By Jack Swallow ’13

India is probably one of the countries most synonymous with tradition in the world. It’s the home of some of the oldest cities in the world, the world’s oldest major religion, the infamous traditions of caste and hierarchy, et cetera.

We arrived in India on August 22, just a week after Independence Day, so the first real Indian festival I really experienced was Ganesh Chaturti, the birthday celebration of India’s famous elephant-headed god.

It’s a hugely important festival, because of Ganesh’s popularity – as the compassionate Remover of Obstacles, Ganesh is sort of like the Swiss Army Knife of gods. You could pray to Indra for rain, Lakshmi for wealth, or Durga for protection against evil, but to do so would require visits to each of their three temples. But Ganesh is applicable to all of those situations – lack of rain is an obstacle to your crops growing, while the fact that you’re poor is obviously an obstacle to getting that nice Xbox.

Even more fascinating is the gruesome story of Ganesh’s birth. He was originally a normal, human-headed baby, albeit a divine one, born to Shiva and his consort. But Shiva was unsatisfied, and ordered his wife to kill Ganesh, an order she predictably refused.

When Shiva discovered that his son wasn’t murdered, as he’d requested, he drew his sword in a fit of rage and sliced the child’s head off. The sight of the beheaded child, however, filled him with remorse, so he then ordered his servants to go and find his son’s head so it could be reattached – obviously, even baby gods are pretty durable. Unfortunately, the child’s head was nowhere to be found. The servant, not wishing to return empty-handed to the Lord Shiva, despaired, until he saw a newborn elephant, lying in a nearby field. The rest, you can probably figure out.

In comparison to the beginning of Christianity, this is pretty violent. Jesus’ birth had lambs and kings, while this one has two decapitations and a head transplant. What this made me realize, however, was that Hinduism couldn’t really be compared to Christianity, or any of the other newer religions – it was more in tune with ancient Greek mythology, if it had never died out. What at first seems alien, non-Western, is really just old.

And Hinduism’s age is evident in most every aspect of the Ganesh Chaturti celebrations. It’s a five day long festival, though only two of those were school holidays, in keeping with the American tradition of 45 required credit hours per semester. The streets were lined with idol hawkers selling hundreds of different clay statues of Ganesh, from palm-size up to what seemed like it could be life-size. These were to be kept in the home for the duration of the celebrations, and then submerged in Bangalore’s lake, symbolically returning him to the earth. We bought a smaller one, and John – one of two Brahmins in the program – blessed it and built it a shrine in our apartment.

A local temple we visited made a burnt offering of one hundred and ten coconuts, and even more bananas, and piles of rice, for a ritual puja to the god, burning the fire indoors to fill the temple with smoke. Despite this, the place was jammed with people making their own offerings, while the priests chanted mantras, beat drums, and fanned the flames. At certain points in the mantra we threw rice into the fire. Though the temple was only a few decades old, this was a ritual which had been occurring, unchanged, since its instructions were set out in the Vedas thousands of years ago.

Though the temple ritual hadn’t changed, plenty of other things had. The idols used to be brightly painted, and some still were – but a few years ago the city government banned the use of painted idols, because it turned out Ganesh Chaturti was becoming a really awesome way to put lead in your drinking water. The processions carrying the largest idols, bought by temples or neighborhoods, to the lake, backed up their brass bands and drum sections with massive loudspeaker banks mounted on the backs of trucks. People danced in the streets, and BMWs swerved to avoid them. And at the end of the procession was Ganesh, massive and serene, seated atop a bed of flowers on a wooden trailer, staring resolutely ahead.

I think we followed the procession for about an hour and a half, alternating watching and photographing with crazed dancing. Afterwards we went to Mast Kalandar, a sort of fast-food restaurant, and had the Ganesh Chaturti Special Meal. Then we had to get back to our schoolwork.

Two weeks later, we still had the Ganesh shrine in the apartment, never having got around to throwing him into the lake. John told us it was bad luck to keep it around any longer, and he needed to be submerged on the fifth day of something, so we waited a few more days and put him in a bucket in the corner of the living room. A little later that night we took it out into the garden and poured out the water, though we had to scrape most of the clay out of the bottom. To me, at least, it sort of felt like disposing of a corpse.

