Great X-mas Deflations

Scott asked the other day whether I thought that Christmas is a depressing holiday because people just have too many expectations, and they can’t help but get disappointed by something. There seems to be some unfortunate truth to this theory. As a fan of Christmas, I regret to admit this to Scott, who is only annoyed by the behemoth holiday. I think that Christmas is a problem for me because the traditions and rituals that I expect rely on the coordination of too many people and rely on me having a solid week of vacation for making things. Even when I try to condense Christmas into a few manageable factors, I still have a lengthy list. The bare minimum Christmas for me is the following:

1. Buying about four gifts and receiving at least one--keeping it to just a few means you can actually enjoy the brainstorming process of finding the perfect thing for someone.
2. Exchanging stockings with at least one person--it’s fun because this includes buying weird/cheap items, which one never gets to do because it is wasteful (e. g. yucky sushi-shaped hard candy, fake eyelashes, novelty pens), and it involves buying a variety of candies and gorging on half of them. (What else am I supposed to do with them? The stockings are never large enough.)
3. Making refrigerator cookies--this is my absolute favorite part of the holiday, especially deciding which new flavor to make this year.
4. Making a Christmas ornament--when else are hastily glued-together glitter and construction paper crafts admired by anyone after you graduate from 3rd grade?
5. Having a Christmas tree--they smell great and I love watching a sappy movie while stringing up yards and yards of popcorn and cranberry garlands.
6. Cooking something that is overly complicated, like a turkey or a stew that needs multiple hours to simmer
7. Eating a large dinner and feeling physical discomfort
8. Hanging out with family members--especially ones you don’t see very often
9. Getting a little tipsy to take the edge off of being around said family members--essential! I wish I could convince my in-laws of how important this tradition is. Sadly, they are practically tea-totelers.
10. Overindulging on eggnog with brandy--why isn’t this delightful concoction available year round?
11. Seeing multiple movies at crowded movie theaters--okay, I’ll admit that I like doing this any time of year, but Christmas is when most people will agree to do it with me.
12. Singing a couple of Christmas carols--I’ll admit that I like some of them, and I also don’t think that there are enough musical traditions for non-musicians in modern America.

Which of these did I accomplish this year? 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8. Ergo, this year was not a complete failure, but I am feeling a slight aftertaste of dissatisfaction. I might have to let some of these rituals bleed over into my New Year’s festivities to fix the problem.

[Image from: www.polymerclayexpress.com/nov2001.html]

Spatially Challenged

I got totally lost today on the way to the hair salon. The only people who read this blog are people who know me well enough to know that this is NOT NEWS! I get lost all the time. This time was particularly pitiful, because I left the house a full hour ahead of time, printed out two (no fewer!) maps, and had consulted them multiple times the day before, the morning of, and about every 5 minutes during the trip. A lot hinged on this outing, because I needed a haircut badly, I have been looking particularly wooly for at least a month, I was feeling a bit down because of some negative feedback on my schoolwork, and my previous haircut with a new and incompetent stylist was a complete failure. (Those of you who do not allow your hair to rule your psychological and emotional stability may think that last sentence was irrational and unnecessarily wordy, but the rest of us know that it summed up all of my problems quite succinctly and with a tight and fluid line of logical reasoning.) I HAD to get that haircut in order for the month of December to turn out right. However, I was 30 minutes late to the appointment, had to cancel and reschedule, and was forced to waste a couple of hours until the next moment the stylist had available. The cascade of disappointment included getting a blister from walking two extra miles, failing to meet a deadline for work that day, wasting an additional 20 bucks on lunch in a shee-shee shopping district near the salon, discovering that there were items of clothing that I could never afford (such as $23 pairs of badass socks), and sobbing hysterically on a stump while passersby and people in parked cars looked away politely.

Was it worth it? Yes, I love my haircut.

Now that I no longer live in Austin, I am discovering how bizarre of a handicap this is--my incredibly bad sense of direction. I really can read a map. But, for some reason, when I look at a map with the intention of going from one point on the map to another, I lose the ability to make connections between the symbolic representation of space and real-time geometry. Also, to make matters worse, I can’t tell my right from my left, I have to use a mnemonic device to remember which direction is east or west, and I have a poor memory for business names. For example, I can remember that there is a fast food restaurant that sells burgers on a corner near my apartment, but I can’t remember whether it is McDonalds or Burger King. Also, my spatial memory is shoddy.

