Stepwell and Ganesh Chathuthi

These pictures are of my salwar suit material and of the stepwell -

So I’ve been trying to use Hindi here and there – the little I know has actually been relatively useful. I was ordering at the IIM cantina today and said “ek mineral water aur ek Manchurian gravy” and the guys seemed really amused by my few Hindi words. They kept repeating my order and emphasizing “ek” and then they asked if I wanted eggs “unda” It was amusing. So today is the start of this big festival in honor of the god Ganesh, Ganesh Chathuthi - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesh_Chaturthi Last night we drove down this street where they were making thousands of statues of him in all different sizes and spray painting them. All along the roads they were selling them. And they have these like party trucks that are open in the back and full of guys banging drums around huge ganesh statues and walking around the streets with drums dancing and things. Actually there was even an elephant walking around for the celebration. It looks really fun! They even had a big statue and ceremony on IIM’s campus and so we asked one of the students a bit about it. They cover the face of the statue with paper the night before because you weren’t supposed to see it til today. We walked around for quite awhile today trying to find the street this was on, but we just couldn’t find it!

We also went to the step well here in the city today for Caryn’s project. The autodriver didn’t even know where it was – he had to ask someone else, and it did seem to be out in the middle of nowhere. We were glad we had gone together actually, but we had the driver wait for us, and he walked around with us as we looked. I guess I’ll be learning more about the step wells from Caryn as she learns more, but here’s the bit I know. Since Gujarat and Rajasthan are quite dry, they built these wells with steps down to them back in maybe the 1400s, so the architecture is quite lovely. Unfortunately all but one is in use now, but they used to be a hangout spot for people since they were cooler. So there are multiple levels and built and carved with stone in intricate designs. I will post pics. This one in town is called Dada Hari Wav. Then we went to Manek Chowk in the old city which is a kind of market with lots of shops selling traditional jewelry and such. The streets are narrower, and a guy wanted to show us this old muslim burial ground. People were pretty interested to see two white girls walking around there! I saw some pretty salwar suit material with stamped patterns, so I bought a burnt orange and tan set to have stitched into a suit.

So we went to Uncle Sam’s Pizza for dinner because Caryn wanted something not too spicy. Way finding here is so odd – I looked up the restaurant on Google, but even when we told the auto driver the streets he didn’t know. We had to pull out the map, point out the intersection, and then ask some guys who spoke English for help. Even when we got there, the restaurant wasn’t there! So finally another auto driver understood and got us there – and it was actually really close to CEPT! So the inside had all these American things on the walls – four presidents- Lincoln, Bush, JFK, and Clinton. I think Michael Jordan was on one wall, and Micheal Jackson videos were playing so it was pretty amusing. Then we ended up accidently ordering 8 big pieces of garlic bread plus pizza with baby corn on it, it was called something like Corn Fest. They were probably thinking, man, these American girls sure like their garlic bread…