Ok,
this bit of my blog is to assure that I have not in fact turned into a raving lunatic (which may well be assumed from my previous post) and I am in fact a well balanced individual who intends to now bore you to tears yet again with more lengthy explanations that I missed in my last blog!

One thing I forgot to mention was that when I arrived in Mumbai and went down to the Gateway of India although the water was polluted and it stank, there was a beautiful quality of light that I have never seen anywhere else, especially in the morning, which seemed to feel very spiritual and special. The end of the day feels and looks as tired and sad as the sunsets. Mumbai has some beautiful old colonial buildings, if you ever go to Mumabi go and see the Taj hotel, Victoria train station and the Gateway to India.

One thing you notice straight away in India is body contact and touch. Men and woman generally dont touch each other in public, even if they are married. Everyone carries, hugs, kisses and generally adores children. I've lost count of the number of children and babies that have been plonked on my lap! I have no idea if what I am about to describe is a direct result of the 'no touching' thing but in India you see men from school age to pensioners walking around hand in hand, arm in arm, sleeping on the floor wrapped around one another etc! If you were in India for the first time and were not aware of this phenomenon you would be forgiven for thinking that every male was gay when in fact male homosexuality is illegal in India. I have no idea why this weird phenomenon developed, and can only conclude (somewhat sadly) that it is due to a lack of touch elsewhere in their lives.

Another feature very common in India is of course the cows. They are a holy animal here and while they produce milk and pull heavy loads they are put to work. When this is no longer the case they are turned out onto the street where they stand around (usually at the busiest crossroads they can find) and look for all the world like they are waiting for Gary Larson to turn up and start drawing them. They seem to just wander around and stand and chat oblivious to the honking and swervng traffic around them. Their life from once they are released is to wander the streets eating rubbish and plastic until they die. I think I would rather be an unholy scottish cow for all that!
Talking of India and the roads, Indians use their car/motercycle/rickshaw horn to mean
'I will now turn left'
'I will now turn right'
'I will now swerve to avoid the cow'
'Get out of the bloody way'
'Let me through' etc etc.
In India the bigger your vehicle the more right of way you have - no seriously! Pedestrians are at the bottom of the pecking order and the cows are at the top, so if a cow steps onto the road in front of a bus, he's fine. If you do the same thing, forget it!

I wrote in the last blog about the skewed population and how I wasnt sure how much of it was true. I read in the paper today - the 'Hindu' no less, that there is a lot of 'female genocide' goes on in the lower caste families ie manual labour and farming communities where there are only 700 females born for every 1000 males. Men are more useful and can do manual labour etc.

The tradititional dress in India is a Sari or a punjab suit. Most younger woman wear punjab suits and you only wear toe rings if you are married and if you wear one anklet only apparently thats like wearing half a t-shirt, you look half dressed and women will point and laugh at your ankles!
The colour of Saris and punjab suits here I cannot begin to describe. Its like someone has given kids in a playground every colour of paint imaginable and left them to paint a wall, glorious colours abound everywhere, whereas the men in comparison look quite drab. Saris are so practical too really. They are a cloth, a towel, a baby wrap, a pillow, a pashmina, a blanket etc and all while you are wearing it!

After Mumbai I went to Goa (Vagator and Anjuna) and I can say honestly that I wasnt that keen on it at all (sorry Fiona).
The train ride to Goa was fun as there was a few of us to pass the 12 hours together. Every 5 minutes there was someone coming along the corridor yelling 'Chai' or 'toys' or 'sweets' and this went on for 12 hours interspersed with kids begging for money on the train. Every time it stopped they would get on. They were very persistant and one guy who was with us eventually yelled 'chello' at them (go away!) and he said immediatly that he felt bad, but on the same tolken we were sitting in the cheapest part of the train and there were plenty of rich Indian people on the train but people always beg from white people as they think we are much richer than anyone else in India and that simply isnt the case.
This brings me to the meals they serve on the trains. A man came along and asked us if we wanted lunch? We asked what it was, veg/chicken biriyani. Always opt for the veg option if either A) you cant see the kitchen or B) you have done a kitchen check on the way into the restaurant and thought 'yuck' - no hang on scrap that. You will almost always think 'yuck'. If it looks moderatly clean and if the waiters look clean then meat is probably an ok option. However if you ask for chicken they invariably bring you goat.

