Dottore, dottore! And fish with lights inside them

Dottore, dottore! And fish with lights inside them

Awright everyone! Everyone who is reading this anyway… Come andate? Va bene?! let’s resume the adventures. Spaniard of Serampore, I am glad to see you are being as conscientious and regular with your blog as we were in India and Africa haha… hey is Fluff with you now?!

I am in Italy now! Padua to be exact in the Veneto region in the north-east, Venice is close by on the train and lots of other towns like Verona and Treviso and Vicenza. There’s some little mountains nearby and the countryside I’ve seen from the train is green-ish and flat and foresty with a few vineyards and cottages but it seems pretty industrial. But the towns are full of peeling yellow and pink sumptuous old buildings and piazzas and churches all gorgeous and decorated and ancient.
Padua or Padova as they call it is almost too romantic in spots, we are living in an apartment facing on to the river crossed by iron bridges and lined with autumn trees and golden leaves scattered along the banks. It’s close to 3 huge piazze, ‘dei Signori’, ‘della Frutta’ and ‘dell’ Erbe’, I have bought a 2nd-hand bicycle and ride to work along knobbly cobbly streets and past enormous markets of fruit and clothes, and old columns and painted arches and balconies and men standing around smoky hot chestnut braziers (sorry, it just isn’t cold enough for that yet though. They are getting far too excited). Everyone has old clanking bicycles with huge handlebars like in a story.

Since we got here it has been real warm and lovely and we spent lots of gorgeous afternoons in the ‘Parc dell Arena’ lounging on grass and eating in the sunshine and also at this MASSIVE square, well it’s more like an oval, the Prato della Valle which is apparently the second largest square in Europe. I don’t know what the biggest is. But it’s amazing for riding your bike round, it’s so smooth and wide. And it’s got a little canal going round the centre. Everyone was hanging out there in the sunshine last week. Today it got grey and rainy at last.

On Wednesday evenings everyone (that is, the 12 million students there seem to be in Padova) gather in our Piazza dell Erbe (a huge square with an old palace on one side with posh meat and cheese shops underneath it, I think I saw a horsemeat stall there the other day). They set up a little soundsystem and there’s drumming and all the people bring their wine and sit on the cobbles or at a bar and drink ‘spritz’ which is this weird aperitif the colour of Irn-Bru with campari and gin and wine and something awful bitter in it, it’s a bit wrong but they all like it… so we bin drinking it too. It seems like you have to, there isn’t anything else…


The first 2 weeks I was going to ‘Eurotraining’, the organisation who organised everything, there are 11 of us on the programme who came to Padova. We went to their language school to learn Italian in the mornings, which was great fun and very helpful and I think we needed more, on Monday we all started our work placements in various locations, including a maskmaking workshop in Venice and one girl making handbags… Rebecca who I’m living with is working for a fashion-type design company who make knitted things… I am in the English International School of Padova, a huge place of 700 students where I’m in the classroom helping teachers with Reception (4 years old) and Year 2 (7) children. They are bananas. Lovable though. But very strange. They ask really good questions like, but Miss Gillian but but why does the fish have a light inside it? And how can the sun be the biggest star when it is so small (holding thumb and forefinger up close together and squinting with one eye). Yesterday I made a puppet theatre with the reception ones and today they were going to do a puppet show but they just ended up bashing each other’s puppets to death and then knocking the theatre over. Hurrah!

Also I have seen more types of pasta in the supermarket than I ever thought was possible. I specially like the ones that are like little ears. The ice cream really is damn good too (and I don’t even have a sweet tooth)… and the conkers are HUGE.

Lizzy and Hannah, would you mind sending some of those orange German teabags of Carolin’s to me? Address is

Riviera San Benedetto 60
35139 Padova

Regular ones too if you can spare any… pleeese…?!?!?! dying for tea.

I hope everyone is well, lots of love from me. And how’s the new Broadway?!?!?!

