In India - Total Culture Shock!

Wednesday Nov 9/11

I'm fairly confident what we are experiencing is the definition of culture shock. 

Street view in Amritsar India 

We have officially spent a full day in India. Most of it has been spent recovering from jetlag aka sleeping. So now I am, unfortunately, wide awake in the middle of the night.

We haven’t got out to see much of the country yet. However, our brief experiences in here have been overwhelming. It’s a whole lot of new for the sleep-deprived traveler to digest. Sleep will be essential for coping with what we will encounter in India. I am now feeling fully justified in being anxious about the unknown and concerned that I would be able to acclimate. This is a lot to take in.

In the Delhi International Airport, which is very nice and includes duty-free stores like Channel, there were two little birds inside the building. They looked like prairie chickens running around and through the seats as we were waiting to board our flight. The presence of the birds was odd but what was even more strange was that no one seemed to care, at all.

We are currently in Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple. It is a city about the same population as Edmonton and couldn’t be more different. You can see the tips of the Sikh temple from the roof of our hotel, but I am looking forward to seeing it close up.

My initial impression upon arriving in India was, “this place is a Hell-hole! I want to go home!” When the cabbie parked in front of our hotel he had to avoid soggy trash piles like one avoids letting a passenger out in a puddle after a storm. People had warned me that it was dirty; I had seen pictures but truthfully it’s shocking that people can survive in this kind of filth. And it’s totally normal here. In some places, it looks like they built the roads through a landfill.

There are dogs everywhere. The first pair, we saw when we arrived, were still joined after a little baby-making activity; disturbing. We probably saw over a dozen stray dogs on our cab ride to the hotel.

(Do not read this paragraph if you are sensitive to graphic images or animal violence, like me.)

On a tragic note, there is a dog that appears to have just been attacked or given birth, dying in the alley outside our window as I write this. It has been wailing since we arrived. This has been extremely disturbing to me as there is nothing at all that I can do but check on her and watch her slowly leave this world.

The proprietor of the dingy Grace Hotel, where we are staying, came to barter the price of our room wearing only a blanket. A blanket that while it did cover the rather ample top half of him barely accommodated the more sensitive regions of his lower quarters with a shabby fringe.

Thursday Nov 10/11Now that I have slept, nearly a full day, I am feeling better about being here.

Here are some things that are unexpectedly nice about India:

- our hotels have both had sit-down-western-style flush toilets and hot showers

- it does not smell that bad

- we can quite easily live both of us for under $30/day. (It’s been a bit more expensive than the guidebook projected because apparently it is a Sikh guru’s birthday today)

- transportation is easy to find

- the airports are not difficult to navigate

- people are nicer than I had anticipated

The Golden Temple - Amritsar, India

The Golden Temple

Wow!  This temple complex was so worth our horrible stay in Amritsar. The Golden Temple is a Sikh holy site.  One man told us it was more like the Vatican to the Catholics than Mecca to a Muslim because their pilgrimage is not mandatory for salvation.

All around the temple are marble walls and beautiful big towers. Then in the center of a large pool is the relatively small temple itself. According to the Lonely Planet guidebook it is made of 750 kg of gilded gold. We went early in the morning so that we could see the sunrise reflecting off of it.  The sight is stunning. It is quite an oasis, removed from the insanity of the streets outside its walls. It gives it a sense of holiness, so set apart from the city and everyday life. Volunteers clean the site continually; it sparkles. Your bare feet do not even get dirty.

All are welcome, but you must take off your shoes off and wear a headscarf to enter. It did not occur to me when we read the scarf note in the Linley Planet that meant men too; N had borrowed an orange bandana that looks hilarious on him. It made for some handsome photos.

We knew we could not wear our shoes but being hesitant to leave our Birkenstocks at the door we put them in N’s pack. When we were in line to see the Golden Temple itself, we were hauled out because the zipper on the pack and loosened to reveal our stashed shoes. Bringing shoes into the temple is strictly forbidden. We thought they just were not supposed to be on your feet. They were very patient and forgiving of our mistakes, throughout our visit though and still let us come back in once we’d left the shoes outside.

It made me reminisce about my family trip to the Vatican as a teenager when I was corralled off with the other scantily clad women until Mom found enough sweaters to make me decent enough to enter.

The inside of the Golden Temple was not anything special to us. We were the only white tourists there, for most of the morning. And we seemed to be something of an attraction ourselves. Beyond the normal pointing, staring and laughing that we are getting in the street, in the Temple people bombarded us wanting to take our photo. I did not like this at all and found it very strange.

The temple has a free kitchen where anyone can go to enjoy a meal. One of the aims of this is to unify people from all walks of life. They feed 60-80 000 people a day. Everyone sits on the floor together in long lines with your plate in front of you. We were given both a yellow and a brown spicy soup with routi bread and a cup of hot water.  They gave you as much as you wanted. N and I were shocked at how tasty the meal was considering the masses they serve.

We now have a cell phone so were able to contact our parents at home. It was a little bit challenging to get set up without an Indian address here. Now I don’t feel quite so far away. The Internet here is sporadic, and it makes me feel out of touch.