I tried to fit the episode into a greater narrative about India, like the tensions between tradition and change, or a bunch of silly Americans miming ancient rituals. But it doesn’t really – the drivers who weren’t celebrating Ganesh Chaturti didn’t really seem to mind driving around the dancers who were, and the banning of toxic painted statues looked like it went through pretty easily. And not all of us were silly Americans – one was a devout American Brahmin, who recited the relevant verses from memory.

That’s pretty much India for you – if you know enough to make any sort of accurate generalizations, you will know enough to contradict every single one. One of our professors said something about how you could get Indians to agree with each other pretty easily, but first you’d have to get them to agree with themselves. You could say that India’s oldest and greatest tradition is confusing the hell out of people.

An Insider’s Guide to the Best Semester of Your Life

By Serena  Shapero ’11

Click here to view essay (PDF)

By Chiara Draghi ’13

One of my favourite Scottish traditions that I have been able to experience since being here has got to be a ceilidh (pronounced kaylee).  Any sort of celebration calls for a ceilidh. We had one at orientation. There were many held by various academic departments throughout the year.  Just about every student club had their own ceilidh. You get the picture. What barbeques and mixers are to us, ceilidhs are to the Scots. Now you might be wondering, what exactly is a ceilidh? Scots are known for being loud, sloppy, and drunk – oh, and wearing kilts of course. Ceilidhs highlight all of these beautiful aspects of the culture. Usually at a ceilidh there is an accordion, a fiddle, and a caller; all the men come dressed to the nines in their kilts, and the beer and whiskey flow freely. And you dance. The dancing is very similar to contra dancing or line dancing back home, the caller tells you what to do, walks you through it slowly a few times, and then you are pretty much on your own. You switch partners, you spin, you jump, you clap (a lot), you slide, you run through tunnels made by people’s arms, you run in circles, you run in place, you hold hands, you play patty-cake, you skip, and basically do all of the things the caller asks you to do that you thought you would never do again after leaving the elementary school playground.  And the drunker everyone gets the more everyone smiles and sweats and laughs. By the end of the event everyone is red in the face (from drink, exertion, merriment, or some combination of the three) and your stomach and cheeks ache from laughing so much. It is easy to see why ceilidhs are so popular. You get to meet new people, goof around, dance like a complete buffoon, and just generally have a very silly, but wonderful time.

By Caitlin Boylan ’11

Couscous.  Every Friday, every lunch, in almost every home is couscous. Friday is the Muslim holy day, akin to the Jewish Sabbath and Sunday for Catholicism. Friday is the day that all believing men, and some women, attend Mosque, and for Moroccans Friday Mosque only leads to one thing: couscous. As Friday prayers come to a close, the Mosque doors open and men pour out hastily throwing on their shoes and rushing home to a heaping, steaming plate of fresh, delicious couscous.

I’ve had couscous in a few different forms; sometimes sweet with caramelized onions, other times with roasted zucchinis, squash, pumpkin and potatoes, always with meat—often lamb, occasionally beef—hidden somewhere underneath huddling in its warmth and moisture so that it literally falls apart in your fingers. And yes, your fingers, despite the small grainy texture of couscous it is often eaten with your fingers. Grab a fistful and smush it together so it stays like that long enough to make it to your mouth. That is how you ought to eat couscous in Morocco.

Couscous dishes are always plentiful, in fact my household of four girls is often served a dish sufficient for at least eight grown men, but leftovers are unheard of, the food in front of us is meant to end up in our stomachs by the end of the meal and that is never an easy task! Moroccan women tsk-tsk us, gesturing to our slim figures and to the food and keep pushing until the plate is wiped clean and we can only be rolled from the table to bed for our afternoon siestas.

Something I’ve found so wonderful about couscous is its simplicity—a grain-inexpensive. And since the dish doesn’t require a meat element, that part is a luxury; it is something that even the impoverished people of Morocco can enjoy which means it is a custom, a tradition enjoyed throughout time and space by all people.

