India: Part 2

Not the post you expected? I figure for those, if anyone actually does, who read I blog you would rather read the second part of my departure from Kazakhstan. That will be the next post but at the moment I am trying to settle in back in the US and want to give myself a few days to get away from the whole thing so I can look back on it from an less emotionally dominated viewpoint. That being said Kazakhstan Part 2 will definitely be my next post but until then here are some pictures from the second leg of my India journey including the cities Jaipur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer. Also a big congrats to my fellow blogger Renxkyoko on her nominations for multiple blog awards!

Due to the fact that that there are a lot more cities and sights in this posts I had to be more selective with what pictures I chose and those that I did choose may have smaller captions. We’ll start with on of my favorite cities in all of India, it’s called Jaipur and it’s nicknamed the Pink city for all the building in the old town that have a pinkish hue to the exteriors of the buildings.

This first set of pictures are of the Jal Mahal Palace on the Man Sagar lake.

The Jal Mahal Palace:

The next image is a shot of the lake itself. I’m kinda a sucker for nature shots and some of the views I saw in India just stuck with me. I’m not sure if it’s the color combinations of the sky and earth together or what but there was just something about this next shot that I fell in love with. This is Man Sagar lake and the hills behind it.

The next picture was taken on the way up to the Amber Fort. Early in the morning you can ride them up to the fort on the top of the mountain. I love elephants and this was one of my goals for India but, sadly for me, we got there a little too late and I missed out on the chance because they were being taken back outside the city to a place to eat and keep cool during the sweltering August days.

After a few minutes of driving we reached the main draw in Jaipur, the Amber Fort. It’s an old fort situated on a hilltop in Amer, a small area adjoining Jaipur. The first is a picture of the fort from the bottom of the hill that the fort sits upon.

After you go through the main gate you enter a big courtyard where you buy tickets to walk through the fort and take pictures. This next shot is from the top of the stairs you go up to enter the rest of the fort, aka after the door where they take your tickets.

Once you get inside you see an incredibly beautiful garden and fountain. Sadly no one was allowed to go down and walk around the garden.

This next picture is probably my favorite I took while I was in India. It was just some marble latticework that you could see through. I loved how the light shone through and illuminated some part and made the contrast between the marble in the foreground stand out against the scenery in the background.

The next city we went to was called Bikaner. In Bikaner there is really only one main attraction, that being the Rat Temple that’s about 30 mins outside of the city. You read that right, I said Rat Temple, it’s a place where people worship rats. Interesting side note, you have to take off your shoes before you go inside, and before you ask, that means exactly what you think it means; you walk around the whole temple either barefoot or in socks with a multitude of rats running around the place. Also it’s considered “lucky” if a rat runs over your foot, needless to say everyone leaves as very lucky people.

The temple itself isn’t much of a draw because it isn’t particularly beautiful or anything, so I’m skipping pics of the outside of the temple and getting right into the good stuff. This first picture is of the outside of the main shrine; no one is allowed to take pictures inside the shrine itself so this as close as I could get.

They also feed the rats!

Also it’s considered extremely lucky if you can spot the white rat in the temple. So in short you’re all welcome for the luck that I’m about to bestow on you, that is if you can spot the white rat!

The last city I’ll show in this post is Jaisalmer. Jaisalmer is known as the “Golden City” because of the yellowish tint around the city from all the yellow sandstone around it; the whole “Golden City” thing is probably helped by the fact that Jaisalmer is in the middle of the Thar Desert.

During our first day, out of two, in Jaisalmer we wandered around the main fort in town. Seeing as most of the city’s population still lives within the massive fort this was also the main bazaar and restaurant area. We walked around and bought a few small things like scarves that make turbans; said turban/scarves will come in handy later! Here is the entrance to the fort from the bottom of the hill.

While I took a few pictures in and around the fort most of the pictures I took over these two days were during our overnight camel safari. This is the start of the safari when we left out from the small village in the desert, here is a pic of Daniel doing his best Indiana Jones impression. Notice the Turban/Scarf!

Next is a picture Daniel took of me and my Turban/Scarf!

After a little while of riding we stopped and took a break during the middle of the day in the desert. Some of you out there know my thoughts on camels; for you who don’t, I’ll be succinct, I can’t stand them. Though I must admit that this guy wasn’t all bad, I guess. Too bad I never got around to naming him.

After our break we got back on our camels and rode to a group of sand dunes on the horizons.

