Delhi Belly Strikes – Even CPH Students Are Not Immune

Meagan and I are currently spending the second evening in a row alone in our hotel room; resting, recovering, timing out when to take various doses of medication, trying to stay hydrated—and taking turns in the bathroom. We truly thought we had managed to avoid sickness almost completely on this trip… until yesterday morning. Meagan started feeling sick first, and I stayed in our room with her not wanting to leave her alone. At first I was actually a little relieved to have a mini break in our non-stop schedule since arriving in India. But about 4-6 hours after she presented with her initial symptoms, they started hitting me. Luckily, our professors and all the other students were very supportive and helpful to us last night and we did sleep soundly through the night, even getting up this morning, going over to IRRAD with the group, and thinking we were on the mend. Unfortunately, that was not the case, because after about 20 minutes at IRRAD nausea had overtaken me again, and I had to run to the restroom. Our professors called a car to drive us back to the hotel where we have been resting ever since. After sleeping all day, and my antibiotics beginning to finally kick in, I am feeling MUCH better right now. Delhi belly, a more polite and very commonly used expression among travelers to India, struck nearly everyone in our group at some point on this trip. Yesterday, we were among the 4 total students in our group who were sick.

Well, since I wrote about such unpleasant subject matter, I thought it was best I leave you with some beautiful pictures from our last weekend trip to Jaipur and Agra. The palace that is in the middle of the lake, and looks like its floating, is the lake palace in Jaipur. It was originally built by a king for fishing and bird watching, and currently is under renovation to be an expensive hotel and resort. The (semi) group photo was at the City Palace in Jaipur, near by the Observatory, where the world’s largest sundial is located (third photo).

The last two are more photos of the Taj Mahal, which was a tomb (not a palace as commonly thought) built by a Mughal emporer king for his third (and favorite) wife when she died during childbirth. The close up photo shows some of the semi-precious stone design inlayed in the weather proof marble of which the Taj is built. The Taj is both magnificent but eerie, because the king killed many of the 20,000 workers he hired to construct the tomb upon its completion—so that no one could ever build an exact replicate.

The Taj Mahal - No Words Needed

Monkeys, Bindis, and Hindu Gods

We traveled to Haridwar, which is located at the foothills of the Himalaya mountains and along the Ganges river, in northern India last week. We spent most of the day being shown various canals, dams, and hydrologic structures that were built along the tributary rivers leading to the Ganges, or the Ganga, as it is called here.

After seeing more canals and bridges in one day than I thought was possible, we took a break from our water studies to drive up a mountain and visit a Hindu temple. We were carried up to the top of the mountain by cable car, from which we could see hundreds of monkeys throughout the trees we were passing over. Although we were all excited to finally be seeing so many monkeys, we were all a little uneasy because the signs everywhere saying “Beware of Monkeys.” We were continually instructed not to make eye contact, carry any food with us, or take any direct pictures of them because that might instigate an incident—particularly purse and/or camera thievery. I did see a small “gang” of three or four monkeys surround a young mother and her two kids, and steal the street food snack one of the children had been eating. I also saw a monkey go up to a woman and grab her shiny sequined scarf and try to pull it off of her, but this monkey was beaten away by the woman’s husband and his quick reflex to grab a stick. As a result, I don’t have many good photos of them because I was trying so hard to not initiate any attention or trouble from them!

To enter this mountain top temple, you must show respect by removing your shoes (which at first really bothered me, but I have since gotten over, as I visit more and more places in India where this is required). After you walk through the temple and are handed some puffed rice that you can leave as an offering to one of the god statues, there are several shrines where you can enter to be “blessed.” This consists of entering into a small room where a holy man has his shrine/alter, telling him your name, him tying a ribbon around your wrist, chanting a blessing (that includes your name), patting you on the back three times with a stick, and dipping his finger in bright red dye which he uses to mark a little red dot in between your eyebrows—also known as a bindi.

There are several major Hindi gods which are represented by these holy men and their alters, and you choose from which god you want your blessing depending on what you need in your life that day. (Or, you can go get a blessing from each of them—as long as you pay the tiny blessing “donation” at each alter, which some of the boys in our group definitely did.) Meagan and I chose to visit the Monkey god, Hanuman, because we were hoping his blessing would provide us with protection from his live counterparts whom were just outside the temple doors. (So far, his blessing has worked wonderfully…) This god is known for loyalty, selfless service, and learning—which we found quite appropriate too.

