Where are we?

We live in Nashik, a town of Maharashtra, counting about 1,5 mio inhabitants, situated 185km north east of Mumbai.


http://www.nashik.com/

Goa!

Ahhhhhhhhhh Goa. Some say it is the Ibiza of India. Well I have to correct them straight away and tell you: even if it is true that Goa used to be a hippy spot and is still somehow in some areas a party place, you know, a kind of a Costa Brava where silly European people (l’élite de l’Europe!) come to smoke hashish and drink cocktails, you can still find very nice and quiet areas, like Palolem, where we went after visiting Panjim (or Panaji) and Old Goa.

We were twice in Goa already. Bouh... some of you will tell us, why already twice in 3 months, whereas there are some many things to see all around India. See Goa is quite easily reachable from Nasik. And we went once with Greg's family, and another time to meet up some firnes who finally couldn't come, as they couldn't leave Bangalore because of riots in the city as a very famous actor died on that day. Anyway. We went once in February, and once for Good Friday.

The first time we drove from the airport to Panjim. Panjim is a very nice Portuguese styled small city, with Indian people inside. Strange impression. A flavor of the landscapes I had seen in Brazil, with the people I had seen in Nasik. Hum… After that we went to Old Goa. Anybody interested in bent trees, cathedrals and Christian religion should go to Old Goa. You can find there the biggest Christian cathedral in Asia. See?

And then we drove to the south to Palolem and stopped over at a very interesting spice farm, worth visiting. They show you a number of spice trees, how spices grow, what they are used for, what they are good for on your body, etc…
The drive to Palolem was quite long and chaotic, as we were the 6 of us in a car where 5 normal people fit. One of us had to sit on the floor at the rear, and to hide him/herself when the police was around.

We also stopped over at some famous Hindu temples (Shri Shantadurga Temple and Shri Ramnath Temple) where some ceremonies were going on. Those temples are surrounded by a beautiful landscape, very green, with among others rice fields.

And finally we reached Palolem.

Beautiful beach, extremely nice people, Indian women swimming in sari, great weather, lots of backpackers, a few hippies, gorgeous sunset on the sea… and cows on the beach. Tens of them! And dogs. Dogs playing around, fighting with one another, sitting on your towel… We spent 3 days doing nothing. Going to the beach, eating seafood and fish twice a day, shopping, sleeping, and jogging (yes we did!). Another real holiday! (Again a flavor of Brazil). I won’t spend to much time telling about this boat trip we took to see the dolphins, which you can imagine turned to be the tiny part of the back of one single dolphin at the end of the 60 minutes of the trip (the guys taking us to the tour were happy, they had told us “no dolphin, no money!!”).

A good thing in Goa for us is that you can hang around in any clothes you like. Unlike the rest of India, in Goa you can show almost any part of your body. Otherwise the country is extremely conservative. I never show my shoulders and my legs in Nasik!

More pictures? Try fotos.web.de/cam_in_india/Goa_Feb_06

On the road

Driving on the left hand side of the road was one of my challenges when I came here. Driving in the city was one of the first things I did on my first day in Nasik. Ok, I already talked about it to some of you in my few previous emails, but I have to say that I am so proud of being able to drive:
A. on the left hand side of the road, and
B. in India, that it is worth repeating it.

I could never have imagined how it is to drive in this country. If you want to be successful you have to understand and remember a few basic rules:
1. the biggest always wins
2. horn if you want people to see you (!) (it is written on the back of each and every truck here)

Once you know and use those rules, you will be fine on the road. If you happen to be nice to a two-wheeler, like if you stop and want to let him pass before you, the guy will be so confused that it can get quite dangerous. He won’t know what to do, will hesitate, and the guy behind you will get angry at you, horning like hell. So here you have to be self confident enough to take the decision to go in situations in which you would just stop in Europe. Even more dangerous is to drive at night, as most bicycles and of course people walking don’t have a light, and cars put on their very bright lights, I don’t know what they are called in English, it would be “plein phare” in French, Fernlichte in German I think…. So you are like blind. The “good“ thing here is that most of the vehicles on the road don’t drive too fast. So if an accident happens it will happen slowly, and probably won’t be too serious, at least if you are in the car and not on the bike.

