mango on an apple

The obligatory cow photo

We arrived on Sunday early in the morning, India time. After lots of rest in Delhi on the first day, on Monday we spent the day on the train (11:00AM – 8:00PM) to Amritsar, in the province of Punjab. Typically the train journey can be as short as 6 hours, but since we were booking very last minute, we couldn’t be choosy.

Amritsar is just as large and bustling as Delhi, but perhaps with less of a metropolitan feel. As soon as we pulled into the train station, I could hear the horns bleating constantly outside, and spot the tourist-hungry auto rickshaw and cycle rickshaw drivers. We were always planning a short stay to check out the main sights: the Golden Temple, the holiest temple for the Sikhs, and the Indo-Pakistan border closing ceremony in Wagha. As soon as the city came into full view, I was glad of the decision.

However, now that I think about it, being in a large city has forced me to get over the culture shock faster. The first day here marked an important accomplishment: booking our train ticket out at the railway station. I was in the wrong line at first, and got felt up in all directions by old ladies seeking to get onto trains for the same day. Finally when I could edge a word in through the tiny window, the lady behind the counter informed me that the reservation office was on the other side of the station. There, the scene was calmer, but the crowd was just as large. Since it was reservations, the lines also took longer to get through. You’d be glad to know that we learned the ways quickly, and sweet success, got our tickets booked from Amritsar to Delhi on the “superfast” train, and from Delhi to Jaipur later that same day on another express train, in second class with AC. Never mind that I didn’t have enough cash on me, so Alex had to run around town looking for a functioning ATM to give us more money while I waited by the ticket window with old men constantly pushing me out of the way, and pigeons above looking to drop poop on unfortunate souls below.

The queue at any given point of the day for train reservations (Amritsar).

Then today, we tested out a few more traditions to get used to this new lifestyle. First thing in the morning, we hopped onto a cycle rickshaw to get to the Golden Temple. The rickshaw cyclists share the road with little mopeds, cars, trucks, buses, and auto rickshaws, and nobody drives in their own lane. Lines on the road may as well not be painted at all here, because they’re definitely not used by anyone actually on the road. So off we went, with me holding onto Alex for dear life. It felt quite weird to be so exposed on the road, but soon we were used to it, and got busy refusing the cyclist’s “offers” to take us to other sights around the city.

Eyes on the road, dude! Our cycle rickshaw driver.

We got to the temple, and had to purchase head coverings before going inside. After looking around for a bit, I bought an ornate cloth that’s a little too thick to be a scarf (not sure what else it could be used for, but I couldn’t tell the thickness from the packaging…ah well, lesson learned), and had talked down the seller from Rs200 to Rs120. Considering I’m usually the worst bargainer in the world, I was pretty proud of myself.

Lastly, I HAD FRUIT TODAY! I hate to admit this, and please don’t judge me, but I’m already a little tired of Indian cuisine. Before leaving Canada, we were pretty good with our healthy eating regime that almost always included a crunchy salad or grilled/steamed veggies, and I miss food prepared in its original, simple form. I miss olive oil, salt, and pepper. So for breakfast at the hotel, I had eggs and toast. Then for lunch, as Alex wolfed down paranthas across from me, I had a Coke. (Thank goodness for Coca-Cola and its never-changing taste across the world.) I also stopped at various fruit stands looking to buy little green oranges that seem to be everywhere, and as I bit into the familiar taste of citrus, I swear my whole body rejoiced from head to toe. I would’ve gone a step further to buy a lovely ripe papaya, cut up by the vendor in front of you, but as we’re spending most of tomorrow on the train again, I had to stay away from fruit that is more likely to induce frequent trips to the bathroom.

As we ventured out and started interacting with locals to get our daily transactions done, I think I’m finally getting used to the world I’m in. I’ve also realized that part of my inability to accept India readily for what it is has been because of the way the guidebooks are written. We’re using the Rough Guide to India, but we talked to someone with the Lonely Planet book as well, and we’ve concluded that these guidebooks use a certain style of writing that tends to focus on the negative and inspire fear and paranoia more than anything else. Once we took matters into our own hands and tried out a few things ourselves, I appreciated that this was going to be OK, and it wasn’t going to be as hard as I thought, and as long as I’m OK with letting things roll off my back (i.e. paying a little more because bargaining gets exhausting), then this is going to be fine, and maybe FUN!

Most people don’t feel the need to get onto the right platform at the train station until trains start coming in and blocking their way…then they choose the fastest way possible to get to their platform – walking right across, in front of the oncoming train. Awesome.

Tomorrow, off to Jaipur we go.

I don’t think I actually really thought about this until we got to India. After the first day I looked around me and thought, “This isn’t really going to be fun, is it?”, then Alex and I talked about why we are really here.

[Aside: it is never a good sign to be landing in an airport, only to be daydreaming of the elation of leaving from that same airport in four weeks. I blame the jetlag and the completely uncomfortable state I was in.]

To set the scene, when we left Canada, I was in a state of mind that went something along the lines of: we sold a lovely home of our own, I walked away from a great job (and life!) opportunity, this had better be DAMNED GOOD FUN.

And then Alex went, really, fun? In India? All the time? You really expected that?

And I had to agree with him that I probably wasn’t very good at connecting the dots before we left, and yeah, this is going to be harder than we thought.

It’s hard because we are strangers in this land, with no connection to the people at all. It’s not like Europe where we could guess and derive from their words and expect fluent English (or bust out French 12 vocabulary to see where it gets you). There is some familiarity, in that some parts of Delhi reminded me strongly of Taipei where I grew up – except Delhi is markedly different with a lot more chaos, many more traces of military presence, and a sense of uneasiness that comes with not understanding the language around me.

It’s hard because we haven’t traveled “on the cheap” like this since we were students, in 2004. Even then, we splurged more than we should to stay at budget hotels rather than hostels, and always made sure we ate well in the cities we visited (and understood the menus enough to do so!). So looking for accommodation, being comfortable in the accommodation we decide on, and feeding our grumpily hungry selves will prove to be a big challenge regularly. Only when we get in the groove of accomplishing these simple tasks daily, will I be able to move past the stress and proceed on to all-out DAMNED GOOD FUN.

But that’s not why we are here. If we were looking for just “fun”, we would’ve saved this trip for another time on another budget, and gone with a lovely two-week luxury honeymoon in Hawaii, or even the Maldives. We’ve been telling people we chose India because we “wanted to knock off the least kid-friendly places on our bucket list.” That’s the simple answer. The complicated answer is, we wanted perspective, we wanted to see how the rest of the world lives, we wanted to experience something totally different, we wanted to be outside our comfort zone for a while to wake us up from the complacency we have developed in our North American 9-to-5 ways.

For that, we’ve definitely come to the right place. I just have to keep reminding myself that’s why we are here. And I’ll have to keep you posted on the pursuit of DAMNED GOOD FUN.