USAC apartments

All of us USAC study abroad students have a GREAT deal for housing in Bangalore.  We basically have a whole apartment complex to ourselves, with 2 apartments on each floor.  There is plenty of space and lots of light, and everything that we need is there for us to use.  I have one other roommate and two suitemates who share the apartment with me, and we all get along great!  They are all really nice girls who are excited to be in India.

The only downside is that we have to walk 40 minutes to Christ U, but we're able to pass lots of shops, restaurants, and stalls and get a better feel for the city and the culture.

Last night after I had gone to bed, I heard a loud, "OH SH*T!!" and when I opened my bedroom door to the living room, I saw the whole commons area and kitchen was flooded with about 1-2cms of water.  One of the girls was doing their laundry and the washer was draining water onto the floor for about 20mins instead of down the drain in the floor where the water was supposed to be going.  Luckily, our landlord provided us with floor mops in each apartment (it's like he knows this stuff is going to happen).  I went next door to where three USAC guys are staying to take their mop, and we spent a good bit of time trying to push all of the water out the kitchen and onto the balcony.  Finally we just decided to leave the fan on and the balcony door open to let the floor air out.

Here's some pictures of the apartment's common room!  The top two pictures show the flooded area.  In the third one you can see the two doors to the bedrooms.  Both rooms have two beds, two desks, a wardrobe, and an attached shower/washroom.

Commerical Street, Bangalore

On Sunday I went with Swati, my friend from Navadarshanam, to Commercial St. in Bangalore.  Its one of the largest shopping places in the city filled with markets and stalls for different goods.  There's one main street and then a giant grid of streets surrounding it, so it seems like there's an endless maze of stores to go into!

We went early on in the morning so there wasn't a lot of people there yet, but normally these streets are packed with pedestrians, two-wheelers, rickshaws, and even rich people with cars barge their way around.

Even in the smallest alleyways there are an impossibly large number of shops squeezed into the space.

 Aaaand of course it wouldn't be India without the stray cows wandering in the alleys also!

 At the end of the day we ate a really late lunch at a place called Woody's, a classic vegetarian restaurant on the main street.  Yummy roti's and veg hyderabad curry!

FOOD in Navadarshanam

The food that I was fed in Navadarshanam every meal, every day was so amazing.  95% of the food was vegan but that never meant the taste was bland or there were cheap substitutes for anything.  It was all delicious.  100% of the vegetables and almost all of the grains came from the garden that's on the property.
Here's a mini cucumber thing that was growing in the garden.

 

Its here that I learned how to eat with my hands, scooping up the food like a shovel onto my fingers and then feeding myself.  It sounds easy but its hard not to drop anything, especially when I'm trying to eat soup that is running through my fingers.  We're taught in the U.S. not to play with our food but in India that's how you eat it, by mushing it around in your hand!

This is a typical breakfast that I had, with some masala, a millet porridge, and some bread with guava jam and peanut butter mixed with jaggery (unprocessed sugar).  I'd basically make a layer of porridge in my hand and then scoop up some of the masala and eat it that way. 

 

 The following are three different lunch/dinner dishes with the different types of curry, gourd/green bean salad, red rice, ragi balls, sweet millet paste, spicy mango pickles and chutney, butter milk, and rice ghee.  You can see that the ragi balls were my FAVORITE!

 

 

Manjari - Home Sweet Home!

Manjari is the name of the dorm-style building that I stayed in during my visit to Navadarshanam.  It was a super cozy and efficient building, powered by solar panels and also attached to a solar water heater.  In the future they're going to utilize the slanted tiled roof for harvesting the rainwater runoff.

This is my room in the attic!  Since I moved in two days before everyone else, I was put into the single room at the top of a spiral staircase while the rest of my four roommates shared the large room on the first floor.  There was also a shower room (w/o a shower, only bucket and pail), two toilets, and a small kitchen where we made tea every morning.

Here's how thick my mattress was: basically I was sleeping on a wooden plank.  Since the tiles weren't seamlessly glued together, on windy nights or mornings I would have a nice breeze going through the room.  I also had some visitors of moths, mice, and lizards.  But I know it's all part of the experience of living closer to nature, so overall I loved staying here.  I would do it again in a heartbeat!

