Save the Jackals!
It’s hard to believe, but I’m leaving India in less than two weeks. This means that all the work I’ve been procrastinating for three months needs to get done in less than one week. Thankfully, I’m not quite as behind as I had thought before.
I am behind on blogging however! Since my last post I’ve visited Bangalore and Ooty. I’ll try to get these posts up as soon as I finish up my real work…
On the way to school, I ride the city bus. The women sit up front. I try to show respect to other people on the bus, because I’m in their culture, and most of the passengers are older than me. I have to walk from the flat to a bus stop, ride the bus, then walk from another bus stop to the college.
On the way home from school, I ride the college bus. It’s full of girls. I’m the only male save for the driver and I sit up front. The other passengers show me respect because I am a “pastor” (meaning I teach a class at the Bible College) despite the fact that they are my age. This makes me uncomfortable. The bus leaves from the college and takes me directly to my flat.
P.S. I’m really pleased with the title of this post. I think Lewis Carroll would have been proud.
So the balcony outside my room affords a good view of the front yard of our neighbors across the way. They have a dog and a guineafowl who are friends–of sorts.
The other day I saw an autorickshaw driver wandering around outside the neighbors’ front gate. Then I noticed something. Is he chasing the guineafowl? Sure enough. The man and the bird were engaged in an ultra low speed chase.
The driver, hands behind his back as he mosied about, demonstrated remarkable nonchalance for someone trying to catch an animal. But what was he going to do with it? It wasn’t his bird. The man opened the front gate, herded the bird in, and closed the gate. He must have accidentally let the poultry loose while dropping off a fare.
What he didn’t know is that the bird can get out on its own. On one occasion I watched it flap a few times, perch on the gate, and jump off, gliding to the ground outside. It regularly struts about the street–once I even saw it get shooed out of the jewelry shop next door.
Since arriving in India, I’ve ridden on/in a number of vehicles: Planes, taxis, cars, scooters, motorcycles, buses, and most recently, an auto rickshaw. Prior to coming to India, I had never ridden a scooter, motorcycle, or auto rickshaw. Though I religiously wear my seatbelt and bicycle helmet in the US, and though helmet laws are on the horizon in India, I have not worn a seatbelt since arriving in India, and have only worn a helmet on one occasion. People just don’t do those things here. Autorickshaws don’t even have doors. And actually I take that back. I’ve worn seatbelts on planes in India, but not in cars.
A really strange happening that transpired sometime last week:
Walking down the street, I saw an odd sight. A white person. He was about my age. I started to wave, then realised, Why the hell should I wave? I don’t know him! And he saw me. We kind of looked at each other, neither of us stopping or saying anything. Then we passed. Replaying the incident in my mind, I can think of all sorts of funny things to put into thought balloons above our heads. What I was actually thinking was, What are you doing here?
So I seem to have come down with a bit of a cold. The family I’m staying with is vegetarian, but Auntie prepared the South Indian equivalent of chicken soup–rasam. Rasam is usually eaten mixed with rice, and contains a number of beneficial herbs. Why do we eat chicken soup when we’re sick anyway? Why not vegetable beef or cream of celery?
We went to the zoo on Sunday. I got to see golden jackals, with which I have a slight obsession. The name of this website, in fact, comes from the binomial name of this creature. I took my film SLR and my camera phone in hopes of getting a good picture to spice up my rather bland layout. Sadly, the bars of the cage were very close together, and so the shots I took are not worth posting. Unless I got something stupendous on the film camera that is. Alas.
The jackals were so cute, though! They were smaller than I expected. Most were lying down, snuggling in groups of three or four, watching the people watching them.
So last night I went up on the roof of our apartment building to look at the stars, armed with this month’s star charts for both northern and southern hemispheres. Got to see some stars I’ve never seen before since they are not visible in the US.
At first Pratik and I climbed up on the huge, concrete, box-shaped water tank for an even better view. But then the parents came up and were nervous about this. So we got down. A few minutes later, my host dad received a call from a friend. He had been looking out his window across the way and seen two people up on the water tank. He wanted to warn us that there may be burglars in the vicinity. Yeah, about that…
Even from just the roof, the view was spectacular. I’m really glad I took Astronomy last summer, and that I paid attention.
So yesterday I received a USB cable in the mail, which means I can finally upload all the stuff I typed during my travels. To make things more confusing, I think I’m going to chop it up into individual posts and date them appropriately. So in other words there are new posts mixed in with the old ones. I’ve also been playing with the video camera on my phone, so maybe I’ll post a video as well.
Here are links to the new old posts for tonight: