One of the highlights of my internship in India was visiting Amritsar.

We got up at 3 AM on Wednesday to get to Dharamsala to get our bus at 5 AM. It’s about a 6 hour ride but on a government bus, which means its literally like rows of benches and super crowded. Amritsar itself is just a typical busy, dirty, dusty and underwhelming Indian city but it’s also home to the Golden Temple, the holiest site in Sikhism, the religion of most Punjabis. The Golden Temple is AMAZING and so beautiful, its like stepping into another world when you get inside the complex. You approach the complex and everything becomes marble and immaculately clean (weird) and you have to check your shoes and socks (they aren’t allowed inside the complex even inside a bag) and cover your head (men too) and then you walk through this shallow pool of water to wash your feet and then into the temple complex.

It’s full of people 24 hours a day but it’s also so peaceful and quiet, except the hushed sounds of lots of silent people milling around and praying and the gurus inside the temple singing/chanting prayers over this loudspeaker. I spent hours just sitting on the marble on the edge of the water (which is holy water and the men bathe in it in their underwear and the women can too but they have to go in this covered section). Then you can get into the line to go into the temple itself and you get inside and it’s so crazy and ornate (also warm, I cannot even imagine what it’s like in there in the summer) and when you get out of the temple they spoon a scoop of this stuff that looks kind of like dark brown oatmeal into your hand and it tastes like sugary whole wheat flour mush and you’re supposed to eat it and then rub the oil from it on your face. 

We stayed there for free, they have what are called “niwas” which are giant hostels essentially that are free for Golden Temple visitors. You just walk into this giant courtyard just next to the temple complex and if you’re foreign this really nice Sikh guy comes over and brings you to the “foreigners room” which is basically a small section of the niwas that is a bit more private. There’s one big room with a bunch of cots and then four or five smaller rooms off it that each have three cots in them, we stayed in one of the smaller rooms (challenging to get four people onto three cots). There’s a bathroom with a tap and sink and bucket to shower in the big room but then for the toilets you go out into the courtyard and there two-story toilet “halls” with the most toilet stalls I have ever seen in one place. The whole place is full of giant rooms with cots and there are so many people that at night the whole courtyard is full of people just sleeping on blankets on the ground

The most amazing part of all of this is the Langar (which just means food in Punjabi) hall. You enter through the temple complex and you walk through another foot pool and then you walk up and a guy hands you a plate and then another guy hands you a spoon and then another one a bowl and then you shuffle into this enormous room with really long thin mats lined up in rows and you sit down on the mat and then these guys come around with baskets of fresh chapati, buckets of dal (lentils) and subjee (Indian mixed vegetables) sometimes rice and then either something similar to what they give you when you leave the temple or like a sweet rice pudding type thing. It’s totally free, and you just eat as much as you want and then take the plate down and hand it to someone and they pass it along this assembly line to like 100 people who are doing dishes. And next to that there are 100 people cooking in these absolutely enormous vats. Apparently something like 40,000 pilgrims eat there a day. I loved it, the food was incredible - I ate every meal there.

The whole temple, niwas, langar experience was absolutely incredible, I loved it so much.

Part of Naddi's team in the Golden Temple

Kyla Korvne - USA

Women's empowerment Project Manager/ Centre Coordinator in Naddi

A weekend in India

Before coming to India, I was assigned to work in Rait, Himachal Pradesh. As excited I was to get to know this community, I also wondered how much I would travel and see the areas outside of this village. I read all the blogs on this website to obtain as much information as I could about what my weekends would look like (in addition to information about the projects in Rait, of course). Regardless of how much I read, nothing could have prepared me for the adventures that were to come. 

Now that I have been in India for more than two months, I, alongside my fellow Rait-ians, have travelled every weekend to villages and cities near and far. Included in the growing list is Shimla, Kashol, Manali, Dalhousie, Chandigarh, McLeod Ganj, and Udaipur. 

Shimla will never be forgotten (not that any of these weekend adventures would be) because It was riddled with both the good and the bad.