Working the Farm - Intro to Permaculture

Taking this permaculture course with Rico was truly an eye-opening experience.  Not only did he show us the ins and outs of permaculture, but we also discussed the importance of subsistence farming and self-sustained living in order to create a better planet.  The definition he gave us of permaculture is "A design system to create a regenerative human habitat." It's basically an organic farming and reforestation technique that mimics natural processes to help heal the Earth.

The week-long course was very intensive, we were almost always either in the classroom learning different concepts, or out in the field doing hands-on projects.

This is me with a huge bale of hay that was used to make a compost pile.

 

This is the compost pile before completion with a nice, fresh layer of cow manure on top!  Some other layers included sticks and twigs, hay, brown mulch, green plants and banana leaves, and rice husks.  Micro-organism galore.

To regenerate a forest after the soil is damaged, one tactic is to first plant all sorts of legume species that omit nitrogen and other minerals into the soil, that can also be cut to be used as green manure for future trees.  This increases the quality of the soil and the likelihood that plants beneficial to humans can grow effectively later on.
One way to plant a high amount of these nitrogen-fixing plants is to roll a bunch of them into 'seed balls' of mud and composted soil, then bury them around the property.  Here are our beautiful balls!

In order to control the water runoff from rainfall and raise the water table, 'swales' are made on the land's contour lines.  A swale is basically a long pit that is dug, and all the soil brought up is put into a mound alongside the pit.  We used 'mumate's (mummah-tees) for the digging instead of shovels, which means we had to bend down and pull all the soil towards us to dig.  3-4 hours of this and I'm still sore four days later.

There were a lot of people like me who aren't used to hard manual labor, but at least I tried!  Some of them left after the first half hour or so because they didn't want to work. 

There were many other projects we worked on, but these are the main ones!

Navadarshanam - Poster Child for the Future

I believe that the world would be a drastically different place if everyone every year went to live in nature for a while.  The value of our forests and the biodiversity of animal species is something that can never be quantified, but somehow it can still be felt by us if we only just take the time to go and appreciate it.

What started as an overgrazed and abandoned farmland was able to be turned around completely into a thriving jungle at Nd.  Surrounding the property there are still vast amounts of land that are suffering from being misused by humans, but with some time and effort Nd has proved that not all hope is lost.

This is outside the Nd property (with an electrified fence on the right to keep the elephants away).  You can see how little trees there are - mostly dried out shrubs on mineral depleted soil.

In the 110 acres within the Nd border and the connecting national forest and wildlife refuge however, the view is completely different.  There are trees of all heights and shapes, better soil and water quality, and increased biodiversity.

The people here grow almost all of the food they consume all year in some garden patches downhill from the living areas.  Even though its for human consumption, in order to create the least amount of harm for nature everything is done organically and naturally.  The only food miles that the food travels are from hauling the baskets uphill to the kitchen.

The Nd land is so biodiverse and the surrounding land so dead, that many times there are unwanted and dangerous visitors that stop by.  Especially during the dry season, elephants are desperate enough to take rocks and bash down the electric fence just to get to a source of food.  The wildlife refuge that has been set aside for them is continually being encroached by land robbers and new construction that they have no where else to go.
There are increasing numbers of elephant sightings and interactions with humans, to the point where one 'rouge' elephant has killed 12 people in the nearby villages just by throwing them over its back using its trunk.  But there would never have been rogue elephants if there were no rogue humans to instigate it in the first place.  I always imagined them to be gentle, docile creatures, but in the wild jungle there is no such thing.

This is a sign at the edge of the forest reserve.  When I went for a walk with a couple of the other people at the workshop when we had a spare hour, and we decided to stop here and climb rocks to see if we can spot any elephants.

This is the view from the top of the rock!  We ended up hearing the trumpeting of an elephant pretty close by, which apparently is a dangerous sign if there's only one elephant.  The next twenty minutes we could hear it moving around in the jungle, knocking down and snapping trees beneath its feet.  We never saw the wild majesty itself, because some of the younger male villagers came and started yelling and throwing rocks in that direction and we left before it caused anyone to get hurt.

 

Backtrack to Auroville - FOOD

You don't want to get me started on how delicious the Indian food is, especially in India.  Basically I'm not going to survive being back in the States without a solid collection of all the best Indian recipe books.

