Wednesday, April 6, 2011

April Fools and Amritsar

The week of April Fools Day was a great week! I continued to bond with the daycare kids, make progress with the girls in English class, learn more Hindi (and a little Pahari) and play a few pranks on April Fools Day! The daycare kids are so cute! They are very energetic and they love to dance and sing! One little boy in particular really loves dancing! He's got all of the moves down from probably every Bollywood movie out there! In the English class the girls are improving a lot and I can definitely see a difference in their English and computer skills from the beginning of the class. I've come to appreciate every one of them for their individual personalities and I realized that I will miss them so much when I leave! I was so happy to hear that India has April Fools Day! I love April Fools Day I had been thinking that I was going to miss it because I would be in India! They may not get as crazy with it as my brothers, Josh, and I have in the past, but I managed to get everyone in the joking spirit that day! We had been talking about April Fools Day about a week and a half before but I think I was the only person who remembered when the day came! Of course, I had to plan ahead for some things so I got up in the middle of the night a few times the night before to dip Aoife's toothbrush in a cup of water and then put it back in the freezer. By morning time there was a block of ice frozen around it but by the time Aoife woke up it was just a little bit icy! Another classic April Fools Day prank was the "balloon in the door" trick! I inflated a balloon but didn't knot the end and shut it in the door with the balloon on the outside and when Vineet went outside, he opened the door and the balloon flew up in the air zoomed right in front of him. I was sitting on the couch when it happened and I couldn't stop myself from laughing a little and making it obvious that it was me who set it up but once he realized what day it was, he was laughing too! I had more things planned for that day that were a bit delayed because of one problem. Ramesh. Just kidding! He's not that bad but just when I was about to start setting up a new prank, he insisted that I watch him and Vineet fix the water pipe. Then when I need glue for the coin trick, I asked Ramesh if he had any glue and after what seemed like an hour he finally came back out with... toothpaste! And that wasn't supposed to be an April Fools joke! But then I found some double-sided tape that worked well to stick a coin and a 10 rupee note to the floor. Varun helped me with that one and we were planning on tricking Ravi with it, thinking that he would see the money on the floor when he got out of the shower but he just walked right past it several times! Ramesh didn't fall for it and then tried to help us but made it completely obvious by going out of his way to make Ravi walk over to the money. After that there was no one else to fall for it. I still don't know what happened to my 2 rupee coin though! That morning I had the worst chai ever! I usually don't like sugar with tea so when Ravi gave me a cup of chai with breakfast, I thought that the little white crystals on the rim of the cup was sugar and they put sugar in it as an April fools joke. But then I took a sip, thinking that a little bit of sugar wouldn't be the end of the world, but it wasn't sugar! It was salt! It tasted like ocean water with milk! I couldn't drink chai again for a while after that! Then I did a few other pranks throughout the day, like taping paper over the bottom of the computer mouse. Varun was the victim of that one and restarted the computer twice before finding the "April Fools!" note under the mouse! Then I made my own Uno cards that fit into the deck and when we were playing Uno that night, I slyly slid the "draw 20" card and the "automatic win" card into my cards and tried to use them but they wouldn't let me! On Saturday morning we boarded the taxi for the four hour drive into Amritsar in the state of Punjab. When I first got in the taxi, seat belts didn't even cross my mind. I found here that even when the seat belts are intact with the car, nobody ever wears them or even waits for you to put on yours before driving off. So when the driver made an attempt to fix the seat belts in the back seat of the car, I was a little bit shocked, but not shocked to see that they were not even in one piece. So we drove four hours, on some of the craziest roads in the world, with no seat belts. It would have seemed completely insane before I came here but now, somehow it seems normal. The car ride wasn't terrible. We stopped a couple times along the way at smoke filled rest areas with dirt floors to go up to the roof to use the non-flushing toilet surrounded by walls made of bamboo strips and the door that didn't shut completely. Once we were in Punjab, there were few traffic jams in the cities. Traffic jams are a great opportunity to buy some fresh coconut from your car window! I didn't know until we bought some that the brown skin of the coconut is edible! The