Xxx

Summeringland

Thoughts weave gently round my head (I think my mind is quite lazy at the best of times so in this druggish, heat-hazed atmosphere of homecoming, things are striking me in a slow-paced, sleepy-bee way. At least that is my excuse). African time, hey!

One thread that keeps coming up is people saying, “oh it must be such a culture shock to return innit, coming back ere to this miserable lot… it must be so unfriendly/cold/reserved here after all those places… people aren’t so open and friendly here are they compared with abroad… yeah these grunting English…” and all that kind of thing.

It is true people are ridiculously friendly in most places we went on our double-continent spree. And it IS different to here. And it is so easy to complain about how we don’t greet each other in the street in this country, that people don’t stand around and have time for conversations, how nobody smiles. But I do now begin to think those are clichéd and maybe not such true observations and in fact most of the people I know are extremely friendly, starting with just a few egs... my sister who constantly makes friends with the general population of London as well as the flies buzzing round her face (okay, she does have too much free time), that man in green on Carlton Road from the council who always shouted MORNING DUCK to me on my way to work and Dave Bowley who never does stop talking but hey nobody would want him to anyway… when you say hello people usually say it back with warmth and everyone generally seems to love a good chat.

People in England are friendly, they just maybe aren’t so curious about funny-looking foreigners (unless they are that way themselves), or they are so polite that they won’t make a fuss, they’d rather pretend everything was normal and nice, whereas in Tanzania or in Serampore they will damn well stop you in the street and find out everything about you cos you are a freak and they need to know. That way of being I do find more normal and honest and real I suppose, plus it leads to much more hilarity and interesting conversations. The more freakishness you interact with, the better and funnier and spot-on’ner the world becomes and the sunnier your outlook. I reckon.

What I propose is international exchanges for all from the age of 5, and you have to do it, just for a month or something. Every half a year or so.

But going back to the dour and frigid populace of old England, there is the other way of looking at it, which is maybe that we don’t have to be jolly and hugging each other all the time… there are obviously people who like to have private time, it’s just that in the context of being in India for example, it doesn’t work so well. People don’t understand the concept of alone, there, generally. And imagine if in Dar es Salaam any of us had got fed up with constantly talking to people and just didn’t feel like saying hello and excitedly explaining our origins every single time – what do you do then? And I can truthfully say I had moments when I just didn’t want to respond, or felt like making it up completely (as Ana did advise me to do after incredulously observing the barrage of questions rattled off at me on every train journey in India and as a result memorizing my life story by heart herself). There were moments when one of us might be hard-pushed not to snap at a persistent seller of something. Sometimes that can be irritating when people won’t leave you alone. But then that would be rude and there's no need and I guess the better thing is not to give in to impatience and… just give in and sit down and let it all flow. It depends on your mood, and luckily the 3 of us were pretty easygoing in that way, most of the time. And you can't really get mad with crowds of people who are just lovely and welcoming and whose intentions seem nothin but good-hearted! That really is a main difference between here and African places we visited - the feeling of the streets. I felt much safer and encompassed by warmth there than some places here...

So what can you say? Different cultures. Different ways of being. Different ways of groping each others’ tentacles… Lately I’ve come across various mentions of the ‘European’ habit of having less personal space. Why is that so important in some places and not even an issue in others?

My mum reckons in India they still haven’t lost the habit of living in herds like animals. That’s why it’s unusual to be a loner. Or at least you don’t often find people living without at least 7 other people around them. But surely everyone needs to breathe on their own sometimes. But then if you have grown up that way and that’s what you know, you think it’s all fine and normal… look at arranged marriages, eunuchs, the chronic infidelity of many men we encountered in Africa, willy-spearing and all those things that guy Bruce does in ‘Tribe’.

Many weirdnesses, I can tell you.

