Arrival in India

*Apologies that we have not written more frequently! We don't have much internet access at the moment!*

We are in India and the overwhelming impression is chaos.

We left Cambridge at 9 o’clock on Thursday morning and reached Heathrow by noon, for our 2:25 pm flight. Matt had not bought any sun glasses yet so we went to Sunglasses Hut to buy a cheap pair. This however was not sunglasses hut in Coral Ridge Mall. They were all designer labels – Dolce and Gabbana, Fordi, Chanel, etc. As yet Matt does not have any glasses. The first leg of the flight was 10 hours from London to Colombo, Sri Lanka. We flew Sri Lankan Airlines and they gave us an emergency exit row so Matt could stretch his feet. The flight was fairly uneventful. We went over some interesting lands, including the Northern Alps, the Middle East desert (the plane made a noticeable route change to avoid Iraqi and Afghani airspace – we did fly over Iran).The two meals were not bad Indian/Sri Lankan food. We spent most of the time reading, sleeping and watching movies. For some reason they played the X-men movies one after the other, but starting with the second one so we saw the second, then the third, then the first. They also had several channels of Indian Bollywood movies; Matt watched a few and realized pretty quickly that they all have the same plot: handsome successful boy meets sweet meek obedient girl, love/arranged marriage at first sight, song and dance routine, trouble, conflict ensues, parents yell/guilt each other and children, conflict conflict conflict, everyone apologizes, everyone is happy, song and dance routine.
We landed in Colombo Airport early in the morning there and were supposed to catch a connecting flight to Hyderabad, which was delayed by two hours. First we settled into some chairs in a coffee shop directly under a fan (the airport was not air conditioned) and had some English Tea and discovered that the currency in use was the US dollar.(we had some with us luckily because Matt’s grandma Karen had sent him his annual $5 for his birthday!) Our flight kept being delayed farther and farther so I decided to lie down and nap a bit until our plane was ready. It was hard to find an open bench, even to sit on because so many people inconsiderately just stretched out on whole benches and didn’t leave much room. One example of the chaos that seems to rule this country is the appalling lack of public manners. People are so inconsiderate, pushing, yelling, spitting, cutting in queues, impatient, demanding. Everyone does it so it only seems to bother us Westerners.
By now it was becoming quite rare to see any Caucasian travelers and people had begun staring at Matt and I. On the next plane to Hyderabad Matt was one of only two white people on the plane and got many upward stares at how tall he is.
-KGT

