The last night of my stay at the home was our talent show, and it was pretty excellent. We had two age categories, and a monetary prize of 100 rupees for each category (a little over two dollars, which is a pretty significant sum to the girls...the oldest girls get an allowance of 30 rupees/month), plus everyone who participated got a little chocolate bar. It was way fancy. There were an amazing amount of different talents displayed: singing, dancing, styling hair, cooking, acting, etc. Anjali and Sahina (7 and 6) sang "You Are My Sunshine" and thereby won first prize in the younger age bracket hands down with an immeasurable amount of cuteness. There were a few sore losers, but the aftermath was generally lighthearted, culminating in a huge spontaneous dance party, since we had gotten the speakers all set up for the show. Everybody danced, although the visiting Yale volunteers took a little persuasion. It was a marvelous way to spend my last night.
We left for Goa early the next morning. We had heard that there was a bus that went straight to the Nizamuddin railway station in Delhi, so we went to the bus stop and just asked every bus that stopped if they went there. It was way easier traveling into Delhi with my duffel bag than it had been the other day when I had taken my big rolling suitcase into the city to drop off at the Udayan Care office. Fun fact: there was a monkey in the railway station. It didn't belong to anyone, it was just a monkey. Welcome to India.
The train ride to Goa was 30 hours, which sounds awful but actually it was awesome and amazingly relaxing. I had a ticket for a middle bunk, but I traded it for an upper bunk, and promptly got into my bunk and passed out. We were so tired that we were happy to spend the entire trip horizontal. Eating sitting up was a little awkward, but we were sleeping almost the entire time so it was okay. The meals were complimentary and frequent, although I learned after the first one to always take the vegetarian option because the meat is a little bit sketchy.
I was bracing myself for some sketchy train bathrooms, but they were actually pretty nice (there was soap! it ran out halfway, but whatever, it was there in the first place) although they possessed the charming feature of Indian trains in that they were mainly holes emptying out onto the tracks. Nice.
We could tell we were arriving in Goa because when we looked out the door between cars, it was all palm trees and other green leafy things. We arrived in Margaon, which is in central Goa, so we had to take another bus to get to the beach. Before we left, Elysia and I had formulated the following game plan for our arrival in Goa: bum around on the beach and see if there was anywhere that looked like a good place to stay, then stay there. The only downside was that since we went straight to the beach upon our arrival, we were still carrying our bags
in the most obviously touristy fashion possible, so we were set upon mercilessly by people trying to sell us things. This eased up after we had found a guest house and weren't looking quite so newly-arrived. The guest house was a little damp and mildewy because of the monsoon, but they brought us a coconut with a straw stuck in it! Who can complain about that? One other really nice thing about the guest house where we stayed in Calangute is that there was a little restaurant place on the beach in front of it which had chaise lounges. We were super wary at first, and asked several times to make sure that they wouldn't charge us for lying on the chaise lounges, but not only was it free, the restaurant guys also shooed off any sketchy men who looked like they might be loitering to stare at the white girls in bathing suits. It was marvelous. So for two days we lay on lounge chairs on the beach reading our books while being waited on by nice little Indian men who chased off creeps and brought us cold beverages and dried off our chairs with towels after any spurt of monsoon rain. If that doesn't sound fabulous already, keep in mind that since it is the off-season, we got our room for about a third of the peak season price, something along the lines of two American dollars per night.
Although our personal beach featured our friends who ran off the sketchy men, the rest of the beaches did not. At one point we were being tailed by some guys, at which point Elysia and I pretended to stop for a while so they would be forced to walk past us to keep up their act. They stopped soon after, and waited for us to keep walking so they could keep following us. At this point, we suddenly acquired a friend: a random beach dog (these are not so uncommon) decided to walk along with us. At first I was not entirely comfortable with this; what if the dog had rabies or tried to bite us or something? But then the dog proved its friendly intentions by getting between us and the sketchy guys and keeping them away. They kept following us until I finally broke down and told them off in a loud and angry fashion, but the dog stayed. We walked several miles, all the way up to the end of the beach, and the dog stayed with us. The next morning we went back to that area of beach to get breakfast at a certain restaurant, and once again the dog showed up to walk with us. We were leaving Calangute right after breakfast, and we saved our canine friend some bacon for a parting gift, but by the time we were finished with breakfast, he was gone. It was a little bit sad, but Elysia and I reasoned that he had been called off to go guard some other foreigners.
We spent the better part of the afternoon riding buses, but finally we arrived in Palolem, a little fishing village in the southern tip of Goa which Elysia had deemed from comments on the Internet to be the best vacation spot in Goa. Important fact about Palolem: it is full of hippies. While Calangute is more of a tourist spot (according to our travel guide), it is more popular with Indian tourists in the peak season. Palolem was populated with hippie Westerners, even in the off season. It was strange, after spending so long in India, to see so many white faces in one place. It sounds racist to say that I was glad to see so many white people. However, really it was just relaxing to feel for once like I could blend in after enduring so much stress during my stay due to my nationality and the color of my skin.
In retrospect, both Elysia and I agreed that we wouldn't have minded just going to Palolem for an entire week, even if it meant seeing less of Goa. The beach there was insanely beautiful, and not just that, either. Unlike any beach you've been to, this one featured cows!
I really wasn't kidding when I said that cows are everywhere in India. The beach is no exception.
