Farewell India

It is hard to sum up what 11 weeks in India has meant to us. It has been a difficult, and often emotionally trying experience, that may take months or years to digest. What we have seen, felt, smelled, tasted, and experienced here is unlike anything we will ever do again. Some things we loved, many things we hated. We met one traveler who said the only way to get through India and enjoy your time here is to let go and see the world as Indians do. It is wise advice that we were never fully able to do. We may see a rickshaw driver as trying to rip us off, but the driver only sees it as negotiating. There is a different flow to life here, colorful, chaotic, and uniquely Indian.

So instead of boring you with some half-baked insights into our time here, we came up with a short list of things we liked and things we didn't like about this overwhelming country.

Things we liked:

1. Cows hanging around and hearing them moo from our hotel room
2. The Golden Temple in Amritsar
3. The food (for the most part)
4. Watching monkeys swing across rooftops
5. Being up close and personal with historic sites
6. Masala dosa (look it up if you have to. Awesome.)
7. Watching chaiwalas (tea servers)
8. Riding in rickshaws
9. Colorful bazaars
10. Watching mini communities form on train rides with people sharing food, space, and stories

Things we did not like:

1. Overnight buses
2. Anise flavored food or sweets
3. Paan spit everywhere, including inside national monuments (paan is like chewing tobacco, but the spit is bright red and stains everything) and the general number of people spitting
4. Paying 25 times as much as Indians for a ticket to a tourist sight (10 rupees for Indians, 250 rupees for foreigners)
5. Crossing busy streets with no regard to pedestrians
6. Getting stared at on buses, in the streets, at monuments
7. Seeing child labor
8. Burning trash and mounds of trash everywhere (plastics included)
9. Hearing the excuse, “Its India” (said with a big grin) for anything and everything that might be slightly off, for example a bus arriving two and a half hours late.
10. Feeling sick sometimes (and not knowing why)
    
    

    

    
    

    This photo is of Gandhi's last footsteps (in concrete) before he was assassinated in 1948. The memorial in Delhi was very moving and beautiful.