A Day in the Life...

     I can tell that school in Sikkim has finally started.  I felt such a sense of accomplishment after a day as Acting Principal during which many things happend. During the day yesterday:

1. The geysers (hot water heaters) were fixed in the rooms where the student boarders live, and the water filters were changed in the water filtration system. To get this done, it required a call to a board member last week who called in a special favor with someone he knows who fixes geysers.  Then the principal's assistant had to arrange for the man to get a ride to school (no one wants to travel all the way to the jungle to fix our equipment!).  By the way, there is no running hot water in Sikkim. Every bathroom and shower has it's own small hot water heater. So I just found out today that besides the ones that needed to be fixed, we now need to purchase 6 more for the new Boys' Hostel. That means 6 more pieces of equipment that will need to be fixed within a month or two!
2. The water tank that provides water for the kitchen staff and the cooks was cleaned.  Many students in the hostel got gastroenteritis before anyone paid attention to the water tank.  Even I had noticed that there was often sand in the rice.  Come to find out, the tank was so dirty there were worms living in it.
3. The Head of Administration came to see that she is not taking, and does not want to take, the responsibility for being the person in charge of the administrative side of the school. She has been expected to oversee so much, but really doesn't want to take on that level of responsibility now that the school has grown so large. The problem is, where is the school going to find someone capable of taking on that kind job?
4. I informed the principal's assistant that she was getting a lower raise than she wanted. She cried over it and then shared with me that she had expected to get a 50% raise this year because she had been offered a government job at the higher salary and turned down that job last year (unbeknownst to anyone at Taktse).  She has never told her family how much money she makes because she feels bad about the amount she makes, and her family expects her to send money home regularly.  Her mother really wanted her to take the government job and she refused to because she felt she would learn more working at Taktse.  Still, she was counting on the fact that her salary would be raised to the government job level so that she wouldn't have to feel bad anymore about her salary.
5. I received a suggestion from a board member to buy pressed-leaf plates to use during snack rather than using old student papers. Right now snack is handed out on old worksheets that students completed in their classrooms. It never dawned on me until yesterday -- who spends all that time collecting and cutting old worksheets for our snack?
6. Five students were sent to the hospital for various illnesses -- a broken foot, back pain, vomiting. They rode down in the school car but came back to school in a taxi.

This is all in a regular day at Taktse.  Ms. Thapa, Headmistress of the Lower School, joked with me that I will spend the next two weeks, while I am standing in for Pintso, experiencing things I never thought I would see as the Acting Head of a school....

     Still, here is the scene I witnessed at the end of the day: Ms. Sonam Topden teaching 2 young girls how to throw a cricket ball. Such fun!

Sweet 16 in Sikkim

Grace's 16th birthday was this last Saturday.  It was a beautiful sunny day and she enjoyed a chance to relax and eat Peanut M'n'M's throughout the day!

Here is the cake that Corrina and I made her. The cake mix and frosting traveled all the way from Beverly....In the evening we had a dinner party with her friends from school -- veg momo's and vegetable soup were on the menu.  We had hoped for chicken momo's, but because of the Buddhist New Year holiday called Lohsar, you aren't allowed to buy/eat meat killed in Sikkim for two weeks.

During the day, Grace and Corrina had some fun playing with a paper airplane Corrina received in a Kinder Egg Packet.  Here are some candid shots!

The Road to Darjeeling

Last weekend, we took a long-weekend trip to Darjeeling.  The road from Gangtok to Darjeeling is about 4-5 hours by car, and involves crossing state lines from Sikkim to West Bengal.  Like the trip up to Gangtok from Bagdogra (see "The Trip to Gangtok"), the roads were "rustic", and the view right out your car window was precipitous.  This blog entry is recounting of the highlights of the trip, as captured in pictures.

The trip from Gangtok to Darjeeling involves first driving from Gangtok to Rangpo -- which is a path shared with the trip from the Bagdogra airport to Gangtok.  The overall distance to Darjeeling from Gangtok is just over 100 km.  

Not far from Rangpo, the main "border town" in, there is a population of monkeys that hang out on roads.  Monkeys! 

For most of the weekend, it was overcast and rainy.  For the drive to Darjeeling, the otherwise stunning panoramas we expected to see along the road were muted by mist.

For the most part, roads run along ridges, with steep slopes above/below to either side.  Every now and then, you need to cross a river or a ravine.  For the slightly smaller roads crossing not too large ravines, there is a smorgasbord of bridges.  I don't think any two are alike.  Here are a couple examples.

