India Journal -- Part 1 -- December 27-December 30

Day 1 – December 27

We spend the day getting packed and ready. Is everything in order? Is the dog taken care of? Do we have copies of all our important papers and are they in the right places? Are we packing light enough? What did the kids say they wanted us to bring? Do we have room for it?

The day is spent with questions and stomach tension although we are essentially ready and confident enough to leave the house by 7 pm for our 10:10 flight from Dulles Airport. After parking in economy and getting the shuttle in, we wait in line hoping our paperwork is in order. Our seat assignments have been changed, and we are not all together. Actually, none of us are together, but we are close by. We don’t lose our cool. In fact, we are patient and so is the airline rep. This pays off for us later. We pass through security and head out to the gate.

Boarding starts almost an hour ahead of time. It’s a huge airplane, and it takes time to fill. We are in the back with a number of families with babies and young children. Uh-oh. There is crying and wiggling. The young mom I am beside has paid for a seat for her baby, but there isn’t one. Fortunately, Jonathan has an empty seat next to him, so I move there to give her the seat she needs.

This is it. We’re going!

Day 2 – December 28

The days begin to get mixed up. Our flight on Qatar Airlines to Doha takes about 13 hours it seems. There is a very good entertainment system and we are fed as much as we want, so the time seems to go by pretty quickly. I guess I dose a little bit. Shortly before landing, Steve discovers that a friend of ours from The Falls Church, Anne Landis, has been sitting in front of him all along. She comes to say hi to me. She has a sister living in Doha. I am very surprised to see her!
Our layover in Doha is only a couple of hours. We meet a young man who is a graduate student at Penn State who is going home to a village near Vellore for the first time in two years. As we board to head to Chennai, our seats are changed again. We are seated together, and we are in first class! Steve thinks it’s because we were nice to the agent in Washington. Whatever it was, it sure is nice to have all that room for our last 5 hours to India.

Day 3 – December 29

We are well fed and get to sleep some before landing on time in Chennai, India at 3:40 a.m. local time. Yes, it’s the middle of the night and the customs agents look a bit sleepy. But once we get into the airport we find a huge throng crowding the rails to meet people. Elliott has told us to look for someone holding a sign with our names on it. He has gotten a driver from the Christian Medical College to meet us and take us to Vellore. We search the whole line of waiting and crowding people till it ends. Then we walk back up the line and find Raja holding a sign with our names on it. We walk to the parking lot and get into an older model sedan of some sort. Evidently most international flights arrive in the middle of the night.

First Class leg room...

Arriving at Madras Airport in Chennai

This is the first of several driving experiences in India. Since it is the middle of the night, traffic isn’t that bad, but still we notice that driving in India is a whole new experience. (I now have a whole new impression of the Penn State graduate student’s mother.) Raja says there are no traffic rules, at least none that are enforced. The basic mode of driving is to honk and then veer or hope the other car veers around. This is our most tame driving experience of our visit, probably due to the time of day and to Raja, whom Elliott says is his favorite driver. It is dark for most of our drive, but the sky is beginning to brighten as we near Vellore. The oddly shaped hills that pop up out of flat ground with rocky promontories begin to appear. We’ve seen them in Elliott’s pictures.

Daily's living room first morning

As dawn brightens to full day, we are being dropped off in front of a large apartment building, one of three in a compound surrounded by fencing. The apartment buildings are for staff of the Christian Medical College/Hospital. Raja had a key to let us into the Daly’s apartment, a Canadian family, the husband of whom is a doctor working at the Christian Medical Hospital. There was a squished little gecko on the screen door that continued to dry out throughout our entire stay. Elliott was soon at the door to welcome us even though it was still very early in the morning. He’d walked over from his rooms—about a 10-15 minute walk. We sat around dazed and said we didn’t need to sleep, but we felt pretty awful to begin with. We articulated how amazing it was to be here and sat in the simple and small concrete block apartment furnished only with a table and some hard wooden chairs with rattan seats. There was also a small, artificial Christmas tree with lights and a full size refrigerator. The rest of the apartment is two bedrooms and a kitchen with shelving, counters, and a pantry, and a bathroom, all joined by a short hallway. The beds, which seem to be typical for here, are wooden platforms with foam pads. They feel harder than we’re used to, but they’re not bad.

Elliott makes us all oatmeal after David, Jessica, and Eden walk over. They’ve just arrived last night from Delhi and Agra and points north where they had all sorts of adventures seeing the Taj, camel safaris, and being clobbered by a monkey with a brick (Eden). It is amazing to see Jessica; it’s been so long, it’s hard to let go.

After breakfast and “freshening” up (The bathrooms here don’t invite a comfortable relationship, just a necessary one.), we headed out walking to tour the Christian Medical College campus with Elliott. Interesting in light of the fact that I am reading Paul Brand’s book The Gift that Nobody Wants. The most beautiful spot was the chapel and surrounding gardens. See pictures. From there we went to cruise the neighborhood and surrounding areas. Wow! Very hot. And seeing for the first time what I knew was true—trash everywhere, dirt, open sewage, smells, animals (goats, dogs, cows mostly), people, living, walking, working, sitting. Saw rice paddies for the first time and people working in them.

neighborhood goat

CMC Chapel Garden

Elliott climbing a banyan tree whose roots grow down from the branches and make messy, interesting configurations. Isn't there a song about a banyan tree? Listen to this: ) http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=33660

A friend to climb with (above)All kinds of housing in the neighborhood...