During one of my first weekends in Rait, I went to Shimla with Sylvja and a friend from the Harike centre, Sacha. It was a perfect opportunity to un-wind and seek some adventure outside of the Rait. So at 6:00 p.m. on a Wednesday (the last day of the work-week), Sylvia asked, "So are we going somewhere?" We looked at each other with that "oh-what-the-the-hell" look, and we quickly packed small backpacks not really considering logistics or considering; we were our the door by 630pm. Let me tell you, travelling by local bus during the night is not exactly fun. To all the future interns reading this, just know that local overnight buses will become your norm. Sylvia and I must have taken the world's worst bus driven by the world's worst driver (all of the buses in india will seem like this but, seriously, this bus was bad). With foreign smells and broken windows, we spent the next eight hours of our lives holding on to our seats for dear life. We literally could not rest our grip for fear of flying to the opposite side of the bus or inadvertently elbowing some cute, unsuspecting child. Sylvia and I also did not anticipate just how cold it would be in Shimla and on the way there. By the end of those grueling eight hours, we ended up wearing literally every single piece of clothing we had brought.

Arriving at 4:00 am with no reservations, Sylvia and I proceeded to walk the hills toward the main area. For two hours, we knocked on guesthouses door to door inquiring about availability. What made it worse was the snow. Yes, it was snowing. The two pants, two shirts, and two sweaters I was wearing could not keep out the cold. We finally found a guesthouse and slept for a few hours. With tired still in our eyes, we met Sacha mid-day. The first destination was the monkey temple. As you can guess, there were monkeys everywhere, but these were no ordinary monkeys; these monkeys were monkey thieves. Slowly creeping towards us with a nonchalant and calm demeanor, one monkey was just asking for trouble. He suddenly leaped toward my head and stole the sunglasses of my face. I wish I could say that my wonderful friends, Sylvia and Sacha, jumped to my aid, but no. They shouted and stared at me. I have to admit that my reaction would have been no better! 

Over the next 18 hours, the three of us unexpectedly went on a hike; visited some interesting and not-so-interesting temples and monuments; and nibbled on everything imaginable from coconut and peanut brittle to Chana Baturi to pizza. Finally, on Friday evening, Sylvia and I said our goodbyes to Sacha and we parted ways. We got on yet another gruesome overnight local bus back to Rait. We returned to our centre at 5:00 am with zombie eyes and strained backs (as we always do after a weekend of travel). After sleeping for a few hours, Sylvia and I went to the main market for the weekly house grocery shopping. As I was buying vegetables, several locals gathered around Sylvia and asked if she had been in Shimla the previous day. In a state of confusion, Sylvia and I pondered how they could have known that. A man came running to us presented us with the Himachal Pradesh newspaper.

Low and behold, a picture of Sylvia and I was on the front page. In Hindi, the caption read, "Tourists are enjoying the snow in Shimla" (or so we were told - I won't pretend I'm cool enough to read Hindi). Sylvia and I had no idea that we were being photographed! Being that Sacha is not in the photograph, I assume it was taken before her arrival. On one hand, I suppose it's kind of cool to be in the state newspaper, but on the other hand, it is somewhat disconcerting... We were 8 hours away from Rait yet everyone in Rait knew exactly where we were!

All in all, my weekend in Shimla was, like all the other weekend travels, unforgettable. For any future interns coming to India, don't do what I did and try to obtain as much information about as much as possible. Much of that information still won't really prepare you for this great adventure. Just know - You will be cold; you will be hot; you will be happy, you will be sad; and you will be sick. 

Just take it as it comes and have fun :)

Kelly Strautins - USA

Women's Empowerment Project Manager in Rait

THE 5 STAGES OF BOOKING A TRAIN IN INDIA

Let me preface this by saying that I am an experienced traveler, especially in the developing world, and yet even I face these 5 stages almost every time I try to book a train. These are really only applicable to when you are booking a ticket that is available, because when you’re booking yourself straight to the waitlist, you generally skip these stages and go straight to defeat and angst, where you remain until the moment your status is changed to confirmed. 

