Women need more advancement in India, not that the US has reached parity yet. We had multiple experiences with this. People almost always addressed my husband and not me when they talked to us. "Sir, are you ready to order now?" in restaurants or at hotel reception desks. "Sir, how is the food?" "Is she your wife?" when I am right there. That is because as MT's wife, I "belonged" to him and they did not want to cross a boundary. Also, some men will make lewd faces, brush against women and say things to women that were derrogatory in either English or Hindi. There are strict social rules that men and women never touch in public. They euphamistically call this "Eve teasing." Men do this to Indian women and to tourists. There was a sign in the train bathroom that instructed that harassing women was illegal and went into quite a bit of detail about what constituted harassment and the possible penalties, so the laws have been updated (2008) to address the issue. Enforcement is something else. Women and girls have lower literacy rates than men and boys. Jobs were very dominated by men, even the people who cleaned our hotel rooms were always men. We rarely saw women in non-traditional jobs.
The driving in India is so scary. They did not always stay in lanes, stop when they should have, keep safe driving distances (understatement), have head lights on after sunset, take corners slowly, or most things that we do to make driving safe. And in most of the cars that we were in the seat belts did not work. The only good thing is that they did not usually reach high speeds becaues of all the holes, bumps, brick piles, cars, animals and people in the road. Multiple times I kept thinking about how my car pool buddies would not like certain things that I was in the midst of--Jay would hate these cows. Catherine would not like that they are not keeping enough space between the cars. Carrie would be disturbed by all the broken headlights and tail lights and dents. Ted would miss the ability to have a sub-woffer in the back of the rickshaw. They don't pull over for ambulances with their sirens on. In a main road in Jaipur, multiple lanes of busy traffic converged into one lane because someone had built a little temple in the road. The pedestrian does not have the right of way and vehicles come quite close to people, even children. I had to close my eyes more than half the time, I could not stand it. Perhaps our drivers thought I had some sort of neurological disorder, with all of my rapid inhaling, eye shutting and gasping at close calls. There were oodles of close calls. A few times the car or rickshaw that we were in got tapped by or did the tapping to another vehicle. Once our car hit a cow with the side mirror. That was awful. Fortunately, cows are big and sturdy creatures.
Being a pedestrian is even more scary than the driving. There are no cross walks, even in major metro areas with multiple lanes of busy traffic. You find a good place that is likely to give you good visability, you wait for other people to gather around as well, you keep looking at each other to see if you are ready to go as a group--which would cause more damage to a vehicle and would incur lots of bad karma if hit-- then all at once the whole group weaves and runs through the cars, rickshaws, bikes, trucks, people and dogs. Sometimes you have to hop onto a skinny concrete divider to cross one direction of traffic and then do it over again for the traffic going in the opposite direction. And the drivers of various vehicles have uncomfortably small margins of space between themselves and peds. They are fine with coming within an inch of you. I am not exaggerating. And they honk and honk at you because they see you as being in their way and want you to move. I saw them honk and advance upon old, frail people who had a hard time walking, even people with canes. Once at night we had to cross a busy multi lane street to catch our bus and we had our luggage and my stuff went the wrong way and trucks were coming and I really wanted to not have to be hospitalized or cremated in India and I jumped onto the concrete divider while twisting my wrist and yelled, "I hate India!" But the traffic was so loud that fortunately no one in the host country heard my rude comment. What I really meant was that I hate some things about that place. The country's population's quality and quantity of life would increase immensely if they all agreed to have and enforce basic traffic and pedestrian rules. Think of the revenue in fines that they would collect if they gave people tickets when they did not follow the traffic laws! Maybe all this running keeps them fit. It is really mystifying because there is an underlying value in being polite and respectful in the culture. Even though people drove like crazy, we never saw road rage types of behaviors.
This is really gross, you can skip this paragraph if you are a higher minded person. One thing that really grossed me out was the public nose picking. No kidding. It is apparently o.k. to just pick your nose while you are in public and when you are an official or a travel agent or hotel receptionist handling my passport and then giving it back to me like there was no disgusting major social infraction that you just did to another person who is creeped out by germs anyway (but not to the extent of that mousey school counselor in Glee.) Steve S, I know you did not skip this paragraph--see, I came up with a really yucky thing about our trip. Yucky, not icky.
Corn flakes. We eat them in the US with cold milk, but Indians serve them with hot milk. Weird, but we ate it because breakfast was included and the first time it happened on the train, we did not realize what was going on our cereal.
Every third guy looks like a movie star. What bone structure and eye lashes!
One thing that we learned early in the trip was that the change during a sales transaction was always accurate. Unlike Italy or Greece. They might exaggerate the virtues and substance of a particular product, but once you landed on the price, they always gave the right change.
MTV in India actually plays music videos. It was a stark contrast to the lack of music videos on US MTV. I saw good videos that make me want to buy the song. Here's a link to the most popular song right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcKtDXUb6C
(Dear Mayor of C--I think this should be your theme song.)
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| Akbar's kitchen building for the women of his harem--these are earrings carved on the outside. |
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| Taj Mahal inlay |
This is a generalization, of course. Indian people are interested in people they don't know and will start conversations with strangers more readily than Americans do. They start asking questions right off the bat about your age, marital status, job (if you are male), how many children you have, where you are going, where you are staying, and other questions that might seem forward to an American who just met someone on a train or in line. We knew about his ahead of time and also experienced it in Thailand and Bali, so we took it as friendly connection making and curiosity. As a result, we got email addresses, invitations, and people taking photos with us, plus some good travel advice and insight about the culture.
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| Buddhist statues in caves carved out of canyon side, 1500 years-old. |
People in both countries love to talk about their kids.
That is the end of compare and contrast. I am doing at least one more blog on Goa and maybe a few more that focus on photos.
One thing for sure, being in India is way better than looking at something in a coffee table book!
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| Hindu temple |
P.S. People keep asking us if we got sick while on our trip. The poor sleep alone would have made us succeptable to bugs. I (FF) will answer for myself. I stayed healthy. This is the first long trip I have taken (the number of long trips is not huge) that I have not gotten some sort of cold. And, of course, people are curious about the common illness that bothers travelers to developing countries. But no, I did not have digestive issues. I think this is because of two factors: 1) luck and 2) being very conscientious. I only ate vegetarian food in a country that has frequent power outages, had daily yogurt for friendly bacteria, ate only fruits that had been peeled or that I had personally washed with purified water, avoided any veggies or herbs that were raw, did not eat sauces made with water, did not eat things that looked questionable, only drank treated or boiled water, brushed teeth with same, wiped off any residual water in glasses or on plates before using them, shunned ice (the hot weather made that a challenge), had no fresh juice (preserved was o.k.), took daily multi-vitamins and vitamin D, washed my hands before I ate (when possible), used hand sanitizer fanatically, and accepted that I probably would get sick even with my precautions. MT was more adventureous in his eating habits. I am glad I was adventureous when eating virtually anything on the menu that fit my criteria above, but I would not go the adventurous route as to possible encounters with microbes. I am fortunate that I stayed well.
