guess what
i went to this temple called guruvayur yesterday - it's in kerala where everyone speaks this really funny language called malayalam. ok atleast i think it's funny, but i also think kannada and punjabi and marathi are funny, so yeah. maybe it's cos when malayalee people speak tamil they speak real funny. kinda how vaish talks to her mum in tamil. it's very cute.

anyway. we took a train to the place, which is 12 freaking hours long through the night, and the only train we could get was a 3-tier sleeper. as in, there are three bunks per wall so it's really freaky when you're on the top bunk cos it's damn high. we normally go in the two-tier first class sleeper but then there's this mountain near guruvayur called sabari mala which is a sort of pilgrimage site - and very chauvinistically, women in between puberty and menopause aren't allowed to go. normally you can't go to a temple when you have your period, but this is just completely if you're in the.. ovulating phase of your life, you can't go. anyway apparently at this time of year a lot of people go to that mountain and before they go they have to go to the temple at guruvayur so all the trains to that area are fully booked and we only managed to get any train because due to high demand for train tickets, they introduced a special train from bangalore and it only had the 3-tier since obviously a compartment with three tiers per wall can have more people. and obviously because we were travelling with the grandparents, my brother and i had to take the top tiers. it's impossible to sleep in a train. or... actually i did sleep, but when i woke up i had a terrible backache. and the toilets are disgusting. they lead straight to the track, so indian train tracks are pretty gross. but indian train journeys are really Experiences. and indian train stations are scary but sort of interesting. it's like a cross-section of india, in a way. cos there are certain parts of india that it only really makes sense to go to by train. my mom said that from now on she forbids my grandparents to go anywhere by train and that we should've flown to cochin and then taken a car to guruvayur even though we'd have been stuck in the car for a few hours, but anyhow. it really was an Experience. it was probably the first -long- train ride i've taken in my memory. otherwise it's the 4 hours from madras to bangalore or vice versa, although mostly we fly and if we do take a train it's usually in the day. once we went at night but comfortably in first-class. not that first class in a train is really anything much. it doesn't compare to the orient express or european luxury trains. but when train rides are short, they're fun.

anyway. my grandpa's super-religious and apparently his guru appeared to him in a dream and told him to go to guruvayur so we had to go. the dream thing is completely absurd, but it's the sort of thing you can't argue with my grandpa about. so we went. we arrived there 4am sunday morning, at a train station an hour away from guruvayur itself, while the closest airport is about 3 or 4 hours drive away, giving you an indication of how infrastructurally isolated it is. it's not a village though, cos there are proper big houses. atleast it doesn't look like villages in the movies. but it's quite pretty, with huge paddy fields and mountains in the distance. but apparently there's a lot of middle eastern money in kerala so maybe that's why it's not village-like.

the hotel was quite ok, although depressingly silent and airconless. but it's walking distance from the temple and the best hotel in guruvayur, so that was that. food was really good though; i think i've inherited my dad's taste for kerala food. actually i think my grandma was partly keralan. malayalee, whatever. and for the temple, i'd brought a salwar kameez because that's what i normally wear to temples. and since we were there for just one day, the only other clothing i had was jeans and a shirt. so i'm happily wearing my pretty pink salwar and eating my breakfast, when i realise that all the waiters are looking at me and smirking. i just put it down to weird oglingness in this pious temple town and i just ignore it. but THEN, when we're stepping out to go to the temple, the concierge exclaims that i can't go wearing that! because salwar kameezes are actually of muslim origin, and pants are of western origin, so anything pants-like is not allowed in the temple. men have to wear dhotis and no shirts, like the priests, and women have to wear saris or lehengas or pavadais (skirt and blouse combinations, and even western skirt-and-blouse combination is fine as long as the skirt is atleast shin-length). and i have nothing of the sort. all the bottom-half-covering clothing i have is of the pants variety. so - Quandary. and now i know why the waiters were smirking.

so GUESS WHAT. on the way to the temple, there was a row of shops selling everything from kerala lamps to saris to kerala pickles. so my mom bought a sari (typical white kerala sari), i tucked my kurta into my pants, and rolled up the legs because if the pants were seen at all i wouldn't be allowed into the temple, and tied the sari around. and because it was a brand new sari and it was stiff cotton, it was totally puffy, and i had this long-sleeved hot pink kurta underneath and the sari was tied in such a hurry and my pants were elastic, not drawstring like a normal sari underskirt so it totally felt like it was going to come off and it looked so ridiculous that i felt like i was being stared at or smirked at even more. but when you're feeling self-conscious that's what you imagine, so i just told that to myself and looked at the ground and kept walking. thank god we didn't take a camera for fear that it would get stolen on the train, because i do not want any visual memories of that day. i'm just putting it down here because it's hard to imagine how ridiculous i looked if you weren't there, and it's undeniably a funny story.

