India Pt 2, 22 Dec - 02 Jan

This is the part of our trip we’ve really been waiting for…India. But even better, India with some of our people. We had planned to be in India sometime around the end of the year but when our friends and second family Mitch and Devy (also occasional landlords) said their family vacation was going to be in India this year we got excited. They invited Lyd, and by association, me, and we jumped on the chance to enjoy part of India with their family. Even more excited because Devy’s dad, Raju, immigrated to the US in the late 60’s from Mumbai and this was an opportunity to show his family and grandkids the place he grew up. When we think and talk about the American Dream, Raju is the poster-grandpa. He came over to work on advanced degrees and he and Theckla (Devy and Pookie’s parents) have built amazing lives and raised incredible daughters. Raju and Theckla had come to India a few weeks early for a wedding so we also got to shadow them earlier in our trip to Kerala, and got lucky to have some dinners in different cities with them. There were 8 of their group so we filled the last two seats available for almost two weeks. For more of my random thoughts, see the bottom.

New Delhi

Christmas Eve Dinner at the Leela in New Delhi - just because it rocked so much.

The Taj Mahal deserves its' own entry...

Random pics from Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Mumbai. Out of order because they made me sit at the back of the bus and I might have forgotten where we were...

The Art of Kite Fighting

Last Day...please sir, don't go...don't leave me alone with her for another year!!!

We flew from Kochi to New Delhi and met them at the super fancy Leela Palace Hotel for Christmas and then to Agra and Jaipur (the Golden Triangle) and then to Mumbai for New Year.

Along the way we saw some of the most amazing and historical sites in India, with my top two being the obvious -  the Taj Mahal and then a newer site, the Swaminarayan Akshardham Jain Temple in Delhi. Even with the crowds the Taj ranks as one of the greatest buildings in the world in terms of sheer beauty. It’s amazing to see - the Taj and all of its stunning white marble shines above the sea of people surrounding it. It’s one of those places that you stand awestruck in front of and almost forget to take pictures. Almost…until you realize you’re dodging 4,356 selfies as you try to walk around it. It does make for some beautiful pics and really is worth all the craziness.

Jainism is a form of Hinduism that apparently attracts billionaires and a lot of volunteers, because their temples are outrageous. It was built in 2005 using over 8,000 volunteers and over 300,000,000 hours of craftsmanship. And until you see detailed pics of it you can’t really believe the detail that went into it. It’s made of almost solid marble, intricately carved into hundreds of different Buddhas and Buddhist related statues. Unfortunately, the Jain Temple doesn’t allow cameras or phones in but if you google it you’ll see one of the craziest marble churches in the world.

BUT, the funny thing about the sights, or possibly the sad thing about me, is that what next stuck in my mind the most about the trip, ASIDE from the laughter and amazing time spent with our friends, was the Christmas buffet at the Leela Hotel in Delhi. We don’t ever stay in places this nice but Raju picked it because he’s all fancy. Since we were tagging on to their trip, we HAD to use the same hotels (damn!!!) and got to step out of our normal Motel 6 lifestyle for the High Life, hence the Leela. It was one of the nicest hotels I’ve ever stayed in and had the greatest water pressure of any hotel ever (I judge hotels a little differently now, being as I live in them EVERY night!). The buffet for Christmas Eve was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I was grumbling about the price tag until we walked in the door and then I was devising strategies for maximum intake. It alone was responsible for adding 1.7 kg to my bloated stomach. It was so great that I dedicated a whole section of pics to it - pretty sad but also really friggin amazing. Fair warning...only look at them if you want to be jealous.

Oh, and Delhi, and to a lesser extent, Mumbai, are as smoggy as the reports say they are, especially in the winter. Which, of course, is when we were there. But that also means that it isn’t hell level heat. There are two funny pics in the group - one in New Delhi from the roof of our hotel. I was trying to take a pic of the surrounding area, including the heavy smog, and my phone told me to “Please clean your lens” thinking it was a dirty lens. It was so smoggy that you couldn’t see more than a km away. The other was in Agra, where the Taj Mahal is. Our hotel was close enough that we should have been able to see the Taj from our window. But the smog was so thick we had no view. The Taj Hotel gave each of the rooms a white chocolate model of the Taj (Yes it was edible and, I know, how snooty - this was another of Raju's hotel choices). I had Lyd hold it up where the real Taj would have been in the view, so we at least got SOME view of it! We did wear face masks in some places but we both developed a nice hacking cough from that portion of the trip.

