Boston to India...

Hi everybody… it’s taken me a bit to get this set up, on account of a very busy first few days in India and some highly intermittent internet connection and laptop charging. We’re working out the latter two. But here it is—the reluctant, peer-pressure induced blog of a humble American ex-pat :)

The trip was by all accounts a success. Some 43 hours after setting out from my apartment in Somerville, I arrived at my new home at the CMC campus in Vellore, India. It was a long, disorienting trip that felt simultaneously like the lucid dreams of an afternoon nap, and the most epic college all-nighter of my life. We took the train from Boston to Newark, NJ, then flew to Frankfurt, then to Delhi where we had a cozy nine hour layover. Then we hopped a domestic flight from Delhi to Chennai (after convincing some heavily-armed security guards that we were, in fact, the three obviously-American passengers booked for that flight). We were picked up in Chennai by car and brought the remaining two and a half hours to Vellore. With each leg of the trip, the hour on my watch became increasingly meaningless, while our trio became evermore the minority… Though I was thoroughly warned beforehand, I have yet to adjust to the stares.

My first impressions of India are many and scattered… honestly, I can’t seem to keep my eyes wide enough to take it all in. This place is a veritable bombardment of my human perception. From the moment we stepped off the plane in Chennai, I could see the heat and congestion pressing against the front glass of the little airport. Hundreds of people yelling, old British cars honking… the smells of tires and exhaust mingling with some amalgam of human body odors and incense ripped my nostrils into the reality that waited outside. I was nearly run down by a moped before I groggily made my way to the car, where I pretty quickly passed out.

I woke from time to time during the drive to gaze out the window. The roads from Chennai to Vellore are a site that cannot easily be described. The ‘lanes’—though well marked—are merely suggestions, and do little to guide the insane milieu of cars, buses, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, rickshaws, autorickshaws, pedestrians, and livestock all wrestling, honking, and yelling for their share of the road. I will never again complain about Boston traffic or Jersey/New York/Connecticut drivers… the scene feels like something out of a video game. At one point, I blinked open my eyes to see an infant just inches from my window, clutching her mother on the back of a moped driven by the father, with another small child in front of him.

The human landscape alone is something to behold. So, so many people EVERYWHERE. I'll leave you with this shot out the window on a road not far from the college campus, which could be repeated over and over for miles with hundreds more people crammed into the frame…

I have lots more to write soon... that start on 'first impressions' barely scratched the surface. missing everyone back home! Much love, ~ Alicia