Hyderabad

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The last week I have been wandering east toward Visakh. I figured out how to use the tourist quota and left Aurangabad at 3:30AM on a sleeper train toward Hyderabad. The train station was wall to wall sleeping people who were waiting for their respective early morning trains. It was a sea of humanity in tons of colors and the sounds of snoring and coughing with mounds of bodies covered in colorful blankets and patrolled by groups of wandering dogs meandering in and out of the sleeping lumps. The Sleeper Car where I had my ticket was a rail car jammed with as many benches for sleeping as it could hold. They sat three high and were approximately 24 inches wide, with little more padding than a generic bench. I finally managed a few hours of sleep before the constant movement of people and start and stop of the train stole whatever chance of slumber I had. We put the middle bed down and it formed a bench where 3-4 people could sit across comfortably. The sleeper car was not nearly as crowded as the second sitting had been on my ride to Aurangabad. The car was frequented by a steady stream of men and women selling peanuts and tea, the occasional beggar and ancient "holy men" singing songs and hitting hand drums in an attempt to earn a few rupees. At one point as I drifted to sleep while sitting up I felt a hand on my shoulder shaking me. When I woke up an austere woman with outrageous facial jewelry put out her hand. "Ten Rupees" she commanded. Bewildered I replied "No" and shrugged my shoulders. Her response was to clap her hands very hard a few inches in front of my face and storm off. This was extremely surprising and jolted me from my groggy exhaustion with a squeal and I nearly jumped out of my seat. The other people sharing the bench all burst into uncontrollable laughter. "What the hell was that about?" I asked. "She is a gay" the woman next to me replied. "A What?" "A gay, don't they have the gays in your country?" I wasn't really sure what they were trying to say, but I think the woman might have been an Indian version of a gypsy.

Hyderabad is dirty, crowded, and smells like poop. I have read that this is one of the cities at the center of the Indian economic miracle, but it still has a long way to go. My first few days here were as overwhelming as at any point since those first few nights in Cairo. I paid for 5 nights at a small hotel near the Secunderabad train station, it seemed clean enough at first though it rarely has hot water and I discovered the first night is infested with cockroaches and bed bugs. Fortunately my sleeping bag zips completely closed so I have been relatively bite free though I wake up about ten times per night with the sensation of something crawling on me. It doesn't really matter since neither of those things spread disease and if you are going to let this stuff bother you then you should probably just save yourself the headache and not come to India. Additionally the walls are paper thin and I have had the unfortunate luck of sleeping in a room next to two Chinese (I think) men who have a tendency to leave the TV on very loud and spend a ridiculous amount of time spitting in an extremely obnoxious manner that I find utterly disgusting. Additionally one of them was very sick and I spent several hours listening to him violently emptying himself. This has not been an environment conducive to peace of mind!

I spent two full days wandering through downtown. The first day I paid for a Tuc-Tuc driver to drive me around the Hussain Sagar lake- a huge lake in the middle of the city. This was probably a mistake. I think my driver either had a death wish or was on drugs. It was among the scariest things I have ever done, worse than any cab ride in Egypt. I found myself repeating "don't be afraid, don't be afraid" over and over in my mind and was pretty close to freaking out in the back seat. i couldn't figure out why he didn't want to just follow the Tuc Tuc in front of him but instead insisted on swerving repeatedly into oncoming traffic to pass cars, made no attempt to even look at intersections, and would wait until the last second before swerving to avoid pedestrians. I am consistently shocked that anyone here makes it to adulthood, you would think the average life expectancy would be only a few years before they all die in car accidents. There are thousands of motorcycles, many fitting three people, often with a baby perched on the steering wheel. I have yet to see a helmet. There are no followed traffic laws that I can discern and the roads are shared by a sea of pedestrians and animals. I finally decided my life was worth more than this and asked to get out.