Anyway to grag myself back from yet another tangent..... we wento to the kitchen on the train - wow!
It was basically a converted carriage with one guy in a whole compartment to himself peeling mounds of potatoes - the trains are huge so a lot of food is needed. A guy in another compartment was rolling out chapattis and a third guy was frying rice on a huge gas hob. The wok he was cooking in I could have sat in with another person quite easily (size wise I mean, not because it looked comfortable!)
Lunch cost 50p and was washed down with a glass bottle of coke (20p)

The other huge thing I forgot to mention in the last blog was 'hand etiquette'. Your right hand in India is used for eating, shaking hands, receiving things from another person etc. It is your clean hand. Your left hand is your toilet hand and your body hand and is therefore not used for eating. I had to sit on my left hand for days until I got used to not using it (at mealtimes I mean, not in general!!)

Anyway Goa was fun zipping around on a scooter for 2 days in the red dust that is so indicative of India and enjoying the beach and the beer. Made me think of when Grandpa was in India as he had a moterbike here as well and there are so few cars here, everyone has a scooter or moterbike.
I got the bus to Hampi after that, the place where I had my first squat toilet and learned about the Gods!
Catching the overnight bus to Hampi was fun! At one point we stopped at an eating place and I looked out the window to see 2 men holding hands beside a sign that said 'brain soothing cream' and 'skin whiteness cream' and then a couple of cows wandering around in the foreground and my one thought was 'if I take a picture of that scene no-one will believe it!'
They use skin whitening cream a lot in India as the higher up the caste system you go the lighter your skin becomes and they are horrified when the learn that most of the western world is very concerned with getting brown! I was travelling with a very fair skinned girl at one point and she was pestered and stared at far more than me as her skin was lighter than mine.

Hampi is certainly beautiful - if going to India it is a definite 'must see'. Here there are some principle temples to the Gods, the friends of the Gods and the hangers on/companions of the Gods.
They have a huge temple to Ganesh in Hampi and every morning they bring the temple elephant down to the water. It is a beautiful sight to see to get up early and walk down to the waters edge, where accross the river the elephant is coming down the ghats to the water. Further down the river a group of boys are swimming and shrieking in the early morning sun. In a quiet inlay of water, the woman wash their Saris and lay them out to dry until the ghat looks like a huge patchwork quilt of every concievable colour imaginable.
A man is coracle fishing at this side of the river. Coracles are used a lot in Hampi and local boys will take you for a spin down the river in one (for the right price of course!)
The place I stayed in Hampi was full when I arrived, but 'would I like to sleep on the roof for 40 rupees a night?' Would I ever!!!
I slept under the stars and mosquito netting and rose at sunrise every morning to the sounds of the parade leading the elephant down for his morning bathe.
One other thing of note I did in Hampi was visit the Hanuman temple. Hanuman is known as the monkey god and has the face of a monkey but is actually a devotee of Lord Rama.
While I was up at the top of the temple watching the sunset over Hampi, a monkey sauntered up and had a chomp at my arm!!! Naturally the thought of impending rabies ruined my peaceful sunset watching, so, frothing at the mouth I returned to Hampi for some immediate injections.

From Hampi i took another overnight bus to Hyderabad, simply to connect to Varanasi. Hyderabad is worth a look if you find yourself there. Hotels are pricey though and the mice were not only included in the room price but they ate my hot chocolate in the middle of the night! Hyderbad has virtually no white tourists and instead of measuring things against how many fast food chains there are as I did in Central America I do a ratio of White Person : Stray dog and the higher the stray dog ratio gets, the happier I get.

I MUST mention the Indian head wobble here as I've started doing it! So you ask an Indian person a question and instead of saying 'yes' or 'no' or 'its that way' they wobble their head!
I guess in its purest form it means that 'I dont want to say no', or 'I'm not sure', so I will wobble my head' So far it seems to have meant
'Yes'
'No'
'I'm not sure'
'Maybe'
'I don't know
'I don't understand'
'I dont know where Scotland is'
'I dont know WHAT Scotland is'
There is a huge issue in India about saving face. The head wobble is a great way of saving face without saying 'I dunno' If you ask for directions in India they will always tell you - even if they are lying through their teeth, as long as it sounds good then all is ok. This can be very frustrating if you are trying to find something as everyone will point you in very specific and totally different directions with the utmost confidence they know exactly where you want to go!