car ride was nice for a while with the windows open but then once we drove a little further into Punjab, I was getting very bored and it was too hot to close the windows but the dust, dirt, and smog blew right into our faces. It wasn't too hard to get used to and ignore most of the time, but when we arrived in Amritsar, I noticed that my hair was really dry and dusty and a layer of dirt had built up on my face. Once we were checked into the hotel I was able to wash my face and use a little bit of baby powder to freshen up my hair. Then we took an auto-rickshaw to the Crystal Palace restaurant and then took another rickshaw back to the hotel. Aoife and I took the taxi for an hour to go see the Wagha Border closing at the India-Pakistan border. Varun didn't come with us though because the final world cup cricket match between India and Sri Lanka was that day and he wanted to see it. The border closing was really fun and crazy and I was thrilled that I actually got to see Pakistan from about 70 meters away! They started getting ready for the border closing by getting the audience enthusiastic. The Indian side and the Pakistni side both try to play music louder than each other and on the Indian side people from the audience get in line to run the Indian flag up to the Pakistani border and run back. Then they play really bouncy music and people get up to dance and some people sing along to it! It gets really crazy and exciting on the Indian side but then when you look over at the Pakistani side, you see the men and women sitting on separate sides, just sitting there with no enthusiasm at all. When the border closing starts, India and Pakistani border guards start their goofy-looking marches (trying to kick their legs much higher than they are really capable of) and they do yelling contests where they yell into a microphone and see who can yell the longest without running out of breath! It's kind of silly but it's definitely a lot of fun! Before Amritsar, the only people that really annoyed me were the sellers that tried to sell me everything in Delhi but walking back to the taxi from the border closing was when I really got annoyed by the boys there. There was a group of four teenage boys that followed Aoife and I all the way back to the parking lot (about at 15 minute walk), trying to get our attention and "accidentally" bumping into me and then apologizing in the midst of laughing and high-fives from their friends. Eventually we lost them and got back to the taxi, followed by more staring and waving from young men. After getting back to Amritsar, we went back to the hotel and then went to the Golden Temple to see it at night. The Golden Temple was amazing! At night, the lights on it make it look like it's glowing and it shines really brightly and the reflection of it in the pool makes the water look like a golden liquid. It was much better seeing it in person than I'd ever imagine from a picture! Pictures can't grasp the shininess of the temple like human eyes can. Photographs also can't show the complete atmosphere and mood of the area surrounding the temple. Many Sikh families travel a long way to see the temple because it is very important to them and their religion. The temple grounds at night are scattered with families sleeping on blankets on the marble floors and other people still walking clockwise around the temple and kids playing together near the water. You can hear the high priests inside the temple, reading aloud from the Granth Sahib. The entire Granth Sahib takes 48 hours to read and at the temple, they must always have a priest reading it aloud so they take shifts for reading it over the big speakers throughout the temple grounds. The temple was amazing and I didn't want to leave but we still had to get dinner somewhere and stop at an ATM. I also was temped to bring my shoes to the shoe-fixer guy on the corner of the street to get my shoe fixed because at the border closing, the back strap of my sandal snapped off on one side. But I didn't want to bother with something that wasn't extremely important. We took a rickshaw back to the hotel and on the way, we were a little confused when the rickshaw driver slowed down in the middle of the road and then stopped and turned his head too look at something outside. Then Aoife and I saw that he had stopped in front of a store window with a TV in it to watch the cricket match! We had dinner at the hotel that night. We had dinner with Varun and the taxi driver but I think that their minds were more focused on what they were missing in the cricket match! There was a TV in the bar of the hotel and a few times I saw our waiter standing by the door watching the match for a few minutes. Then he came over to our table with more beverages and apologized for being slow because he was really busy! Apparently cricket is a really big deal here! Towards the end of the night at the restaurant, Varun and the taxi driver went back inside to watch the match when there was a few minutes left. Then from our table we heard a ton of cheering coming from the bar and then people coming