After four weeks!!!

After four weeks I thought I should write at least a bit for our English friends.
At the time we are in the south of India enjoying the beauty of the Western Ghats. Monsoon is still going on but to experience some rain etc. you need to go to the mountains. At the coast it is very hot an humidity is high so that we are enjoying the cooler weather up here.

But India is not only the weather of course! When we first arrived, we experienced our very first cultural shock in our life. India is just so different to the "western world". Streets are full of people and cars and waste and dust ... All is very noisy and even in our hotel rooms we sometimes can not find silence..

The culture is different as well, of course! Males are doing the business while women keep the house and are working on fields as well. But the males are almost all the time the once who talk to you (females talk to women only). If a male asked something ,he is just asking me (Konni), Suse is mostly not asked or listen to as well. It takes time to get used to that. But in the whole time we are here nobody was unfriendly to us! If we asked in the bus were to get out everybody wanted to help us and after a while the whole bus knew where we wanted to get off! It is sometimes really funny when the whole bus looks at you pointing to the door to tell you to get off. But this interest in us is sometimes walking on our nerves as well. As soon as you have a look in the guidebook at the bus or train or rickshaw stand people are crowding around us asking where we want to go and if we want to have a taxi and so on. There are simply to many people around. In most cases they probably just want to help!
A bit a problem is that the Indian people do not say if they do not know the answer to the question you just asked. Then they are telling just anything and it must not be true! That upsets us quite a lot especially if it is the time for the bus or a platform we are asking for.

The men here are funny too. You can see lots of men "couples" walking through the streets hand in hand or holding in their arms each other like in Europe a male/female couple! Once a group of Indians asked to take a photograph with me and I said yes! In this moment my right hand was grabbed by the man to hold it for the photo! I laughed all the time, probably the best smiling picture taken of me ever. But that is not all about men! They paint their finger nails !!! In really "nice" colors like violet or pink etc. To that they where clothes like skirts because of the weather I guess. All together it really looks funny and strange!!!

There I remember what else I wanted to write about the relationship of male and female. In a lot of restaurants there are separate "family rooms". Women or couples have to go there because the woman is not allowed to sit in the usual room! Women are not really respected here! But Suse likes them very much. They smile all the time when you see them and smile as well. The smile of the Indian women is often very warm and seems to be meant honest. It is a shame that they are so undertaken by the men here.

Some adventures we both had as well. One night for instance we had to sleep on the floor of a train. That was just because there was a demonstration in Bangalore (the destination) on the next day. Hundreds of people wanted to go there and blocked the 2nd class sleeper, which we were booked in. It was impossible to enter the second class so we went to the first class and got the place on the floor. On the next morning when we reached Bangalore we saw that several hundreds of people were sitting on the roof of the train. These people risked their lives for a demonstration!!! We could not really believe that!!!
Another adventure with transportation was our ride from Hyderabad to Hospet. We took an overnight bus of the state transportation. It actually looked quite good compared to all the local buses, but the journey it self was terrible. The streets were so narrow that the bus alone would have fit on it. But at some time cars or busses or lorries came the other way and we had to make a bit space. The buss almost fell to the left side and we always thought it will turn over itself. So this night was sleepless at all. Once the bus stopped and almost all people went out to have some dinner. But nobody said anything! That was a bit strange.

As we arrived at the Hospet bus station (it was at 4:30 am) lots of people were laying on the ground under a roof. There were old as well as little kids just sleeping next to their belongings. In between some dogs were strolling around having a look at the sleeping persons. We had to wait one hour only till our bus to Hampi left. During this time the bus station woke up. Children were crying, men went to get their morning tea and women packed the sleeping clothes away. Within some more as half an hour the whole mass of people got up and sorted. It seemed that those people did not need much for their lives to be happy.
A few days later I took a bike and discovered the surrounding area while Suse was curing herself in bed. On my way I met some field workers and had a talk with them. They told me that the income of a female field worker is around 20 Rupees a day which is less than 50 US cent!!! ( 1 US$ = 46 Rupees at the time)
By the way Hampi is nice little village in the federal State of Karnataka India. It is very interesting for tourist even out of India because of around 2000 temples. One of it is still in use, the Virupaksha temple. For Hindu-people this place is a real holy sight.

On our way to the south we passed Madurai where hundreds of tailors do their business. We discovered that every bigger town has special products which it is selling. Such as Hyderabad is almost only selling furniture and Madurai has got more tailors than other shops and Kollam at the coast of the Arabian Sea has lots of jewelries. Kollam was the most southern point we went to. It is market town and starting point to so called backwater cruises.

In Kollam we went to the vegetable market to buy some carrots as an exercise for our teeth; the food here is mostly so soft that we will loose all our teeth if we do not exercise it. On the market we saw some strange fruits and we asked what it was. Sadly the marked men did not speak as good English as we thought. But they were really funny and took it easy. The language is really a problem sometimes. Some Indians do speak very well English but most of them just speak the local slang. Sure we could have learnt some Hindu! But the problem then would be that Tamil or Malem is not the same language as Hindu and just locally spoken. But at this market it did not matter at all. The market men and we had a bit fun while taking some pictures.

The day after that we went by boat to Allapey via the backwaters. Backwaters are some lake kind waters as well as canals divided only by a small strip of land or just beach from the sea.
That was just so lovely! The water is sometimes really not deep so that the fisher men just went to these places and stood in the middle of a lake for fishing of collecting mussels. Some had so called Chinese fishing nets. A construction of a bamboo trunks formed to a square on which the net was fixed. It was put into water for some minutes only and lifted up again. To lift it up at least four people are necessary. I once pulled one up in Kochi where five other men pulled with and it was still quite hard to do. When these people do that the whole day it is really a hard job!!!

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