The only fun part of living in a new city for me, is making friends who don’t know that I am completely unreliable when it comes to getting from place to place. They start rattling off directions and saying, “Great, we’ll meet at this place at such and such time, right?” completely confident that I am a normal person who will have little trouble following their directions. Little do they know that I am a complete imbecile. I wonder how long I can keep up this charade.

[Image from: www.biblehelp.org/whatsay.htm]

Verbosity

It's official. I use too many words when I write. This semester, we had a 700 word limit on our weekly science newswriting papers, and I would always spend only 2 or 3 hours writing them and then at least 1 hour trying to shave them down from 786 to exactly 700 words. Last night, I turned in my final for my science magazine class and the word count was supposed to be 1200-1800 words. I wrote 1950. I couldn't trim it down, because I ran out of time. It's a damn fine paper on planetary science and the struggle between scientists and lay people over the importance to classifying solar system objects as planets, but hey, I'm a failure because I can't be succinct.

Next semester, my goal will be to be brief. Maybe I'll read some Hemmingway in preparation. Maybe I'll write what I should have written for this blog:

I write too much.

Go see King Kong.

Molly like.

[Image from: http://nutter.net/dana/humor/joke.asp?r=605&lang=en]

Bread Baggage

It snowed today, a few inches. Scott asked me if I had any boots. The moment that I replied "no," a long-forgotten childhood memory suddenly log jammed my brain. When I was little and we visited my grandma's in Indiana for Christmas, we never had snow boots. It didn't make sense for us to have them for just one trip up north each year. So, my mom used to have us double up on the socks and then wear bread bags over the socks and then our usual tennis shoes over the bags. I think there might have been some rubber bands around the ankles, too, but I'm not so sure about that detail. It was the 80s, so of course, to cover up the bizarre practice of wearing bread bags on our feet, we wore leg warmers. This noisy solution to the problem of lacking snow boots kept our toes warm and dry while we went sledding, though I can't imagine what the neighbors and my cousins thought. (Probably thought, gee, how many sandwiches did this family of five kids have to eat to get ten bread bags?)

Then, I remembered another thing about bread bags. (How many traumatizing memories about bread bags can I dig up from one childhood? The answer, my friend, is many!) My parents also used to save the bread bags because they were so handy for lunches and leftovers. But for some reason, my dad wasn't satisfied with reusing them just once. No, he had to breathe more life into each square foot of that plastic than was ever inhaled by the original organisms that decayed to form the petroleum byproduct that makes up the bag. He would reuse the bread bag and then, if they were still remotely clean, he'd put them back in a drawer, which we called The Bag Drawer. This drawer was stuffed full of years' worth of bread bags, so that you had to do a quick little stuff-slam-yank-your-hand-away maneuver to close the thing without bags exploding out like a jack in the box. He'd reuse these bags so many times, that the plastic or maybe the printing on the bags would start to disintegrate. They were all sticky, and I think that their stickiness was infectious, so a new bag would get sticky from residing in such close proximity with the ancient bags. I also think he might have put them in the washing machine, but perhaps this is only an exaggeration that my mind has accepted as real. I remember that I hated those sticky bags so much that I would hide new bags around the house for my own personal use. That way, I could pack my lunch in a brand new reused bread bag.

By the way, my family ate only Roman Meal brand wheat bread. This is exactly what the bags looked like:

[Image from: http://www.romanmeal.com/]

Volcanoes and Planets

This past week I have been interviewing dozens of volcanologists and astronomers for my two final papers in my science journalism classes. One paper is on an Antarctic volcano that is injecting burning hot lava underneath a frozen ice sheet. The other paper is on the red-hot debate over the classification of newly discovered celestial objects—that is, how astronomers are having to redefine the word “planet” to keep tiny oddball Pluto in with the Big Nine and exclude all these massive new guys that they keep finding.

With these two seemingly opposite topics juxtaposed artificially through a hectic school schedule, I hadn’t anticipated that I would discover two important ways that volcanology and astronomy are related. I mean, in addition to the fact that they are both Earth/planetary sciences.