out of the bar and their rooms and getting on their cell phones with friends and talking about the match. Then, of course, there were fireworks! Then Aoife and I decided to go into the bar to see what the celebration on the field looked like but there was nowhere to sit and it got boring after a minute. I'm glad that they won even though I'm not a cricket fan and I don't even know the rules of the game! If India didn't win, I had a feeling that there would be a more negative mood the next day. It's more fun when the whole country is celebrating! The next morning, we went back to the temple. This time Varun came with us because there was no cricket match to watch! The Golden Temple was amazing during the day as well! It looked really bright, even against the sunny, blue sky! The temple was so crowded that day because there was a Punjabi politician visiting the city that day so many people came to Amritsar. It was too busy to go inside the temple because the line would have taken at least two or three hours. The temple grounds were crowed and we felt squished while not in the line, so I couldn't imagine being squeezed into the roped off que with hundreds of people for that many hours! I see how it would be worth it if you were Sikh and you made a long and difficult trip with your family to go see it because of it's religious importance, but for me, photographs are going to have to do for now, until I visit the temple another time! I would really like to go back to the temple sometime to spend more time there. We were a little bit rushed to leave because we got sort of pushed out by the huge crowd. There were a lot of Indian tourists there at the temple that asked to take pictures with me and Aoife. Most of the time we would stand there with the family of strangers for a quick picture but as we were leaving it was a bit of a nuisance to keep stopping for pictures. We were able to see the cooking going on in the other areas though. That was really neat to see all of those people being served the food made by the volunteers. It was awesome to go "behind the scenes" of the temple and watch all of the volunteers (including children) making hundreds of pounds of food to feed the temple visitors. There was one man standing on a platform, stirring a huge pot of food! The pot was bigger than a king sized bed! Then there was a chapati making station where people sat rolling out the dough for chapatis. I had to stand on a pile of broccoli stalks to see into the cooking area but I could have stood there and watched for hours. I loved how everyone seemed so happy to be there to work! They were mostly Sikhs that were volunteers but not all of them. There were no foreigners there but I thought that it might be fun to be a volunteer for day at the temple. I might be peeling potatoes for five hours straight but I'm sure that I'd have a very interesting experience with the other people! When you enter the temple grounds, you have to cover your head with a scarf (or turban), leave your shoes with the volunteers who put them in boxes with numbers on them, then wash your hands in the little sinks, then walk through little pools of water to clean your feet. When Aoife and I were sitting outside, waiting for Varun to come back with our shoes, we started getting surrounded by boys asking us if they could take pictures of us. We just said no but then more people came and asked for pictures or just took pictures without asking. Some boys also just stood there and tried engaging in conversation. When Varun came back, the ring of boys around us dispersed and finally, we could breathe again when we left the temple without the suffocating crowds! When we left we took a rickshaw to a dhaba for lunch and then went to the memorial park where 2,000 Innocent Indians were killed by a British man. You can walk through the park and read about the massacre and about the people that were killed there. You can walk up to a little brick structure to see the bullet holes in the bricks and then look into the well that people dove into to escape the gun fires. All over the park, you can see signs that say things like, "you are standing on blood-soaked ground" and "biking, skating, football, and playing cards are prohibited in the park". The park was nice except for when you are reading a poster about someone who died in the massacre and then all of a sudden a guy comes up to you and snaps a picture with his cell phone or when a lady assumes that you need help reading the poster and starts reading it aloud, very loudly, so that you can't concentrate on what you are trying to read! Then we got back in the car and drove back to Himachal, stopping along the way to buy some juice and getting stuck in a traffic jam, because in India, they don't hold fairs in a field or empty lot, they set them up on the street! Amritsar was great and I would have loved to stay there longer and spend more time at the temple but it was nice to get back to Himachal and see the kids in the daycare and the girls in the English class again!

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