When we reached that sand dunes the sun was still up but due to an approaching storm the sky started to darken and I thought the sun against the darkening sky was an interesting contrast.

This last picture is of nothing particularly special but is one of which I’ve become especially fond, and while most of the time I think I’m good at finding the appropriate words to sum up my thoughts at the end of a post; I think in this case American artist Andrew Wyeth says it much, much better than I ever could.

“It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.“

GO BIG BLUE

On a bit of a lighter note here is a video of my 11th grade class during my last day in Shymkent.

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The Long Goodbye: Part 1 of my departure from Kazakhstan

While I’m waiting until after I’ve left Kazakhstan to post this I’m actually writing on the 28^th of November (last day in Kaz) while sitting around a coffee shop and trying to get my thoughts together after what has been one of the most hectic and tumultuous 10 days of my life. At this point I’m sure a few of you are a bit confused as to what this post is about. Well the Peace Corps Kazakhstan program has been indefinitely suspended, meaning that all volunteers are being evacuated from Kazakhstan. After 18 years of operation in Kazakhstan the program will be shut down until further notice, and while it may be re-opened in the future it does not seem likely at the moment. While I’m sure many of you are curious about why Peace Corps (PC) is leaving Kazakhstan let me tell you now that I’m not going to address the reasons why we are leaving in this post. There were too many factors and frankly mentioning only a few of them will undoubtedly paint a skewed portrait of the lives of Peace Corps Volunteers during our service in Kazakhstan and of Kazakhstan itself. I will provide some background information about what happened over the last 10 days or so but this post will be about my reactions and feelings after I got the news, no more. This first part will only be half the story because to fit all of my thoughts and feelings into one post is just not possible without turning it into a tome that will bore everyone about 5 minutes into reading. So like any good storyteller I will just start on Wednesday the 16^th of November and take it from there. This will be from the day I found out to the train station the day I left to go to Almaty, the rest will come in the next post.

While this whole time has been very emotional, I think the day I found out was easily the most emotionally schizophrenic. Wednesday is usually one of the longest days of the week for me due to the fact that I start my day at about 7:30 in the morning and am running around and working until about 8 at night; though this particular Wednesday actually seemed like it was going to be one hell of a good day. On Wednesdays, around 9 AM, I usually give English methodology seminars to teachers at the government pedagogical institute, though on this day I was told I could sleep in and come and give my seminar at noon. This made me really happy, not because I could sleep in but rather because it allowed me to enjoy one of my favorite things in life, that being University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball. After mentally preparing myself to be without UK basketball for 27 months I was ecstatic when I checked the schedule for ESPN America on my local cable package and saw that to my surprise UK would be playing the University of Kansas in basketball at 8 am local time. Needless to say, like a kid at Christmas, I woke up at the crack of dawn out of sheer excitement. I made a pot of coffee and proceeded to watch the game and after UK won, I showered and left my apartment to give my seminar. While the content of my seminar was not particularly exciting I actually enjoyed it more than pretty much all the other seminars I had given so far in Kazakhstan. After my seminar I walked a block to the secondary school (High School) where I teach and sat to have another cup of coffee and prepare for lessons. At this point, because of the game and the seminar, I was in a really good mood when I answered the call from a PC staff member, though as you can probably guess that changed very, very quickly.

Before I even got the message that Peace Corps was closing this phone call filled me with worry. The tone of the speaker’s voice and the phrase “can you sit down and listen for to me for a few minutes because I have something to tell you” immediately made me think that I was about to be told that someone back in the USA had died. So I sat there and listened, and after a few words I realized that no one important had died but that something intimately important to me had. While I am usually very good at analyzing and finding the right words to describe my emotions, when I look back at that moment I simply can’t sum it up. I wasn’t numb, sad, angry, happy, or anything like that, there was just something visceral that I really cannot describe.

We were asked not to tell anyone until the next day while other volunteers were being told and PC prepared to break it to our schools and organizations in the best way they could. While this was, in my opinion, for the best it did, somehow, manage to make an already emotionally trying day even harder to handle. Because, after I found out I still had to conduct my two favorite English clubs and somehow cancel them without giving a concrete reason why. I pretended nothing was wrong and at the end of each club made the announcement that all volunteers would be in Almaty for a conference for a little while and that all clubs were cancelled until further notice. While this allowed myself and fellow volunteer Katie Whitmore time to prepare a statement to all our club participants about our departure and the permanent cancellation of all volunteer run clubs in Shymkent; seeing their smiling faces and hearing their goodbyes was basically just turning the knife that already felt like it was lodged in my stomach.

