Tuesday, January 14, 2014

P.S. Flackistillontour Pt II


  • Christmas Karma 
  • Ireland..... Tea/Cake/Tea/Cake/Tea/Cake
  • New Years resolutions
  • Whatnextontour?

I had been expecting to come home to a month of Christmas socialising, home cooking and long days of yoga before job applications.  That all changed when I found out that my mum was not on good form and I needed to be nurseflack for a while.  Being a two person family team it took a bit of getting used to and meant I had to get on my pinny and be the cooker, cleaner and PA.  Christmas didn’t really happen; for most of it I felt like I was in an episode of Andy and Lou pushing mum around in her wheelchair.  But it did mean I got the chance to polish up my Indian cooking skills and after a bit of bickering remembered just how important family is.

For New Years my mum had her friends over to help out so I headed off to Ireland.  I'd missed Ireland so much, from the fact that I saw more fake tan on the flight over to Dublin than I’d seen in the last year to the fact that I spent the entire flight talking abou the weather with an old couple from Wicklow.  And once I got to Ireland life was simple: Tea/Cake/Tea/Cake/Guinness/Friends/Guinness/Friends/"I’ll put on the spuds”.   I ended up by the fire listening to Irish Folk music at Johnnie Foxes one day.  I’ve been to Johnnie Foxes lots of times but never gone into the tourist bar and this time went in by mistake and left in a blur of Guinness and crackin music grinning from ear to ear.  I’ve missed Ireland badly.

Me tucking into a spuds based diet in Kerry with the lovely Deenihan family


New Years Eve was a cosy few pints with good friends down in Co.Kerry.    My week there involved kids running around and constant children’s DVD’s.  It was the opposite of my Christmas and all of a sudden I was glad to be back in the west (and even happier to be in West Ireland!).  I noticed a massive boost in people’s optimism now that Ireland is out of the bailout and even caught one friend getting quite stressed over the new design of the front of the BMW range.  She doesn’t even own a BMW - 1st world problems eh!  And that’s where comments such as ‘welcome back to the real world’ start to sink in.  The real world is what you make it but if it involves stress over aesthetics then I don’t want to be part of it.  

What you face when you work in a developing country....


Ah Jaysus - it's killing me.....


oh and one other thing about the 'real world'.....


I've come back from long trips enough times to know that travelling is one of the best life experiences you can get.  So New Years resolutions?  I started travelling solo in my early 20s, then one year I made a resolution to leave the UK and go work in South America and it changed everything (a decision made over dinner with my friends at a New Years Eve party).  I'd lived overseas before but all of a sudden I had an appetite for more diverse cultures and would love to see more people do the same.  Lucky for me most of my mates are grounded enough to enjoy life wherever they are.

However, the goal of this blog was as a little memoir to myself but also to try and encourage more people to travel.  And I don’t mean a two week package in Goa, Thailand or a caravan in Waterford.  They are all well and good for holidays.  I mean live with locals, work with locals, get sick with locals and love their life.   You can get your thrills at the local theme park or jumping out of planes but trust me it is nothing compared to boarding a plane and travelling to an unknown place. Arriving knowing nothing - not the people, the language, whether your ATM card will work or if you have network coverage (unless you’re in a Vodafone advert and travel with a brand new tablet).  In india this would equate to a bad Dr Who episode, arriving on a bus and seeing lots of people with wiggling heads marching towards you.  Now that is a real adrenaline rush. Don’t cling to the illusion.

It's one thing us lads doing it and I'll be continuing a bit more travel this month heading back to India in a month but the ultimate in adrenaline is a girl travelling alone.  I love to see girls out there discovering the world with no makeup, a dusty pair of hiking boots and a confident stride.  The hassle girls get from us boys back home is nothing compared to oogling eyes of foreign lads.  Here's a salute to all those girls travelling solo :)



Sunday, January 12, 2014

P.S. Flackistillontour Pt I

  • Why chocolate is better than Bollywood 
  • Indian Love with no smiles (a rarity!)
  • Baby in a hammock goes out the window

So I’m back in the west for a while.  Christmas is possibly the worst time to return from an Indian rural based NGO project.  Within 12 hours of getting off my plane I witnessed people fighting over a Turkey in a supermarket (Waitrose, no punches just a lot of superlatives); lucky for me I was still smiling from all the happiness that my 15 months away from such behavior has brought.


So firstly a THANK YOU for sharing the journey with me…….



