First Impressions of Kodaikanal

Preface:
I started writing this soon after arriving, but I'm just not going to catch up with myself for awhile, and I think I'd better post what I've written so far. I promise to catch up with everything sooner or later, but I'm madly busy learning how to be a teacher (I only get to my second day in Kodai in this bit of the entry; I think I'm going to have to cut the detail if I EVER want to get to my first day of classes!)

Photos coming soon, I have lots, I just have to get to class really soon and don't have time to post them right now. SOON. Hopefully this evening.

Also, I'm considering password-protecting this blog, because I've realized that the high school students - even though I only teach the elementary school - like to stalk their teachers on the internet. More on that later. If I password-protect it, I'll email you all.

That's all for now, folks.
-Jenn

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After God knows how many hours of travel, I arrived in the Chennai (Madras) airport at approximately 1:30 in the morning. The airport was fairly crowded because, in addition to my flight, another 747 had come in from Dubai. The baggage claim was crowded with people bearing duty-free bags with stamp of Dubai Duty-Free that I recognized from my own brief visit to Dubai. I fended off a few men eager to volunteer their services as porters and hauled my bags off the carousel myself: my trusty black rolling suitcase, still alive after 4 years of being stuffed, sat on, and stuffed again as I traveled back and forth from Victoria and Princeton – and my new love, a beautiful 65 L Osprey backpack.

Arrival, and then… The wait. The flight to Madurai was scheduled for 6:50 AM, so I settled into a chair in the airport lounge to wait. After an hour of restless jet-lagged twitching, I went to the bathroom and had my first experience with Indian toilets. For those of you not in the know, imagine a narrow toilet bowl recessed in the floor and a little water tap and bucket placed nearby. You squat over the trough in the floor (it drains and flushes) and relieve yourself, then use the water and your left hand – KEY POINT! LEFT, NOT RIGHT! – to clean yourself. If possible, flush, then exit and wash hands. Because this is the customary way to relieve yourself, the left and right hands have very different roles in Indian culture; never get caught eating with your left hand!

I managed to sleep for awhile in the airport chair, feet propped up on my bags on their luggage cart, as people came and went around me. There were many families around me doing the same thing, children clustered under their mother’s shawl as they tried to get a bit of sleep before the next flight. At about 4:30 AM the airlines’ counters opened again, and at 5 AM I went to the Jet Airways counter to check in. I anticipated a lot of fuss because it was a domestic flight yet I had an enormous amount of luggage, but I guess they felt sorry for me, and the fellow behind the counter tagged them and sent me to get them screened. The screening process seemed largely superfluous but involved a lot of questions in heavily-accented English that my exhausted brain had trouble deciphering, and they eventually gave up on me, slapped “Checked By Jet Airways” stickers on both bags, and sent me through security.

Airport security note: after getting to Madurai I realized that I’d had a small kitchen knife in my carry-on bag the entire time, black plastic handle and 5-inch blade. Vancouver airport? Searched my backpack to the point of pulling out my change purse and rifling through it, digging to the very bottom of each pocket, and absolutely destroying my careful packing job, but they didn’t notice the knife. Newark airport? Sent me right through. Chennai? Screened ME with a metal-detector wand, but didn’t bother with the backpack and its knife. So much for all that plastic cutlery on the planes. (Mom, Dad – sorry, I didn’t realize I had it, but I guess I’ll just use it in India. It’s only a little knife.)

Flight to Madurai was delayed by 2 hours, so I waited around in the airport in a daze, and then got on a plane and began, at last, my final flight. They served a nice Indian meal (what North American domestic flight serves a full meal on a 1-hour flight???) and offered me a newspaper, which I took but was too tired to read very carefully. Very colorful language for a newspaper. Landed in Madurai! Claimed my bags and went outside to find the poor taxi driver who had been waiting for at least two hours for me, and then was quickly loaded up into an ancient car that looked like it had been left behind by the British, back in the day; paneled interior, high cushioned seats, and utter lack of seatbelts. Which, let me tell you, was PETRIFYING given the ride I was about to embark upon.

I’ve never experienced anything like traffic in India. The ride through Madurai was one of the more harrowing and exhilarating experiences of my life (SO GLAD TO BE ALIVE), and Madurai’s not even a very big city… Can’t imagine what Mumbai or Delhi are like, though I hope to find out during my holidays. It’s the sheer volume and variety of traffic that makes it so terrifying – pedestrians, motorbikes, bicycles, cars, trucks, and the occasional ox-drawn cart, all vying for space and moving at different speeds on roads that are far too narrow and have very poorly-defined dirt sidewalks. Nobody stays in their lane – scratch that, there aren’t any lanes. Everyone squeezes through spaces I’d never believe they could make it through. Women nursing babies don’t bat an eye as a motorbike loaded with three people – all without helmets, of course – dodges a truck and nips past them with an inch or less to spare. The garlands of jasmine flowers in their hair sway in the slipstream, and they keep on walking, unperturbed.

Gradually, the hustle and bustle of Madurai gave way to the Ghat Road, the long twisting road that threads through the Panil Hills and up to Kodaikanal. Another terrifying experience, in that the road has no lanes at all, barely enough room to pass, and a very high density of completely blind corners. The drivers, of course, race around them at high speed, such that you don’t know what to be most afraid of: that they’ll skid off the edge, or that they’ll be hit by an oncoming bus. Everyone uses their horn like crazy to make sure that people coming round the bend know they’re there.