The Art of Kite Fighting…or Chris’ take on the soul of India. We pulled into Jaipur and noticed hundreds of kites flying everywhere. People were on the tops of buildings, in fields, playgrounds, everywhere launching new kites or jerking their arms all over the place to help steer their in-flight kites. These aren’t the kites we are used to, with a long tail to steady them, but were simple little diamond shaped kites with no tail. Since they had no tail they flew erratically. Jerking. Diving. Spinning. All wildly. They reminded me of a fish on a line, fighting this way and that trying to escape. You name it, they did it, from 100 feet to a thousand feet in the air. It turns out that kite flying is hugely popular in parts of the country but it isn’t just flying…it turns into kite FIGHTING, which is really funny. The first time I heard Raju say it, and with such reminiscent joy, I thought I was mis-hearing him. As it turns out, it’s a big pastime here and you see stalls all over the place selling cheap little paper kites made in someone's 2nd grade art class. It look like they use old popsicle sticks as the frame, so really cheap and really light. They coat the last hundred or so feet of line with powdered glass (it is basically like a nail file on a string and not actual glass shards) and this is what turns into a "fighting" tool. And this is where I realized this is the soul/ethos of India. More on that shortly, though. As I mentioned, the kites have no stabilizer and they go all over the place. The operators will pull and jerk them to catch different drafts of air and “try” to steer them. Some operators are actually quite adept at this and able to make the kites drop and encircle nearby kites’ strings. At that point the glass coated string will slice the opposing kites string, so the losing kite with simply flail away in the wind. You see kite casualties in trees, in the pool, dangling from roofs and cut lines all bunched up into trip hazards on the lawn. This I know from experience. It’s actually quite mesmerizing to watch. I tried to do a play-by-play in an Indian Howard Cosell voice but it was more funny INSIDE my head than out of it. There's a video above of them flailing around but I cut the kite death portion out as it was too gruesome.

So, this is where I dig a little into the soul of the country and exaggerate almost a lot. If you see the Indian traffic, it’s a lot the same as kite fighting. The cars and tuk-tuks and bikes and ambulances and trucks and tourist vans and rickshaws and cows and people all travel in somewhat of a stunted line forward, in search of an elusive target - forward. That target is elusive for many reasons…for instance the road might be closed due to it’s a random friggin Saturday or there might be a large cow wandering down the middle of the road, or monkeys or any other odd reason that Google Maps can’t understand and doesn’t report, so your little line home in the app gets amended and re-amended 20 times in as many minutes. Once we were 1.8 km from the hotel and it said it would be 45 minutes and then .8 km later it said 55 minutes. I half expected the app to finally say, “F#$% it, you’re on your own…maybe Steve Jobs can get you home”. Traffic might be the worst you’ve ever seen and jammed up with 4-5 lanes of vehicles on a one or two lane road. And the Indian driver, which is about all you see as Westerners will NEVER drive here, will inch forward and around and across and search for any opening they can find to snake past the car in the front of or to the side of them. They’ll get a foot or so from your bumper and once they get past the 5 inch mark, they know they have you - you’re not going to move for fear of hitting a 12 year old on a scooter. And that scooter is also carrying three other 12 year olds and a stack of lumber as well. And then they bull right in front of you. Like a kite, they are zigging and zagging endlessly until they find that opening and then they will cut you off. The motor-bikes and tuk-tuks are the worst/funniest as they will run around you on a sidewalk or around a street person or a goat and try to parkour into a spot in front of you. And they won’t (or I rarely saw it) get angry. It’s like everyone is just “I will cut you off faster than you gloated about cutting me off 50 feet ago”, no harm no foul no animosity. But I will honk non-stop as I do it, by Ganesh! Same thing happens in Indian queuing - at the airport we were the last ones in a line of maybe only 7 people and this little trio of brightly sari’d ladies just calmly walked around me and tried to cut in line. When I said something snide she just bobbled and waggled her head a bit, as if to say “I didn’t think you’d catch me and I definitely didn’t think you would say something.” So…I know that was a long story, but this is Chris’ far-fetched perceived ethos of the country - there’s so so so many people that they can’t get mad at everyone trying to pass them because there’s always someone else behind someone else that needs or wants to get by you. But you have to keep moving forward or you’re going to get honked at and never reach that destination. It’s going to happen so just go with it and try not to hit the cow, whatever you do. It’s chaos, but excruciatingly maddening and/or funny chaos to watch.

Driving in a 10 passenger van was a really fun shit-show and constantly a “you saw what?????” game:

“Cow!”

“Ooooh puppies”

“This kid wouldn’t take his face off Louis’ window for 5 minutes”

“Look at that man masturbating on the side of the road”

“Look at that lady pooping behind the car”

“1…4….8…11…there’s 12 people in that Rickshaw”

“I saw 13 - I saw 13…WINNER!”

“4 people and 600 servants live in that skyscraper?!?!?!?” (This super wealthy guy lives in a freaking skyscraper in Mumbai!)

“MONKEYS!!!!!” and Lydia "Baby Monkeys...they're soooo cute....awwwwwww"

“Look at these f’ing people…these f’ing people…f’ing traffic…I f’ing hate India” said after a three hour traffic jam where we moved 5 km.

Unfortunately our friends, who mostly had real jobs or school had to go back to them, but I can’t say enough how comforting it is for us to be able to share travel with our people. Even with the chaos of India, having family with you to laugh at it or wonder at it or just experience it is magical - thank you Mitch, Devy, Kiran, Milana, Raju, Theckla, Pookie and Louis for allowing us to crash your party!