Why hello my faithful fanclub. I have just arrived in Nagpur, the departure point for Lindsey and my thelma and louise 36 spiritual caves and a McVeggie surprise christmas in india trip. Just got back from a tiger reserve with no tigers, just a guy with a stick to make tiger footprints, park rangers playing badmitten, vllagers, and a lot of cows. Gandhi was a cool dude, but I am sure you already knew that. Cows are adorable. More to come when I get a compter made after 1997. Happy Christmakwanzika and I Love you if I dont get to speak to you all before this most special time of the year!

Random Tanzania photos in no particular order

Say Hello to New Delhi

Namaste!

I have happily arrived in New Delhi, and neither terrorists nor pollution nor insane amounts of homework can upset my good mood.

I am living in Vasant Kunj - an area in South Delhi, with an amazing family consisting of a mother and 19 year old and 12 year old daughters. They are hilarious and find our (mis)adventures in Tanzania pretty much the funniest thing ever. Today, we are making them pie for thanksgiving and they are taking us to chinese food for lunch. Last night, 19 year old joohee (spelling?) showed us the paper mache she made in school and I thought she said paper-my-shitty and we all almost peed ourselves laughing. We went to Chandi Chowk - a beautiful market in old delhi with an awesome old mosque, and while there we thought it would be a good idea to eat sketchy candy on the street made out of milk and mcdonald's "shake shake fries" - both very bad ideas. The candy had gone bad, tasted like sour milk, but we kept trying different pieces hoping it would get better. Then we got home and showed our homestay sister, and she burst into laughter cause they tasted nasty cause they had gone bad, not because indians have bad taste. And shake shake fries are just straight up nasty - mcdonalds india is no better than the original. We are foolish Americans.

Our classes are amazing - we have amazing guest lecturers and our new ecology teacher is the former director of research for earthwatch. Smitu, our program director, had to leave class because he made a presentation to the people from the European Community negotiating the terms of a free trade agreement between India and the EU - badass. This country of contradictions is quite a mystery to me. A mall with Gucci and Diore next to slums. 70% farmers with the second largest number of billionares in the world. My mind may explode with information, but luckily there is lots of chai to compensate for sleep deprivation.

Welcome to maasailand

We drive on the most bumpy "road" I have ever seen for 3 hours. There is so much dust that it looks like we are under water- under brown brown water. it is so dry and dusty that we are all coughing and my boogers are black. we stay in a fenced in ngo overnight and finally get to walk to our homestays after a day of lectures. on the way there, the rains come! the most intense, mindblowing rain I have ever seen. everything about my entire being is wet. a river emerges in minutes that we must cross to get to the boma, out home for the next two days. as we arrive, the clouds part and i see the most beautiful sky and sunset I have ever seen in my whole live - and the barack obama song (a super popular song that its playing everywhere) plays on our portable radio. everyone - us, our translator, our warriors, the kids start singing. then my family takes off my clothes, redresses me in maasai clothes, dries my stuff over the fire, and feeds us amazing chai. in the night, it starts raining again - the roof is doing nothing but adding poop to the rain, and we feel very very icky and flea bitten. then at 330 am our mother/sister/ preggers 18 year old new bride pulls us out of bed and we dont know whats going on. then she pulls up the cowhide we were sleeping on and puts us under it! we were too stupid to get under the covers! also apparently they couldnt rethatch the roof cause in the dry season there is no grass. and they thought we were amazingly good luck cause we brought the rain. and i got to milk cows and wash dishes with charcoal. the maasai warriors taught us how to jump incredibly high, something that usually men only do in the traditional dance style but traditional gender roles and women being silenced is being broken down before our eyes - very very cool. also got some amazing maasai jewelry and plaid as gifts. some great internal conflicts regarding female circumcision and the role of traditional societies in the globalized world.

once again my post is incoherent and makes no sense, but thats literally how things sound in my head right now.

Just got back from a two day safari in Lake Manyara National Park and the Ngorongoro Crater. The nature was absolutely mindblowing. Highlight was probably the vultures and marabou storks chowing down on a newly dead water buffalo. We stayed at this campsite and there were zebras and hyenas literally right outside our tents and the last night there the biggest elephant in the entire world walked right through dinner to drink water out of the storage tank. Our guide spiro was a masai who insisted on being called jack sparrow. It was pretty frustrating to sit in a huge land cruiser and be escorted around to see nature, and see a billion other land rovers doing the same thing. Somehow it seems like nature should be able to just be and not have a bunch of fat white smokers messing it up all the time. And that $1000 a night hotels have free reign, yet the masai are allowed only very limited use of the land to make their livelihood.
In Arusha we got to go the the UN Tribunal for the Rwandan genocides and got to meet lots of big cheezes. Very insane that the UN built the fanciest building and employs over 800 international emplyees, yet has only had 60 trials in 10 years. But I still like international governance, what can I say.

It's our last day in Zanzibar, very strange and sad seeing as I finally feel like I am getting to know the place. Tonight, our homestay mom is taking us to go get our hands henna -ed ! Yay! Last nigt we had the most amazing dinner with them (the family that speaks english, not the grandma's whose house we sleep at who speaks none) and it was some of the most amazing food I have ever had - everything was homemade, even the mango chile and the bread. My homestay father decided my Zanzibari name is Mariam because Nadine is too difficult to say.

For independent research day, a couple of us went up to Nungwi, one of the biggest tourist areas. The hotels were absolutely mind blowing - so many, so fancy, and expensive! There is a large wall in between the village and the hotels - mzungu's (white people) on one side and swahili on the other. The villagers have to walk 20 minutes for water cause the hotels have run all the wells dry, and one hotel had an outdoor shower for each bungalow. We felt like we fit in more with the local people than the tourists - or like we really didnt fit in anywhere. The people in the village were so nice and wonderful - I think they loved us cause we actually try to speak swahili and wear kangas instead of bikini's. On the tourist side, there is lobster for $29 dollars, and on the swahili side, chapati and ugale for 300 shilling, 29 cents. We took the most intense dalla dalla ride to get there - a small truck had 23 adults, two toddlers, many chickens, eggs, and sugar cane on the roof. The drive was completely beautiful - villages, people, trees, farms.

Now we are off to the north to see coffee, sisal, "wild wild africa", mt kiliminjaro, and the masaai.

Zanzibar, Part 2

For the past 2 days I have been at Urua and Pete - two villages on the East Coast of Zanzibar, where most tourists go and where the beautiful coral reefs and beaches are. In Pete, we got to see the last Red Colobus Monkeys in the world at the Jozani National Forest, learned about traditional healing methods, and I got to farm cassava with my homestay father. Pretty cool attempt at trying to get conservation to help the local people, if not entirely effective.

In Uroa, we saw hotels taking away land from the local people , women seaweed farmers being exploited by multinational corperations, fishermen building amazing handmade boats called dhows, the most amazingly beautiful multicolored starfish and blowfish, a fresh fish market, and mangroves (amazing!) that are being killed by the rising tides that are a side effect of global warming. The people are so beautiful and intelligent - very very friendly and polite (even the small children), intelligent (most speak 3 languages, sail, fish, build amazing things by hand, and farm) and so so wealthy in natural resources - yet all of the benefits of these things so to outisiders - who are clearly continuing on the legacy of colonial exploitation in my opinion. Just because they are nice, our guides took us out swimming at a sand bar - so so beautiful. We also all got to sleep on the beach in front of the B & B we stayed at and ate fish fresh from the fish auction.