For one, astronomers and volcanologists both like to hang out on or near volcanoes. That’s right, most every one of these guys and gals are located in Hawaii. Volcanologists like to work within an easy distance of a volcano for obvious reasons. However, astronomers also dig volcanoes as sights for their observatories. Apparently, the telescopes get better images when located at higher altitudes, which have a thinner atmosphere and therefore have fewer pesky air molecules blocking and scattering the light from distant stars. Higher altitudes can be achieved on, you guessed it, pointy volcano summits.

The other commonality is less of a coincidence: Some astronomers study volcanoes on other planets. Why is this so cool? I can’t tell you for certain. Perhaps it has something to do with the sisterly feeling I get from knowing that another alien planet has similar blemishes on its surface. One guy I spoke with uses heat-detecting satellites to study both Earthly and Martian volcanoes. Awesome!

[Image from http://www.digitalmedia.cz/3dsoftware/show.asp?nid=128]

True Love

I saw the new Pride and Prejudice flick the other day with some ladies from my department. Actually, I'll go ahead and out myself. First we watched the 5 hour and ten minute BBC version and then made a mad dash to the movie theater (It was like a scene out of Burn Out 3!) to see the Keira Knightly version that just came out. The new movie was pretty good, though I was a bit Jane Austen'ed out by the end of the 8 hour affair.

One scene in particular moved me more than any other. In this scene, Elizabeth Bennett is in bed with her sister Jane. The warm lamplight illuminates the cozy tent they've made with the sheets. They are giggling and whispering about the dance they had just attended, in which Jane had met her new crush Mr. Bingley, a handsome man of good fortune and potential husband. (I know, I know, this description is perhaps putting a final nail in the coffin for any hipster persona I could have glued together from bits of coolness in my life. Hey, I'm a sucker for 18th and 19th century literature.) Anyway, my point is that this scene was so authentic I wanted to cry. It captured perfectly the pure delight and bathing warmth you feel when you love your sister and the two of you are completely in agreement over the importance and loveliness of some trivial event. I have two sisters and many times have we played out this very scene.

I think that you can achieve this kind of love with people who are not your siblings, but the physical comfort is hard to attain with a non-family-member. Even lovers and partners, who probably find themselves in bed together more often and more naturally than siblings, have an entire dimension of complicating emotions (good and bad) that would ruin or preclude this kind of intimate moment.

The Transformation Has Occurred

I had my first journalist moment yesterday. As I was heading back from an interview that I conducted at the convention center downtown, having gone two hours and $10 out of my way to speak with a chemist for 20 minutes (someone I easily could have spoken with just over the phone), the day before two major work assignments and an unrelated school paper were due, I realized that I have finally crossed over to thinking like a journalist. There is no explaining the value of a face-to-face interview versus any other type of communication.

Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochran), late 1880s
[Image from http://www.newsday.com/other/special/ny-ihny1119story.htmlstory]

No Longer in Texas, But Still Texan

The house finally sold. We no longer have an address in Texas. YEEHAW! God, that is a huge weight off my shoulders. When the dogs are crazy and need exercise but it's too cold to leave the house, I miss Texas. When Bostonians are rude and talk funny in such a way that I misunderstand and make social blunders, I miss Texas. When it costs over $10 for a freakin' movie ticket, I miss Texas. When I bruise myself tripping over a dog and ramming into a piece of furniture because our overpriced apartment is way too small, I miss Texas. When I want to hang out with my old friends and family, I miss Texas. AT ALL OTHER TIMES I am really happy to be out of that crazy state!

This is Bud, a puppy that my friend Allison was puppy sitting last summer. We took him to the fair. Another thing I miss about Texas that is strangly missing in Boston: my secret puppy fix was regularly administered through random everyday encounters.

Bloody Journalists

A guy in my graduate program asked me today, "Are you one of those people who went into Science Journalism because you are an escapist and thought it would be all about how 'cool' science is?"

My first reaction was quite paranoid, either because he used the words "those people" or because I am probably an escapist and I have some guilty feelings about it. It's true: I have always hated reading the newspaper and having political discussions with people. It just makes me feel helpless to hear about awful things. I still read the newspaper, usually avoiding the sections that will just depress me, and I suppose I humor some of my friends and family by having the occasional political discussion, but it never gets me anywhere but down.

Today in the class that I TA, which is a freshman course for communications students, the lecturer showed photos by famous photojournalists in history. He flashed up, one after another, images from World War II and Vietnam and Iraq and Ethiopia--all the pictures you have seen before of dead, dying, tortured, or oppressed people. He showed us one particular picture from a Vietnam napalm attack. You know the one with the children running from the smoke, with the one girl crying in fear, naked from head to toe, and soldiers looking on in the background.

