David Grajal

Chennai was the beginning of the and also the end of my circle trough south India. A few minutes after landing in Chennai Airport I met Ann and we took my first Rickshaw to our place. What an experience to get a Rickshaw! I had only seen them on the movies, but it’s completely different to take one. The rickshaws were our main transportation medium on cities because they are cheap and they are very fast. And they are a lot of fun because you feel like surfing the traffic. I got used to them on the next days, but that first trip will be always recorded in my mind.

Are you hungry? This is a Thali, the typical lunch meal in South India. Rice and some vegetarian curries. At the end of the trip I was pretty sick of them

Coconut water is refreshing at 35º

Once in our host place, we spend the next two days relaxing, recovering from the jet lag and getting used to the wonderful Indian subtropical climate.

On Easter I traveled on the Southern states of India with Ann for 2 weeks. We move in a big circle carefully planned by her to get the maximum of our time at the same time that having time to relax and enjoy the trip.

I must clarify that more than backpacking we were flashpacking. Compared with Europe, India is extremely cheap. That’s why we were booking some nice hotels and eating nice food. Make sense to splurge a little because the same stuff in Europe would have cost 50 times more!

In the next columns I will share my experience in India. Stay tuned!

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My brain sometimes is in Eurocentric mode and that makes Ann crazy. When we where traveling in India she  gave me her White Tiger book in a effort to make me understand better the country.

It is a very easy to read book that  explains in a very  simplistic way how the political system works in the poorest democracy (where the lives of the poor people have no value), the new caste system (people with money and big bellies and poor people) and the differences between the darkness (India small villages on the mainland that are still ruled on a feudalism style) and the Light (The big Indian cities)

White Tiger is a captivating read with a lot of brilliant moments!

Last week I discovered the “Casa de la India” in Valladolid. This house is almost unknown (I didn’t know it existed and I’m sure my friends didn’t know it either) and it was build by the University en cooperation with the Indian embassy to encourage the Spanish people to discover the country, because as they mention in their webpage, India had never have a important presence here or at least as important as in other European countries.

The house is interesting. It has a cool library with hundreds of books (in their official languages, English, some in Hindi, nothing in Tamil) and magazines (in English) and they usually hold different kind of activities as traditional dancings, expositions and seasons of Indian documentaries. It was interesting for me visiting the house, specially after living with south asians in Canada.