As requested by my mom, here are some pictures of the food I ate in Auroville.

Joy Guest House supplied us with breakfast every morning: bread, pb, and jelly.  Everything comes from local shops, which means the bread is really hard but is organic and could last a lifetime, the peanut butter is also organic and really pale-looking instead of the nice brown that is seen in America, and the (organic) jams are all made from fruits that are picked on Auroville farms.  So far the types of jam I’ve had are mango-pineapple, orange-ginger, something with papayas, guava, and the usual grape.

For lunch I liked to go to a neighboring village inside the boundaries of Auroville called Kottakarai, where the famous Ganesh Bakery is located!  It's a very small but quaint place where people can sit and enjoy yummy pastries and bread, and buy things like vegan biscuits and coconut buns.  My favorite is the chocolate croissant that they make.

 

 

For lunch/dinner I liked to go to La Terrace, which is a café right above the Solar Kitchen buffet.  Both places make the most delicious foods.  My favorite is the Tomato-Basil-Mozzarella crepe thingee that is to die for, from La Terrace! (They have Wi-Fi on La Terrace, which is why the picture also shows my laptop in it)  

On the last day I had in Auroville, I ate this monstrosity of a lunch at the Solar Kitchen with a couple of the people staying at the same Joy Guesthouse.

 

The last picture is of a dinner I made myself from things I bought around Av.  This was the first time I ever made rice for myself, which ended up being a lot easier to do than I thought.  One of my favorite things about India is the fresh mangoes everywhere that I can buy for so cheap!  I could eat them all day, which is basically what I was doing anyways.

 

 

I'm backkkk

I had a blast at Navadarshanam, made a lot of new friends, and learned so much from the Permaculture course - It inspired me to hopefully start vermi-composting and growing a kitchen garden in the Fall!
Anyways, I'm back to civilization after that week and a half, and I will be regularly making new posts!

Joy Guesthouse - Part 2

Now we'll look at the kitchen and bathroom!

Here is the kitchen:

 

There are cups of water placed under the cupboard where all of our food is kept, so that the ants and other bugs aren’t able to climb up its legs and get to our food.  Genius!!

And yes, there are ants EVERYWHERE else in the kitchen.  One time I left my morning breakfast out on the counter for too long, and there were about twenty little ones hiding underneath bread where I wasn’t looking.  I figured this out only after I had taken a bite out of it... so I might have gotten some extra protein in my breakfast that morning - So much for being a vegetarian.

  

The showers are open-air without a ceiling, which is nice and breezy in the morning, and ideal when I'm trying to get a full body tan.  Normally the water stays pretty cold, which is also nice because of how ridiculously hot it is here.

 

  

And finally, this is the bathroom! A traditional Indian squat toilet, with a bucket used for flushing everything down (bring your own toilet paper).  There is never a time without a frog or lizard or two or three just chillin out near the sink or on the ceiling.  Several unfortunate ants are also usually drowning in the water in the bucket at the time of flushing.

 

Here's a little frog that surprised me after I turned the light on to go brush my teeth.

Joy Guesthouse - Part 1

One of the reasons why my stay in Auroville has been so amazing is because of my choice to stay at Joy Guest House with all of the other wonderful people here!  It’s not a five-star resort by any means, but everyone is so friendly it's a reasonably comfortable place to live out in nature.

I’m living in the dorms on the guest house property, which is the biggest building with the highest number of beds.  This is what it looks like from the outside:

And the inside: 

 

There are six rooms total.  Two are on the bottom that are taken by Julian, from France, and me, three empty rooms on the second floor where the ladders go to, and one attic room where Alex, from Quebec, just recently moved into.

And below is my wonderful (and messy) room with a mosquito net over my bed!  There are also three other beds in the room, but since it's the tourist off-season right now, I’ve got the room to myself.

 

  

Below you can see the dining-commons area where we are usually all hanging out.  In the first picture you can see it connecting to the kitchen in the back, and in the second picture you can see the dorms building.

At night, if we are not going to see the free movie that is always put on by Auroville, we are usually hanging out here reading, writing, or just chatting.  This common kitchen and dining area really help to build a sense of community within the guesthouse, and its such a relaxing place to hang out!

