretty good deal." She was nice about it, but she was pretty annoyed, too. We had been in the Palika Bazaar, an underground market which reminded me of a casino, in the overwhelming sensory input and the darkened environment meant to blind you to the outside world. I am refraining from buying much (except my shirt and pashmina, both overpriced) till I can get a better handle on the baseline prices. As I said, I don't mind there being mostly seller surplus (in the economic sense), but I think prices will be cheaper here in Dehradun. At the National Museum, we met a few guards. One gave us mango while we lunched in the Canteen, and later, in his gallery of musical instruments, a cookie and some nuts warm from his pocket. He managed to slyly ask both me and Jenny if we were "available" He was old! But pretty sweet all things considered. In another gallery, I attempted to mimic a Buddha statue's mudra, a complicated hand position much more intricate than the usual YogaYoga forefinger-to-thumb mudra. Jenny and Mari tried to mimic me, and we turned to find a guard also mimicking us and laughing. He attempted to ascertain Jenny's status by asking if she was our mother. This managed to shock all of us and offend her somewhat. Another thing I may forget to write about if I don't write it now is how overstaffed everywhere is. I guess when you have a population of nearly a billion, you enter the realm of diminishing returns, especially when the economy can't support nearly that many. It gets confusing trying to remember who took your order, whom you should pay, how you get the food.

On the bus to Dehradun

[very difficult to read handwriting]After an emergency bathroom break, when 5 of our number trooped out to behind a thatched hut into the woods behind, and shortly after a woman in a bright pink sari emerged smiling a big smile, the first boy returned and said gruffly "There's monkeys." Indeed! We are traveling through a national park. More observations-I am, as Sara warned, about a foot taller than anyone here. I often have to duck through doorways and on second floors.