Came back yesterday from an amazing 3 week trip in India. I think this will be a very long update, so I will divide it into 2 parts:
We left Sund by bus on Sunday the 31st of November, and drove to Oslo. I think we arrived at the airport around 2am, and since we weren't going to check in before 5am, we spent like 3 hours playing cards:-)
After about 5 hours waiting in Heathrow, we arrived in Bangalore around 6am on tuesday, november 2nd, and got about 5 hours of sleep, before our teachers took us to a huge mall called 'forum'. In Bangalore, we stayed at 'Christ University', and the dress code there, at least for girls, is not to show shoulders or knees. This is a rule that counts for most parts of India, so the girls went a bit crazy in the shopping mall, but I have never seen this color full clothes ever, and they are so comfortable!
We stayed in Bangalore for 3 days before we moved on to Kerala, and 2 of the days in Bangalore, were spent photographing in the slum. This was such an amazing experience. I thought the teacher was exaggerating when she said that, to the children, we are Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but this was crazy! 'Anti anti, foto foto', they scream while they come running 10-15 at a time. They are so adorable and it's so hard not to take pictures of them! The slum was a really big reaslity check, at least for me. These people are so happy with what they have, no matter how pore they are, and I envy them the importance of family to them.
On November 5th we moved on to Kerala, by bus, of all! The indian perspective on time is a story of its own. For each hour they say something is going to take, you have to add at least 2, so 1 hour on the bus became 4 etc. We stayed 2 nights at them same place at the most, and I think we stayed at 5 hotels in 7 days. this was in some ways a lot of fun because we got to see so much more of the country, but on the other side I have never been more exhausted. Anyway, we moved from Bangalore to Kerala, and me and 3 other students spent the night in a really cool house boat. earlier in the day we had gone sailing with the same boat, and we also stopped on the way for shorter photography sessions. Here, I actually got to hold an eagle, it was so cool! The bad thing is, people had chopped off parts of its wings, so he couldn't fly. We moved on to Varkala, an amazing beach resort, where we spent 2 days just relaxing at the beach. At this point it was almost 40 degrees in the sun, and we spent the evenings walking up and down the road, trying to bargin with the sales people, it's not really that much we are talking about herte, the point is that they are constantly trying to get more than they should. After a while we learned to bargin quite well actually:-) The resort we stayed at also had a spa, and I had the most amazing full body massage of a very long time!
We moved from Varkala to Trivandrum, where we stayed in an AMAZING hotel called Keys. This is actually quite ironic, because you needed a key card to get anywhere, and when 3 people share a hotel room, with only one key card, this gets a bit difficult. After a few day, we started to leave the key in the reception. With us to Kerala, for the entire week, we had a professional photographer called Girish Kurup, a very nice guy, as well as an amazing photographer! I learned a lot from him over that week, we also went out around 05.30 in the morning to photograph, best time to take pictures is either early in the morning or in the evening. We moved from Trivandrum to Fort Kochin, on the way we visited a textile factory, which made the most amazing clothes out of plants, so every clothing item was good for your skin, sore muscles etc. In Fort Kochin we also went out in the morning to see the morning life:-)
This was about half of the trip, I will continue from here in part 2, which will also contain 'song of the day:-)
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