Then, he showed us a film taken at the same time as that picture. It was color and showed the same girl, though you get a more vivid and active view of how injured she was. You could tell for certain that her clothes had probably been burnt off--she wasn't just interrupted during a bath, as I had previously thought. In the same footage, within feet of this little naked girl, there was also an old woman carrying her dead grandbaby whose skin had been flayed off by the burning chemicals. I just started to cry when I saw that. (I'm so glad that I didn't happen to be sitting with my students during lecture today.)

This isn't the first time that my journalism professors have traumatized me this semester. Two of my other professors within the first two weeks of school mentioned murder investigations that they covered. One described vividly a police beating he wrote about. The other went into great detail of the rape of an elderly woman, mentioning weapons and acts that I just didn't want to know about. I felt kind of victimized by these professors, who are just so hardened to this type of story that they don't recognize it as crossing a line that sensitive people such as myself draw and try never to cross.

I think that today is the day that I realized a major difference between the fields of Science Writing and Science Journalism. In science writing you can guiltlessly limit yourself to writing about what scientists and educators think is important, how science is helping and sometimes hurting people, what people are curious about, and what is just gosh darn neat-o. I don't think that you can get away with that in science journalism.

I think that journalists of all ilks, but specifically print and photo journalists, feel this obligation to be deep and thoughtful and present only what is important. True, they write and illustrate feature stories and human interest stories, but they do so with disdain for their readers and for the market forces that demand them to. They call it fluff and hold it up as an example of how the medium of the newspaper is in decline.

I'm so sick of hearing about how young people don't read the newspaper and how they want only to hear about Brad and Jennifer. I question this need to constantly share and obsess over the horror of what is happening in the world. Please let me keep writing about astronomers and robotics engineers who are wasting our money on less-earthly pursuits. If anything, let it be a breather to balance out the bad that we all have to swallow in order to be "good citizens."

Studying the Occult...ation

My latest paper for class is on scientists who study eclipses and other astronomical events involving celestial bodies in alignment, specifically occultations and transitions. (Astronomy primer: During an occultation, something, such as a planet or moon, blocks the light from a distant star or planet.)

I'm pretty thrilled by the concepts of: 1) giant balls of fire, dirt, or ice whizzing around in space and occasionally lining up in straight lines, 2) anything blocking out the whole freakin' sun, 3) geometry equations that calculate the exact moment that these things will be visible at specific locations on Earth, and 4) people who spend all their time and money studying these events, which last only a few seconds or minutes. Here's an excerpt that was cut from my paper because I was getting a bit too caught up in the excitement and cornball drama:

"Every bit of preparation over the previous year led up to this brief moment, in which every second counted. If the equipment failed, they would get nothing. If the sky suddenly turned cloudy, they would get nothing. If the instrument operators made an error, they would get nothing. Thousands of dollars, months of research, hundreds of hours of equipment testing, days of organizing and traveling to a remote and isolated location, all of this would go down the toilet if just one little thing went wrong during those few precious seconds."

In summary: Astronomers are one crazy lot, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they might have their priorities straight.

[Image from http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/sunearthday/2004/vt_gallery.htm]

Pictures from India

Many of you know that I just got back from a 2-week adventure in India. The first part was a traditional North Indian wedding. (These amazing parties last five full days!) I thought I'd share some of the pictures in case you all are interested. Hopefully, I'll get even more pictures from my friends.


Wedding - Day 1
The first night of the wedding begins with a ladies event, in which all the women are painted with henna dye, called mehndi, on their hands and arms. The dye leaves a brown temporary tattoo that lasts about a week. We were encouraged to wear traditional dress. Most of the ladies were wearing sarees or kurtas. The men wore kurtus. For kicks, some of the American men got mehndi, which is apparently outrageous to the Indians.

Here I am getting mehndi on a couple of fingers. I opted not to get too much and to get it only on the back of my hands, for fear of accidentally smearing it on my face or on other guests.

Karin had it done on her palms, which I imagine required some skill not to get it everywhere when eating and drinking that night. We found out that the woman applying mehndi to Karin had lots of family in Plano, TX, which is just outside of Dallas. Very small world!

