If you haven't yet...

Then check out my new blog at askillfulsong.blogspot.com !

It's a continuation of this blog using the same format, website, etc, but linked with all of my other things like google buzz and picasa! (that means little to no change for you guys but makes it WAY easier on me :D)

"A" Skillful Song

Hey all,

Over the past few weeks I've been working to consolidate all of my information to my other google account (joshray88@gmail.com). This has included me moving my calendar and rss feeds from the old account to the new one and now the time has come for this blog to make the jump too.

Unfortunately you can't just merge two google accounts or even just move your blog from one to the other, so I've done what I can only hope is the next best thing: I exported the blog from here to my other account. Now I'll keep this blog up for a few weeks/months just in case, but from now on I won't be updating here.


Instead, all future updates will be at www.askillfulsong.blogspot.com


Let me know if you have any trouble with making the jump! See you over there :)

(Non-India Related Thoughts)

I've been reflecting on this blogging process and my experience for the past two weeks as I've updated regularly and come to the conclusion that this is definitely something I need to continue. Now what that WON'T mean is the daily updates about what happened a month ago to the day continuing-most of you have been with me for the good majority of it and would find a retread of all of it of little interest.

But I want to make writing here a habit and not an exception. So the plan is to continue writing after this little project of mine wraps up in just over a week.

I've got a few songs and parts of songs in the pipeline too, so you just might see those pop up here in the not-immediate-but-not-TOO-distant future :D

Mamallapuram to Pondicherry

January 15, 2010

To start out today, I thought I'd take 5 minutes to talk a little about the names of the various places that we visited or stayed in India. Some, like Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, were pretty simple. However, a TON of the other places have multiple names. We didn't visit Mumbai, but it used to be called Bombay. Calcutta is now Kolkuta. Of the places WE visited, Chennai used to be called Madras, Mamallapuram is also called Mahabalipuram, and Pondicherry is also known as Puducherry. Just a BIT confusing lol.

So on the 15th we drove down to Pondicherry. On the busride I finished Ender's Shadow and started Shadow of the Hegemon, which (although I didn't know this previously) takes place largely in India and Pakistan. How's that for external alignment? haha

The french quarter of Pondicherry, which used to be a French city before joining India in the 40's, is a MUCH different place than the rest of India. When we got there we took a walking tour around the city, and at least twice I COMPLETELY forgot I was in India. We were walking down a certain street and I looked over at a poster that had some advertisements on it. One of them was for a Bollywood movie and had the word "Bollywood" written on it: I remember thinking to myself, "Why is there an advertisement for a Bolly....OHHHH!" :)

This is a photo of the main street in the French part of the city-on the left is a lighthouse and on the right is a statue of Ghandi.

Le Cafe-if you are ever in Pondicherry, DO NOT go to Le Cafe. More on that tomorrow...

Gandhi is hidden in there-you can see him better in a later picture

They had some cool colors for the buildings in this section of town.

The French value their peace and quiet a bit more than the Indians do-I don't think I've mentioned it before, but the honking in India is CRAZY! Honking is the rule rather than the exception and if someone honks at you it's just to let you know that they're there more than anything else. This results in a cacophonous assault on your ears...the French would prefer to avoid that (as this sign hints at).

We got to go inside a cathedral on part of the tour and it had some really cool lighting resulting from its stained glass windows.

We arrived in Pondicherry during Pungal, or the Harvest/New Year Festival. As part of the festival people decorated their cows/dogs/pets and drew all sorts of designs on the ground in chalk. Some were a bit messed up by the time we saw them...

...others were in better shape...

A very very select few were immaculate and looked like they had JUST been finished!

"Don't jump, Jesus!" was the first thought that went through my head lol

Ghandi again!

Another view of the lighthouse.