Anyway, yes, it is different in England but I didn’t find it a huge shock coming back, praps cos I hadn’t been away long enough to forget what it’s like and praps cos experiences like the ones we had recede quickly although they are still intense and memorable, just stored away for future perusal because now it’s a point where you have to think about what’s happening right now. Images keep flashing into my mind of places we were in, of conversations we had and feelings and funny people and beautiful sights and freedom and all the brilliant STUFF – but it’s also intense coming home after 5 months and seeing all the people you haven’t seen in ages and feeling the feelings of this time and being joyful in friends and family and SUMMMMERRRRRRRRR!!! As Ana says, it’s not better or worse, just different. We were trepidatious about coming back to routine and monotony and not getting up everyday to new adventures and possibilities. But I decided that in that case I would just have to keep doing that wherever, whatever. Woohoo!

Now that’s enough gayness from me.

x

Phewwwwww. hot.

We are back!! Haven't done a post for ages but thought we would continue putting on tales of adventure as now have decided to just carry on being excited wherever we are. Yayyy! We were quite spectacularly lame at carrying on with the blog tales, everything just got too frenetic and madder things kept happening than we could keep up with.

But the African journey was awesome and quite massive - we went a long way on inter-city buses and little chapas and took a 2-day train journey through Zambia and Tanzania, with zebras and Zambian business ladies and beef stew along the way. It was fabulous. The whole route, after Mozambique, went:

Johannesburg - Gaborone (Botswana) - LIvingstone and Victoria Falls (Zambia) - Lusaka + Kapiri Mposhi (Zambia) - Dar es Salaam and Stonetown, Zanzibar (Tanzania) - Mombasa - Nairobi - Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria (Kenya) - Kampala, Uganda. Woohoo!!! hahaa funny times. Kenya is beautiful, with green mountains and tea gardens as well as bushland. We spent a night camping on the Ssese Islands in the middle of Lake Victoria in Uganda (and having midnight swims hehe) with my sister's friends Paul and Ivan... went to a sleazy-ass club called BOTTOMS UP and saw hippos bathing in the lake at Kisumu... met a guy who was apparently Idi Amin's son in a club in Kampala. Ate a LOT of barbecue chicken. Danced to Shakira a fair amount and generally shook the skeletons to the booming speakers everywhere in the streets. In Stonetown in Zanzibar everyone gathers at the seafood market on the seafront in the evening and drinks spiced tea for hours. In Dar es Salaam people constantly shout JAMBO! and CARIBOU! (hello! welcome!) at you as you walk round the markets (BRRRilliant markets everywhere) and also MZUNGU!!! which means 'oi! white person!!!'

People were gorgeous the whole way and it was really the friendliest experience. Thankyou to all the dear folks who befriended and took care of us!!!

Back in Nottingham now after being in London and Leeds and Norwich and it's a bit hot and breathless. In fact quite a lot hotter than most places we went in Africa...
It has been ace seeing everyone again and so glad it's summmmerrrrrr!!! I just wish there was an outdoor pool here. I am parching!!!! need... cool... splashing... water. Pleeeese can we go to a waterpark, or Ilkley Outdoor Pool, soon...

Have put on a picture of Skipton Market for y'all to enjoy. Markets of the world you see. Plus here's a few of the last weeks of our African adventures...

lotsolove!
rasheeqa
x

Tud' Bennnnnnn

Cor we really do get attached to places round this world... Can't seem to leave Mocambique at all... what a grand time. Maputo has been a bit like Nottingham with people to meet all over the place and mad things happening right along. The folks are the friendliest and keep making us stay and go to parties and eat food and join them in their lives. Like India... hmmm...
Went to a great drumming party and to visit the children at an orphanage place with the rastaman Founder and his musical friends... roamed around this amazing Xipamanine market, the little 'chapas' (minibuses) all pound out music all day long. Found a Broadway-type place, the Mocambique Centro Culturale Franco with lovely gardens and FREE cinema!... went to the famous Africa Bar on Thursday night for live Mozambiquan music and LOTS of Bob Marley... and we know Maputo streets pretty well now.

