To Allahabad

I follow NPR on Facebook, and a story about a 51 yea old Danish woman who was gang raped in New Delhi popped up on my feed this afternoon. The incident took place very close to wear I was staying in Delhi (indeed, the photo used in the story was quite familiar) and, sadly, it wasn’t difficult for me to picture that happening to a woman traveling alone.

Amid the disturbing thoughts of that area of Delhi, I realized that I hadn’t written more or posted more of my India pictures for my small and faithful group of American followers to see. And, given the gray and misty weather here, thoughts of brighter (if sometimes hazy) skies in India from last month sound quite nice. So, onward with some thoughts from my travels.

There is a lot of demand for train tickets – especially tickets for compartments with under six people – in India, and there were no direct trains from Agra to Allahabad, my next destination, available. However, I was able to purchase a ticket from Tundla, which is 30 miles from Agra, to Allahabad, though the train didn’t leave until 11:30pm. This left me with a lot of time to kill on the day of my departure, and with the challenge of getting to a train station 30 miles outside of town at night.

The man who had driven me to the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort told me that he could arrange for a cab to take me to Tundla. I agreed and settled on a price that seemed reasonable for Amsterdam standards, but was probably double what a local would have paid.

I felt a lingering nervousness about that cab ride the entire day. My mind occasionally drifted toward thoughts of how I really had no idea where I was going and who the cab driver scheduled to pick me up was. I didn’t have a cell phone, and no one really knew where I was going or when I’d arrive there. I was traveling at night. The thoughts fluttered across my consciousness throughout the day, and I tried to beat them down with reassurances that the locals would have very little to gain and much to lose through harming me, and...well, that was about it.

I met the driver at his cab on the dusty, loud main road immediately outside of my hotel room at 8:00pm. There was another man in the front passenger seat. The driver told me that this was his brother, who would actually be driving me to Tundla. This subtly raised my hackles, but I went with the flow and got in the front seat as the original driver got out of the car and his brother got behind the wheel.

I talked with the driver about his wife, his kids, Indian cooking, and taxi driving during the drive to Tundla. The doubts in my mind dissipated while talking with the man - he registered as genuine, and interested only in getting me to my destination. And he did after only 45 minutes, which put me at the Tundla rail station around 9:00pm - two and a half hours before my train was scheduled to depart.

When I got out of the cab, young men swarmed around me offering their assistance as porters at the train station. I turned them all down as politely as I could, though I felt some ambivalence in doing so. The little bit of income would have helped someone out quite a bit, but I didn't feel up for the extra hassle of having to negotiate and guard against a scam, and, really, I didn't require any help in carrying my laptop and travelers backpack.   

The Tundla rail station did not match my image of a train station, which generally has been formed by experiences in Western European and Japan. The building that housed the ticket counter was filled with people (really, there was no space on chairs or on the ground to sit) who were waiting for the long delayed trains. The single board with train times noted that many departures had been delayed up to eight hours. Everyone from children to elderly women did the best they could with the situation, huddling on the concrete floor under blankets, trying to rest. I was the only non-Indian there, and I drew eyes from whomever I passed.

Since the inside of the building was packed, I waited outside. I placed my backpack on the ground next to a wall, and I sat on it, leaning against the wall behind me. I had packed an English language Indian newspaper from the hotel, and I read it for the second, third, and forth time as the time passed. The air outside was hazy and smelled like burning cooking oil. Several of the men outside spit something dark and thick on the ground - something similar to chewing tobacco. Rats ran through the shadows across the sidewalk, and insects scurried along the pavement.

The time went by surprisingly fast and, mercifully, my train was not delayed. The situation had been interesting - I imagine I would have described it differently had it lasted another six hours.

And, after the two hour wait, and my only interactions being more offers from "porters," I was approached by two boys as I waited for the train on the platform. They were both around 16, and they ran toward me from a crowded train that was stopping at the platform for two or three minutes before continuing. One of them asked me, cautiously, "My friend wants to know how he can learn English better." I smiled, genuinely, at them and thought for a minute before saying "Go to YouTube.com and search for English lessons." They didn't look all that satisfied with the answer, but they thanked me and sprinted back to their train, which was already in motion for departure.

And then, the next six hours were in a cramped sleeping compartment (though, really, there was no sleeping involved for me) before I arrived in Allahabad, bright and early at 5:30am.  