Besides the gorgeous beach and the cows, Palolem also had a number of nice little restaurants and guest house where, since it was the off season, we bargained down our nightly rate to 125 rupees, which is a little more than a dollar per person per night. There is no way I could have afforded this kind of vacation anywhere else, but India, although flawed in many other areas, has prices that pretty much can't be beat. We spent the rest of our week there, strolling on the beach and reading during the day, in the evening relaxing at some restaurant with good food and drink. Goa is famous for seafood - what you saw the fishermen catch in the morning was your dinner at night. So good! We developed a habit of ordering drinks to fill the space before our dinner came, which resulted in a couple nights of slightly tipsy girl-bonding. (important lesson: alcohol+sunburn=double dehydration. watch out) We had made friends with some cute boys who we met at the bus station after arriving in Goa and then ran into again in Palolem, and we were staying in the same guest house as them, but we never ended up looking for them to hang out in the evenings because we were having too much fun ourselves to be bothered!
Although there were many Westerners in Palolem, it seems that the locals were still not quite adjusted to them. The tourists on the beach were all white, and all wearing Western-style bathing suits, so we felt pretty comfortable in our bikinis. However, one day towards the end of our stay, one of my sandals broke, so we hustled back to the guest house without bothering to put anything over our bathing suits. The guest house was just steps away from the beach, so it didn't seem like a big deal; however, we had only gotten maybe 25 feet before some local men started hassling us, yelling out "how much?" and then when we didn't answer, "twenty dollars?" Fortunately I didn't hear their words at the time (Elysia informed me a few seconds later), because at this point in my stay in India I was completely fed up with the disrespect that Indian men showed to Western women, and if I had heard it at that exact time, I was ready to physically attack the men and kick them where they'd regret their words the most. But we were too far away when I realized what had happened, so instead I just thought angry thoughts back in our room and plotted the deeds of violence I would do to the next man who so insulted me. It's funny to think that I was so riled up, but the constant disrespect I felt towards white women had just accumulated to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. I was so ready to leave and get back to a country where I wouldn't be judged so much by my race.
On the day that I left Goa, I tried to call my airline to check if my flight was on time so I could let my boss back in Delhi know when I was going to be arriving to pick up the rest of my luggage from the office. I found a pay phone at a travel agency, but every number I called was incredibly unhelpful. I called the airline, but then they tried to tell me that I should call some other number. When I called the other number, nobody picked up. I realized that the first number was the person I was actually looking for, but when I called them back, they just pretended not to hear what I was saying and then hung up on me. At this point, I had had enough adventures abroad. All I wanted was to go home, and the person on the line who could give me the information to send me on my way was being actively unhelpful. I felt so frustrated and defeated that I just sat next to the pay phone and started to cry. While I sat there in the travel agency feeling miserable, the man behind the desk noticed my unhappiness and asked what was the matter. I showed him the printout of the receipt for my plane ticket, and using his magical travel agent powers, he just went online and found out that the plane was on time. Although I had countless negative encounters with sketchy and disrespectful Indian men, the kindness of the travel agent redeemed my faith in humanity a little and reminded me that I couldn't make a complete generalization.
From the time I left Palolem, it took me about 40 hours to get back home. First I took a bus to Canacona, a slightly larger town in Goa with more buses running to Margaon, where I had to catch the shuttle to the Goa airport. On the third bus, I saw the airport out of the window, but the bus didn't stop. I thought that maybe it would drop us off somewhere else near the airport, but after it kept going for a while I realized that perhaps I had been misled to believe that it was just a shuttle to the airport. The next time anybody called for a stop, I grabbed my suitcase, got off the bus, and started trekking back in the direction of the airport. I must have walked a couple of miles with my suitcase, ignoring the stream of whistles and catcalls from passing cars at the strange sight of a white girl walking down the road with a suitcase. I made it to the airport in plenty of time, however, and waited wearily for my flight. After getting into Delhi, I took a prepaid cab from the airport to the Udayan Care office where my luggage awaited. The airport cabs are supposed to be outbound only, but I bribed my cabbie to take me back to the airport, and to the international terminal this time. I had left Palolem around 1 pm, and it was now the middle of the night. I changed my clothes in the Delhi airport and packed up my stuff for the flight. My flight left after 3 in the morning, so I waited several hours in Indira Gandhi airport, which I must say is the most awful airport I have ever experienced. It was hot and crowded and I never quite felt safe. I was glad to get on the plane, and even more incredibly relieved to arrive in Helsinki for my 5-hour layover. Although I wasn't home yet, getting to Finland was almost as good as being back in the U.S. Everybody was so friendly, nobody stared at me for being white, and there was very delicious chocolate for sale. I spent the remainder of the euros I had changed on the way over on chocolate, and curled up on a couple of airport chairs to sleep. My plan was to only sleep while it was nighttime in New Jersey in order to fight jet lag in advance. It didn't work very much, but it was worth a shot. Anyway, my experience in Helsinki was extremely positive, and I would definitely consider going back to Finland simply based on my experience in the Helsinki airport.
Another 7 hours or so, and I was coming in to JFK. I looked out the window at Long Island as we came in, concentrating to see streets and houses and cars as the plane got lower and lower. I waved to Pu Danni, even though I don't really know precisely where on Long Island he lives. Close enough. There was a long line to get back through customs in New York, and then more time spent waiting for my parents to come pick me up. I was worried that I was waiting in the wrong place, because they weren't there when I arrived, like I had expected. After some time waiting in the airport, I went outside to where the cars pull up, and soon enough a familiar van came along. I was surprised to see that even Josh was there to pick me up from the airport instead of back at his house in Baltimore! The westbound traffic out of JFK was kind of gross (it was rush hour, so what do you expect), but after 2 hours or so we finally got back home. It was a long, 40-hour trip from Palolem to my house, but it was so, so good to be home.
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