Even though I couldn’t focus on anything and my mind would not stop racing, after clubs being able to go back to my apartment and shut myself off from the world gave me a small bit of respite. I finally fell asleep later that night after dreading walking into school the next day after Peace Corps broke the news to them. Needless to say I didn’t sleep that well at all, I managed a few hours of fitful sleep but that was about it. I rolled around and constantly woke up until I finally gave up trying to sleep and made some coffee and took a shower while trying to mentally prepare myself for what I was about to have to deal with at school. After just sitting in my apartment listening to music for a while I eventually forced myself to leave and head to school. I had turned my phone off already because I did not want to answer any of these questions over the phone; I thought it too impersonal a way to handle such a difficult subject with people to whom I had become really close. So after I took a lot of time walking from the bus stop to my school I felt like I was mentally prepared to deal with everything. I was wrong.

Why was I wrong? Well because when I walked in there were no sad faces, no tears, no evidence that anything was out of the ordinary. At this point I honestly did know what was happening, so many different questions went through my mind, do they not care, has Peace Corps not told them yet, am I dreaming? After a few seconds of bewilderment I realized that they must not know yet, or at least I was hoping that was the case, so I went outside and called my regional manager to ask if she had called and told them yet, she told me she hadn’t been able to reach them yet and that if I was okay with it that I should just go ahead and tell them myself because I was there. This was a bit bittersweet for me, on one hand I had to break the news to them, but on the other hand I was going to be able to break the news to them personally. So I stood outside for a second and took a few deep breaths to brace myself and went inside and found all the teachers I could and asked them to meet me in the teacher’s lounge for a moment because I had something really important to tell them. When I pulled them out of their classes I think it was pretty obvious to them that something was up, so I just decided that I would just get to the point as quick as possible and basically acted like I was ripping off a band-aid and told them that Peace Corp was closing. When I looked around after I told them I saw pretty much exactly what I had expected to, that being sadness, disbelief, incomprehension; in other words, I saw on their faces all the different emotions I had felt in the last 24 hours.

Now I wish I could remember the next few days as vividly as I did the first few but looking back I honestly cannot. My life became a blur of packing and saying an endless amount of goodbyes to people at clubs, acquaintances, and students at my school. I honestly do not know if it was the best idea but before I started all of these later goodbyes I decided to memorize what I was going to say about my leaving and all that because, looking back, I do not think that I could have handled putting myself out there emotionally with every goodbye, I fell that I would have been too emotionally and mentally spent to focus on all the things I needed to get done, i.e. packing and buying train tickets to get me to Almaty on the necessary date.

So after an emotionally and mentally grueling few days Tuesday night finally came and it was time for me to meet the other volunteers in the city and board the train to Almaty. I had tried all day to prepare myself because I knew this was going to be hard in every way possible; between getting all of my bags to the station on the train, to see all the people that came to see us off, and to know that this could be the last time that I would ever see any of them, after spending a year and a half getting to know them and build relationships with them, was something I dreaded.

When I got to the station it was pretty much everything I expected it to be, namely sad. The weather was cold and dreary, even though I know it is not true, it felt like Mother Nature knew how all of us there were feeling and decided to set the weather accordingly. The further I get away from the whole situation, the more I realize those fifteen minutes at the train station were probably the hardest fifteen minutes of all of my service. Breaking the news to everyone that I was leaving was hard but seeing all these people huddled together against the cold, some with teary eyes wanting a hug or picture every five seconds was just too surreal. It was like a sad scene in a movie that tugs at your heartstrings but that you think in the back of your mind seems too much like a movie to every really happen, and at times while I was standing on the train platform I honestly thought it was too surreal to be real. Though with the final kisses, photos, and hugs I snapped back to reality and knew that it was time for me to step on the train and end so many of the relationships I had spent the last year and a half creating and strengthening.

So after what seemed like the longest fifteen minutes of my life I was sitting in my train cabin with the other three volunteers from Shymkent, and in their eyes I saw the truth in the saying by British-American novelist Amelia Barr, that being:

“All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.”

Because for all of us sitting in that train cabin, as we pulled away from the platform, we were pulling away from all the little parts of ourselves we had left with the amazing people we had met and grown to love over the past year and a half of our lives.