Here's me on in my last week with some of the college kids at a gig in the local town....



and two of the funniest girls in India who I'll miss dearly Sujata (my sponsor child) and her BBF Renuka.....plus some random



A week before I left KSV I’d decided to organise a Bollywood dance teacher as a gift to the kids.  Not as easy as you’d think. Despite western media suggesting that India is full of Sangitas and  doing sexy bollywood dances around the streets that is far from the truth (public hip is only gyrating is only for the few travelled middle, upper classes and actors).  However, we found one.  Albeit a tubby middle aged guy who liked gold chains and spandex pants (a new concept for the kids).  He cost 5000r (£50).  That’s a crazy amount of money in rural India.  Yet all he did was dance in front of the kids, he didn't teach them. The kids, however, loved it.  It was a real goose pimples moment when you saw their little faces light up.  The volunteers loved it too, I spent a lot of my time helping look after the precious dance instructor.  Yet at one point when the floor filler Jai Ho came on I had about 8 kids hanging off me including one on my shoulders who was having so much fun that he trickled some wee down my back.  I gave my camera to a college boy and he took some videos (luckily not of me being wee’d on); despite capturing the moment he seemed to think that you needed to keep pushing the video button.  So this is a mashup of 1 second videos…….you should get the idea.



Over the next few days somehow the kids found out how much the teacher cost. I’m pretty sure he told them as he didn't stop talking about his spandex empire.  A few of them said to me that for 5000RS they’d have taught the class themselves and spent the rest of the money on chocolate.  Next time we’ll do that.  Dancing and chocolate with no spandex - result.

I've been to a few Indian weddings.  If India is a sensory explosion then the Indian wedding’s I’d been to earlier in the year had been Indian amphetamines.  The day after the Bollywood class we went to a local staff member’s wedding.  A Christian ‘love’ wedding.  I've never seen such scared, sad faces on a bridal party.  The sad truth of 90% of India where all of a sudden two strangers (I know this was a love wedding but they’d never even been in the same room together alone) were sat next to each other for hours with the daunting challenge of later seeing each other naked then trying that thing called sex that ‘everybody’ talks about yet the church said was sinister (reproduction = good, anything more = bad).  Blimey that must be a confusing day.  So I didn't really feel the love at the wedding.  15 white volunteers also attracted the wrong sort of attention as we were mere photo fodder getting more attention than immediate family and at one point being told to dance ‘we want the white people to dance’.  We danced like monkies in the corner whilst the paparazzi snapped away.


Me with the college boys class from KSV at the wedding


NOT THIS Wedding (just to prove that I don't normally wear western feckin clothes to an India wedding - we were ordered to!)


The happy couple


The one thing I did love about the wedding was compliments; the bridal party looked great and we all complimented them but I’m talking about the general compliments by strangers.  The female volunteers looked amazing.  Saris are so complimentary (and that works the opposite way for big aunties with their low flying nipples and unguarded growlers) but these girls are all slim and pretty.  Quite a treat for the eyes.  Us western lads had to wear western clothes.  It felt food to be out of dusty, muddy clothes although I’d grown quite accustomed to them.  However, the compliments given by the Indians to us westerners once we scrubbed up.  You always feel like a Hollywood star in India if you are white.  That day I felt like a superhero ;)

The girls in their saris.....


To leave India I had to take a few buses and a 10 hour train to Bangalore.  I’ve travelled a lot before and often spent my time thinking about what was going to happen next (which town, bar, girl, mountain).  Whereas India for me was so much more present and in those last hours I sucked as much of this amazing country in as I could.  I sat hanging out of the train door with my feet on the step watching the sunset and the farmers head home from a hard days labour in the fields.  It was stunning.  Then I got hit on the head by a plastic bottle, thrown out of the next carriage.  It was India!



I made friends with a family sat opposite me in the carriage.  Oddly their 4 month old girl was called Dixita.  They’d name her after the pop star Raghu Dixit who I’d been working with as a supporter for KSV.  A lovely baby, but as names go a bad choice.  Dick Shit Ah.  The family had an ingenious way of getting the baby off to sleep, a hammock tied up across the berths which she gently rocked in as her father showed me his brand new Samsung Tablet.  Usually a sure sign of a middle class Indian.  Their social education was soon confirmed, however, as, after changing the nappy in front of me they threw it out of the window.  This is India!!



The sleeper class baby hammock - amazing :)



Out with good friends in Bangalore......my first beer in a LONG time just before boarding my plane


Leaving the subcontinent after 15 months was hard.  I've been lucky enough to spend time travelling through SE Asia, South America, The Middle East and some of Sub Saharan Africa but for me India is the closest I've come to feeling like I’I've left this planet.   Oddly despite living through a few earthquakes and monsoon within my first 48 hours back a climatic Armageddon hit the UK & Ireland. 

Seriously......


A neighbour’s tree came down on our drive and I commented to said neighbour ‘everything happens for a reason’.   They looked very confused and it soon hit me that I was no longer in the East!

Oddly the biggest thing I noticed once back was the change in food.  My mum has crones so there is no spicy food in the house and having been used to spicy curry x3/day I had to get used to more bland cuisine.  

I’m not sure if this is a direct result but all of a sudden I was farting 'less than I was not'.  For the last 15 months (apart from when in a room with a lady) I fart more than I don’t which is kinda like having a jetpack on your back the whole time.  Every boy’s dream, every mans nightmare.  One advantage of being back.  The rest, I didn't like so much - more in Pt II.