Congratulations to Erin Maxwell ’13, winner of the October 2011 study-abroad writing contest.  The contest is part of the Goucher Passport Series which was created to provide a forum for Goucher students to share their interesting study-abroad experiences.

Erin will receive a $75 Visa gift card for her story “Old Street Bathroom Visit.”

Honorable mentions go to Corinne Bennett ’13, Leih Boyden ’13, Sara Weber ’13, and Caitlin Boylan ’11.

Thanks to all of our entrants for writing about their exciting adventures abroad.  View the entries below.

by Erin Maxwell

Her name was ‘luscious Laura’.  At least, that’s what she told me it was.  Our meeting lasted exactly three minutes, but she was unforgettable.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, almost seven o’ clock at night on October 1^st. I had just returned from a long day of three-hour lectures and was feeling exhausted, cranky, and quite angry; my poetry had been rejected from yet another  literary magazine for ‘lacking substance’, ­which was only shocking enough to make me a little bitter and frustrated at the crowds that filled up the station.

I had to pee; it could not wait the entire three minutes it would usually take to walk down Old Street to Pitfield to get my dorm.  So, in desperation, I ducked into the station’s bathroom. It reeked of piss.  I didn’t care.  One of the lights was out, which left this tiny vestibule coated in half a shadow. Deplorable, filthy; this is what a tube station bathroom looked like.

After I finished my business, I exited the grimy stall and proceed to wash my hands. Someone had written in bright red lipstick, “Lonely Londoners.”  Although this was probably a reference to the 1956 novel by Samuel Selvon, it resonated with me in a different sort of way.  Perhaps it was the day, the time, the awful crowds. Perhaps it was none of those things.

Before I could give the scrawl another thought, the door swung open.  This is the moment that has stuck with me weeks later: the black pixie cut with neon blue streaks, the over-sized red checkered shirt, and the baggy pants that were hanging off her skinny waist.  This was ‘luscious Laura.” Of course, she would not tell me this until the end, when it was time to say goodbye.

She didn’t acknowledge my presence at first as she situated herself in front of the mirror opposite me; she was too busy fiddling with her hair, poking at her hollow cheeks, wrinkling her nose.  I had just switched off the water and was about to move around her to get to the paper towels before she asked, “Oi! Darlin’, you mind helpin’ a girl with her hair?” I blinked, confused.

“What exactly do you want me to do to it?”

“Aww you know. Mess it up a little. Like yours,” she said, pointing a bony finger at my own pixie cut that was growing out quite well considering it was uneven.

I shrugged. It was an innocent request.  I moved back towards her and began my task. She smelled of beer and the kind of perfume you buy at drug stores.  I tried not to gag.  Her hair was very coarse. Still, its roughness felt appropriate.

As I was awkwardly flipping small strands up at her instruction, she started talking. It was her birthday; she was twenty-eight.

“Happy birthday,” I said, smiling at her reflection in the mirror.

She nodded, smiling back. “Yeh,” she laughed, sticking her hands into her pockets and rocking back and forth on her heels a little. “My friends are taking me up to the London Eye! You ever been?” I shook my head. The London Aquarium is as close as I had ever gotten I said.

Pop. A pink bubble burst. I hadn’t realized she was chewing gum. She signaled for me to stop. Then, she leaned onto the sink and took in the result. She grinned: a successful endeavor. “It’s gonna be wild. It’s gonna be wild I bet,” she sighed. Then she turned to me, and did something I was not expecting: she touched my cheek. “You’re pretty,” she said. “You’re too pretty to be a Londoner.”

“That’s not possible,” I laughed, embarrassed. Her hand hadn’t left its spot on my cheek, which made me even more embarrassed. “All the women here are so…fashionable. I feel quite out of place most of the time.” It was true. With their flashy Calvin Klein suits and dresses from French Connection, I always felt ashamed when I walked down Regent Street in ripped jeans to browse the boutiques in Soho; I feared these women’s giggles as I whizzed by were about me.