Once we had crossed the boarder into West Bengal, it wasn't long before the landscape changed quite dramatically from what you see in Sikkim due the presence of tea plantations.  Tea plantations transform the scrubby/jungly landscape into regular arrangements of knee-to-waist high tea bushes.  I was surprised at how aesthetically pleasant to agricultural-order these plantations were. 

In Darjeeling, we stayed at the "Sunflower Hotel".  The "Sunflower Hotel" is a 3-star hotel located right on the main marg (which means "market place") in Darjeeling.  The hotel was… acceptable.  Not quite what an American would expect from a three star hotel.  The dining room was shabby, with ripped and dingy furniture.  One of the rooms smelled bad.  Both bathrooms were full of mold.  There was no heating -- so it was the same temperature inside that it was outside.  Power went out 2-3 times a day during our stay.  But enough with the complaining.  There was live television -- which the kids were glued to through a solid chunk of our stay.  One of the rooms had a bed, a couch, and a chair, which made it quite pleasant for all 4 of us to hang out together.  The hotel supplied a portable space heater that made one of our rooms warm enough.   The view out of our room was pretty good.  Here's a snapshot of the typical view...

…and here's a snapshot towards the end of our stay when the sun almost broke through the clouds...

We enjoyed the tea in Darjeeling.  With most of our meals, we had tea.  We went to "High Tea" at the Windsor hotel, where we took this panoramic shot looking west...

Corrina and I snuck out one afternoon and went to a tea shop (Nathmull's) and tried some fancy tea -- an Autumn Flush (3rd flush) variety.  It was delicious.

The drive back from Darjeeling wasn't as cloudy as the trip there or most of our stay.  Here's a sample of the the view looking over the small stone barrier at the edge of the road.

While still in West Bengal, our driver stopped in a small town (there were probably a total of 10 buildings) where he purchased some meat.  Here's a snapshot of the town...

Our driver (Asheesh) is the person standing in the doorway on the left.  Here he's chatting with a fellow in front of the local tuck shop.  The elderly couple in front was filling bags with sand.  The shop on the right side was a butcher shop.  Behind the couple (white shirt + blue shirt), displayed proudly to the world, was a variety of animal parts hanging on hooks.  This is a sight we never saw in Sikkim.  I don't know if it is due to differences in regulations or customs between states.

There were quite a few chickens wandering the little town, you can see one in the above picture.  there was a mother chicken with some babies that the kids thought looked quite silly -- so they made me take their picture.  The mother hen, and her chicks, had feathers that stood nearly on-end.  Quite unusual.

The Himalayan Metropolises

Honking Without Ire

Driving in India isn't like driving in the States.

Roads are narrow, pedestrians are plentiful, and the "rules of the road" are far more organic, and in some ways civil.  In larger cities like Mumbai or Chennai, cars, autos, motorbikes, scooters, and trucks clog the roads.  If you haven't been to a large Indian city and seen the traffic for yourself, it is a thing to behold.  Here's a snapshot of sample traffic in Chennai...

When you first experience this kind of traffic, it may appear chaotic.  Cars aren't in their lanes, there's constant honking, and vehicles are often only a couple inches apart -- quite literally.  While Gangtok isn't as crowded as Chennai, the streets are extremely narrow, and in addition to all the vehicles, shared with pedestrians.  The picture below was taken from the back seat of a taxi driving out of downtown Gangtok.  The really amazing thing about this street is that it is 2-way. When a car comes from the opposite direction, there isn't room for pedestrians and they have to move all the way over to allow passage of the cars.

In both Chennai and Gangtok, these crowded and narrow roads work.  The chaos we westerners perceive is, in fact, a remarkably efficient means of getting a lot of vehicles and people through a small area.  The secret is in the honking.

In Inda, you are expected to honk to let others know you are there.  Nearly every truck (called "Goods Carriers") has a custom painted "Blow Horn" request on their back gate.  Here are a few examples...

Trucks know they are probably going to be a bit slower than the smaller and more nimble taxis.  On narrow streets, curvy mountain highways, and everywhere in between, cars are passing each other _all the time_.  In the States, it is relatively uncommon to pass another car on a one-lane road.  In India it is expected.  No one gets upset that there's a slow car in front of them, they just pass them.  When passing them, as the truck has requested on its tailgate, the passing car taps its horn and the truck moves to make room.