We arrived in Hyderabad airport around noon local time on June 8th. The moment we stepped off the plane an Indian man in uniform asked us if we were Kaveri and Math (apparently there was some confusion about my exact name and for weeks everyone thought Grace’s husband’s name was Math). It turns out one of Grace’s Uncles, Kamalakar, was a classmate of this man and he escorted us through immigration. Once outside we met another one of Uncle Kamalakar’s friends, Mr. Mohan. He helped us carry our baggage and get our money changed into rupees. We then grabbed a taxi down to a hotel were we planned to rest and eat lunch.
This was our first experience of the Indian road system. Utter chaos. Instead of lanes every car, bike, motorcycle, bus or autorickshaw just goes where it can fit. They swarm around each other passing on any available side. And they honk and honk. It’s necessary to let other cars know where you are. Many of them can’t see behind them and you never know when you’ll be passed. We saw whole families riding along on motorcycles, the baby in front, the sari-clad wife side saddle on back, none with helmets. To give you an idea of just how lawless driving is, we missed our street so the driver just backed up on the shoulder.
Autoricksaws, or “Autos” are these little yellow taxi cabs. They only have three wheels, a canvas roof and open to the air sides, no doors. They’re only about half as wide as a regular car and they’re everywhere.
We were dropped off at the hotel were we had 90 minutes to eat and rest before catching a bus to Vijawada. We would have had more time to rest but our plane was delayed by a few hours. Anyway, we grabbed some super cheap lunch. More food than we could possibly eat for under two pounds.
It’s nice to go from England where everything is basically twice the cost as it is in the States to India, where things cost far less than in the states, especially food. The economist in me practically was screaming “This is the Balassa-Samuelson effect! You’re seeing it with your own eyes!”
Those of you not interested in economics should skip this paragraph. The Balassa-Samuelson effect is an explanation for why certain items are much cheaper in poor countries than in rich ones. Think about it – why should food cost less just because a country is poor? Shouldn’t a dollar always buy the same amount of stuff no matter where you are, and poor countries just have less dollars? It’s not the case though. Basically, what happens is there are two kinds of goods, tradable goods, ie anything you can pack onto a boat and ship overseas, so timber, steel, coal, DVD’s, Coca-cola whatever, and non-tradable goods, ie anything that you have to get from the country you live in – restaurant food, haircuts, real estate. Poor countries have to compete against rich countries in trying to export things like timber, coca-cola, clothing. Because these goods can be packed onto a boat, all countries have to sell the items for the same price – no one would buy the same good for a higher price. Rich countries have a lot of machines, poor countries have a lot of cheap labor. In a rich country the average worker sits at a machine and pumps out a lot of the product and so get paid a hefty salary. In the poor country maybe 20 people do the work of that one guy and his machine, so they all earn a lot less (they earn so little that it’s cheaper to use 20 people than buy 1 machine). Anyway, these people then have a lot less money to go out and spend on things like haircuts and restaurant food. So, unless those businesses want to close, they charge a much cheaper rate. So in India an iPod costs roughly the same as it would in London, but I can buy 8 cups of tea and four breakfasts for the price of one cup of tea in Britain.
Anyway, after lunch we got our baggage and walked a block or two to our bus stop. We had a six or seven hour ride ahead of us before we got to Vijawada. Uncle Kamalakar’s friend was accompanying us, since there was the wedding the next day and he was attending.
If we had thought driving in the city was hectic, it was nothing to the country. The drivers are ambitious passers and several times we had to resort to the shoulder to accommodate a car or truck that couldn’t get around the slower moving vehicle in time. We forced several cars onto the shoulder ourselves. My mom, who gets tense when semis pass on the highway would have promptly gotten back on the plane and out of the country I think. I sat transfixed on the edge of my seat for the first three hours then relaxed. As soon as I realized this was just how things worked here, I was able to go along with it. But we did see two accidents enroute. Driving at night is particularly dangerous.
And yes, cows do wander the streets. We had to go around them a lot. And people cross wily nily. Lots, lots, lots, of honking.
We arrived in Vijawada around midnight and Mr. Mohan arranged for a taxi to take us to Vuyyuru, where we were staying. He left us along for a few minutes while he went looking for one and it was really uncomfortable to be standing there with our suitcases. We’ve since learned that tourists simply don’t come here so a foreigner is really unusual. And since I was standing next to an Indian girl also dressed like a foreigner, well, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. The looks were not very approving.
Good thing we didn’t bring our big suitcases. We had a hard time getting these ones into the cab. We piled into the car and journeyed for another hour until we arrived and met Uncle Kamalakar and his oldest son. I had never met this man before and Grace hadn’t since she was a baby. Mr. Mohan left us here and Uncle Kamalakar joined us and directed the cab driver towards his home, where everyone was staying.
The village was much more rural than I had expected. Most of the houses were made of dried palm leaves with dirt floors. People slept outside on cots and sleeping cows were tethered to wooden stakes on the side of the road. Uncle Kamalakar, however, did not live in a house like this, but a two story concrete house which in ordinary times must have seemed enormous. Now it was draped in colorful lights for the wedding and so seemed like a mansion.
Grace’s mom was staying here and we ate a 1 am dinner with her and Uncle Kamalakar. Naturally, we had Indian food. I haven’t seen non-Indian food in the time I’ve been here at all – not on menus, not in posters, certainly not on my plate.
After dinner we piled into Uncle Kamalaker’s 28 year old car. We were instructed not to lean on the doors, because they wouldn’t hold. His son drove us to our hotel, which had been obtained for me specifically. Because I was American most people assumed I would burst into flames when the Indian heat touched me. Accordingly, they had gotten me a hotel room with Air Conditioning. The bar was set really low for me and I jumped it by a wide margin. I think they all expected me to jump back on a plane the minute I got here. They were really surprised that I ate Indian food (I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t).
The hotel room they got us did have air conditioning. It also had a lot of bugs, but that’s extremely normal for India. After some two days of traveling we finally managed to collapse into bed and fall asleep. Some time in the night the AC died because the power went out, but we’ve found that happens several times daily in India.
-MSC