still kickin in hyderabad

today anj, ak and i hooped it up in Indira Park, which is a beautiful oasis of green space in the middle of congested hyderabad. we stole a few minutes to ourselves, ak played the flute, and anj and i took turns passing the hula hoop off to each other and dancing. it was so nice and relaxing and hard to leave. we came back to my aunt's house in time to make lunch (the only time we've cooked anything yet), which was udon soup with a homemade broth. it was fun to chop vegetables together as a family, and we actually felt somewhat productive instead of just spoiled and full. later, i had my aunt's amazing chai and escaped the house for a moment to internet. my little cousins should be back by now, so i must return. namaste for now.

Namaste!

First of all, I am in Hyderabad now, staying with my dad’s family before my cousin’s wedding in the end of November. I will be here for another week and a half, and then I will be traveling with my sister through the south or west of India (we are thinking to visit Goa this time around). Vicente is still traveling in Colombia, and we are heading home right before Christmas.

Being home in Chicago was nice, though short, and we were running around trying to take care of a bunch of things before heading off to India (my parents, sister (already in India), and sister’s friend came here, too). One day I went downtown to the Indian Consulate to get my visa and then just walked around the city, heading down to the Art Institute of Chicago and then back up the lake to a coffee shop before picking up the passports. Another day my dad and I cooked an Ecuadorian birthday dinner for my mom, complete with plantain soup and ceviche (it’s similar to sushi, but the fish is cooked by marination in a whole lot of lemon/lime juice, tomato, raw red onion, and a bit of ketchup). Muy rico! Later in the week I unpacked, washed, and repacked my stuff. I hate packing.

The plane to India stopped in Frankfurt ( 6 am), but there was not enough time to leave the airport, so I just paced up and down the terminal, trying to get a tiny bit of exercise before sitting for another 8 hours. I arrived at 1:30 in the morning, and was greeted by my auntie, her daughter, and her daughter’s husband. In India, greeting people at the airport is a much more important custom, so it would have been out of the question for me to take a taxi to their house or any other such arrangement. When my parents and cousin came 2 days later (it was my parents’ first time in over 25 years), we had over 15 people at the airport to greet them. At 1:30 in the morning!! Craziness.

Hyderabad is a bustling, rapidly developing, over-stimulating city, and something as simple as crossing the street can be a real adventure (generally you wait a while, can cross halfway, dodge a few cars, cross a bit more, and then run quickly when there’s a slight gap in traffic). The city has a really interesting history, which I am still trying to piece together. It in Andhra Pradesh, in the south, but has an amost 50-50 ratio of Hindus-Muslims. The old part of the city, which houses the famous Charminar (char=4 minar= minarets, see pic below) landmark, is largely Muslim and a lot more historical. Around the site is a colorful and crazy bangle bazaar, which we visited again to pick up some bangles for the wedding. My mom was immediately accosted by a million people asking for money (not a good time to be a tall woman), and had a hard time trying to fend them off.



The newer part, where my family lives, is chock full of tall glass buildings, malls, businesses, auto rickshaws (small yellow “cabs”), concrete, construction, the occasional water buffalo, flower stands, and way too many people trying to get around. Before my parents came, Akira and Anjuli and I did a few things on our own, making it to a Yoga and Ayurvedic Health Conference near the lake, buying tubing for more hula hoops, and walking around a bit in the border between new and old city. There we went past a fruit market where we discovered custard apples, a green artichoke-like fruit that is so sweet and delicious. The health conference was interesting, especially a display for the digital traditional knowledge library being made about traditional ayurvedic knowledge (funded by the Indian government and science foundations) in order to hopefully stem biopiracy in the face of recent attempts to patent such integral products as tumeric and basmati rice. Also, the library would be available to practitioners and patients via the internet. It is not complete, but there is supposedly a working model that I have yet to check out. There are also many interesting steps being taken by the Indian government to regulate what would be called “alternative medicine” in the US. Practitioner registration, regulated coursework, and more standardization of herbal medicine are being legislated by the government. It will be interesting to see how this works.

Yesterday, my parents, sister (Anj), her friend (Ak), and my cousins and I went to a party at the bride’s house. Her family is so sweet and laid back, which is nice to see. It is easy to be stressed with all of the wedding preparations (they have been preparing for over 2 months straight) but everyone was relatively calm last night. We are trying to maintain a balance between all of the family events and having a tiny bit of free time for ourselves (and not exploding from all the food). This is more difficult than it seems, both in terms of the food and the free time. Hopefully, there will be pics soon…

belatedupdated

whew, so it’s been a while. First things first, I am safe and back in Chicago, with my family, which is pretty wild but hasn’t really hit me yet. I had a flight out of bogota today, and got in at about 11pm. The last week and a half has been incredible. After popayan, we took a day journey to tierradentro, one of the important archaeological sites and just generally hermoso.

