mussoorie's upsidedown sky, and what would have been the end?

I promise that I have tried to blog before now. An embarrassingly long time has gone by, and I've been slacking. Every time I have tried to write the following entry, I get a few days journaled and then I pass out because I've been so busy - which in terms of everything except for blogging, is a good thing. The annoying part is going back through and having to change everything to the past tense since it has been so long since I've written the beginning of this post.

A few months ago, I thought I would have been writing you my goodbye/reflection post or something that would feel obligatory at the end of a journey - I would have been home for eight days now had I left when my program was officially over! Jury is out on whether you will get something so formal when the time comes.. we shall see. The program is over, and I'm flyin solo :)

I know everyone says this, but I can hardly believe this time has flown by so fast... maybe it is because I've documented most of it week by week (well, mostly) that I can look back and realize how fast so much time has passed.. I also think it is because this program has crammed as much as was physically possible to cram into an extremely small amount of time. In four months, I have seen so many different snapshots of different parts of India. This blog should have been called laurainindia.blogspot.com, but 1) unfortunately that name was taken by a girl who wrote a starter entry and then never updated (lame) and 2) I think I made the name at a time when I was still pretty intimidated by heavy international travel and so was attempting to comfort myself in a small way by pretending I'd be in just one city as a home base. Maybe I'm psychoanalyzing too much, but the point is that I acknowledge that travelling definitely intimidated me a little bit before I shipped myself over to the other side of the planet for a while.

My last week in Delhi after ISP, as I've described, was pretty lame. I spent five and a half days just lying in the a/c at Sarvodaya Enclave and writing my paper. Well, "writing." I worked on it a little bit at a time... and not enough. On the overnight train to Mussoorie I was still rushing to work on it. At 5pm the day it was due, I was adding finishing touches. Predictable. ;) Probably the only exciting things that week were making Mother's Day mexican food which I blogged about last time, and seeing Aura's music performance at school. I really loved hearing her play the tubla, a classical Indian drum, and recorded it. I think I'm going to use the audio from it for a short video of my time here to show people (the full 800 pics would be a little excessive.. and probably boring).

So last week I met up with the other girls who had returned to Delhi (about half of us) on the evening of our overnight train. We went out to dinner at Khan Market (the really really upscale part of Delhi) and had these chicken roll things for Rs 120 each (that's about $3, folks), and then treated ourselves to chocolate crepes and frozen coffees. After all that time at Jamkhed, this was even more of a treat than usual. It was great to meet back up with people and hear about how different our ISP time had been.

That night we traveled by train to Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where we picked up the rest of the girls who had done their ISPs there and then made the slow, early morning climb up by bus the side of some mountains to Mussoorie! Dazed and travel-weary but pumped to be back together as a group once again, we had a quick breakfast, reunited with our homestay roommates, and passed out for a few hours. In the afternoon, Molly-ji (sweet reunion!) and I had manicure/pedicures in the hotel spa (I know... I'm feelin the extremes of India right about now) and went out to explore Mussorrie and find some lunch! We ate in a restaurant that reminded me so much of a scene from a Bollywood movie called Jab We Met..and then eerily, one of the songs from the movie came on the radio! Bizzarro.

Street food in Mussoorie - 

this is julebi - basically a mini funnel cake, but crunchy and soaked in sugar syrup (and bright orange):

Mussorrie is in the foothills of the Himalayas, at an altitude around 8000 ft. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool... absolutely perfect weather. Molly and I also checked out the "Aquarium," which was actually about ten tanks with some pet varieties of fish. It was kind of a let down until we saw the piranhas which were... well, toothy.. and interesting. And obviously not native to India.

That afternoon we all relaxed back at the hotel, walked through Mussoorie some more. We ate Gol Gappa from who would become my favorite Gol Gappa guy. Rs 10 buys you four of them, made to order of course. My teacher Goutam ji saw me buy them and stood behind me and said in a dead pan voice "I have Dr.Chowla's number" (the lady from our clinic in Delhi). Mikey and Elizabeth, if you're reading this, don't tell Jonathan that I broke his rule of not eating the street food... it was just this one booth I swear! ;) Fortunately the mountain temps made for food that hadn't spoiled in the heat as is the common cause of street food sickness, and we had a great snack, and went back to him more than once.

