Surprises of India

The past seventeen days have seemed longer. It's hard to believe I'm flying out tomorrow. I wasn't mentally well-prepared to come here, and in most ways that was a good thing. I wanted to get a change in perspective, and got plenty of that. Here are some of the many surprises of this trip:

- More animals than in a Disney cartoon. The streets of most towns are filled with cows, pigs, dogs, donkeys, camels, and monkeys. The countryside also has goats and buffalo. A cow wacked me with the side of its head when I walked by it in Pushkar. I'm glad it didn't have horns. In the lacto-vegetarian town of Haridwar, I could understand the presence of cows, but why were pigs of all ages running around in the bazaars?

- Surprising practicality #1: Telephones in midrange hotels are minimal. Most in-room phones can't make long-distance calls at all, and they never have voicemail. Payphones are pretty much nonexistent, so if you want to talk you usually have to do it in a shop or a hotel front desk.

- Admission rates are usually several times higher for foreigners than for Indian residents. In the National Museum, Indians pay about 10 rupees (less than 30 Canadian cents) and foreigners pay 300 rupees. Which leads to surprising practicality #2 (OK, not all that surpising): So why can't they figure out that the foreigners aren't used to using a tap in the washroom stall, and that we would would really appecreciate it if toilet paper could also be provided?

- The as-an-educated-person-I-should-have-known-this surprise: Poverty here can be shocking. I thought it would have been a lot like Canada's urban miseries. The big difference here is that the very poor in the streets are often children: tiny kids wandering among cars and knocking on windows, and women carrying dirty, bare-bottomed infants.

- The nicest surprise: Tourists encounter some pretty obnoxious types, but with time you find people who are worth trusting enough to get to know a little bit. And then you discover that most people are incredibly kind, honest, and open-hearted people.