Agra

After a 3.5 hour train ride from Delhi in which I shared a car with three young Indian men (somewhere between 18 and 24, I’d guess) – one of whom was quite interested in chatting with me about why I was in India, while the other two shot me glances out of the corners of their eyes – I got off at Agra’s main train station and was greeted by a mass of individuals eager to “help” me, just as my the guide book and Wikitravel page had predicted. It’s a strange situation, to be repeatedly approached by strangers and have to choose between firmly telling them to leave you alone and then ignoring them (and maybe adding a little bit of a scowl, as I do) versus losing time and money through myriad scams. I choose the former, and it raises some feelings of guilt to go along with the frustration engendered by the scammers themselves.

I’d arranged for a driver to pick me up at the train station, as I’d done at the Delhi airport. After wading through the throng of individuals asking to take me to my hotel – or a hotel of their recommendation, if I didn’t yet have one – I spotted the sign with my name on it and got in the car. Then came my introduction to Indian driving, which a later driver told me requires three things: A good horn, good brakes, and good luck. Even when a street has two lanes, cars and tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws, basically) form three or four lanes and communicate with each other by honking their horns whenever they are behind someone or passing someone, which is almost always given the traffic density. Inches separate vehicles on all sides, even at the high end of their city speeds, and bicycles, tuk-tuk’s, motorcycles, trucks, cows, and pedestrians all mingle into the chaos. But, ultimately, it seems to work, and it seems to be the best system for an infrastructure that does not have enough space on its roads and has scarcely any traffic lights.

Agra is best known for the Taj Mahal, which I could see from my hotel room, standing in the distance beyond the road pollution and congestion below. 

I’d naturally heard of the Taj before the trip, though I probably associated it more with the Las Vegas casino than the Indian mausoleum. I also had a perhaps ethnocentric assumption that the Taj couldn’t be as impressive as some of my favorite European buildings, like Sacre Coeur in Paris. I was dead wrong. It was unequivocally the most beautiful and impressive structure I’ve ever seen, and it was perfectly framed by gardens and fountains, as well as a few smaller buildings, including a mosque.

Apparently this obnoxious photo pose has spread across many cultures

Adjacent to the Taj

 The other main attraction in Agra – the Agra Fort – was also impressive, both for the architecture and the group of monkeys running around at the gates. 

Inside the Fort

Inside the Fort

One of the most endearing parts of the visits to the Fort and the Taj was being approached by Indians and asking if I would pose for a picture with them, or if I would take a picture of them. The first request was at the Taj, where a school teacher told me that his group of ~20 eight year old boys would like to take a group picture, with me in the middle. At Agra, a group of brothers approached me for a picture, and they explained that they wanted a picture with a White person, and I seemed easy to approach because I was alone. Also at Agra, a man had his wife take a picture with me, and a small boy asked me to take a picture of him.

The fourth brother is taking the photo

Boy who asked me to take his photo

There was a funny twist on this at the “Baby Taj,” a Taj Mahal prototype of sorts on the outside of town. A group of older women working in a garden asked me to take a picture of them. I smiled and agreed, and then they demanded to be paid for being photographed. I laughed and gave one of them 20 rupees. I’d be curious about how they divided the single bill.

"Baby Taj"

 

Adjacent to Baby Taj

I really wasn't planning on taking this photo until they asked me to.

New Delhi

My flight from Amsterdam to New Delhi arrived at around 2:15am - about 45 minutes later than scheduled. Even so, Vijay, the driver arranged by my hotel to pick me up, was waiting for me, holding my name on a sign just outside of customs. Vijay was tiny - maybe 5'6" and mostly skin and bones - but he insisted on grabbing my backpacking backpack and laptop case and carrying them to the car. 

The wide-laned first few miles of highway around the airport were similar enough to those leading from Phoenix and Los Angeles in the U.S., except that the smog was far thicker than anything I've seen in either city. Indeed, if you stacked the LA smog on top of the Phoenix smog, I think you'd still have clearer air than what I saw in Delhi. After those first few miles, the air did not clear, but the road lost some of its similarity to those in the Southwestern U.S. Even though lanes were clearly marked and maintained, drivers stopped paying attention to them and drifted, seemingly aimlessly, left and right across the three lanes on our side of the concrete median. Pedestrians darted across the highway, and some people simply stood around on the shoulder as cars and trucks zipped by at high speeds. 

