V - Indian bathrooms

All Indian bathrooms that I have seen so far did not have special compartments for showering. The whole room is tiled, so you just stand in the middle of the room, either pouring water out of a bucket or using a European shower head to clean yourself. The water of course splashes all over the room, which does not only help rinse some of the dirt off the toilet and sink, but also means that you do not have to deal with sticky shower curtains or malfunctioning shower cabins. All in all a really practical setup – if you want to wash your bathroom, you just hose the whole room down, the Indian heat will then dry it in no time.

The toilets are something that I was very afraid to use at first but quickly became accustomed to and even learned liking it. So, here is a quick instruction on how to use an Indian toilet: 1. Wash your hands. You are later going to touch your genitals with your left hand. 2. Sit down and do whatever needs to be done. Most Indian toilets are similar to the European toilets: it is a big bowl with a seat. Until the recent past the usual Indian toilet used to be only a hole in the ground. Fortunately for me, this changed. 3. Every Indian bathroom has a small shower head right next to the toilet. You take it, use the little lever to get water shooting out, and you rinse yourself off. 4a. So now, you are clean, probably cleaner than if you had used toilet paper. But how do you avoid looking like you peed your pants? Easy - you take your left hand and wipe the water of your genitals. This will not get you dry completely but at least you will not be dripping wet anymore. And in the Indian heat, the rest of the moisture will dry off pretty quickly. 4b. In some more modern and western places there is a role of toilet paper next to the toilet - just like in Europe. If you don’t want to use your hand to dry yourself off, you use toilet paper instead. But be aware! Do not EVER throw any tissue, not even the thinnest of toilet papers into the toilet! Indian toilets and their water pipes are not made for paper tissues. They will literally clog up from just a few thin paper tissues. 5. Wash your hands! If you wash your hands thoroughly it should not matter if you use your left or right hand to dry yourself off. But per Indian custom you use the left hand to wipe yourself off and the right hand for everything else.

So, next time you hear horror stories about Indian toilets – it is true, you do use your hand for cleaning yourself but only after you have thoroughly rinsed your genitals with water.

Next time a cleaner story – I promise :D

IV – Navratri

Navratri is a 9-day celebration to welcome fall. It is a very colorful celebration with drummers and beautiful sarees and dresses. On the last two days everybody cleans their cars and their homes, most cars, buses, rikshaws and homes are beautifully decorated with flowers and paint in ochre, yellow and red and for a lot of people it is a day off.

At work I had the honor to attend a typical Puja, a short religious ceremony. At first two religious figures of two gods were decorated with flowers and paint, then bananas, betel leaves, a coconut and a sweet similar to halva were put in front of the decorated statues. For the main part of the ceremony one man lit camphor on a metal plate, incents were lit and he opened a melon. After going around the group to offer the fire and red paint (Kukuma) to paint the Bindi on their foreheads to everyone, one person after the other took off their shoes and prayed in front of the statues.

Here are the pictures I promised J

A staff member performing the Puja

The women wear beautiful sarees

The statues are beautifully decorated with flowers and food  and food is put in front of them. 

No matter if the sight of the driver is hindered, a lot of the cars and tucks are decorated. 

Even police cars are decorated with flowers and banana leaves

One group of drummers waling through the steets of Banglore 

III – The first week (Living in India)

Living in India so far has been chaotic, charming, stressful, disappointing, surprisingly clean, colorful and most of all – most hospitable.

In the western world we hear a lot about poverty in India and bad sanitation standards. This is mostly true for live on the streets: Most street stand owners do not have a way to wash their hands, even when they serve food, garbage is thrown on the floor, and stray cows and dogs do not only leave their feces but also help to spread diseases.

Unfortunately, garbage piles like this are a common sight in the streets of Bangalore. The situation inside people’s houses is quite the contrary.

 

Inside people’s homes, however, the situation is completely different. Most Indian women care very well for their houses, they clean, sweep, mop and scrub every day, in most homes that I have been to I could not find a single grain of dust. If they can afford it Indian families hire a maid to help around the house, which is considered a positive thing, as giving back to the community by paying someone to do work they could have done on their own.  

Once you enter people’s homes, Indians have been very hospitable to Lex and me. We get offered really good, homemade food and fresh water. People treat us very politely, they are interested in our stories and eager to explain anything about Indian culture that we ask about.

Back out on the streets the world seems to be completely different – most people are nice but you have to be careful about trusting strangers. Every time we ask for driving directions we ask at least two people because some people either willfully give you wrong directions or they don’t want to admit that they don’t know the way, in which case they just point you a random direction, which might or might not happen to be the correct way.

I am looking forward to meeting more Indians and making more Indian friends. Their hospitality is pretty amazing, and I just love to see how much they appreciate small presents like the little lavender pillows and chocolates we brought.

II – first day of work

So much information, so many new faces and names… My predecessor Krasimira from Bulgaria is leaving today and it is my first day of work. The start of my mew job could not possibly have been more busy. My boss tells me to take it slow, but how can I take it slow if there are so many things to learn and to do?

The place I work at is a startup incubator called BHiVE. What they do is renting out office spaces to people, mostly startups. My job is to be the receptionist, the one who cares for the community of business founders, answers calls, shows new customers around, answers questions, cares for keys and lockers and every once in a while organizes a little event.

I work 5 and 6 days a week alternating weeks, 8 hours a day. There is supposed to be a second community manager helping me but at the time there is not. Looks like a whole lot of work ahead of me…

But I don’t want to be whining constantly: Everyone is super nice to me, I already know my way around the city a little better and I found a really nice, clean restaurant with yummy food J And I am sure that as soon as I figures out the basics of my work the rest will fall into place just fine.

Oh, and I really do want to share some pictures with you. Will try to remember taking my camera with me more often.

I - First days in Bangalore

Overwhelming – one single word that right now is THE word for me that best describes Bangalore in my eyes. Bangalore is full of different smells – overwhelmingly good smells of food and spices and overwhelmingly bad smells of dumpsters and human feces. Bangalore is full of noise – overwhelmingly nice noise of exotic birds and overwhelmingly bad, omnipresent noise of traffic. Bangalore is full of colors – sometimes overwhelmingly ugly colors of dirt, garbage and poverty, usually the overwhelmingly manifold colors of women’s dresses, temples, cars and flowering trees.

And Bangalore is overwhelmingly slow moving. In the first three days that I have been here so far I managed to do exactly one very important thing: Get an Indian SIM card. As a foreigner it is almost impossible to get a SIM card on your own without knowing the right people. So, at first I had to get ahold of the person who wanted to help me with acclimation, which is unsurprisingly hard without a working phone or an internet connection. Once I did get ahold of her and met her it took the two of us an entire day to buy a SIM card. She is a local, she speaks the language, she knows the right people but still it took us an entire day for something that in many other countries takes a few hours maximum.

But now that we do have working phones and mobile internet we can start working on actual projects, such as getting to know my work and colleagues, making friends, getting wifi at our house, getting our clothes treated against mosquitos, going (grocery) shopping and so on. My biggest project will be to get established at my work. I am very excited to meet everyone tomorrow and hopefully once that big part of my life here is somewhat clarified things will settle down a bit more.