India: Part 2

So, we are back on the ship now, having just left Thailand and on the way to Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam.  We will have two days at sea before arriving in Vietnam. Thailand was absolutely incredible, however, before talking about what we did, I need to finish my post for India, so here goes…

India: Part Two

Saturday

On our third day in India, Saturday, we were off the ship at 11:30ish and took rickshaws to Spencer’s Mall in Chennai.  Spencer’s (the name of the mall) is the largest shopping mall in all of India and the most unique mall that I have ever been to.  In addition to being humungous with many identical looking sections/wings or “phases”, I was most intrigued by the vast variety of types of stores.  There were all the department, clothing, and electronic-type stores that you’d see in any mall at home, all with fancy signs, security guards, and credit card machines and fixed prices (not too much to ask for, you’d think), as well as countless small personally owned little shops selling the craft and souvenir-type things.  Yet these small shops look and function like the stands on the streets, without any fancy signs, lots of bargaining, very funky smells, and only accepting cash.  We spent several hours in the mall, mostly just walking around, running into other SAS students, and getting looked at by all the Indians.  We stopped in one of the chain/very commercial music stores and got some CD’s of popular Indian music.  Unlike in the US where CDs cost $10+, these CDs cost between $2 and $3 each.  Lots of stores had entire walls of Slumdog Millionaire stuff, especially the soundtrack since the Grammy winning song artist A.R. Rahman is from Chennai.  After the mall, we took rickshaws back to the ship and were fortunate enough to be driven by an Indian man named Jaffar.  It turns out that Jaffar has driven SAS students around for many years (Chennai is one of the most visited ports of Semester at Sea).  In fact, he showed us well over a dozen postcards and letters from previous SAS students, a couple going back to a 1999 voyage. 

After getting back to the ship and changing out of our incredibly sweaty and disgusting clothes, me Jonathan, Isaiah and a few girls went to a movie with three of the Indian students we had met several nights before at the Welcome Reception.  The movie theater experience is very different in India than at home.  There are only about 7 or 8 movies at each theater, a couple from the US, the rest Indian.  People buy tickets for movies up to several days in advance.  The theater, however, was hands-down the nicest movie theater I have ever been to.  Everything seemed brand new and very western and modern, you had to go through security to get in, and the bathrooms were incredibly nice, especially for India. Another cool thing is that our tickets only cost 120 rupees each (less than $3) and the JUMBO popcorn and drink combo, which would be over $10 at home was only 100 rupees (less than $2).  However, even though they seem incredibly cheap for us, our friends told us that the prices were considered very expensive. When we got to the theater before the Indian students, they told us to just get tickets to whatever, as they didn’t really care what to see, just that we’d get to see and experience an Indian movie. The one Baliwood movie that we were recommended to see was sold-out, so we got tickets to some other random Indian movie that we of course had no idea about.  It turned out that we got tickets to a three hour, P.O.S., movie in Tamil (language of South India) that the guys compared to Scary Movie or one of the many stupid “spoof” movies.  Throughout the movie, they kept looking at us saying the movie was BS and that we should go.  So we left half way through, at the intermission (yes, they have intermissions in Indian movies).  The guys then took us to a close-by small, authentic, and local vegetarian South Indian restaurant.  We were the only non-Indians there and at one point we even saw the chefs peering out of the kitchen to see the Americans they were cooking for (no joke).  The guys ordered well over a dozen dishes for us to share and pass around.  Most of the SAS people with us didn’t want anything spicy, so I had them order a spicy potato curry kind of thing for me to try.  It ended up being probably the spiciest (but still delicious) thing I’ve ever had served to me.  All of the food was great, despite us not knowing what most of it was, and by the end of the meal we were all stuffed.  During dinner we exchanged stories with our new friends, talked about college, and taught them how to play football after they taught us the basics of cricket.  All three of them were incredibly friendly and interested in everything we said.  At the end of the meal, we were amazed to see the bill at only 170 rupees per person (less than $4).  After dinner, we went back to the ship and made plans to hang out with the guys again the next night.

Sunday

On Sunday, I woke up at 6am again for the 7am SAS trip entitled RURAL INDIA & DAKSHINACHITRA HERITAGE VILLAGE.  Again with Jonathan and Isaiah, after an hour bus ride, we started the day at a local village in which we got to watch a large Indian wedding procession.  Next, we went to a rice paddy and watched several women show us the pain-staking process of harvesting single grains of rice.  After, we went to a very rural village where we walked around, took a tour of a very nice family’s home, drank out of fresh coconuts after watching a man climb a 30+ foot tree with his bare hands to throw them down to us, and played with lots of Indian kids.  Following the village, we went to the DAKSHINACHITRA HERITAGE VILLAGE, where, according to the description, Traditional craftsmen and folk artists work and perform in the reconstructed period settings of 19th –century streets, homes and workshop spaces.  There, we had a great South Indian lunch, again eating lots of things I had no idea what they were.  We also toured 4 replica houses representing the four major regions of southern India, watched craftsmen make pottery, various art, henna, weaving, and other things. 

We got back to the ship at around 5:30 and soon after we (me, Jonathan, Isaiah, and the three girls) went to meet the Indian students at the beach.  Being the 2^nd longest beach in the world, it took us a while to find them, despite several phone calls of us and them knowing exactly where the others were.  Also, even at 6:30pm, as the sun was going down, it was still incredibly hot out.  We stopped at an Indian food court-type-thing on the beach and I picked up some kind of chicken sandwich (which ended up being surprisingly good) and we all ate together on the beach.  Having been a Sunday night, the beach was incredibly crowded. It seemed like every person in Chennai was there relaxing, eating, talking, and there were many kids playing pick-up cricket games.  We sat, talked, and walked around for several hours and when we finally said goodbye, after exchanging emails and everything; the guys presented us with gifts and personalized cards. 

Monday

Monday was our last day in India.  Having done and seen pretty much everything there was in Chennai, I slept until about 11 and at around noon, me and a few other people went back to Spencer’s Mall, where probably half of the ship was since it was our last day in India and our on-ship time was 6pm.  I got a very cool Indian cricket jersey and some other small things that I enjoyed bargaining for.  We finally got back to the ship at around 4pm, upon which I soon after took a very necessary nap after having had to wake up at 6am two of the last four mornings.  We left Chennai at around 8pm for the port city of Laem Chabang, Thailand.

 

After leaving India, we had five days at sea.  The first day we did not have any classes and was used as a day for us to reflect on our time in India (or as many people think, allow everyone’s stomachs to get back to normal).  The next four days of class were very busy for me.  I had a big paper to write on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and my second speech to give in Public Speaking.  Both ended up going very well.  Like my first paper in Asian-American Fiction, I did surprisingly well on the second one. Also, my professor really liked my speech, who is apparently pretty tough when it comes to grading and critiquing peoples’ speeches.  Also in between India and Thailand, we had a Halloween themed “Pub Night” in which a lot of people dressed up in whatever make-shift costumes they could create.  It was a lot of fun and cool to see how into it people got using various things they had bought in countries.