Some more pikchers

Mozambique! a beautiful land

Some pictures... Maputo from across the bay - Ana's antennas say hello - dhows like one we sailed on from Vilanculos to Benguerra Island! - Barra beach, a totally + utterly secluded place where there was just the 3 of us and our hut aaaaah - and Ana carrying on the world tour of the pi pi pi song with children of Mozambique heheee....

busy..busy....busy..don't ask!!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh well!!!!!!!!!!!
what can we say?
here we are, in Africa, the 4 of us now!! Mildred, Hilda, Ethel, and of course Doris!!!!

This is just a quick catchup (which you´ll be relieved to know after that last insanely long post, sorry), we have been completely unable to update regularly...

we´ve had long and busy adventures, many big and delicious meals (yes this is an ongoing theme, the food of the world is too good).
now we are in vilanculos, a little happy town in mozambique with many new friends, yes we feel like home here. (we´ve found our house in inhambane, there is a big space for goats children and monkeys).

so just to say hello and all our love, peace and proposals, we will explain later.

Ciao,
Rash, aNa and Vicky
xXXXXx

MOMOS!

Dear friends, Ve are back! Sorry for zis long delay. We got occupied with stuff for a bit… so… here’s the next instalment…

RASH
Getting hotter… we had 3 weeks or so at school and I carried on showing the kidlets maps of the world, and dancing, and playing that wink murder game which they love. Also hangman and pictionary and extreme shouting (and bits of English). Ana brought the teeny ones to fever pitch with the pi pi pi song which is now a Serampore favourite, she’s getting requests in the street. Also she got addicted to mishti doi, this lovely sweet brown yoghurt you get in big clay pots.

Our teachers have stopped trouncing the children with sticks which is good… Dr Auntie Sequeria and Uncle Robin who run the school are well impressed and have decided Ana has to come back and take over after the summer. She is brilliant with the kids and really catches their interest – the regular teachers have this monotonous repetitive way of teaching (“A for A-pple, B for Ball…”) that makes you want to pull your teeth out and sends half the children into catatonic fits. Ana on the other hand stomps around shouting and being weird in Spanish and they can’t take their eyes or ears off her. Videos to follow. The teachers have introduced a bit more variety now after watching her…

We went for a night out in Calcutta with some kool kids (Auntie Nupur’s son Lattoo and his gang) – dancing clubs and late bars and all-night street eating. Twas well funny. One club, Bed, was proper strobey with a strange and addictive mix of trance and bhangra. And a paan-seller outside. Them kids was well up for it, they go screeching round Cal (as they call it) all night, 8 packed in a car on laps, hopping from bar to bar and stopping off for roti and dal and butter paneer at 2 in the morning. Brilliant. Although we two are getting old… had to go to bed at 5.

And we roamed various small towns of west Bengal, went to this lady’s place in a tiny village over the river, Nilganj, where they were renovating the house. She had a HUGE vegetable garden with a pond and coconut palms and betel nut trees and eggplant and galangal and celery and herbs and spices and flowers and about a million other things growing there. Went to the mela (fair) in Sheoraphuli, my Auntie Leila’s place, there was a tiny pirate ship and ferris wheel, little rides and huge piles of snacks and cheap clothes (so Ana went mad shopping again) and gangs of boys ogling the girls. And we wore saris a few times. Our Monimala kids had their sports day and I won the prize for hitting the pot with the big stick blindfolded. Haha!



Then we got on the train and headed for north…

March the 1st we took the Uttarbango (!!!) Express from Sealdah station in Calcutta for a station called New Jalpaiguri from where you can jump on the Toy Train to Darjeeling, the tea place in north Bengal. Which was the original idea… but it was the overnight train and that was enough time to make friends with an excitable Bengali man called Partho Roy who was travelling in our compartment with his mother and sister back to his hometown of Cooch Behar. He was super-joyous to meet us and ended up inviting us to come back to his with him. Which happily we did and thus got completely waylaid in our plans but had a fantabulous adventure… involving staying with his family for 4 days and being fed huge piles of rice and fish, swimming in his river, and being taken into the jungle to his wife Sunita’s place, Aliporduar (a green forest place with rhinos and elephants and MANY lovely folk, close to the north-eastern borders of India), where Ana was the first whitey that had been seen in the village in living memory. Ahahaha. About 50 people gathered round to goggle at her when we walked the lane in the evening, I was in hysterics with Sunita’s cousin Chotu behind the crowd while the Spaniard obligingly answered a stream of questions about where she came from and what service she was occupied in at England.