After I checked in to the hotel, got a few hours of sleep, woke up for the last hour of the breakfast service, and got a few more hours of sleep, I left the hotel to explore the streets a bit and try to arrange my transportation to my next destination. There were a handful of run down buildings with shoddy "travel agent" signs within a thirty second walk from the hotel entrance. I decided to return to the hotel to ask the front desk if they could recommend one of these. Management said that my safest bet is to go directly to the train station and to not deal with any private dealers, who would invariably try to screw me over. I was also warned that I might be approached outside the train station by someone telling me to follow them to the ticket office, and that I should ignore them.

I left for the train station with my camera strapped around my shoulder and my passport and wallet in my pocket. I didn't have a chance to take pictures, though. The walk was chaos. There were goats, cows, and dogs wandering along the road, sometimes guided by people, and sometimes wandering freely. Throngs of men walked up and down the street at slow paces, seemingly with no real destination in mind. I saw hundreds of people every minute, and none of them were female. The road was filled with cars, bicycles, and three-wheeled, CNG powered auto rickshaws, with the cars and rickshaws honking constantly for reasons that were beyond me (and, I do mean "constantly" - I could hear honking, with less than two seconds between each honk, even from inside my hotel room from 7am to 9pm).

After I darted across the road through the rapidly flowing stream of vehicles toward the train station, I was immediately approached by a short man who was in the mood to chat. He asked me where I was from. The Netherlands, I told him curtly. He commented on my short hair with a smile. Thanks, I like it too, again, curtly. He asked How long are you? I told him that I'd be in Delhi for two days. No, he said, laughing, how long are you? When I realized he was referring to my height - and that he was looking up at least eight inches at me - I told him 185cm. I started turning left toward the man part of the train station, and he urged me to follow him away from the train station, where he could get me a good deal on a train ticket. I told him, No, I'll go to the train station. He pleaded, No no no...that's only for Indians. You need to come with me! I kept my head forward, even as he put his hand on my shoulder to guide me with him. Without looking back, another man ran up to me and also said, No sir! No! This is for Indians only. Tourists need to come this way, with me! 

Delhi train station platform

I kept going and, when I entered the station, I saw a large sign advising If anyone tells you that the office is closed, or that it is for Indians only, please ignore them. This is a commons scam. It reminded me a bit of a the message blaring from loud speakers outside of the Imperial Palace in Bangkok, which advised Trust no one.

After purchasing my ticket and making my way back to the hotel, I didn't venture outside into Delhi again before leaving the next day to catch my train to Agra. I regretted this a bit, because it's a giant city, and there were more things to see than the chaos immediately around me (and, really, I felt like a bit of a wuss to be discouraged by the craziness). But I justified it given the fatigue associated with jet lag and the hectic last few days in Amsterdam (getting my visa at the last moment - another story), and the benefit of getting rest before traveling the next day to Agra outweighed those of venturing more into the smoggy mess.   

*All photos grabbed of google image search this time.

Gent the Third

I went through the "intense" portion of my teaching responsibilities in September and October. This involved teaching two classes during the eight week period (so, a period akin to a U.S. quarter system rather than semester system): 1) structural equation modeling (a statistics course to students in our masters program), and 2) research methods (a methods/statistics course for students in our "research masters" program - so a program that has more emphasis on research training than our other masters program).

Immediately after I gave my final exam for one of the courses, I hopped on a train to make my way to Gent, Belgium, which is about 120 miles southeast of Amsterdam, to give a keynote address at an evolutionary behavior conference. I arrived around 10pm after finishing up at work around 7pm, and I gave my presentation the following morning. The conference was great, and my hosts were as hospitable as one could hope for, but the highlight of the trip was (as it's been twice before) the beauty and charm of Gent.

This photo didn't quite do the autumn beauty of this scene justice.

A cute play on "tout suite" (right away) in French

Exterior of the Castle/Fortress in Gent

Most tourists - I think - who visit Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) think of and go to Brugges instead of Gent. I find Brugges to be fairly boring - an overly manicured village that exists purely for tourism. Gent's center, on the other hand, houses a university and thriving non-tourism business (though, naturally, tourism is a major portion of the economy). So an functioning city is built around churches and castles that date back to the 14th century.

