Local Life – October 15

This morning everybody on the ship either left for the Taj Mahal, a local homestay, or for adventures on a train (unfortunately for that group, the Darjeeling Unlimited left out the warning for travelers against burglarizing prostitutes. Email CMEhrlich@semesteratsea.net for that story.) This exodus left me and the twenty other students still on the ship to fend for ourselves and find our own entertainment in the city that threatens our lives with each street crossing and enforces an 11pm curfew.

I had originally planned on spending the day with two girls in my International Health class to research the prevalence of eating disorders in India (if anybody has any research suggestions here – my grade and parents would greatly appreciate it). In classic rickshaw fashion, however, we were all separated from the start, leaving me alone in a market bargaining for items I would never buy, simply because I made a game of seeing just how low in USD I could get a certain shirt or skirt. If I couldn’t get the price below 2USD, I lost.

Just as boredom was settling in to the point that I was about to actually spend some money, Giri, my genie in a bottle, appeared out of nowhere.

“You! You! Are you Semester at Sea? From the ship?”

“Umm yes…”

“I LOVE Semester at Sea!”

“Okay…I mean…obviously…we overpay you like ten times the amount for each rickshaw ride. Like you could probably retire the day we leave Chennai.”

“No no! Like really love SAS!”

At this point, Giri pulled out a notebook from his front breast pocket and proceeded to flip through pages full of comments such as: “Giri is the best rickshaw driver EVER! – Stephanie, SAS Fall 2002”

After reading through dozens of SAS reviews dating back almost a decade, I decided to test out the best rickshaw driver ever.

With no plans for the day at all, I settled in (in crash-ready position) and told him to take me around. And boy did he take me around – we went to the beach, his mosque, his favorite restaurant, various stores and markets; he let me drive his rickshaw and took me to a very clandestine snake verse mongoose fight. We had a debate about politics and religion (my new pastime is convincing foreigners that Obama’s “change” campaign isn’t exactly what they all seem it’s cracked out to be) and ended the day with me being allowed to add an anecdote to his notebook. We also exchanged addresses to send pictures and postcards to.

Unfortunately, when I got back to the ship and started raving about how fabulous my day with no plans ended up being, I learned how very uncreative my plans were. It turns out that just about everybody I spoke to had had the same experience. All twenty of us, with no plans, had latched onto rickshaw drivers for our personal tours of the city. One guy even invited his rickshaw driver out to dinner with the group of us that night. So my second day in Chennai was awesome, but disappointingly unoriginal.

Getting Around – October 14

Before disembarking at each port, members of the US Embassy give a presentation on the ship. The imminent arrival of 700 college students into their jurisdiction terrifies the directors of each embassy enough to send, without fail, their highest ranking security officer to drill into our heads the mantra of US Embassies everywhere: don’t break laws, don’t wave money around and don’t wear American flag t-shirts (unless you’re in Namibia – then you should wrap yourself in an American flag and sing the Star Spangled Banner as you walk down the street). They also usually manage to throw in a little anecdote of being mugged themselves, or of an American being thrown into prison and them being able to do little more than send a care package complete with KFC (more prominent than McDonalds in every country we’ve been to) and soap, hold the razors. At the end they throw out a few taxi rates at us so we have an idea of what to negotiate. These rates are inevitably misinterpreted to mean “per person” when they really mean them to be “per cab” and we spend the rest of the trip overpaying by five times each amount. (But…it’s so hard to bargain when all you’re arguing over is 50 cents.)

India’s talk was a little different. Although the fact that the drinking age is 21 and those found using fake IDs can be prosecuted is a little terrifying – it’s simply too hard and too expensive to find alcohol in this state to even worry about that. Instead, the Indian embassy workers took the opportunity to warn us about the number one public safety concern in Chennai: crossing the street. Sidewalks, one of the workers warned, are a “mere afterthought that come to abrupt ends.” He suggested that we just walk in the street and deal with the honking – because if a car is honking at you it at least shows that it sees you. And here I use the word “car” very liberally to include rickshaws, motorbikes, pedal bikes, busses, ox-drawn wagons, and thousands of 1950s model cars. “Honk” is similarly used liberally to include a regular car horn, a musical horn (think of downloading ringtones to the horn of your 1950s car), yelling, beeping, poking (seriously), whistles and bells.

He then finished with two pieces of advice: to speak Tamil, just add an “-ah” to the end of every word and neither pedestrians nor the cars with a green light have the right-of-way: he with the most guts has the right-of-way.

**If there is a reason that Dartmouth does not approve SAS credit again after this trip it should not be because the classes are too easy or because the curriculum is too fun: it should be because Dartmouth can only stretch its luck so far with sending kids to Chennai before one dies. …I think that with the way we’re used to crossing the street, it’s a guaranteed 20% risk…and there are five of us here right now.**

I would lie to say that I felt prepared for the streets of Chennai. But I did honestly think I’d be more prepared than I was. Because it was ridiculous. I cannot fully express in words what it was like. When we asked everybody what they did during their first day in the city, the most common answer was “survived.” We piled four people into an auto-rickshaw, only to have the two on the edge (hi, that was me) pushed to near decapitation as there is nothing, nothing designed to hold you in. In one particularly congested area, our rickshaw driver found a rather clear street and zoomed on down towards our destination, only for us to realize too late that – fuck – we were on the right side of the road and the opposite light just turned green. But remember Rule #2. It was like the chase scene in an action movie as he weaved us through five lanes of oncoming traffic without even flinching. And then there was that time when he went to pass a bus on a narrow side street, only to get into the other lane and see a car coming right at us. …yet our driver still somehow managed to sneak between the two and temporarily fit three abreast. And yet, neither of these are extraordinary situations.

I’ve already started to treat each rickshaw ride like a rollercoaster. I jump in my seat and brace myself between the drivers’ seat and the poles provided, both holding on for dear life and encouraging the driver to go faster faster! The best part of this type of roller coaster ride is that there actually is a fear factor, because it actually is dangerous, because you actually could die, because there actually aren’t any seatbelts. Oh, and that at <1usd>