Can't Type with Hands Full of Chapatti!

Chilling on the rooftop of our building

Pizza Hut - Corn and chicken pizza!

Rooftop restaurant downtown Mysore

Rocking the bindis for good luck - Chamundi Hills

It’s been a week and a half since the nomadic tourists from UofG swarmed into Mysore from their whirlwind adventures across Southern India. We settled right in to a Catholic missionary called the Organization for Development of People just on the outskirts of town. It is like a gated sanctuary from the dirt, dust and pollution of the streets. It’s all green; potted plants and flowers everywhere, trees, a veranda and….about 5 daily calls to prayer, sufficiently loud and starting at 5:45 a.m. The first morning we were rudely awoken by this long, out-of-tune drone of some sort..I thought I would get used to it but that’s yet to happen and I start pretty much every day diving deeper under my pillow and cursing the call to prayer – seriously, why can’t a watch suffice?

Anyways, enough about that. Mysore is fantastic – it’s a much cleaner city than some of the others we visited in January (Chennai…), and there’s so much to do and see – so many cool markets and stores, a huge palace at the town center, a zoo, great restaurants and a department/grocery store (about 100 metres down the street for which the 25 of us are likely generating twice their regular profits). The center here hosts conferences and groups of people, who come and go. This week they were hosting an agricultural conference, so Abby and I were chatting with some of the farmers over dinner. Mostly, they just wanted to try her peanut butter, which they’d never had before. With the grocery store so close, most of us have acquired peanut butter and/or nutella and have found various combinations of spread+banana+ carb product to supplement the pretty bland menu here. Our prof Cynthia somehow persuaded the cooks to switch from spicy Indian breakfasts consisting of curries and idli (rice patty things), to ‘continental’ breakfasts consisting of white bread, peanut butter and jams, and fruit.

Late last week I did a full load of laundry, washed by hand until my hands were raw, with all the bright colours from my new Indian clothes leaching into the water and turning everything I had left that was somewhat white…into a weird blueish/purplish mess. The gardener didn’t like me hanging my weirdly coloured clothes on the railings outside our room and directed me to the rooftop patio – what a discovery that was! This patio wraps around the building in a huge circle, with no floor in the middle but a sweet view over the inner courtyard, the rest of the compound and everything else out there. I now go up there every day to read and take in the view, and we’ve relocated our morning yoga class to the rooftop as well – sun salutations are so much more authentic when we can actually see the sun!

Last Friday was our first yoga class and our instructor is this hardcore yogi who likes to do a lot of humming and chanting, and has this terrifyingly evil cackle of a laugh. He laughs especially hard as he goes around the class ‘adjusting’ people into the correct position; he tends to prey mostly on the guys, who generally crumple to the ground once released from his clutches. But, overall it’s a good class and the most exercise we get between our carb-heavy meals and sedentary days sitting in the classroom.

After class last Friday a bunch of our went out to Pizza Hut for dinner – yes, a Pizza Hut, and right across from it was a Dominos, which made our decision hard. We went for the Pizza Hut because it was on the same side of the street as us, which is a huge factor here, where crossing the street is a life-or-death situation every time. I ordered Corn and Chicken pizza, and loved every bite. That night a bunch of us gathered back in the classroom and set up the projector to watch Bride and Prejudice with newfound appreciation. It was a solid West-meets-East night.

Last Saturday was a jam-packed day. We took a long bus ride to visit Vivekananda Youth Movement; an NGO which has founded a Montessori tribal school, as well as an Ayurvedic health clinic. The school was being run incredible it seemed, and they were producing remarkable academic results. After, we got a tour around a nearby hospital which had been started up by another group of people, and the director has spent his lifetime working to help gain funding and awareness. It was amazing to see all the good, honest and charitable work being done in India by such hard-working people with a genuine desire to make their country a better place. I think everyone in the group was humbled and inspired.

This week was much the same as the previous week, with lots of lectures and 4 yoga classes, lots of peanut butter and chapatti with bananas, and several trips to the nearby department store (I get a pineapple there almost every day and cut it up and eat the whole thing – delicious). I also picked up some pieces of silk at the market last weekend to get tailored into headbands; they let me have the fabric for free (could have had to do with the fact that the guy at the checkout was in the midst of asking Lauren on a date and had plied her with free fabric). I got prescription glasses and sunglasses here (they’re about $60 each) and am still completely in love with the inexpensiveness of India. It’s going to be such a shock coming home…. “You want me to pay HOW MUCH for this dinner and beer!?” Or trying to bargain it down… “Joke price!” as the rickshaw drivers like to tell us when we don’t offer them enough rupees.

Last night we celebrated another week of classes (well, it was our second week anyway), by heading downtown to a rooftop restaurant with an incredible view overlooking the plaza. We all got King Fishers (the popular beer here) and spent most of the evening just hanging out and chatting about our trip so far. We joked about how fat we’re all getting and how far behind we all are on our journaling/blogging (at which point someone made the very valid point that we ‘can’t type with hands full of chapatti’). So true; and that was another solid Friday in Mysore.

Today was much like our busy Saturday last weekend, but I really enjoy having such cool and relevant activities and NGO visits incorporated into our itinerary. We visited a rotary school for the hearing impaired; their primary focus was on integrating the mothers into the child’s education by having her attend school with the child, and after hearing a four-year-old girl read in in English (her second language), I was amazed. We visited another, smaller NGO which was a parent’s association which runs a small school for special children. Before our trip we all made donations and did some fundraising to help these NGO’s out, so we will be distributing this money to these organizations as we see fit (basically a combination of who needs it the most, and who will the funds most effectively).

This afternoon we visited a sultan palace and museum, then drove up to Chamundi hills, with incredible views overlooking Mysore. We decided to get ambitious and hike down the 2000-or-something stairs and have the bus meet us at the bottom. The stairs are all sporadically spaced in height and distance apart, so we had some slips and seriously shaky legs by the time we reached the bottom, but it totally worthwhile cause we got to see some cool temples on the way down and a LOT of monkeys.

Anyways, that concludes the excitement of the past couple weeks. Tomorrow we are visiting Mysore Palace at night, apparently it’s even MORE impressive all lit up in the dark, and then we going out all together for dinner which should be good, since we usually break off into smaller groups. That’s it for now, time for some chai tea and Chapatttiiii! Ciao!