I climbed the Belfry for the third time in my third trip to Gent. The first two trips were in December (winter) and August (summer), so this was the first time I'd seen an autumn landscape from the panoramic view. 

I may have visited during what might have been the last weekend before autumn transitioned to winter. It was warm enough to use only a light jacket, there were no clouds on Saturday evening, and the sunlight glowed against the buildings at dusk. 

Of course, the real star of Gent is the nighttime lights above and reflecting against the water. 

And, naturally, the Belgian food and beer were a close second to the nighttime light show. Belgian beers are a bit sweeter and stronger - and less adventurous - than I prefer, but I can't recall ever having a bad one. And the food - the food is light years ahead of what one gets in Amsterdam restaurants (and the Dutch readily acknowledge this). 

So, I'm not done with Gent after three visits. I'll look forward to a fourth soon. Perhaps in spring this time.

Walging

I had a chance to contribute to a Dutch science show on Walging (disgust). Feel free to check it out if you didn't see it on Facebook:

http://www.wetenschap24.nl/programmas/labyrint/labyrint-tv/2013/oktober/Walging.html

Venice

Several cities are sometimes called “The Venice of the North” (largely by tourism boards, I would guess). A brief internet search tells me that Amsterdam and St. Petersberg are the two most common, but I’ve also heard Leiden, Ghent, and Brugges referred to in this way. Given my superficial impressions of Venice gleaned from scenes from Casino Royal and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I suspected that such comparisons to be a little silly. A four day visit to Venice last week confirmed this suspicion – while lovely, Venice is not the Amsterdam of the South, Amsterdam is not the Venice of the North, and the two cities seem to have little in common outside of being beautiful in markedly different ways and being especially vulnerable to rising seas.

 Venice had never been on my radar as a travel destination until two close friends of mine invited me to attend their wedding there. I never asked Francesca why they planned the wedding in Venice rather than Amsterdam, but I suspect the decision had something to do with Venice’s more reliably warm and sunny weather, the convenience for Francesca’s family (Dan’s family is from Wisconsin, so differences in travel efforts between Amsterdam and Venice were small), and the fact that the beauty of Venice might be more suited for romance and weddings than Amsterdam’s beauty is.

Venice takes one of my favorite things about Amsterdam – the relative lack of cars, compared with places like Phoenix and Albuquerque – to an extreme; there are zero cars in the city, which is accessible only by water and via foot bridges. There are also no bike paths and, from what I saw during my short stay, no bike paths. Everything is by foot or by water taxi. One of Francesca’s relatives actually bemoaned the government’s lack of investment in alternative transportation in the city, since the heavy emphasis on walking and the ubiquitous bridges, all of which are covered in steps, present challenges to the physically disabled and parents with strollers (as well as tourists with roller baggage). It’s not clear to me how the city could be changed to be more accommodating, though; it feels like it is has been oriented in its current form for centuries, and that this orientation is constrained by the water on/in/around which it is built.

The streets were quite narrow, and they snaked their way in between buildings that, again, felt as if they’d been there with minimal changes for hundreds of years. The main pedestrian arteries between major sites were nearly as narrow as the side streets, and they were clogged with people walking in different directions at different speeds and stopping to look at shops. There was a minor feeling of claustrophobia in these areas. But after a 90 second walk down an adjacent street – many of which were narrow enough that I could touch the buildings on the left and the right side of the street at the same time, simply by spreading my arms – I could find myself alone, with no other people in eyesight, and only the muffled sound of the crowd within earshot.

The contrast with the tourist zoo was even stronger at night, when many of the visitors have taken buses or trains back to the cities around Venice in which they are staying overnight. These side streets – and after midnight, even some of the previously bustling main streets – were not only empty but also silent. There were few street lights, and the sole source of light came from dimly glowing windows. Walks down these streets at night felt like walks into a different century. Apart from those dimly glowing windows, there were no obvious cues to indicate that it was the 21^st century, and even then it was easy to imagine those lights replaced by candles. 

The canals in Venice bore little resemble to those in Amsterdam. Many of the Venitian canals separated houses rather than separating roads, most were far narrower than those in Amsterdam - some narrow enough that a person could touch both sides of the houses lining the canals at the same time - and the water was a striking teal color, which contrasts with the dark gray of Amsterdam's canals.   

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And, finally, the wedding was beautiful. Dan and Francesca picked a perfect venue, and they pulled it off marvelously.