Robyn getting mehndi:

I wish I had pictures of the bride’s mehndi--it was very elegant and detailed and went up her arms and legs. The tradition is to hide the groom’s name somewhere in the design. The groom gets to look for it on their wedding night, a fun game no doubt. Here is some more elaborate mehndi:

Later in the evening, when the mehndi was dry, it flaked off revealing the dyed skin underneath. The next day it was even darker. Within a week it was very faint, and by the time I returned home, two weeks later, it was barely perceptible.

A funny thing I noticed the night of the mehndi party: there were small piles of brown mehndi clay everywhere--on table cloths, chairs, the floor--it just flaked off all the guests. Plus, it was very satisfying to pick at it. I kept feeling paranoid that I was going to get it in my dinner. I guess Indian wedding guests are used to this, but all this dirt sprinkled around seemed such an odd contrast to the fanciness of the rest of the event.

After the ladies mehndi event, the men started to arrive and cocktails were served. And, just like in the Bollywood movies, the groom, Sonesh, entered the room dancing, accompanied by a dozen frenetic professional dancers. It was very impressive. I didn’t get any pictures of his grand entrance or of the sweet moment when the bride, Erin, recognized his reluctance to dance alone for another 20 minutes and joined him. Then, the family came up to the front and danced for all of us. I got this quick shot of the bride and her sister dancing. (There were so many professional photographers that it was hard to get a good shot of any of the week’s activities.)

Sadly, the above picture is the only one I have of the bride (back to camera) that turned out at all. It does not do her justice. Every night she looked more elegant than the last. It made me rethink how I should have done my wedding!

Later in the evening, many professional dancers did their thing. There were dancers dressed as peacocks, bulls, and various other animals. Some women did what I assumed are traditional dances, such as dancing on bowls, dancing while spinning plates, and dancing while balancing things on their heads (see below).

Then, the whole thing deteriorated into at least an hour of sexy/coy solo dancers who had bells on their ankles and danced/flirted with the male guests. The male guests (and eventually female guests, too) would dance up to the lady one at a time and shake a 100 rupee note or two at her and then let it fall to the floor at her feet. An assistant would pick up the rupees (so that she wouldn’t slip on them? I’m not sure).

Shopping in Bombay
So I just *had* to buy sarees for some of the wedding events. Okay, no one had to twist my arm. This look on my face that appears to be complete boredom, shyness, or retardation is really just what I look like when I have died and gone to fabric-lover heaven. I *loved* the saree shop and spent four hours choosing and buying 2 sarees. I bought the teal one next to me. It was gorgeous. Please help invent an excuse to wear it again!

I didn’t buy this one, but I wish I had.

Shopping for jewelry with Karin and Robyn:

Sadly, my camera broke when I was getting dressed by the professional saree draper. Someone in the world has pics of me and my friends wearing these elegant getups, but I have yet to get my hands on them. After two nights of having a professional dress me, I was ready to get my clothes on by myself and wore Western clothing (Western as in European/American, not cowboy—doh, I kept getting this confused!).

Wedding - Days 2-5
Because my camera broke, I have no pictures from the rest of the wedding, which was amazing, of course. There were many events involving dancing, both professional/traditional dancers and family members dancing, plus general dance-floor grooving to Indian pop music. We ate delicious food and drank too much wine every night. Let me tell you—I have discovered the limit to how many nights in a row I can be spoiled comfortably: it is 3. On the fourth and fifth nights, it really seemed silly to be dressed up once again and eating from yet another sumptuous buffet. Of course, I’m only pretending to complain. It was very fun. My hosts were very generous.

The actual wedding day was pretty cool—day 3, if I remember correctly. The women all wore sarees and the men wore western style suits and brightly colored turbans. I wish I had pictures, because the turbans were my favorite part. We did a celebratory procession with a live band and all of us dancing and jubilating around the block. The streets were crowded with onlookers. The groom brought up the end of the parade in a horse drawn carriage. It was too hot to dance, but we danced anyway, though less exuberantly near the end.

The wedding itself took place under a tent strewn with long, fragrant flower garlands. The bride and groom and their families sat in the tent and said many blessings, vows, etc. Then they ate things and burned things in a ceremonial way. It was very pretty. The funny part was that the Indian guests talked through the whole ceremony and answered cell phones and got up for snacks. I was told that this is pretty common.

Touring Mumbai
We visited several sites in Bombay, including this Jane temple:

Janism is some form of Hinduism, but seems to have a lot of Buddhism mixed in with it. The Janes do not eat meat or kill any animals. They wear face masks (some of the time) to prevent themselves from inhaling and killing bugs. Their temples were gorgeous, with intricate carving and colorful paintings and statues.

The Janes had some strict rules for visiting their temple, including removing your shoes. I regret to say that I broke at least one of these rules but couldn’t help myself.

Karin, Robyn, and Molly visit the Hanging Gardens of Mumbai. They had a decent explanation for the criminally misleading name, but I forget what it was.

A little Bollywood:

This sign claims that this is a peacock topiary:

Here is the main train station in Mumbai:

I’m very sad to say that few of my pictures of people came out. Missing are pictures of Deena (a fabulous designer from NY), John (Robyn’s charming boyfriend), and the bride and groom, Erin and Sonesh, as well as their very sweet siblings. But, here are my hotel roommates Karin and Jon. They were *this* fun to hang out with : )

Jon was the one who taught me how to interpret the India head-nod, which looks an awful lot like someone shaking their head “sorry, no” but actually means something like, “sure, why not.” If he had not pointed this out to me, I would have never survived the second part of my trip.

Touring Aurangabad
For the second week of my trip I traveled alone, but I made many friends including many Indian students, a Belgian man, and woman from Ghana. It was kind of a relief to have some peace after so much wedding action. I never got sick from the water or food, never got mugged or groped or threatened, but I did get ripped off many times by auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers. It wasn’t really a problem financially; it just wore down on my self esteem after a while. You start to feel a bit unwelcome when people try to screw you all the time. I can handle the tourist up-charge (that makes sense given the cost of living difference). I just hate the little tricks the drivers sometimes used, such as them stopping after a fair price was negotiated and they are half way there and them acting like they just realized it is farther and should cost more. Or, them claiming that the international airport is different than the domestic airport and costs more/less (always in their favor). There is a free 5 minute shuttle between them--there is no reason they should cost 100 rupees different! Anyway, that kind of thing left a bad taste in my mouth.


Aurangabad was beautiful and the people were much friendlier and less money-grubbing of tourists. My hotel was rather disgusting compared to our lush accommodations in Bombay, but I can’t complain when it was just $10 a night for a room with AC, cable, and hot water. However, it had roaches (eek!) and the electricity kept cutting out at random times.

The caves at Ajanta and Ellora were just gorgeous. These are human-made caves, cut out of a cliff side by monks over a few centuries. Some of them were cut by Buddhist monks, others by Hindus, and still others by Janes. It was hard to get a good picture because of the lack of lighting, but I made a few attempts. Here are some interior and exterior shots:

Cave exterior:

Buddhas:

Cave interior:

Spiritual moment captured:

Even more exciting than the caves was seeing this crazy old fort that was carved out of a mountain top. It had 7 retaining walls, a moat (that used to be filled with crocodiles and snakes) and a dark labyrinth with bats hanging from the ceiling that flew at my face during the torch-lit walk--omigosh it was thrilling! The only word I understood from the tour was “Dracula.” It is far more frightening to take a tour in a labyrinth when you don’t know what the guide is saying. You don’t hear/understand the important warnings, such as “I’m about to extinguish the torch to show you how dark it is in here,” or “Watch out for that impossibly treacherous stair case,” or “Those creatures hanging just six inches from your head are bats.” The Indian children who were on the tour seemed to find my reactions to these surprises quite amusing.

The tip of the fort is tiny looking structure at the top of the mountain. In the foreground is a Hindu temple that has been converted into a mosque.

Temple interior:

Woman carrying water:

View from the fort:

Torch-lit tour:

bats!

I saw saree weavers:

And, I saw the Mini Taj Mahal! Apparently, I was fortunate to have seen this one first. It seemed quite large to me, so when I saw the big Taj, I was not disappointed as many tourists are apt to be. The Mini Taj too is made of marble, though it doesn’t have as much marble and it has fewer precious stones.

On my last night in Aurangabad, the monsoons came. It was pretty fun to see all the Indians looking so darned pleased to see rain and cool weather. And it was like a wall of water and rivers for streets.