Honking is a form of communication between drivers in India.  It is not something done to express anger, like it often is in the States.  In the traffic snarls of Chennai, squeezing past a car in front of you is not problem, just tap on your horn so that the car in front knows you are there.  Between cars, you can almost think about honking as a means of echo-location, informing other drivers that might not see that you are there.

In Gangtok, roads are rarely straight for long.

         

Drivers will honk their horn as they near a blind corner to tell other drivers, and pedestrians, that they are there.  This pro-active, non-ire-inspired form of communication is essential to these narrow, often congested roads working so well.

 

Entrepreneurial India

The people of India have an entrepreneurial spirit.  

In previous trips I've made to India, first in the early 1980's to Mumbai, and then in 2011to Chennai, I've seen an emergence of a technology-driven middle class economy.  Many places in the Indian mainland have a thriving middle class of talented software engineers, and an emerging industrial base (e.g., Tata Motors).  This was something I didn't see at all in my earlier trip to India, where I remember opulence of hotels in downtown aside beggars and poverty, and outside the city a poor agrarian setting.

In this trip, I have seen very little poverty.  I see an economy that is, as far as I can tell, thriving.  There is a clear division between the poor and the rich, between the traditional and the new, strongly western-influenced, dross of culture.  Back in america, when you go into an Indian restaurant, you are almost always in a setting made to feel as authentically Indian as possible, from the art of the walls to the background music.  Here in India, restaurants try to be as western as possible.  Corrina and I were in a restaurant in downtown Gangtok yesterday ("Bakers Cafe") and we heard a stream of top 40 American pop tunes, and all the posters on the wall looked like they were pulled from a poster shop in a strip mall in suburban Boston.

But I digress.  The point for this blog posting is the entrepreneurial spirit you see throughout much of India, and very strongly here in Gangtok.  Here in Gangtok, as you walk through the "suburban" outskirts of the city, in what are otherwise completely residential areas, you can't go for more than a couple houses before seeing a small business, run from a hut in someone's front yard...

… or from the bottom floor of their house.  Most of these shops are what are locally called "tuck" shops -- places where you buy "tuck".  Tuck is a slang term for a snack or other tidbit of food.  In the pictures above and below, you can see strings of small bags of chips hanging from the ceiling, and counters adorned with gum and candy.  Often, you'll see no one tending the shop, as they are likely tending to duties around the house, playing with their kids, or lounging on a comfy bench behind the counter.

Around the corner and up the road from Chandmari house, is a monastery -- the Enchey Monastary (pronounced "Inch-ay").  Right next to the entrance to the monastery is a blue house with a tuck shop in the ground floor.  Below you'll see a picture, complete with a buddhist monk acting ask proprietor.  Like I said -- entrepreneurial spirit.

Some folks aren't satisfied with having _just_ a tuck shop in their basement.  Here you can see the Sumpurna Bar & Restaurant run from the ground-floor of a home.  Not to lose out on any potential business, to the right of the entrance to this fine dining establishment is, you guessed it, another tuck shop.

Not all the local entrepreneurial spirit is manifest as tuck shops.  Across the street from Chandmari house is a hair salon ("Professional Salon with Cosmo Treatment for skin & Hair" in case you can't read the sign)...

…and a hole-in-the-wall liquor store, where 22-oz beers cost 50 rupees and 750-ml of "special" local whisky can be purchased for 175 rupees (that's about $3.50).

My Continuing Love Affair with the Spaceo Ride

     Today I got back on the road to school in the Spaceo.  What a joy!  Mr. Bempa is behind the wheel again, as Mr. Santos left the school (the rumor circulating is that he started to drive his own taxi and ran away with a woman).
     As often as I have taken this road up to school when we were here in the Fall, today it was as if I were on a completely new road -- during this ride, for some reason, I looked up along the way only to be surprised, shocked, impressed by the sheer cliffs above with brush clinging to the shale and rock, by the hills that climbed steeply and majestically into the sky.  It was beautiful in a totally new way from anything I had seen in the past.  I even saw a walkway strewn with prayer flags along a precipice, where is the path that could take me to THAT?
     I also realized that only by traveling at a speed less that 30 mph have I been able to see any of the views I have witnessed in the car rides to and from school.  There is the time to take a good long look as we pass by, something I could never do during my 1 hour daily ride to or from Gann with Laila, where we were either careening down the highway at ungodly speeds or glued to the bumper in front of us trying to make sure no one cut into our lane right in front of us.
     Even though we just arrived, I can feel myself preparing to miss moments like these that can only happen on the Upper Road to school.