For dinner we went to a French restaurant-due to the service, this was one of the worst dining experiences of the trip. First of all, on that particular day because of Pongal no one in the city was selling alcohol-so no beer or wine. Strike 1: no wine with French food. Then our waiter took FOREVER taking our order, bringing the food, and calculating the bill. Because of his delays, it was three hours from the time that we arrived before we were actually leaving the restaurant. Strike 2: SUUUPER slow service. Lastly, for desert they didn't have any crepes AND didn't have any of the flavors of ice cream that were on the menu. Strike 3: NO crepes!!! At a FRENCH restaurant! lol

So that was Day 1 in Pondicherry. Tomorrow: Zack gets sick! An interesting conversation with a local! And the only real thing there is to do in Pondicherry.

Mamallapuram: Day 2

January 14, 2010

Something I feel like I should note is that both of our professors had been to all the sites that we visited for the first half of the trip multiple times: they knew them like the back of their hands. However, this was the first time that either of them had been to the south, so we were ALL in the same boat.

For our first and last full day in Mamallapuram we toured the local Hindu temples. Immediately a difference from our experience in Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow (aside from the temperature) became apparent: gone were the mosques of the Islamic north. In their place were churches and cathedrals. While Uttar Pradesh, the province we were in in the north, is about 12% Muslim, Tamil Nadu in the south is about 7% Christian and 6% Muslim (about 85% of both regions is Hindu). So it was a regular occurrence to see churches everywhere.

I'm especially fond of this photo because I saw the church on the right-hand side of the road and just whipped my camera up and took a shot without really aiming or anything as we drove by on our bus: this was the result. So i can't really take any credit for how well it turned out :)

Before anything else, we visited a temple that wasn't in any of our guidebooks but that Norbert had heard about and wanted to check out.

It was at the top of a nearby mountain. To get to it we had to take somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 steps. Don't believe me? Or don't know how to visualize that many steps? Let me help:

There were stairs...

...and more stairs...

...and even more stairs...

...and *pant* even *pant* MORE stairs...

...and FINALLY the top! You really felt it when you got to the top...haha

View of the surrounding area from near the top. The really tall buildings are all temples.

Since this was India, there were monkeys everywhere and so we were used to it. However, the monkeys here let you get REALLY close!

Exhibit A

There are at LEAST 7 monkeys in this picture: i'm sure there are more hiding in the trees

That's our professor, Tim, literally surrounded by monkeys. That's all the monkeys from the previous picture plus four or five more on the right side!

A more detailed pic of the temple complex

Me!

This temple was one of the highlights of the trip for Zack, and I'd agree that it was just awesome to climb so high and be rewarded with a spectacular view and an amazing temple at the top. And then there were the crazy monkeys doing things like stealing things from the other tourists and just being ridiculous in general! haha

The other temples we visited during the day really showcased how the temple-building practices evolved.

The locals went from carving temples out of stones that were already there...

...to carving temples into the stones that were already there.

This relief at one of the temples just blew everything else out of the water!

I mean, just LOOK at it! amazing.

Kinda liked this gargoyle-esque statue on the roof of a building-that's a temple in the background.

This is a lighthouse that the British built way back when (but more recently than all this other stuff haha). Love the view of the ocean!

More temples.

The Shore Temple is the pinnacle of the architectural feats that these particular peoples achieved in Mamallapuram. This is the same site that was in the picture of the beach from yesterday.

Pretty neat, no?

Me (complete with some hat hair haha). I kinda wish I'd not been mostly blocking the second part of the temple there, but whatevs!

For dinner that night we had seafood! These are some of the prawns that we had-I am not exaggerating when I say this is the best seafood I've ever had! I had some more pictures of the food but it was either blurry or just of the remnants of the food (which I found on viewing now to be a bit gross-no one wants to see the remains of a meal!).

So that was our time in Mamallapuram! I started reading Ender's Shadow on the bus rides now that I was done with all the required reading for class. Such a good book :).

Tomorrow: we...leave India!??!? nope, but it sure feels like it in our next stop: the French city of Pondicherry!

