Settling In

It was so fun having Gregg here even just for a short time!  We went to see the biggest tourist site in Vadodara, the Laxmi Villas Palace where the royal family / Maharajas over the area lived and grew up.  One of them started MSUB, the university where I teach at.

We did an audio tour of the palace and learned about what it was like living in the palace.  The family still lives here in one wing of the house, but have opened up the rest of the palace to tourists.

There were no photos allowed inside, unfortunately.  This article shows some of what it looks like and explains more about the family.  We also had a chance to try some more Indian food.  Gregg doesn't have as much of an aversion to spicy food as I do, and we found some new restaurants to eat in.  

We also tried to find a river for Gregg to fish in, but it turned out to be harder than we thought.  The river that runs through the city is polluted and the banks are overgrown with vegetation.  The larger river outside the city was hard to find access to (especially in an Uber with a driver that didn't speak English), so we'll have to try again another day.

I was sad when Gregg had to go back, but we agreed that it was the best decision because of some of his upcoming projects at work.  He will try to come back after the elk hunt, at the end of October/beginning of November.  

My next big task was to get registered at the Foreigners Registration Office.  The process of doing anything (especially anything related to the government) is always a long, tedious, bureaucratic process.  I uploaded my documents to the portal but instead of being accepted I got an automated message saying I needed to come to the office for an interview.  The interview was to be in Ahmedabad, 2 hours away, scheduled for the following morning.  I panicked and contacted Mr. Manthan at the university, and he knew a person who knew a person who used to be the professor of the guy I was supposed to meet with.  He was able to change the meeting for a day I wasn't teaching.  The university hired a car and driver to take me to the appointment.  Here I am sitting in the hallway, not very happily waiting to find out why they wanted to see me.

It turns out to be the same issue the other Fellows faced.  There is no real visa category for the English Language Fellows program, so they brought me in on a research visa.  The guy wanted to know more about the program, and how they were justifying it as 'research.'   Long story short, I had to get a new letter from the university with more details about the program.  They threw in some more fancy words and got some extra higher-ups to stamp and sign the letter, and now I'm waiting to see if they will accept it.  Without foreigner registration I can't open a bank account, and I would be ineligible for a visa renewal.  It also might mean I pay a big fine when it comes time to leave.  It could jeopardize Gregg being let back into the country, since his visa is dependent on mine.  So, it's been stressful.  

After the meeting I had the car and driver for a few more hours, so I had him take me to the Ashram that was founded by Mahatma Gandhi.

It was relaxing to walk around, read the information and think about the life he lived.  It was from here he launched his non-violent resistance to British rule.   

He instructed people to spin and make their own clothes and learn to extract and use Indian salt, so they wouldn't be reliant on the British. 

They had a completely self-sufficient ashram that practiced communal living here.

He spoke against the caste system, and praised the poorer classes.  When people would riot and become violent, he would fast until they would calm down.   His teachings inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the non-violent civil rights movement in the U.S.  Tomorrow is his birthday, and a national holiday in India.  

To celebrate the holiday, people clean.  The university organized a 'cleaning afternoon' instead of having classes yesterday, and the students all pitched in to clean the classrooms in the building.  

It was nice to see a different city, but I actually prefer Vadodara because it is smaller and not as crowded.  I am starting to learn my way around the city and I have figured out how to buy food and other things I need.  This day was lucky because the fruit guy and the vegetable guy were on my street at the same time.

I am finally settling in to the university.  The head of the department had a birthday and it's tradition to provide lunch for the teachers on your birthday.  They were nice enough to ask what my preferences were, and I just said, 'Anything not spicy!'  So they ordered pizza.  

My students are polite, hardworking, and friendly.  Our classroom doesn't have air conditioning, and there are fewer materials compared to what I had at the University of Utah, but I am learning how to provide all the assignments and materials online, so the students can use their phones to access them.  Here they are learning how to calculate their own ecological footprint as part of their reading assignment.

We are on the top floor, so with the windows open the view of the campus just looks like a jungle of tree canopies.  There are lots of monkeys, squirrels, big black birds, and noisy bright green birds all in view of our classroom window.

As they calculated their ecological footprint, I was amazed to see how little they consume compared to most in the western world.  Afterwards I felt like I needed to tell them that I am not here to preach to them about how to take better care of the earth, but that they, as Indians, were in a unique position to teach the rest of the world how to live in harmony as the world's population increases, how to adopt a plant-based diet that uses spices and flavors and protein-rich grains that most of us have never heard of, how to keep traffic flowing with smaller modes of transportation, and how to generally not use so much of the earth's resources.  I think it made them happy to realize that they have something to offer the rest of the world, when so many people around them are just trying to leave India to either study or work abroad.

Another part of my settling in has been to try to find a decent pool where I can swim for exercise.  I found a municipal pool for the public, but when I went there, of course I couldn't just pay the entrance fee and go in.  First I needed to get a doctor's note (signed and stamped) saying that I was healthy enough to swim and then take a swimming test (and wait for it to be signed and stamped) before I could buy a monthly pass.  Plus, I have to pay all the various fees online, which I need an Indian bank account for (see issues above).

I left the pool disappointed but still determined, and I decided to walk down the street to a place where I had seen on the way in they were selling house plants.  I didn't want the trip to be a total waste.  On the way I passed some pop-up tents with markets inside, so I did a little impulse shopping.

Everybody is getting ready for the next big festival, Navratri, where they dance for nine nights in October.  My colleagues have promised to take me to one of the places where they do the folk dancing but you can see some of it in this video.

I made it to the plant store and bought a house plant to help keep me company in the apartment.

Gregg and I always name our plants Robert in honor of Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin.  It's nice to have little Robert here.  He looks so happy in his new home!

Here's a random video of some street ruckus.  I still don't know if it was a political rally, a religious celebration, or a wedding party.  Another mystery of India . . . .