Emotionally exhausted but with a newfound appreciation for life I walked into a very nice restaurant called the Waterfront. Inside I was treated to Budweiser, which to my surprise is considered a domestic beer bottled right here in India. The bar tender was excited that I was from America. He had been taking classes on the American dialect and wanted to work at one of the call centers. He told me that I had a very thick American accent, and that "you speak English poorly." This was the first time anyone had ever said this to me, and I found it interesting since I consider myself to have a pretty solid mastery of the language and don't think I speak with any accent at all. He explained to me how my 't' sound like 'd' (water pronounced wad'r) and my 'd' sounds like 'j' (educate pronounced ejucate) that all my words ran together and I was very inarticulate. In an attempt to salvage the conversation he asked me what I had studied in school, to which I sheepishly replied "four years studying English." He gave me a sad look of pity that made my feeling of failing at life complete. My ego in tatters I returned to my bug infested shithole of a room.

I figured out basically how the bus system works and this has provided a cheap way to get around the city without an undue risk of death. I went down to the Charminar area which is the older part of the city and which was largely Islamic. THe colorful Hindu dresses gave way to more and more black Muslim hijabs and many of the men were wearing traditional Islamic caps. The crush of people was unreal. I wandered for hours through an absolute wall to wall mass of people. Open air fruit and vegetable markets, cows and chickens wandering in the road, trash everywhere, men relieving themselves in plain site, it was disgusting. Everywhere were people handing out free drinks of various types of lemonade and juice. The juice was in these large barrels that the men would dip their cups into. It seemed extremely unsanitary. Additionally they were handing out free distilled water in small plastic bags. I'm not sure how much people actually drank the water, most of the kids I saw instead used it to play "squirt the foreigner"---After an hour downtown I had been sprayed unmercifully by an untold number of children. Unfortunately I couldn't catch any of them or even tell who had squirted me and who was just laughing. I am not sure I have reached the level of enlightenment where I am okay beating another person's child even if I had caught any of them.

I also managed to wander into some sort of religious rally. There was a procession of men dressed in black riding on camels, many wearing green head bandanas and yelling into loudspeakers. I suspect that this was some sort of Islamic rally since green head bandanas are frequently worn by Islamic groups, at least in the middle east. Things started getting really weird when men began walking from an area out of sight covered in blood. I noticed many were also carrying large ceremonial knives. I wasn't really sure what this was about, I didn't get the impression that there was any violence or a riot, and the men walking away covered in blood didn't look overly agitated. I would later google search this and my best guess is that I had wandered onto a Muharram procession which marks the beginning of the Islamic Calender and is often celebrated with bouts of self flagellation in mourning of the battle of Karbala. Here is a website about it: http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/india/muharram Unfortunately while I got some decent photos of the procession I lacked the testicular fortitude to get pictures of the men covered in blood. I was sort of worried about naively wandering into a bad situation, though the only person who found my presence there at all remarkable or noteworthy was me, other people could not have cared less.

Also I saw the new Harry Potter movie, it was pretty good...

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Comments

[Uncle Rick]

Awesome
The end-of-the-semester rush allowed me to only glance at your blog until now. All I can say now that I have read through it carefully is WOW! You are getting an amazing education and expanding your world view far beyond anything I could possibly relate to. Your writing is descriptive, thought-provoking, funny, educational, and entertaining. The pictures are fantastic. I'll probably relate some of your descriptions of the pollution and poverty in my Environmental Science classes. I'm anxious to learn more about the places you have visited and to look them up on a map. We are all very happy for you. It sounds like you are having the experience you had hoped for. I hope your connections with Liana work out. As the Christmas holiday is upon us, know that we are all thinking of you and miss you. But, mostly we are just happy for you and we will look forward to seeing you in the Spring. I look forward to your next entry. Stay safe and healthy!! Uncle Rick, Natalie, Colin and Rhys

[Ravs]

Brilliant!! Went through all of your posts on Egypt. The "gay" incident really had me in peels of laughter. They are eunuchs or castrated men. :) They can be a little annoying at times. Inescapable in India.