First impressions of India are going to hard to write about as they have all but gone. I will use my diary to help me with this one. I will split this up and put it into 2 chunks, first impressions along with my stay in Mumbai and Goa (the first 2 weeks) and then what I have done since (Hampi, Hyderabad and Varanasi)
Ok you stay at homers, really to be honest I don't know where to start. I got to India in the evening and befriended people to share a taxi to a hotel in Colaba, which is the area where lots of the backpackers stay. Outside the taxi it was total madness through the streets of Mumbai.I once asked Damu (my Indian friend from Kerala), why Indian people are so polite and well mannered and yet drive like lunatics and he laughed uproariously and said he had no idea! The pollution and smog was evident as was the dust as 4 of us squeezed into the taxi. The one main thing I remember from the ride was that there was no women anywhere, on the streets or in the cars. When I was in India for a few days I realised that men can go out at night and often they are still working whereas the women have children to look after and must stay at home and perform the duties outlined to me by my husband and mother in law
India was SO different right from the start, that I know no matter how much I write here (and boy this one is gonna be a biggie) that I will never EVER manage to convey India through written words or even with pictures. Before I went to India I asked several people who had been to India to tell me what it was like and every time I was given the same response, a smile, a shake of the head and 'I cant TELL you about India. you just have to go and experience it for yourself'. The closest I can come to an analogy of it is for you to imagine your favourite food. You are eating your favourite food and your friend across the table asks you what its like. Now you know it would be madness to try and describe your favourite food (I could fill a whole page simply on how wonderful a bowl of raspberries right now would be) so what do you do, you hand them the spoon and say 'try it'. That's India. This blog over the next 3 months will try and tell you about India but it will be barely skimming the surface and will not convey the depth of feeling, emotion, hardship, friendliness and as many more words that would fill a page. You cant be told about India, you have to go and jump in feet first and experience it for yourself.
This part I will concentrate on my first 2 weeks in India, Mumbai and Goa.The first thing you notice in India is the smell. Nothing can prepare you for the way that India smells and believe it or not, its not all bad! Every day I smell something worse and I think to myself, ok I have just smelled my worse smell, until the next day when it gets worse. The same is true of the dirt, every day I think I have seen the filthiest thing or the thing that makes my stomach lurch from its resting place and I imagine it cant get any more disgusting or horrifying than that and then it does. Emotionally every day I would see something that shocked, upset or horrified me to the very core. That makes it all sound really bad and its not. You get used to the smells and outside the cities smells are less. Believe it or not you get used to the dirt as well, when you accept that nothing is clean and nothing is hygienic then you relax a lot more, as basically you have little choice! Another first thing I noticed is that not a lot of Indians speak English! There is more English spoken in the big cities but I had an assumption that 'they speak English in India' well they don't. Those of a higher caste and education do, as do some of the touts in places that are very touristy but most people don't speak English.
I spent a week in Mumbai and split my time between local eateries, sightseeing and making money!In India there is not always tourist places to eat or tourist areas in cities so local places are always best. The food is fantastic and if you are white they don't put as much spice in the food. One thing that is very different is 'curd' this is basically plain yoghurt and it comes in a dish to cool the curry or you can have it as a drink with banana in it. Its good to have one a day as it helps the bugs in your stomach! I was worried about not liking Indian food as it would be my last choice back home for a take-away but I met a few people who had been in India for a while and helped me around the menus for things I would like. Food in the city was more expensive than elsewhere in India according to the friends I made there. However for a large meal of 2 courses and 2 drinks (juice plus a big bottle of water to take away) it would cost 70 rupees. At present it is about 80 rupees to the pound so my budget is looking much healthier! You can live comfortably in most places for 500 rupees a day. Mumbai also saw me doing a wee bit of sightseeing, I went to the Gateway of India, the Taj hotel and Elephanta Island. This island was where I discovered discrimination because of my white skin for the first time! The Indian price for the island was 10 rupees and the tourist price was 250 rupees. Now I know that 250 rupees is only about 3 quid but compared to 12p its a big difference! Made me wonder what would happen if they tried it in Scotland - ie entrance to Hollyrood palace is 10 quid for Scots and 250 quid for foreigners! Now I know the Indian tourism board has to make money somehow but maybe asking for 20 times as much as the locals is a little excessive. This 'tourist pricing' occurred at most places I went to that you had to pay an entrance fee.
The hostel where I stayed was predominately full of white westerners. There are a lot of films being made in India, mainly Bollywood films. People think that Bollywood is 'hollywood in India' the name for the film industry and that is not the case. It was explained to me that Bollywood is the name for the group of emerging people in India that believe in love marriages, divorces, wearing what they please and the right for women to have their own careers. This is a very small proportion of India though and includes some people in the big cities (where you can even find gay clubs now!) and people from Kerla and further south where there is a 2% Christian population.