NB: If you don’t have an Indian credit card or bank account, the only website you can book trains on is ClearTrip. In order to do so, you still have to have an account with IRCTC, the Indian rail company. In order to make an account, you need an Indian phone number. So if you have to book before you get to India, which most interns do since we need to get from Delhi to induction somehow, ClearTrip helpfully lets you use a dummy number and then you can email IRCTC to get your mobile one-time-password via email and make your account. 

Excitement. In which you’ve spent days, possibly weeks, planning and dreaming about your next Indian adventure, even if it’s just a weekend. You’ve spent hours on TripAdvisor.in and other blogs, figuring out the best and cheapest way to get where you want to go, where to stay there and what to see. All that remains between you and discovery is time and your train tickets. 

Denial/table flipping. In which one of two things happens. Either A, you reach the page where you put in all the information like passport numbers and then click “book” and it tells you that it cannot get current train information from IRCTC, please check back later and you have the sudden and overwhelming urge to flip the table you are sitting at, after lifting up your computer and chai, of course. And with every time this little red error message pops up when you click “book”, you fall deeper into this state of denial and disbelief until you abandon hope, fall back into your indoor-use plastic lawn chair and wave the proverbial white flag. 

Alternatively, you encounter situation B, in which IRCTC asks you a security question that you never made because you were never able to actually get into your account on the IRCTC website because you couldn’t receive the mobile code needed to make your real password because you made the account with a fake phone number, and you can’t change that fake number because in order to change your number you need to get into your account which you need a mobile code to do. So you find yourself being asked your pet’s name when in fact you don’t have a pet. So you send lots of emails and call numbers that either don’t exist or don’t have any humans on the other line until you give up and just make a new account using your real Indian phone number. 

At this point you start the whole process all over again and soon find yourself on the page where you are about to be finished, all you need to do is put in your IRCTC password and enter the “captcha”. It all seems so simple. You’ve made it, finally. So you enter the password and captcha and it tells you that your credentials are incorrect, or that the captcha was incorrect. So you try again, and again, until finally you lean back and close your eyes in quiet defeat. 

Quiet defeat. In which you sit staring at your computer, wondering why, why do bad things happen to good people? Why is this so hard? Why is it so hard to book a train in this country that the simple idea of doing so is used to cut diamonds? Your musings about this question quickly spiral into an existential crisis and you find yourself staring off into the middle distance wondering “why do you exist, IRCTC and ClearTrip, respectively, and why am I here, trying futilely to use you to accomplish what one might otherwise and naively presume a simple task? What is life, little box on the white screen asking me for a password that even Shiva does not and cannot hope to know? And most importantly, what reckless fool invented captcha?

Renewed hope. In which you’ve had some chai and moral support and are ready to try again, bolstered by the promise of another adventure awaiting you once you complete this process and the pressure of the fact that you likely have people relying on you to book their tickets as well. 

High blood pressure. In which you have your train booked and yet you feel no joy or satisfaction looking at the email from ClearTrip, the confirmation from IRCTC and the multitude of indecipherable text messages you receive from ClearTrip, IRCTC, perhaps your mobile provider, the train conductor, the Prime Minister of India and the ghost of Mahatma Gandhi. You instead feel the desire to drink 7-10 cups of chai and the need for some sort of sedative. Not for another 12 hours or so will you return to the pre-booking process euphoria and excitement of knowing you will soon be in another unique and colorful city seeing and doing and tasting and hearing things you will never forget and perhaps having your snacks stolen out of your unexpecting hands by a monkey or being offered a ride on a camel-drawn cart by some kind and curious locals who will likely want to take a selfie with you. And then it will all be worth it.

Naddi interns and myself at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the previous weekend destination.

A staircase in Rishikesh, my most recent destination in my explore-north-India-in-my-weekends project 

PS: Ironically neither of these places were reached by train, but we've been booking extensively for upcoming trips - just trying to find our way :)

Kyla Korvne

Women's Empowerment Project Manager in Naddi