The bus ride was bumpy and gorgeous, passing through forests and mountains and even some snowy peaks and such. When we got to tierradentro, the climate was more like the selva, with all kinds of beautiful flowers and butterflies. We found a hotel for the night and were immediately adopted by a teenager who lived there, who says he is a tour guide (and certainly proved a good one!) and led us everywhere around that day. He gave us a guided tour of the museum, the many ancient tombs, and the carved sculptures that the region is known for, which were really interesting (though equally impressive was the surrounding countryside at the tops of the mountains/hills we climbed to see these). We were really happy to have such a great guide and tried to chip in by buying him lunch and dinner.
The next day we sprinted to Cali, a warm city near Colombia’s west coast, which is known as a center of salsa dancing and beautiful women. Indeed, it contained both. It also had much friendlier people than we expected for a large city, and it felt like a place where you could just chill out for a while (not as stuffy as popayan) and soak in the culture. We tried our hand at salsa the last night, going to a club called London Bar which had live salsa bands on Thursday nights. It was unbelievable music, and made me need to dance despite the intimidation factor of not really knowing how to salsa in a salsa bar in the capital city of salsa. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.


We broke up our time in Cali with a trip to San Cipriano, a small black jungle village closer to the west coast of Colombia. It was truly a magical place, and is frequented by many Colombian and some international tourists for its scenic location and eccentricities (such as the motorbike-powered railroad through the jungle, where locals transport you on a small wooden platform over the tracks from where the bus lets off to San Cipriano, passing all kinds of wildlife and a large winding river). One of the highlights of the trip was floating down the crystal (and I mean the clearest water I’ve ever seen in my life) clear river bounded on each side by immense jungle growth and river rocks (even bumping over some rapids and passing some very mini-waterfalls). Another highlight was going for a 3 hour jungle trek on a trail that included wading through a few pristine rivers and ended in about an hour of variable mud (you would be going along fine and then all of a sudden your chaco would sink deep into the earth, and you would be up to your shins or so in jungle mud) trails. we heard a lot more birds than we saw, but there were gorgeous mammoth butterflies all over the place (as well as huge beetles and spiders). Our accommodations were the most rustic of the trip, as the ceiling and walls did not meet, there was barely a mattress on the beds, and you could hear everything happening in the kitchen at 6 am every day. de verdad, the family whom we were staying with really needed the money from the hotel, as the mom was trying to feed 10 children, from age 1 to age 18. the kids looked like they could all use a few more clothes and baths, and we were happy to have a few little trinkets to give them on the way out.

After cali we headed out to Salento, in the beautiful cafetal region of Colombia (where they grow the coffee that is so famous). We stayed in an idyllic hostel in the mountains called plantation house, run by a British and Colombian couple who were super friendly and chill. We went on another tour of an organic coffee finca, this time with a botanical flair (they had planted a path full of a million different types of the same flower species, which was really cool to see). Another fun part was walking on the coffee beans, which we did in the greenhouse where they were being dried- I loved the sound of the beans crunching under my feet. Afterward we had an adventure hiking back to the town, even helping two older ladies get back to their family along the way (they were lost and we kind of knew the way). After the hike Vicente and I celebrated with the specialty of the town- truncha y patacones (trout on fried plantain). It was unbelievably tasty and rich.

Since we were trying to make it to Bogota for Haloween, we took an express night bus from Armenia. It was definitely an adventure, and at that point we were traveling with two other tourists from the hostel. The 7 hour bus ride was only 5.5 hours, and we were stopped around 4.5 hours by a mandators ejercito checkpoint (you get out of the bus and a bunch of army guys with machine guns frisk you and search the bus for contraband). The sight of so many army officials along the highway dressed in camouflage and carrying machine guns was at first a bit scary, but after a bit you realize that its so much safer to travel because of the ejercito presence. (there are ejercito (government army), paramilitarios (private defense), y guerrillas (guerilla fighters) in Colombia, all of whom are likely to be wearing camouflage and carrying extremely large weapons, though for very different reasons)

Though we had already missed the Haloween festivities (all the parties were on Saturday), we got so little kids roaming the streets of bogota dressed as lions and snow white and fairies an so on. We also went to a fabulous museum that housed the private collection of a famous artist named Boteo (he works a lot with volume, so his figures often appear to be massive, gordos, or larger than life). The next day we visited the orphanage where Vicente had been adopted from as a baby and met the woman who runs the facility. She had been the one to give him away and was excited to hear about his life back in the states and how great his family was. There was next to nothing in the folder she had on his adoption related to his biological mother, so we were not able to track her down in the short time that I was there. He may have more luck this week, though, if he decides to try calling names in the phonebook or a tv show that deals with this kind of search. We shall see!


Anyways, we caught the museo de oro later that day, probably Colombia’s most famous museum, where thousands of gold objects from the various indigenous cultures of Colombia are artistically displayed. Just as interesting as the museums was simply walking the city streets, stopping in the plazas, and eating the wild fruit salads (papaya, mango, pineapple, mandarina, banana, apple, etc. topped with fresh cheese and some type of cream) and arepas rellenas (corn patties stuffed with cheese or whatever else you want). A bustling market in front of the museum kept me busy buying souvenirs my last day, and it was difficult enough to imagine leaving without trying to remember everyone for which I needed to get something! In any case, Vicente and I enjoyed a nice last dinner together for a while at an Israeli restaurant (we actually paid 3 bucks each) and said our goodbyes for the next few months. I am jealous that he gets to keep traveling in Colombia, which I barely saw the half of, and he is jealous that I am going to get to travel and see my cousin’s wedding in India (I’m leaving next week!).

For now, I have been home for a few hours. I will be home less than a week, will unpack and repack and then restart these crazy adventures, but on a different continent this time. Stay tuned…