We finally left Partho and Sunita and their little boy Babu and took the bus from his sister’s place, Jalpaiguri (we met pretty much every branch of his family, now I know how Ana must’ve felt when we went to my dad’s place in Moradabad).
And we went to the border town of Jaigon, very important place for me, it is bisected by a huge ornate gate that leads into Bhutan and the town of Phuentsholing on the other side. The mountains suddenly appeared and it became really grey and hazy and mysterious-looking. We got off the bus and were in the midst of way more westy-looking people - girls and boys in jeans - then Nepali and Tibetan-looking people, and also a fair amount of villainous types with slicked hair and jeeps trying to lure you their way.
Anyway our goal was Bhutan. We decided to forget all that stuff about borders and visas and extortionate foreigner fees to enter Bhutan and strolled up to the gate where loads of people were wandering through. A guard greeted us with “where is your visa?” and we were like, “visa? We need a visa?” then they sent out a man who spoke Hindi. He told me that I could go through, cos I was Indian, but Ana – where was she from? I neeeearly said she was Indian too but clearly that wouldn’t work (she just hasn’t caught the sun enough, still, the loser) so I tried “she’s half Indian, we’re living in Calcutta, can’t we come in?”
“Er, no. (you fools). Foreigners need visa. Visa from your own country. She not go in.”
We stood with the dudes for a while looking persuasive and saying we’d come all the way specially. But relent they would not. So in the end we decided that I would go in for the evening and Ana would wander on the inside. It was sad but I had to go now I was here…
So I went to Bhutan!!! Woohooo! It was beautiful and peaceful… hazy grey-green hills and prayer flags across a river and I visited a lady in a wooden hut who thought I was mad but fed me tea anyway. There was a Buddhist temple with these red and yellow painted prayer wheels and monks spinning them round, and shops full of wool of every colour. Didn’t see no yaks though. Next time.

Note/moan on Bhutan and Indian tourism policies:
Apparently Indians can go into Bhutan freely for up to 10km and then they need a pass as well. It’s terrible this discrimination thing – all foreigners who LOOK foreign in India are charged high entry fees for places like Taj Mahal – e.g. me and my sister paid 20 rupees and Ana had to pay 750 – that is, 10 dollars. Not that you wouldn’t, and it’s still not that expensive – it’s just it’s such a big difference. Same system with Bhutan evidently – because I looked Indian, I could go in. The gate guys didn’t ask to look at my (British) passport, which was brilliant lucky as it meant I could achieve my going to Bhutan aim (at least for 3 hours!) – but I guess a bit unfair.

Next day we took the bus in the morning back to Siliguri (a horrid place full of pushy men all trying to get you to take their rickshaw/jeep/temple tour) and stayed the night (in a hotel belonging to seemingly the only nice man in the city). It’s the second largest city in Bengal after Calcutta, a big travel hub with train and bus stations and millions of tour operators organising trips to Sikkim and various other places.

And so finally a week after we left Serampore we got on our Toy Train to Darjeeling. It really lived up to its name and never really went faster than walking speed so took 8 hours to go up around the mountains (88km) – but was a great journey. We met a retired Indian couple who had just come back from America and then sat with an English pair of dudes, Barrie and Tor, who were ace. It got cooler and greyer and we wound through many tea gardens and steep hillsides and tiny villages before getting to Darjeeling about 5 in the evening. MMMMmm tea! And cold…

[to be continued]

meanwhile, QUICK FLASH UPDATE:
It’s the 24th of March, steamy hot, and we are leaving Serampore finally this evening, until next time… we have said sorry goodbyes to Monimala School and all the people we have met and made friends with. It has been an awesome, affecting, brilliant time here. We will return!
We’re getting the overnight train from Howrah tonight, to a place further down, on the coast in Orissa – Puri. Then we’ll head on from there to more southern places. We fly to South Africa on 9th April, from Mumbai – Frank, I will be visiting Comet Media there!