Not sure what was being communicated here by Mr. D. :)

More fancy housing of suburbia or at least outskirts of Vellore

Goats and rice paddies

Brightly painted structure with a kolam, a chalk drawing (redone each morning usually) that has some religious or superstitious significance. See http://www.tamilnation.org/culture/kolam.htm

Woman bending in a rice paddie...

and other paddie workers

After drinks and a little rest in the shade of the apartment, Then we walked to “the corner” past little carts and businesses and lots of stray dogs and puppies to catch a bus to downtown for dinner in a nice hotel restaurant—Darling Hotel. We stopped at the only grocery store in Vellore for some needed supplies. Quite small and crowded, but it is quite a super market for there. Glad that the restaurant (one of two Elliott considers completely safe to eat at.) is on the roof of the hotel, above the smells of an open sewage ditch and much of the honking vehicle and people noises.

At the Darling Hotel for dinner (above)

A delicious dinner of rice and various curry sauces and chipotes (flat bread like tortillas). We split up to take auto rickshaws back to the apartment. Elliott told us how much to offer him, but he wanted more. Elliott said to say that was fair, but he wasn’t buying it. We didn’t have any other money. So after an angry exchange, he left, but he knew where we lived! That scared Jonathan (and all of us) for a little while.

Day 4 – Sunday, December 30

We decided to go to St. John’s, a Church of South India congregation that was the closest English speaking worship. The service was typically at 9:30, but when we arrived, it was obviously in the middle of a Lessons and Carol service. Unfortunately for that service they’d had a special start time of 8:30. Oh, well. It was a pretty building, not full but comfortably full. There was a group of folks there from Hawaii, there on a short mission trip. At the end of the service they got up and sang a couple of songs too. Afterwards we visited with various ones. David met the parents of someone he had known a little at Calvin. The American missionary doctor’s family from Boston was there. It was nice to talk with them. A group of children came begging and wanting their picture taken.

David meeting the father of a friend from Calvin. That was a surprise!

The neighborhood kids doing a little begging for money or pictures...

The church building was near an old fort and other downtown attractions (Hindu temple and large market area), so we walked around a bit at the fort grounds and wall and then the temple. There were lots of people there. We got chastised by a temple guard for carrying our shoes instead of leaving them at the door. It seemed a dark sort of place—not by way of physical light, but with so many idols around and people milling about making concession to them. Again, it was hot, so we tried to find the shade to stand and walk in.

Everyone climbs another banyan tree at the old fort.

Gate of the Hindu temple as seen from the fort, I think

People walking into the temple area


On the fort wall (above and below)

The market area was large, with some of it being covered by grass roof and some just open-air. The booths were tiny and crowded together, selling everything from jewelry, food, flowers (many), and necessities of various kinds. It was crowded with people, and I was unprepared for what a spectacle we would present as a large group of white people. Many politely greeted us that you got the feeling may have been dared to speak to us.

Flowers are a very big item for hair and decorations of all kinds. Just the blossoms are cut off--no stems--and then sometimes woven together in necklaces, etc.

Flower decorations (above)

After the market and a stop back at Daily's to recoup a bit, we walked over to Elliott's apartment/rooms. He lives on what you could call a residential street, maybe the only one like it in Vellore. His landlady is a 92 year old woman who rents rooms out to folks mostly from the medical community, I think. It's about a 15 minute walk from the apartment building, past all the typical sites and sounds. David saw a "cotton candy man" but when he bought his, it was about a quarter of the size of what we think of as a bag of cotton candy.

Not sure what perspective this is on the house, but it isn't a very attractive one. Sorry, Elliott.

The desk where all the Skyping happens now also shared with Jessica.I guess Elliott wasn't expecting company. He forgot to make his bed! I don't know if the air conditioner works. He has never used it.

The kitchen areaBelow are goats on a major garbage heap...and Steve protecting himself from the sun with the umbrella. Though it was the mildest time of year, the sun was still really hot.

After a hot afternoon, we headed back to the apartment and got changed to go to the swim club Elliott belongs to. It is a beautiful oasis of lovely pool, changing rooms, gym with some exercise equipment and sort of tea/coffee bar with open terraces around it, including a ping-pong table and tables and chairs. After being out in the city, it really did seem like a quiet oasis of peace, and Elliott commented that we could see why he likes to go there at the end of a day.



The CMC apartment buildings as seen from the swim club


We ate in the “other” safe restaurant that night. Splitting up to go back the apartment, we jumped into the first auto rickshaw that presented itself and then realized that it had no headlight. So we held our breaths and hoped all those buses, trucks and other rickshaws hurtling at us would see us in time to veer. They did! This time we didn’t take the driver all the way to our apartment door, but stopped at the gate where the CMC security guard helped negotiate the payment. The movie you see below was during a daytime ride. It's even more thrilling at night. Well, really, you had to be there!