Tiruchirappalli Tongue Twister

Tiruchirappalli. Try saying that three times fast. Or once fast, for that matter. Fortunately, everyone (not just foreigners) calls this place Trichy. At the bus station this morning, they even understood what city I was referring to on the first try—and Trichy is 200km or thereabouts from Kumily. There were times (most times actually) that I could be in Kozhencherry asking for the bus to Aranmula (a mere 3km
away) and no one knew what I was saying (the Malayalam /r/ gets me every time).

Speaking of the bus station in Kumily.... I was going to catch an early, early bus (like 5 or 6am) so I would have more time in TRICHY (I AM ON THE WORST COMPUTER EVER- IT KEEPS SWITCHING TO ALL CAPS EVEN WHEN I DONT TOUCH THE CAPS LOCK BUTTON. RAHHHHH! GUESS THAT'S WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU PAY RS10 PER HOUR FOR INTERNET). Ok, let's try that again. I stayed up late, last night and decided there was no reason to rush this morning. So I slept in (until 7am! gasp!) and had a nice breakfast-- idlis and coconut chutney – my new favourite (heehee- the auto spellchecker just added that "u " to my spelling of favorite"). I got to the bus station at 8am and was told the next bus to Trichy was at 9am (reasonable- I couldn't remember if it was supposed to be every 30 minutes or every hour). At 8:45 they showed me to the bus, where I sat for the next two hours. I didn't even try to find out why we waited so long—I'm just assuming it's because they didn't have
enough passengers to go (I was the only one on the bus most of that time). Around 10:45, quite a few other people boarded and at 11am we pulled out. In the meantime, I relaxed and watched the amazing chaos that is India through the window.

The drive was beautiful – paddy fields all over, palm trees, mountains in the distance, some lakes and rivers. I discovered where the rest of India lives. On my walks and hikes around Aranmula, most of the homes were nice villas. Some people lived in one-room, cinder block row houses, but there wasn't extreme poverty (at least, not that I saw). Out the bus window today there weren't any villas, but a mix of palm-thatch huts, makeshift shanties, and little tarp-covered tents.

We kept passing through towns that looked so interesting—Cumbum, Batlagundu, Dindigul. As we'd be driving through, I'd see a hotel and think, "I could stay here for a night and continue tomorrow!" I'd have
to restrain myself from leaping off the bus, and I might not have been able to if I weren't trying to make it to Chidambaram by tomorrow to meet my philosophy teacher from home who, coincidentally, is in Tamil Nadu for two weeks.

After I found a hotel here in Trichy, I went looking for dinner. I found the tourist office, so I went in and chatted with the two guys working there. I asked one to give me a mini-lesson in Tamil. (In Kerala, the language is Malayalam. Now that I'm in Tamil Nadu, the language is Tamil). I rattled off some key phrases and he taught me the pronunciations. My favourite is for "good bye": poy varukiren (that's the transliteration, Tamil has its own alphabet). The phrase "poy varukiren" means something like "I'm leaving now but I'll be back later" (even if you aren't coming back) because, as he explained, good-bye is too final and be upsetting to the person you are speaking to (his hand fluttering to the sky seemed to imply that it means you are leaving Earth for the next realm). It's like when we say "see you later" even if we don't have specific plans to meet again. It also reminded me of Pradeep, my Kathakali teacher, yelling at me for saying “thank
you” at the end of class because that implies the end of our relationship; he instructed me to say “see you tomorrow” instead.

At dinner, I chatted with a businessman from Mumbai (we were both eating alone and seated diagonally from one another at a large table). He is from Lucknow (further north, near Delhi) but lives and works in Mumbai . He speaks Hindi and English, so when he travels in the south of India he has to speak English (because he doesn't speak Tamil and people down here don't necessarily speak Hindi).

I bought a new tube of Odomos mosquito repellent this evening. As I stood outside the pharmacy slathering it on my limbs, I was watching a beautiful gray cow standing serenely on the other side of the street as traffic whizzed by a few feet away. It was dusk, so the constant noise of India was joined by the flashing lights of India at night. The cow wasn't tied up and wasn’t wearing any sort of halter or rope. It just stood there, stately and unruffled. I love the cows here and wondered if that feeling is what I recognize in them (as the teacher I'm meeting is known to say, in the stories of India, we are ALL the characters). That kind of calm is certainly something one can learn in India, whether you are dodging traffic or waiting three hours at the bus station. It certainly makes India a more enjoyable place. Come to think of it, that feeling makes any place more enjoyable and gives life a certain feeling of ease.

(I wrote this, um, two days ago? Not today, not yesterday, so must have been two days ago. Anyway, as I mentioned, it was the worst computer ever and after I wrote, my blog wouldn't open, so I couldn't post it. And you couldn't save documents on these computers. And they automatically timed out at preset intervals. Fortunately, I managed to email it to myself- the only email I managed to send....)