We're not in Kansas Anymore

When we arrived on Monday night, it was dark.  It wasn't until the following morning that, in the light of day, that the extreme vertical nature of this land became apparent.   There are hilly cities back in the states, such as San Francisco and Seattle.  But they have nothing on this place.  If you take a snapshot of one of the hilliest drives in the states, Lombard Street in San Francisco...

...you'll get a bit of a sense of what all of Gangtok is like -- but still it hardly holds a candle to Gangtok.

Here's a view from up the street from Chandmary House, where we are staying… 

In addition to the density of houses spread across the steep hillsides, there's a plethora of prayer flags and rebar.  Rebar?  Yeah.  A large fraction of houses here are in a near-constant state of construction.  Most of the houses are built of concrete.  Concrete floors supported by concrete posts reinforced with rebar.  The way construction works here is you save up a bunch of money, and then construct until the money runs out, you then save up again and construct again, and the building is completed in that fashion.  The upper unfinished floors are barren slabs of concrete with rebar sprouting where future support pillars will be erected.  It makes the landscape almost prickly in appearance.

Cheers,

Glenn & Corrina

The Trip to Gangtok

Chris, Grace, Corrina and I left Boston on Saturday, February 2 at 9PM.  We flew first to London and then to Delhi.  I was impressed with how modern and clean the Delhi airport is.  The last time I was in India, I few in to Chennai. The Chennai airport looks like it has seen heavy use many decades without a significant update or face lift.  The Delhi airport, in contrast, was much like any modern airport in the US.  The artwork throughout the airport has a distinctive Indian theme.  Here's an image of a 10-foot tall sculptured hand standing above the customs entryway.

At Delhi, we had a 10 hour stop.  Chris knew about a pay-by-the-hour hotel in the Delhi airport, and we stayed there for about six hours.  The rooms were teeny, so we had to get two for the four of us.  They were very comfortable.  It made the extended stay in Delhi quite enjoyable.  At the end of our stay, we caught a flight from Delhi to Bagdogra.  

From Bagdogra, we had a long car ride up to Gangtok.  The ride took about 5 hours, which is about what was expected.  What's a bit funny is that if you use Google Maps to view the route from Bagdogra to Gangtok (there is really only one way to go) it says it should take only 2 hours.  Ha!  Google maps needs to be updated a wee bit to take into account actual driving conditions.

The first hour and half of the car ride was through a region called Siliguri.  It was a fairly typical (vibrant, dirty, crowded) view of "suburban" India.  Siliguri is known for it's furniture making and we saw a lot of small workshops making everything from statues to bed frames.

After Siliguri, we passed into the most heavily forested area I had ever seen in India (though I have only been to Mumbai and Chennai).  This area is the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary.  Right after the sanctuary, the road got a bit smaller, and started climbing in elevation.  We were on our way into the Himalayas!  The road from here on out was like no road I've ever been on.  At times, the road was a single car's width, where traffic in one direction had to wait for cars to pass coming from the other.  There were, in most cases, concrete blocks or posts along the side of the road that ostensibly prevented drivers from going off the steep cliff on the edge of the road.  In the US, this road would have had large steel and concrete guard rails along its length.  Here in India, the cars drove much slower, but more responsibility is given to the driver to be safe.

The drive up into the HImalayas was quite stunning.  Garishly decorated trucks and buses mixed with small economy cars and jeeps navigated the often unpaved road.  Passing slower moving vehicles was common even though there was no passing lane -- there were no lanes!  The view from the road showed steep, sometimes near vertical hills rising up.

And on the other side, precipitous cliffs that dropped off tens to hundreds of feet.

We drove almost a hundred kilometers up into the Himalayas, and saw a lot of people working on the roads.  We saw no heavy machinery in use.  Instead, individual people were doing heavy labor by hand.

In the above picture you can see six women loading concrete by hand into a large form (to the bottom left).  The woman on the top left was helping the woman with the shovel.  You can see a rope she is holding that is tied to the base of the shovel.  When the shovel load of concrete is lifted, she adds her strength to the load by pulling on the rope.  

More soon about Gangtok.

Your guest blogger, Glenn