Molly and I got dinner at a South Indian restaurant (pretty ironic considering we were as north as you can go before you're travelling into mostly snow covered areas). After dinner, we could hear an Indian band in the distance, so followed it to its source. A street band was warming up for a wedding and some of our classmates we already there listening. A crowd had gathered, and one guy who was with the band danced in the middle of the musicians. After a few minutes of watching, two of the girls jumped in to dance with him much to the delight of about 70 Indian men who whipped out their cell phones to take pictures of us making fools of ourselves. I recorded it but something malfunctioned with the video, so unfortunately the memory will have to just live on in my mind.. and naturally, unable to resist a budding Indian street dance party, I joined as well and we did a lot of the "lightbulbs" move, where you twist your wrists as if you're screwing in a lightbulb. It's a big hit in India. We were all completely out of breath and on kind of a high from the excitement (and the altitude), and headed back to the hotel.

The next morning we were all frantically attempting to finish our ISP papers. At 5pm, the deadline, a lot of us (including yours truly) were still putting the finishing touches on them (or in my case doing the entire bibliography) and then went out to explore Mussorrie a little bit more. We walked around Mussorrie some more, and took a cable car ride to the top of the mountain. The top was this bizarre market for magic tricks and toy but there were some awesome views.

We ate Momo's (dumplings on the roadside) and had dinner in a place that made us feel like we were in America - live music, cocktails... that's kind of a metaphor for the whole place which was having a serious identity crisis. i took this picture that night of a United Colors of Benetton next to a Saree Shop:

That night was also my friend Hannah's birthday!

The next morning was presentation day. We were asked to do 20 minute presentations on our ISP research. Since I didn't have anything to wear but cotton skirts or a saree, I went with the saree. It took me about 30 minutes to put it on, and when Molly told me I looked like I was walking like a Geisha, I realized I had wrapped it around my legs one two many times. Bhavna-ji whisked me away upstairs, and in a manner I can only liken to a cotton candy twirler at a state fair, whipped me out of it, pleated it, and twirled me back in it in under a minute. I think I got an A for effort but it will definitely take some practice.

We gave presentations on our research in the hotel conference hall. It was great to see how pumped everyone was about their projects. A lotta passion.. the best by far was my friend Katie who went to Calcutta for the month by herself, and did a project on health care access for female sex workers. Her interviews were incredibly intense and I don't think there was a dry eye in the house. Her research was incredible if only for its result of gathered narratives of an often overlooked or misunderstood population.

That night we walked around Mussoorie some more and then headed back for a party for the end of our program. We had dinner outside on the patio of the hotel, ate fresh chicken tikka, had mocktails and later cocktails, and had a dance party back inside the hotel conference room. It was a blast and we played both American and Bollywood hits - the best was at the end... it was only about 9:30pm but the hotel staff wanted to wind down the party, so they tried to just cut off the music in the middle of "Party in the USA" by Miley Cyrus... so all 18 of us screamed the rest of the lyrics, a capella style. Never underestimate the power of Miley Cyrus..

roadside tattoo? the real deal...

The next morning we had a few final presenters, and then had the afternoon off. I got henna in the afternoon, and then took a walk with my friend Hannah to take pictures of the mountains and get some soft serve. Funny how people pay $20 for some henna stars in Ocean City and it's only Rs 100 ($2) to have both arms covered in flowers in India... and they even use the same brand of henna cones. We also took advantage of the cheap eyebrow threading and shopping for Kashmiri textiles (beautiful hand stitching).

this is on the list of things my mom would like slash things i should have bargained for and gotten...

this looks like a girl who just wrote a paper (sleeeeeeepy):

Also available in Mussoorie: porters who carry heavy shit straight up the mountain for next to nothing (we saw a guy with a REFRIGERATOR strapped to his back and FOREHEAD), and other porters who push strollers around, and for Rs 20/hour (read: 50 cents) will push around your baby while you shop. Yeah.

Later we had dinner and packed up for Delhi. As we walked down to the bus stop in the dark, you could see Dehradun in the distance, about 2500ft below us in altitude. As there were so many outdoor fires, it twinkled, but it was bright enough that there were no stars. Goutam-ji pointed and said "look! Mussoorie! The town of the upside-down sky," hence the name of this post. The view of Mussoorie as we wound back down the mountain was breathtaking. It looked like Santorini at night, with all of the lights glittering on the mountainside. Another overnight train later and we were back in Delhi at the guesthouse in New Friends Colony.

