The Whole Nine Yards

Hm. I have been here a full month, and haven't yet put up a blog post. I figured that someone should keep up this blog now that Mitch is gone and the trip continues, though...

A brief overview of MY impressions of the last four weeks:

Week 1: India is hot. And humid. And, when presented with the option of playing badminton at noon in a non-air-conditioned gym in such weather, one should NOT leap at that opportunity. One should not even indulge in a small, half-hearted, lurching hop. Unless one is fond of heat exhaustion.

Week 2: Our trip through Nagapattinum and Cuddalore was fantastic, involving everything from discussing US-India politics with the director of Barathi Women's Development Center over lunch, to spending a full day on motorcycles, driving over 100 km to three different rural villages, learning how to make salt from seawater, and seeing Rama's footprints. We came back to Chennai Friday night and met with two more (spectacular and inspiring!) organizations which have been (and will hopefully continue to be) goldmines of contacts and info.

Week 3: We went to two Indian weddings, which were both incredible... interesting cultural side note: in South India, weddings only take place while the moon is waxing and the sun is rising, so that means that all weddings get crammed into the mornings of two weeks per month. One wedding was for Roshni's classmate, and one of the weddings was for (wait for it) Teju's mother's cousin's husband's business partner's wife's sister's daughter. Further evidence that India may, in fact, be just one huge extended family. Everyone there welcomed us as though we were their long-lost niece and nephews, explaining all of the little ceremonial quirks to Mitch and me, inviting us to have tea with them... PS Apparently the phrase "the whole nine yards" came from a traditional Indian garment called... a sari! Full saris actually involve nine yards of fabric, which, after wearing one to an Indian wedding, I can now vouch for personally.

Aaand... we spent last week in Delhi. For the record: If you, like me, have ever wondered, in a small, skeptical corner of your mind, whether the Taj Mahal is really worth all that hype, the answer is YES. Not only is it just Beautiful (with a capital B and that rhymes with E and that stands for Enchantingly So...) but it was built so deliberately! There's perfect symmetry over the entire 5-acre plot or however big it is, and the domes are mathematically perfect, and the minarets lean outward just enough to not destroy the center in event of an earthquake, and there are optical illusions in the stonework (PS, we got to visit the workshop of the guys whose great-great-400-years-and-fourteen- generations-ago-great grandfathers did the original stonework... they're not only still doing that stone inlay work, they're still using the same mortar recipe!) and the garden is laid out according to some Quoranic passage, and... AND!!! And the Red Fort was amazing, and we got to see this abandoned city, and we played an epic 2.5-hour Uno game on the 36-hour train ride... in short, it was wonderful, and I'll do more justice to it some other time (like when it's not 1 AM).

Anyway. That Delhi train ride catapulted us into the 22nd century with the cow count (it's now at 2126 or something) and me thinking of it catapulted me into bed, so good night!