Chennai to Mamallapuram: Mamallapuram Day 1

January 13, 2010

To backtrack a bit, the first thing that we noticed when we got off the plane in Chennai was the humidity: it must have been 70 degrees and humid when we got off the plane. Walking onto the tarmac was like walking through dense, sticky air (probably because that's what it was...lol). Mind you, this was at 1 in the morning or so. We had finally left the fog behind and were in a completely different climate.

In many ways you can split the trip right down the middle at the point we landed in Chennai. It was fog versus sun, structure versus freedom, and more. We met our other Professor, Tim, at the Radisson. We all checked in and then crashed.

We woke up around ten and had a delicious breakfast with things we hadn't had since the start of the trip: scrambled eggs, toast, doughnuts with coffee, bacon (mmm... :D), orange juice...it was heaven for my palette! We left and drove to Mamallapuram. We got there around 2:00 pm. I finished reading Midnight's Children on the drive.

This is what our hotel looked like:

Quite the contrast from Delhi!

There was green EVERYWHERE! And we packed away all our jackets, sweatshirts, pants, and other warm clothing, trading them for tshirts, shorts, and flip-flops. This part of the trip literally felt like a vacation.

We were going to have a huge fish dinner at the end of the week and the cooks showed us just exactly the type of seafood they were gonna cook for us:

The best seafood I've ever had.

This was a carving in the hotel lobby.

[insert amazement about detail]

The view from our hotel-that's a Hindu temple in the distance. We visited it on one of the following days.

Our hotel was called the Seashore Hotel for a reason :)

The city streets. Mamallapuram definitely had that "beach town" vibe going.

I love the colors of the buildings on the left!

One of the temples lit up at night.

A delicious restaurant that we ate at our first night there-it was a french themed restaurant, crepes and all.

View from the street.

Our first day there was very low-key. We just settled into our new climate and location and got ready for the next day.

Tomorrow: the sights and sounds of Mamallapuram! (that's like my favorite place-name to say: Mamallapuram. just rolls off the tongue lol) A scrumptious fish dinner! and travel to Pondicherry!

Lucknow to Delhi to Chennai

January 12, 2010

So I promised at the end of the last post I did about India to tell a bit more about the dance party. This is a LONG story, so I've only put a few pictures at the end of the blog, and they aren't even really that cool or important. THIS is the meat of the update today. So to start with, it was at the girls dormitory on campus. They had dinner prepared for us and a HUGE bonfire outside, so we ate with the girls and then went outside. During dinner I sat next to two girls who I'll refer to for the rest of the post as RJ and EM because 1) I don't remember their actual names and 2) that's what I associate them with.

EM was an English major (get it?) and so her English was very good-she was on the quieter side but it was very interesting talking to her, seeing as how I myself am an English major. RJ? Well that's what I call her because as I was talking to her somehow the subject of my family came up. I was describing how music "runs in our blood": my Mom was in drama and musicals in high school, my grandpa can play seemingly dozens of instruments, my sister has an incredibly beautiful/powerful voice, and of my four brothers and myself, only one has not really shown interest in playing guitar (and the other four of us are not bad at it if I do say so myself). My dad plays guitar too, but at the end I just threw in what I thought was a throwaway line that my mom always says about my dad: "Everyone tells him that he's got a voice that he could have used as a DJ or something on the radio"

Now RJ's English wasn't quite as good as EM's, so while I could tell she was following I could also tell that she wasn't getting 100% of what I was saying. However, as soon as I said that my dad could have "been a disc jockey" her eyes lit up. And I mean LIT UP. I was a bit taken aback, actually lol. "A radio jockey? Your father is a radio jockey???"

Turns out her life's ambition is to become a radio jockey (or RJ)! And no matter how many times I tried to explain it, I just couldn't communicate that my dad was not actually a DJ but only could have been one. I didn't quite know it, but I had myself a problem.

We finished dinner and everyone went out to the bonfire. There were perhaps 200 girls gathered around it. I mean, just everywhere. We weren't quite sure what was going on, but any doubt or confusion vanished immediately when "Barbie Girl" by Aqua came blasting over the speakers: we had been lured to a dance party (I say 'lured' because our professor knew what was going on but hadn't let us know the full picture lol).