The streets are like a kind of a scene in this country, a theater, and as a European you don’t spend 5 minutes there without being upset by the way people drive. I am not kidding. As long as you can’t put yourself in the skin of an Indian you go crazy here. You have to expect what is for you non-expectable. You have to accept that vehicles coming towards you use your lane, that they take a left or a right and don’t bother what is coming from behind, that they make a U turn as of a sudden… The most impressive thing you will notice here is the phlegm of the people on the roads. Even if you horn like hell because 4 people walk on your lane and you don’t have space to drive by, or because two two wheelers have a nice chat while riding there bike and take the whole space on the road, they will keep quiet and will not move until your car is 2 centimeters from them (and you are lucky if they move even then).
Here you can see people sitting along the streets in a very dangerous way. If you take a right and a vehicle comes from your left and takes itself a right, it won’t wait until you are finished and gone, it will just pass by on your left, which should obviously not be. So you have to transpose the references you have in mind. Normality on the road takes a new dimension: normality here is what you find suicidal.

The roads are full of people walking, cows, cars, very big trucks, rickshaw (2-wheeler taxis) bicycles carrying things twice as big as them (e.g. gas bottles, stairs, etc...), crowded buses, trucks full of workers. In times of weddings you also see a horse once in a while going to the groom who is going to ride him for a few minutes. We even saw a huge elephant in the middle of Mumbai (the picture is not quite good, I hope you see it anyway)!

In India, a bike, I mean a motorbike is sometimes the vehicle of a whole family. So you will see 4-5 people on the bike, the father is driving, the mother is the last behind, between them both, a child, and just before the father, another one or two children. It works! They don’t have a choice anyway. They can’t afford a car, lucky enough to afford a bike, and if they have to go from A to B, they need their own vehicle. Ok, you can take a Rickshaw, a funny scooter with 3 wheels, driver in the front, and behind him a seat for 2 to 3 people in a European environment, where 5 to 6 Indian people will fit without any problem if they have to.

More pictures? Try http://fotoalbum.web.de/gast/Cam_in_india/On the road

Our nest

The first week I spent in Nasik back in February 2006 was a quiet week, during which I could make myself comfortable in our house, far too big for the 2 of us but so nice! For the moment we live outside of the so-called “Bosch colony”, where all expatriates have in theory the possibility to live, if a house (they say bungalow) is available. We wanted first to stay outside of the colony, to experience real Indian neighborhood, people… The house planned for us is anyway not ready yet. It is still being built for the moment. So we live in “Anandwalli”, an area of Nasik, near the MICO-Bosch plant. We drive 5 minutes to work. Anandwalli is a nice area with a few houses like ours, but also smaller and much smaller houses and a few low buildings with appartments. There are rich and poor people. The area is quite open, meaning not crowded with buildings. We have a beautiful view on the small mountains surrounding Nasik…

There are fields around the houses and gardens. Some cows (but this is obvious here) and dogs (very loud at night). Most of the people here don’t speak English, so we try and use the basis of Hindi we have learnt. There is a small shop to buy last minute things like eggs, millk, bread, etc… A guy near the house has a very small hut in which he can iron your shirts and bed sheets if you want to “delegate” this task to him. Of course he gets paid for that, 2 Rs per shirt, which is around 0,04 € (…).

To close the house chapter for the moment, we will move to the colony when our house there is finished, not before end of May, most probably mid June it was first planned for end of March, but never mind). We’ll see. One of the main reasons why we will move is that Anandwalli is an industrial area, in which there is no electricity on Saturdays, which is our sole fully free day over the week. The reason for that is that power has to be shared in Nasik, as there is not enough for all. Power cuts are very common over here. So some areas do have power on certain days of the week, and no power on certain other days. This means no fridge, no music, no TV, no AC, no nothing electrical. Ok, we could get adapted to that, but this is not really convenient. On top of that, we have had already quite a few problems with the house, the water pump was down for 2 days, with the 5 of us in the house (Greg’s family was there at that time), and if I agree that electricity is not a must, no water can turn to a catastrophe. I had never realized how important water is in your everyday life! It is the kind of things you have to experience to understand them. Now the pump is repaired, but it happens to do crazy things again and again… So anyway, we will move to the colony. The house being built at the moment looks great. We are preparing the furniture (“home made”) as it will be empty and we didn’t bring any furniture with us. Over there you have the benefit of the security, there’s a pool, a tennis court. So I don’t want to complain, because I know that we will live over there in far much better conditions than 95% of the population, but the context will be for sure very different even though more than ok.