Just been packing out rucksacks… errrg terrifying. Stuff has doubled, against our wills. Vamos! Chelo! We’re off to the seaside! See you there!

aNa
Bueno, bueno……what can I say….? it’s been weeks since last time!!! so many adventures we’ve had!!!!!! Rash has explained it perfectly so I’m just gonna add a few bits and bobs, “TIKEY???”
Firstly………… Serampore what a place!!!! Specially the school where I’ve completely fallen in love with the kids, so much fun and so many things I‘ve learnt from them! that definitely I want to come back but that’s a different story that will be talked about, “PORE” which means later, you see guys? At the same time that you are having fun reading about us you are learning Hindi without even realising! ;o)
(you mean Bengali dude – Rash)



Anyway…. Our trip to the north was amazing and crazy, as Rash has said we ended up going to this family’s house that we just met in the train I know that might sound a bit crazy……….and yes!!!!!! you are right it was!!!!! We had such a good time, an unforgettable experience, it is really amazing that the whole family welcomed us so nicely and treated us as princesses, didn’t allow us to help them with anything not even picking up the table and that’s without mentioning the fact that they paid for everything! even for my mineral water!!!!! It seemed that they were delighted that we were hanging out with them and we were even more so, because they gave us the opportunity to experience things like having a bath in the river, fully clothed (our pyjamas), listening to some live folk music that they played for us and what can I say about having the privilege of being the first White stepping in Aliporduar village!!!!! don’t tell me that is not uber cool!!!!!

Now moving on and changing the subject what can I say about my frustrated intention of entering Bhutan without a visa???? Yes I must admit that we had high expectations about ourselves providing that Bhutan is one of the most strict places to get into, as they also asked you to pay $200 per day, don’t you think that is a bit too much? Us too, so basically we didn’t….. therefore the consequences were that I was a bit.……… what can I say…? Discriminated, and had to stay at the other side of the gate watching how my dearest Rash crossed the border to this mysterious country!!!!!! So yes we did separate for a few hours and in the meantime while she was exploring the long-awaited country she managed to bring me some spices and 2 beers de contrabando! check her out!!! Well amigos don’t think I wasted my time, while I was on the other side I went for a wander and ended up coming across with this weird market, surprise… surprise, it was full of second-hand western clothes!!!!! Thousands and thousands of piles of t-shirts, trousers, etc…. just had a look, as nothing caught my eye I decided to carry on walking, as I was feeling a bit lonely I decided to join this group of kids who were playing with marbles in the street!!! luckily and please don’t ask why, I had a marble myself so I took it out of my rucksack and showing it to them, said in my perfect Hindi, “auntie want to play, Tikey”? they looked at me a bit surprised but they accepted me in their gang so we played for a good 15 minutes but then we had to interrupt our game as we found ourselves surrounded by 50 people staring at me like crazy (I got photos to prove), still don‘t know why though, they might have thought that I was cheating or something………… anyway more or less that was my experience in Jaigon, at the other side of the border………..

El tren de juguete & Darjeeling, funny and long that’s the best way that I can think of to describe the journey!!!! The train was cute and small I think it’s been one of the few times in my life where I was happy to so small!!!!!! This time we made friends with the first white backpackers that we had seen, and they were………..English!!!!! bloody hell guys you’re worse than the Spaniards, you are everywhere ;0)!!!!! He he after 8 hours of chatting and laughs we became good buddies so we decided not just to share the Hotel but the room!!! The next morning or I should say night….? we had to wake up at 3 to go to Tiger Hill!!!! That’s the place to go to see the amazing views of the Himalayas!!!!

TO BE CONTINUED...

Hope all are superduper well everywhere, Lizzy BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY! did you have a fabulus one... also happy birthday to Sally and Lou and all the other birthdayers of the month of celebraaation woowoo!!!
xxx