The film industries would send scouts out to find people and often they turned up at out hostel! The first thing I did was a promotional evening where we went to Bandra (the posh part of Mumbai) to the Rennaisance hotel with 3 other white girls and we had to all put on the same dresses and shoes and serve white wine to the guests with the lights of Mumbai below us. After the event, the host asked us to come clubbing with us and we all piled into his private car and his driver took us and him and his friends to the biggest club in Mumbai where were treated like royalty and danced the night away.The whole experience of the hosting thing was weird though as it was definitely a package deal that someone had paid for 'a free bar, a band, and 4 white girls to give out wine' I couldn't work out if was being revered or exploited. One interesting point was that a girl from Australia with Indian heritage asked if she could do hosting and they scouts weren't interested in her stating that 'it would be insulting to Indians to see you with your shoulders bared' So in other words they expect us to dress as we please and do as we please as long as our skin is white enough! I have experienced a lot of strange things here to do with the Indian Caste system and the fact that I am white but I will go into further detail later. I have not read enough about the caste system to fully understand it
I also got to attend a HUGE wedding on a film set along the same lines.Cultutrally the wedding was amazing to see. It was an arranged marriage. The whole wedding was set on a huge outdoor film studio. The groom arrived on horseback alone with his family and there is a band that leads him in and everyone has video cameras on him. All the attention is on the groom. Then I noticed the bride, walking through the crowd surrounded by her sisters and mother. She was so heavily jeweled I could hardly see her face and I was surprised she could walk. They met on the stage and exchanged wreaths and then sat for photographs. Not once did they touch each other, not once did they look at each other. The place was incredible, women floated in balloons in the sky and fireworks and lights, the whole thing was so over the top and amazing. However as I stood there and watched them I thought 'you know what? you can keep it' I'm quite sure that if my parents and family members were to pick my husband they would make a good choice, but to have a whole life without love, no thanks.' As much as I liked seeing the wedding I wouldn't swap any of it for being in love. It was then that I realised that as much as I had hated western culture in Sydney I was comforted by the fact that there was still some very important things about western culture that I liked and wouldn't give up for anything. At home and in western society, basically I can do whatever the hell I want to and I have a right to do so!
Here, if I was an Indian women, at my age I would be married and I would have at least 2 children by now. Hopefully I would have boys as they can work and will marry and the family will collect the dowry (now illegal but still happens apparently). If I have girls I have to marry them off and it is rumoured that among the lower castes, people abort female babies or have them killed at birth or break their arms and legs in order for them to beg on the streets to make money. I need to read more into this as I am not sure about all the rumours I have heard. It is true however that the population is becoming very skewed and there are far more males than females so it must happen somehow. I cannot hold hands with a man in public, I cannot have a divorce (for any reason). I cannot have a career and must give up my education when I marry. (this is why a lot of Indian women can speak very little English) I cannot have sex unless to have children, I must obey my husband as he is as God to me and I must obey his every word. Revealing my shoulders in public is more offensive than showing cleavage. No one looks twice if you bear your entire stomach, front and back. I must not go out alone as an unmarried woman I must always have company. When I travel here with a female friend that is acceptable but when I travel with a man I always say that he is my brother as it is the brothers responsibility to look after his sisters and marry them off as well.
The other thing I did was go to a drama series shoot where they wanted 4 of us to be filmed having drinks and dancing in a nightclub in Dubai. As they flatly pointed out to us 'the setting is an expensive club so of course there would be some white people in the background'That day was more fun than the hosting as you got to watch the setting up of each shoot. There was several men to set up the shoot and carry around and bolt in the ancient lights (one of which crashed to the floor missing someone by inches!!), about 20 people standing around on mobiles, one guy to light a fire in a pan and add powder, this he carried around the set and was followed by 2 guys frantically wafting cardboard to disperse the smoke that the powder created, this was the smoke machine! There was also about 6 guys whos only job seemed to be ensuring everyone had chai. I hated chai when i first got here. For those not in the know, chai is tea made with condensed milk, yuck! i hear you say! Actually back home I cant stand a lot of milk and here I complain if they don't put enough in! There is also masala chai which is spicy and great!I fot paid 800 rupees for the hosting and 500 for the film shoot. Now that amounts to less than 15 quid for 18 hours work. However when your daily budget here is 500 rupees and the accommodation is 150 rupees it is a lot. Its not about what it converts to in pounds, its what it can buy you in India.
I am going to post this one here and then I will write a second one about buying a bus ticket, the train journey we took, a bit about Goa and the famous Indian head wobble!