An exception in the landscape

One thing you have to be aware of in India, and you have most importantly to accept if you want to make a living here, or even spend a holiday, is that there will constantly be people around you not only looking at you, but staring at you. Except in big towns like Mumbai and in tourist areas like Goa, you are an exception in this landscape. You are definitely something different, sometimes something scary, sometimes something worth looking at in details. Especially if you go out of Nasik for instance, and you go to some small peaceful farmer village, then you are probably the event of the year. One weekend we went to this small place, 60kms away from Nasik, with Pritam, an Indian friend of ours. 10 to 15 children were following us all the way long, as we were walking towards a Hindu temple at the other end of the village. They just followed us, and sat down when we stopped, stared at us all that time, saying nothing. If you look at them in the eyes, the boys will sustain your look and at some point you will be the one looking somewhere else as it is getting quite uncomfortable for you. The girls will not dare looking at you too long. From the moment you look back at them, they will turn their back to you, talk to each other and laugh and smile.
But if you try and speak in Hindi to those people (which I can’t much for the moment, but Greg is quite good at it), they will be surprised, and/or enthusiastic, and they won’t stop start talking and talking and talking to you in Hindi too, which you mostly (still) won’t be able to understand. It ends up with laughers and smiles, showing there was a successful contact, even if it was not, say, “productive”.
However, in 90% of the cases when I smiled back to those eyes I got a wide, white enthusiastic smile from them. Here you will find people living in conditions you have never imagined in your worst nightmares, but still, they will smile. This is probably one of the biggest differences I can tell so far between the Indian way of being and ours...

More pictures? Try http://fotoalbum.web.de/gast/Cam_in_india/Todi_Village/

How it all started - Mumbai train

On the 9th of February 2006, I took the AF134 plane to Mumbai, Bombay, if you prefer. My 27kg-heavy luggage was not held back by Air France in Charles de Gaulle, they just loaded it into the plane. Actually you would be surprise how few this is! I arrived in Mumbai at around midnight, and Greg was expecting me, even if he not supposed to be there, as he was supposed to be working in Nashik at that time (at least on the day after). Great surprise! We spent the night in Mumbai and took a train on the next day for Nashik.

Nasik is located about 200km from Mumbai, to the North East. You can either take a plane, which can be cancelled anytime (there’s only one per day), drive by car, on bumpy and quite dangerous roads, or take a train, quite punctual (serious!) and cold (too much AC). So we took a train, happy enough that we could take it at a terminus station, where we knew exactly where our coach was. Indeed, it is a nightmare to take a train in a non terminus station here, as you have something like 2 minutes to get into the train with your big luggage but no indication on the platform about where you are supposed to wait for your coach. We experienced that a few weeks ago in Mumbai. Our platform was the same as many regional trains (like S Bahn, or RER), so there was constantly a train in front of you, and you had to ask yourself whether this train has a chance to be yours or not. Up to you! Well, one of the main hint is that if you see people literally rush into a train coming (while still moving), and still rush once the train is leaving the station again, then you know this is most probably not your train to Nashik. People just step on one another to get on board. So you would think women have no chance to get in, as they are in general weaker than men. But India organizes it in such a way that women have their own allocated coaches. So that women step over women, and men over men.

Another hint is the way people stand at the open door of the train whilst the train is driving at its highest pace. Quite a dangerous way of taking the train, but that’s just the way it is here. Too few space inside if the train, so you don’t have a choice but to stand and hang at the door, half your body outside of the train.
On that day we were lucky enough to find a guy talking English on the platform, able (unlike the Indian railways employees…) to tell us about where our coach would stop.
So anyway, back to my arrival in Mumbai and departure to Nasik, on that day we took this for 3 and half hours long train from Mumbai to Nasik. Actually you could think this is not a train, but supermarket. Just like Brazilian beaches, but this is not our topic today. Every 5 minutes a guy passes by to sell you things you think you know (like coffee, tea, tomato soup, crisps, etc…), as well as things you have never seen in your life and of which your wonder whether you should really eat them or not. Then if you are in a kind of a dormitory coach you will get bed sheets and a blanket, to have a nice nap. Ok, we took the train to Nasik, which is quite near to Mumbai. Some people take the same train to reach the other end of the country, traveling for sometimes, I don’t know, something like 24 hours!

The arrival in Nasik is of course an experience for you, especially if you have never seen the train station by day (by night is also not bad) of a “small” Indian city like Nasik (around 1,5 mio people), but it is also an experience for the local people who don’t see that many white and fair haired people every day. Of course we are not the only ones here, as there are many German people from not only Bosch, but also EPCOS, Thyssen Krupp, but still you can tell that you don’t look “normal” in the eyes of some of those people. A child once asked me which soap I am using to wash myself. I am so white!

T Zero

Well, this is it, I am on the web. To share with you my impressions of India, as I will be there for a few years from now...

I arrived in Nashik, Maharashtra, on the 10th of February 2006. I came here to live my life with Greg, to share with him this experience, the best and the worst of it, and to make our dream come true.

Within 3 months it looks like we have experienced so many things that it is difficult to report about everything. People, traditions, langages, culture, religions, society, casts, work, traffic, markets, restaurants, lanscapes, movies, music, shopping, clothes, weather... Everything is amazingly different!