Now first a note about the girls: all of them were undergraduate students, so between 18 and 24ish years old. However, many of them were from villages or areas where they hadn't had the best access to a constant food supply. This meant that a large portion of these 18-24 year-olds looked as if they were 12 (they simply hadn't had the nutrition/diet to grow much). So that was really, really weird. The term that most of us guys adopted later after reflecting on it was "cognitive dissonance"-our eyes were telling us that these girls haven't hit puberty but our brains are telling us that they're our age and university students. I'm shaking my head right now remembering lol.

So these girls were RIDICULOUS-three of them came up to Adam, one of the graduate students from our group who has a wife and a three-year old daughter (not that the girls should have known that or anything), and told him "We're the three dirtiest girls here..."! Zack had a stalker who followed him around for the first half an hour or so and did some dance moves that you have to have him act out for you in order to get the full effect, and I had RJ and EM.

Now there were only 12 of us total, so we moved around quite a bit over the course of the party. We were either dancing with a group of about 12 girls for every member of our group or taking photos. I must have been in seventy pictures or so that night-and I'm NOT exaggerating. It was like a chain reaction-you'd pose for one photo with a girl and then all her friends would want a picture, then some of them would take a group photo with you, and then it'd start all over again. It was actually nice though cause we got to take a break from dancing haha.

Despite the fact that I kept moving around, RJ was always there with EM in tow. She kept bringing me back over to her group of friends. All of the girls were eager to teach all us guys dances that we assume must have been dances that only women dance in India (judging by the giggles and tittering that we all elicited). But RJ was getting to worry me. At one point, with me right there in front of me she said a couple sentences to one of her friends in Hinglish (a hybrid of Hindi and English that most Indians speak) about me: I knew it was about me because she kept gesturing towards me, I caught the words "radio jockey" and "father" (among others), and she pantomimed fainting at the end...lol

I actually started trying to slip away from her, using other girls who wanted photos and other things as excuses. She kept following me though, and actually called me out on avoiding her after the fourth time or so! haha

This all hit a crescendo for me at a point where RJ, EM and I had taken a break to talk for a bit. I had been talking with EM about what sorts of books she liked and other English-majory stuff for maybe a minute and a half when RJ, who had been standing there impatiently, rounded on EM and basically yelled at her in a string of Hindi and pantomimed zipping her lips closed. I didn't catch any english in there, so I asked EM what RJ had said.

EM thought about it for a second and then told me, "To put it simply, I like talking to you but she likes looking at you."

The specifics of the rest of the dance party kinda blur together: just more of the whole dance-then-take-a-break-for-photos routine. But that translation/comment by EM is what really sticks with me and summarizes the night for me. Ri-dic-ulous. Retarculous even!

So the next day, January 12th, we visited some English and History students in their classes at Lucknow University. Here's a bit of the campus:

Very nice, actually. It was funny-one of the history students asked one of the members of our group who the first emperor of America was lol

Our last stop in Lucknow was a building built by Claude Martin, the guy whose house is now the school with the cannons from last entry.

It is a government agency now: the CDRI.

or Central Drug and Research Institute.

From the roof.

This is a little Hindu shrine next to the guest house that we stayed in.

Some of our group going back to our rooms for the last time.

From Lucknow we were supposed to fly to Delhi and then fly from Delhi to Chennai. However, we almost missed our flight because Zack and Adam's things got locked in their room! What followed was the equivalent of watching the Keystone Cops: about six or seven people from the guest house tried various methods of removing the lock by force from the door. We finally got everything together and made it to the airport on time.

The sack lunch that the university gave us. From bottom-left clockwise: bread, potatoes, and a delicious sugar doughnut-thing (there was also some mutton that came with them).

And that is the rest of January 11th and the 12th. We arrived in Chennai at about 1 in the morning and spent the night in the Radisson near the airport.

Later today: travelling from Chennai to Mamallapuram! the sun returns from it's prolonged absence! the beach!