Touring Delhi
Delhi was not nearly as nice as Aurangabad or even Bombay. It was even hotter, dustier, poorer, and it smelled. On my last day there I finally looked up what 43ºC is in Fahrenheit—YIKES! It’s a good thing I didn’t know earlier in the trip. Plus, this is not a dry heat folks. It is muggier than any place I have ever been, including the freaking Amazon. On top of that there is this constant dusty haze, which the locals claim is from kicked-up dust, but I can’t imagine that pollution isn’t also part of it. (Most of these pics are blurry due to my camera problems, but many are blurry because that is what it was like. You could barely see anything for all the dust.)

Here is a Delhi street scene:

What you cannot see in any of these pictures are the ever-present hordes of beggar children. It was a big shock to see such abject poverty. And, these kids were very good at their job. They followed me around constantly, begging for food and money. It was very heartbreaking. They had many tricks, including pretending to foam at the mouth, asking for food to feed their baby sisters, and saying sad things such as, “Madam, why do you hate me?” Aaugh, it killed me to hear a little girl say that to me. When I first came into Bombay from the airport, I was confused by what looked to me like night-shift construction workers taking a nap on the sidewalk. “Is it break time?” I thought. After about 5 miles of this (that is, after seeing perhaps 1,000 people), I realized that they simply were homeless people—and these were just the ones that I could see from the highway. It was horrible. India is very, very crowded.

I saw many packs of monkeys both in the country and in the cities, including seeing a pack of monkeys hanging on the sign of a convenience store and scampering about in front of the store. Nobody seemed to think this was odd. It was as if they were squirrels. So, the following picture is the saddest camera failure ever—I *swear* that this is an out-of-focus picture of a mother monkey with her newborn, nearly hairless baby. It was so cute! I am devastated that it did not turn out. I’m including it just because, well, I can dream that it will magically become more in-focus given a little time.

This monkey picture (actually from Bombay) is sad for a different reason. This leashed monkey did not look happy. His owner explained that everything was okay, because he didn’t have any teeth. I guess he didn’t realize that this was no comfort to a bunch of westerners. The monkey did some flips and play-fought with the owner. Very sad.

Despite Delhi’s lack of charm and general filthiness, I had lots of fun and took several tours around Delhi. I got to see some awesome temples, forts, and of course, the Taj Mahal.

Here’s a crazy astronomical structure for telling time (a big sundial, really, but has some fancy extras that I couldn't figure out in the translation):

… and one for telling when zodiac constellations are out:

This is Qutab Manur, a mosque structure:

It’s hard to say that the Delhi part of my trip was worth it because of how difficult it was to get home, but it’s hard to regret seeing the Taj. It really is gorgeous. I still haven’t developed those pics, but I’ll post them for all those interested when I finish the roll.

On the last day of my trip, at the airport, I finally figured out the India system for standing in line. Basically, ladies always can (and are expected) to skip to the front of the line. Also, a second corollary to the system is if you do not stand such that you are lightly touching the person in front of you, it appears that you are not in line. Thus, for the two weeks up until I made this discovery, people kept cutting in front of me. I would sputter in helpless confusion. Then, on the very last day I realized that really, you need to body check someone in order to get your food when ordering at a counter. Oh well, better late than never.

As a lovely Indian farewell, it took me 40 hours to get from Delhi to Chicago. I missed my connecting flight to Dallas and am still negotiating a way for Air India to reimburse me for taking a flight the next day. FYI to everyone you know for all time: NEVER fly Air India!!!

My layover in Frankfort was a relief. As disorienting as it was to be in a random city with an unknown time zone and a language in which I know only a few useless phrases, I was still pleased to be back in the West. I could barely brush my teeth effectively because I was grinning so much about getting to rinse my tooth brush in tap water. The hotel was free because of the airline snafu, but it was pretty swank and the bed so much more comfortable than anything in India, including the 5-star place we stayed at for the wedding. The funny thing is that Air India made super-special accommodations for the delayed passengers so that the Frankfort hotel served us only Indian food, cooked with a German interpretation (i.e. badly, over spiced, and kind of sour tasting). When the waiter put down the plate and said proudly, “Here is your Indian spiced soup and special Indian main course,” I almost cried of sadness. Of all the suspicious Indian food that I ate and dodgy water situations I gave into in the previous 2 weeks, I was actually most in danger of getting ill from the Indian food the Germans fed me right before my 8 hour trip across the Atlantic. Fortunately, I didn’t get anything worse than heartburn, so I shouldn’t complain, but it was pretty funny.

I did not see a single elephant, darn it.


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