I’ve included a picture of a huge statue of another Hindu god, Shiva, who is known for his dualist nature as a destroyer and benefactor. We saw the statue of this god from a top a huge bridge we were visiting over the Ganga, and then later we could see the same enormous statue from the back, when we were in Haridwar.

In the evening after visiting the temple, we arrived to the town center of Haridwar. We witnessed a daily ceremony where leaf and flower lanterns are lit and released to float down the Ganga at sunset. Despite being a week night, and not a “warm” time of year (still extremely mild to our group of Iowans), the streets were packed with people waiting to witness the ceremony. It was difficult to see all the lanterns actually being released in the river because of how many people were there, but it was a pretty magical experience nonetheless. That night we had our first taste of haggling in the market place, and many of the girls in our class fell in love with the thrill of negotiating a great deal.

No Wi-Fi, No Water, No Worries…

We recently were at IIT (India Institute of Technology) Roorkee in northern India for several days. This is the most prestigious engineering school in India, with branches in several different cities throughout the country, and is one of the best engineering institutions in the world. When you first enter through the gates of the IIT community, the difference from the rest of Roorkee is night and day. There is no trash on the streets, no beggars, no pigs, no street carts, no rickshaws. There are beautiful manicured and maintained gardens, vegetation, and palm trees. The campus is not only closed to the outside world, but it is a town within itself; containing shops, housing for faculty of all levels, all students, and pretty much anything else you might need as a student, professor, researcher or staff member of IIT.

However, to us there were several startling intrinsic discrepancies. Initially, Meagan and I were slightly distressed because the room we were assigned had ants scurrying along the floor everywhere, and thus had to instate a strict shoes ON policy while in our room. Next, when we went to the front desk to ask for another water bottle (as there was only one in the room, and we are definitely not allowed to drink anything except bottled water on this trip) we were told simply “No.” And, not wanting to wake up our professor, were forced to retire back to our rooms dreading the ensuing thirst that would hit us in the middle of the night. (Keep in mind we are public health students and drink a lot of water every day and also had been traveling by car on Indian roads getting car sick for the last 7 hours, so we really felt we needed a water bottle each!) Then, when we got back to the room and pulled out our laptops and realized there was no Wi-Fi, and were denied access to internet cables—we felt almost devastated.

We ended up going to dinner at the main cafeteria and were joined by almost 50 of IIT’s students at one point. I spoke with two students from Africa, one from Ethiopia focusing on mathematics and one from Zambia studying civil engineering. They told me how much they missed their food from home, how great it was to study at IIT academically, how difficult it is to understand some of the Indian teacher’s English, and how much they’d like to someday travel to Las Vegas, Nevada—among other things. Some of the other people in our group spoke with some of the girl students at IIT that night, and learned that there was a strict 10 p.m. curfew for the girls, absolutely no drinking allowed, no PDA’s (even hand holding) with their boyfriends in public, and that it wasn’t safe for them to leave the IIT compound after dark.

When Meagan and I returned to our room that evening we felt humbled from our conversations with the IIT students, and reflective on our whole experience in India thus far. As we laid down on our beds that were literally as hard as laying on a piece of plywood—one of us asked the other whether the kids we’d met in the Mewat villages earlier that week, would ever lay in a bed as comfortable as we were in right then. We realized that sharing our one water bottle that night might be more fresh water than many of those children might get for several days at a time, and that internet was a luxury that those children might never even experience once. Being in India has not only completely changed my world view, but it’s provided me with a perspective that I don’t think is possible to obtain without experiencing this incredible country first hand. The next morning, we were awoken by our doorbell and a Roorkee IIT staff member who was going door to door bringing delicious fresh chai to each room on the compound.

The pictures I’ve included are mostly of hydrologic models that we were shown during our tour of the Roorkee campus. I wish I could explain each one in detail, but that’s something I’d need to leave up to all the hydrology students in our group—who were in heaven getting to see these structures.