Pondicherry Excursions

If you look on a map for Pondicherry, in Tamil Nadu, you may see it listed as Puducherry.

In India, since the government isn’t really doing much else, they are changing the names of many of the cities to names that sound more ‘Indian’.  That’s why you’ll see both Pondicherry and Puducherry, Bangalore - Bengaluru, Bombay - Mumbai, etc.  It’s all a political thing.

On both Sunday and Monday I went to Pondicherry, a 15 minute drive or so from Auroville.

Sunday I went with Kaushik, another one of the residents at the guesthouse where I’m staying.  We took an auto rickshaw to the nearby village, then boarded a crazy crowded bus to go to Pondicherry.  Even though it was so smelly and load in the bus, it was only 5 rupees to go all the way to Pondy so I couldn’t complain.  There was a super huge and busy Sunday market going on downtown, where people had mats everywhere selling anything from old tvs and radios to jewelry, clothes, and fruit.  Some people were selling things that basically came straight of the dumpster, like old gears and wires and bicycle tires.

 

On Monday I met up with Venkatesh, an alumni from the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy who is now working with a solar company in Chennai.  I showed him around some aspects of Auroville, then his driver took us to Pondicherry to a vegetarian South Indian restaurant.  We had the best Naan and Goti and then went around to an Ashram that was founded by Sri Aurobindo, the same person who helped found Auroville.  I also saw the sea again, and a statue of Gandhi (with a homeless man sleeping right on the statue, at Gandhi’s feet.  Maybe it will bring him good luck??)

Sadhana Forest's Model Village

 

On Friday I went to Sadhana Forest, which is a community of people who live together in huts like these that were built with their own hands.  They live completely off-grid, all the electricity they need comes from solar panels and human power (with cycling machines), and they also get all of their own food from what they grow and what the forest provides them with.

Every Friday they welcome outsiders to come and walk around their community, where everything is connected by dirt roads and surrounded by trees that the first inhabitants of Sadhana Forest planted.  Afterward there is a movie showing and then a vegan dinner that is prepared by the volunteers living there.

The first two clips that they showed were an introduction to Sadhana Forest, and how they are now working on creating a Sadhana Forest in Kenya and Haiti.  They take completely barren pieces of land and reforest it to make it inhabitable once again.

The vegan dinner consisted of some sort of soup, rise with beet fruit jam, some papaya salad, and jackfruit.  I thought it was bland at best, but all the community members seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.  To wash the dishes we used coconut husk and ash, and composted any uneaten foods.

I really admire that they can live for 6-12 months or even longer off of an all-vegan diet made of food they harvest themselves, and like in thatched-roof huts open to all of the elements (and the mosquitoes, which I couldn’t stand after just three hours!).  Although Auroville still relies on many imports and the grid to get electricity, I hope that Navadarshanam and Pun Pun Farm are more like Sadhana Forest!

Rural India

The day that I arrived in Auroville a new friend I made, Kannan, took me on his motorbike down the the Bay of Bengal, a 15 minute ride from the center of Auroville.  

I was able to see a lot of what rural Indian life is like when I passed through the surrounding villages – there are lots of people selling food or other goods in the streets or they have shops in the front of their houses. There are also lots of stray dogs and cows that are randomly walking the streets, and trash everywhere.

The Bay of Bengal was so pretty, even the condition of the beach was really nice! There were fisherman's huts, boats, and fishing nets littering the beach that added color to the sandy beach ... but there was also a dead dog :( 

On the way back I passed through a rural village that is having a festival celebrating the return of their village Hindu god.  This festival has been going on for 6 days, 3 of which I’ve been here for.   They have bands come and perform on stage and also have fireworks going off in random intervals throughout the day. 

I can hear the festivities pretty clearly from my guest house thanks to their use of loudspeakers. Everyday the music starts at around 6 or 7 in the morning, sometimes as early as 5, and then ends around midnight but has continued somedays until 2am with the addition of firework shows.

I can’t imagine how sleep-deprived the people in the village are! 

 

Its hard to see in the picture but on the left side you can see the lit-up stage where different Indian bands come to play, and on the right is a Hindu-temple that is decorated in flashing lights.