Journal 9-18-2010

Journal 9-18-2010

Today we learned about travel. Our scheduled activity for the day was to take a bus from Egmore to Koyambedu then return. Koyambedu has the central bus hub for the Chennai area. At the Koyambedu bus station, you can find buses that go to every part of India. We went to the Koyambedu station to learn how to buy tickets and to find buses to take us all around India. This will prove to be an essential skill in about one week when we leave Chennai.

The Koyambedu bus station was enormous. It was larger than any European train station that I have seen. The station has a variety of different sections that house busses bound for different regions of India.

In fact, it has so many different Isles that I am sure it will take us forever to find the right bus when we need to.

The busses themselves are also pretty interesting. A few of them look really nice, but most of them look really olda nd worn out.

The busses that drive the local routs look the worst, they seem to work fine but the doors don’t close, sometimes you can see through the floor, and the floor is always covered in a standard layer of brown dust. But bus travel is extremely cheap. It is only 5 rupees to go from Egmore to Koyambedu. It only costs around 100 rupees (about 2 dollars) to go from Koyambedu across the state of Tamil Nadu to our project sites. 

After we got back to ICSA we ate a quick lunch and then got ready to go to Madras Christian College. We were going to MCC to meet with a professor about the MCC conference that we are going to present some posters at. Our plan was to meet an MCC student at the train station at 2:00 and then go and talk to the professor. We meet up with Joshua at the Egmore train station and hopped on a train going to MCC. I still don’t know how Joshua knew which train to get on, and which stop to get off at. He didn’t really help us to understand the system, he just guided us through it.

The train ride was pretty interesting. It was 45 minutes long and all the seats were taken so we were standing for the entire time. At various points blind beggars would get on the train and walk through the crowd of people collecting coins a tin cup. One time a woman with two children came onboard and sat in the middle of the floor. The woman tapped on a metal bowl with two sticks while her extremely young daughter did a little dance and played with a tiny hula hoop. This routine seemed to make the most money, even I gave the little girl a rupee when she came around with the metal bowl. I was impressed that she had the balance to be able to walk around on a moving train without holding on to anything.

The doors to the train were always open and people could sit with their legs or bodies hanging out in the wind.

 

When we got to MCC, we were asked to wait for a professor behind St. Thomas hall where there was a huge concert / festival going on. We paid 50 rupees to get in and walked to the back of the fenced off band area. When we got there 5 people stood up from their seats and offered their plastic chairs to us. We felt kind of weird about accepting, but they were insistent so we gave in and sat down. The first band was really bad. And they stopped to do sound checks after every song. We quickly figured out that there were snacks being served behind the band area. During the hour and change that we were waiting there I had a chicken burger and two butterscotch ice cream cones. The food was pretty good. The third band that played was pretty good. I could easily have mistaken their songs for professional Indian music. But they still stopped between each song to do quick sound checks.

The most interesting thing about the concert was that girls seemed to be segregated from boys. In front of the stage there was a partition that ran all the way to the back of the concert area. Girls were on one side while boys were on the other. The boys were all really touchy feely with each other, there were boys sitting on each others laps, boys holding hands, boys with their arms around each other and boys gently roughhousing. I hypothesize that this increase in physical contact between boys is due to the absence of interaction between boys and girls.

We were getting pretty sick of waiting when Professor Prince Anadurai (sorry about the spelling) found us. We left the concert and piled into his tiny car. Leah had to lay across all of us so that we could fit. Professor Prince was very nice, he drove us around the very large, 365 acre campus, showed us the playing fields, some different halls, the science buildings, and even the bungalow where Anne and Mike stayed. We ended up at his house where his daughter and her friend were running around playing. We had tea and cookies (Biscuits) and then we talked about the conference. Professor Prince told us we didn’t have to stress out too much about our posers. He also reassured us that our ideas were fine. His main message was just come and enjoy the conference.

He dropped us off at the entrance and walked with us across the street to the train station entrance. He even asked a student to help us find our train. The student told us that we needed to go to the last platform, then he disappeared. However another student, Justin, saw matt’s St. Olaf T shirt and offered to help us find our way back to Egmore. Justin had been a student of Anne and Mike while they were teaching at MCC, which is how he recognized Matt’s shirt. Justin also lived in Egmore so he was going to get on the same train. We sat with Justin and his friend (whose name escapes me) and talked all the way back. Justin is planning to travel to Pennsylvania. We made it to the Egmore station and got two rickshaws back to ICSA.

I finished The Girl Who Played With Fire, had a package of cookies for dinner and talked to Claire on the phone. Then we went to sleep.