super orthodox temple, basically. and there was this really really long queue to get in, somehow because my grandparents are old the guy let him cut the queue and go inside, but he refused to let my mom, brother and i do the same. so we had to queue, and i witnessed atleast two guys get chased out of the queue for wearing pants, and told to go buy a dhoti. i saw one girl in the same situation as me, coming out of the temple and unwrapping a dhoti that she'd tied around like a skirt, with her salwar underneath. it was in it's own way worse than my makeshift sari.

and talk about religious fervour. the interior of the temple is PACKED. there are people rolling around the floor of the temple (not in a fit of madness, but some people roll around the perimeter of the temple as a service to god, some people walk around the perimeter 108 times because that's a holy number, some people walk precisely placing one foot right in front of the other instead of walking normally.) and this temple is famous for this thing called a thulabaram, which is where they have this huge weighing scale and you sit on one side and they weigh an equal amount of fruit or sugar to your weight, and you pay for that amount to be donated to the temple. we all got weighed and donated bananas and sugar equal to our total weight, and we also managed to get a darshan (viewing) of the sanctum sanctorum which is a crazy rush but my grandpa managed to pull strings and get us in so we wouldn't have to wait three hours in a queue. there's a 15minute wait to get into the temple, and then a 3 hour wait to see the statue of the main god which is inside. and inside the sanctum, it's even crazier. there's no space to breathe, and right in front of the statue, or rather right in front of the room in which the statue is deep inside and it's sort of dark and people try to stay and see and pray for a while, there are temple guards who literally have to pull people away to keep the line moving. and the statues are extravagantly adorned, although the most extravagant i've seen is at tirupathi (another temple on a mountain) where the deities have long diamond necklaces and there are emeralds the size of your fist. that one's the richest temple in india; it receives billions of dollars of donations every year. going to a temple like that is an Experience of another sort. the religious fervour is really infectious, suddenly you're also anxious to look inside and see the deity and pray for good health and Yale and everything and you even start feeling slightly emotional, because it's such a special place for so many millions of people and you're there and all. it's strange.

and then we went back, my mom bought 5 kg kerala lamps which i had to carry, we bought banana chips and kerala mango pickles, got driven back to the train station, and had another 12-hour harrowing train ride back to bangalore. and i'm back. it was quite a special trip.

before that - on friday i watched ocean's twelve, and i'm really confused about the plot, so i need to watch again. still haven't watched vanity fair, but maybe i'm not fated to. on wednesday my mom took my brother and i for lunch at this posh italian restaurant called it.Alia, where two years ago i sighted the hottest guy i've seen in real life. he was italian, he was wearing this black suit, he was chain-smoking, he was atleast 30, he was HOT. this time around, the food was weird because they had a Piedmontese chef for this Festa Italiana thing going on. Cool that he's from Piedmont and all, but it was weird food. my brother took all the potato gnocchi, which was the nicest. there was a red wine risotto which was interesting but a little too rich. Porcini mushroom noodle tasted like maggi mee, which I hate. And the vegetable thing was ok. My mom was pretty pissed off, because the previous time we came we loved the food and this time the food was just not worth the money. Unfortunately the normal menu was suspended for festa italiana.

Besides that – nothing much. There’s so much homework and I’ve done barely any, as usual. And according to vivien there’s an econs essay which I didn’t even know about. I have to find out about that. Tonight my aunt’s taking us out for dinner at someplace called tamarind. I hope it’s good, after the lousy train food the past couple of days. Or rather, packed food since eating the food they sell on trains can possibly give you typhoid fever or something horrible like that. Man, they should really never ask me to advertise Indian trains. I liken them pretty much to hell. Actually they’re rather fun, like I said. Just that sleeping in a train for two days in a row makes you kinda crabby.
Oh yay vivien’s replied –properly- to my mail and the econs thing is for econs S. thank god. Although now I’m worried again about my lit S. I really hope I get it in the end. And MAN I should start doing my homework.