The forest became thicker, dense vegetation rising in a tangle of trees and vines, epiphytes and shrubs, with the occasional troop of monkeys sitting at the side of the road watching cars go by. It also cooled noticeably as we climbed, to an almost Victoria-like climate. Mists rolled across the hilltops – every corner revealed a new eyepopping vista, of mist-shrouded mountains or the sweeping, patchwork plains below. And at last we began to approach Kodai. (Nobody really calls it Kodaikanal – just Kodai – pronounced “ko-dee.”) The road is narrow all the way up, with the occasional fruitseller sitting on the edge, banana leaves spread with cut-up jackfruit or pyramids of coconuts, and an intermittent flow of human traffic – children, women carrying bundles of firewood on their heads, old men. The buildings along the side of the Ghat Road are, for the most part, actual buildings (as opposed to tin/plastic/wood shacks), brightly painted in the same cheerful, garish way they were painted in Kenya. Schools, shops, cement walls advertising toothpaste and candy and soda, jacarandas and purple morning glory and moonflowers overflowing the walls. Also, oddly, big hillsides planted with eucalyptus trees, which made me feel a bit like I was back in Australia.

We wound up through the spread-out, colorful town, till we arrived at Seven Roads Junction, which is exactly that – seven roads, one of them the Ghat Road, that come together in a chaotic “traffic circle” – otherwise known as “circle of imminent death but not quite as imminent as Madurai, because this is, after all, a ‘small hill station’ and shouldn’t be so crazy.” The main gate to KIS’s main campus is right at the junction. Google Earth doesn’t have very good resolution on Kodaikanal, but I suggest searching “Kodaikanal Lake,” because Main Campus is right on the edge of the lake, and the outline of the lake (sort of a spread-out dark starfish, on Google Earth) is distinguishable. You’ll at least get the idea that I’m in the middle of the mountains somewhere.

Anyhow, pulled into the Seven Roads Junction traffic circle, then in through the main gate, and after some confusing discussion between the driver and the people at the gate, I was driven up the road a bit, past an old, mossy, stone church, a huge covered court where they hold assemblies, a huge enclosed hall where they also hold assemblies, some lovely orangey clay tennis courts, and various other structures, until at last we reached our destination: Airlee Main, formerly a girls’ dorm, and my humble home for the next couple of weeks.

I went inside, dragging my bags, and was immediately bowled over by an extremely enthusiastic student teacher from Ohio, Marie. She toured me around the house in a whirlwind, explaining that she’d already bought various necessities, she was here to teach science and math, she’d only been here a day and a half, she was delighted to be at KIS, etc. Another girl was also there: Yisu, the new full-time Korean teacher. KIS has two categories of employees: teachers, who sign 3-year contracts and are paid a salary and receive various benefits like free airfare and shipment of one cubic meter of belongings; and volunteers, who sign one- or two-semester contracts, receive a volunteer stipend of 2000 rs/month, and various benefits like free room, board, furniture, bedding, appliances, etc. Marie is a volunteer for a semester, Yisu is on a 3-year contract. (I’m not sure how binding the 3-year contracts are; I get the impression that people break them all the time.)

Yisu was at first a very quiet, extremely cute Korean girl of few English words, with whom I thought I would have a difficult time communicating… However, after about a week of hanging around with her, all language barriers were destroyed in favor of some excellent conversations and a long-running joke about being mistaken for students. “I’m going to come over and visit…”

“You’re not allowed out of your dorm after hours, young lady!”

“Please, teacher! Make an exception for me… Please?”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I settled into the loft in Airlee Main and began exploring Kodai with my new roommates, and some of the other new teachers, though we didn’t meet most of them till the workshops started on Tuesday. On Sunday I actually went to church, the first time I’d ever been to a proper service in my entire life. This was motivated by two major reasons: 1. I wanted to see what it was like, since it’s such an important part of life here – at this point, I can say that for many it is the MOST important part of life here, and 2. I was terrified at the idea of being left all alone in Airlee while literally EVERYONE else went to church – I wasn’t ready to completely jump off the social ship at that point. So I went. It was a nice service, and I really enjoyed parts of it; however, for others I was squirming in my seat, both because I disagreed with what was being said, and because I just felt out of place. It wasn’t my place; they weren’t my beliefs. However, I’m glad I went.

After church, we went to the Sunday Market, which was much more my speed – a bustling vegetable market that’s set up every Sunday in a lowered cement marketplace. Shouting, confusion, all kinds of bizarre vegetables being weighed out in rusty metal scales against burnished, ancient weights. Things I’d never seen; new versions of familiar vegetables; an endless supply of absolutely fantastic mangoes; and at the end, the meat section, where you can buy live chickens and have them slaughtered and plucked right before your eyes, where slippery fish flip and squirm in buckets of dirty water and piles of dead fish lie on plastic sheets waiting to be chopped up by the fish-seller – blackened machete on stained wooden block, bits of scale and flesh flying everywhere – where fatty shanks of goat or mutton hang from hooks and are hacked at with long knives while the ubiquitous stray dogs dart among the customers’ ankles, searching for scraps. I like to watch the meat market section, though I’m a bit leery of buying anything. I’m sure I’ll get over that. Cook it well, that’s all you need… (Mom, I know you’re looking concerned right now.)