Around 10am we headed to the program center for the last time as a full group. We went around in a circle and talked about the challenges that we had anticipated when coming on this trip, and how we felt about them now in what Azim-ji called a "fears appraisal." Most people talked about learning Hindi, living with a homestay, the incredible poverty+pollution (all big challenges, definitely). When it got around to me, I talked about how last summer I started to think that I wouldn't go at all. So many of the other girls are already thrice over world travellers.. so I tried to explain that it wasn't really just the leaving home part. When I had been at Tufts last spring and had applied on gut instinct and not applied to any other abroad programs, it didn't feel real. When I told people I planned to go to India in less than a year, they were for the most part extremely excited, particularly my best friends from school like Chelsea and Erika and my favorite professors like Kevin Irwin. In that kind of environment, were it was so far off and people were so supportive, it felt like a good decision. When I got home for the summer, and my parents expressed how worried they would be about me, and a lot of other people from high school (not my best friends, obvs, but others) or other adults would say "INDIA?! Why would you go there??" it became harder to remember why I wanted the adventure in the first place. In the words of someone my Dad knows, "what the s* would she do in India?" While it was said in jest, it added to the long list of people who weren't able to see it for the reasons I did: that it would be different, a learning experience, and an adventure. I'm not placing blame on anyone or saying that anyone tried to make me feel bad about going, but more that the added stress of so many people doubting my decision made me begin to doubt it myself.

Well... long story short, after reading the blogs of friends who went away in the Fall, I felt better about it. I got my shots. I talked to professors who had been there. I was back at school where study abroad is a common phenomenon and where people are pumped for you about trying something new. This was about the same time when my Mom and Dad (heyyyyy guys) started getting at least a liiiiiiittle less worried and a little more excited about it, too. Ok, maybe still just as worried. But definitely more excited ;) And then... I left! I was reading my post that I wrote at the beginning of all of this business about standing in the airport and having something inside of me metaphorically put both hands on the threshold of the door to the 747 and scream IF YOU WANT TO RUN BACK NOW IS THE TIME but boarding the plane anyway. I had reasons to be anxious. This is a crazy crazy place. But it's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And in that moment, I had to push that voice down and do it.


I'm not trying to be self congratulatory here.. but it was something pretty emotional to share with the group. Obviously I didn't say all of that in such detail.. it was more like I told them I had been anxious about coming, and other people were anxious for me, to the point where I started filling out applications for an internship in DC or something domestic, but in the end I got on the plane and the 17 other girls and the amazing staff are a huge reason for why it worked.

The next part was going around and saying two nice things about the person on your right. I got to gush over Molly ji who was the best person to explore Delhi with and experience our first set backs as travellers. She's a witty one. My friend Jordan had me, and said something that I didn't fully realize until she said it.. she said that she admired how much I love India. That I was constantly filled with wonder over simple Indian stuff. And.... I didn't fully realize it until then, but.. she's right... I think that's how I've gotten through the rougher parts of this trip. I really, really do love this country. A lot. Almost everything about it. And I have never been too sad to leave a place because I have this overwhelming feeling that this is far from my last trip to India. I think there will be many more where this came from. 4 months at a time again...? Well, baby steps. ;) Don't worry Mom and Dad. I love everything about Monkton, too.

We had a final lunch together at the program center, and that night was the final banquet. Getting ready for the banquet felt like Prom... except everyone was in sarees... and it wasn't like Prom at all... just go with it.

I think the photos speak for themselves!

Molly and I attempted to sum up our gratitude to the Guhas with a card and some flowers:

prom rainbow:

Tufts jumbos!:

Molly-ji had to leave at 9pm to make her flight, one of the first two people to leave the group of 18. I miss you, ji.

And so now I'm on my own!  Had I gone home at the end of the program I would have missed out on all of this adventure ;) This would have been the end... but instead you'll heard from me probably two more times in the next week to do all of the crazy memories I've made in the past 7 days justice. This post itself is coming at you from my second of three cities I wanted to visit before I left: Jaipur. Soon I'll finish my post about the few days after the program that I had in Delhi with my homestay, visiting Amritsar with Nisha and her Mom, and my one and only night out to experience Delhi nightlife with Michaela. That's coming at you soon... I need to get to sleep because I'm going to see some ELEPHANTS tomorrow!!! ahhh!!! I'll keep a tally. And yes, Dad, I'll find out where they keep the elephants at night.

Love love love, and 9 days,

Laura