“Yeh, well,” she said, rolling her eyes. “They’re bitches. Cold stuck up bitches. Me? I love London. It’s moody, yeah. It ain’t so pretty most of the time, it ain’t like it don’t have its flaws. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I nodded. She took her hand away from my cheek to pull out a tube of hot pink lipgloss from her pocket, which she began to apply sloppily, no mirror necessary. She continued on with her monologue.

“London, it’s a great city. I’ve lived here almost ten years. Came from Liverpool to work. You know what I do? I deal with idiot blokes all day, guys who want tattoos just to have tattoos.” At this, she giggled, and then capped her lipgloss and stuck it back into her pocket. “But you’ll never forget it. This city, I mean. Oh, you Americans got your Empire State Building and your Wendy’s and your houses in the suburbs. But London,” she said, her eyes glittering. She smacked her now shiny lips together. “London’s at the center of everyone’s heart. When you’re here, you love life. You just love it.”

I was silent. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so tired or cranky anymore. I had forgotten about my poems. All I could see was this woman, really a girl, who looked like she was taken out of an Egon Schiele painting and thrown into reality one fine day. She yawned. We were done here.

Before she exited, she gave me a big fat kiss on the cheek. “You tell ‘em you met the luscious Laura!” she hooted. Then, just like that, she was gone. She never asked my name.

I touched her imprint, and then I was going, too. I had met ‘London’ in a station bathroom. That’s what I would take home with me.

By Leih Boyden, Class of 2013 studying “Rwanda: Post-Genocide Restoration and Peacebuilding” in Kigali, Rwanda and Gulu, Uganda.

So, I guess I should talk to you about my trip to Rwanda. I should comment on the pleasant weather and the crowded, steamy buses I take to school every morning. It’s imperative that I describe the goat skull soup my family here makes me eat and how “African time” means arriving at church just as everyone is chanting the final “Amen.”  I need to remember to mention the cute boy who does his laundry next door and the motorcycle accident I miraculously escaped from unscathed. I should report to you back home about all of the typical Africa I have witnessed: starving children, trash-filled slums, giraffes, straw huts, hippos and the occasional child solider. I plan to berate you for doing nothing to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the Lord’s Resistance Army. To condemn you for going on with your life as people across an ocean suffered. Of course, I can’t forget to mention the incalculable amounts of pain I witness every day when talking to survivors, perpetrators, victims, soldiers, brides, men, women, children, people. Oh, and it’s critical to declare my personal transformation and how I’m on the journey of a lifetime. All of these things you must want to hear about my trip to Africa.

With everything I need to tell you, some stories might get swept under the rug. I might forget to tell you that the hand of a killer feels like anyone else’s, simply flesh and bone. And how it doesn’t take a special person to end a life, merely a person. That while Gulu in northern Uganda looks like an eighth layer of hell, Charles, who works at Café Larem, has a good crop of beans this season.  And Akena, who sells shoes at his family store, not only hunts rats, but is also planning his own revolution. Josia isn’t getting married until she sends all of her younger siblings to university on her waitress salary. And Charlotte, who invites me over for dinner every time I walk past her house, is the nicest woman I know, yet her brothers are, after all these years, still in prison.

I came to Rwanda/Uganda to find the best of humanity in the worst of humanity. A well-intentioned, yet pre-conceived notion. Instead, I simply found more people just like me. Maybe the climate is a little hotter, the land more hilly, and enough deep-seeded violence that spans generations to keep even the most seasoned traveler on his or her toes.  But, still, merely another place with mothers and fathers and kindergarteners all the same. Doctors, cooks, lawyers, and fourteen year old punks.

Unlike in Rwanda/Uganda, we Americans live in a society that does not appreciate, or rarely acknowledges, the intangible. The quiet revelations unveiled during hours spent watching people walk by on the street. Concepts of faith, trust, hope, and universal love can be distant from our daily reality. We are secure enough to be able to move beyond blind faith and have no need to give our lives wholly over to those things that we know are “bigger than we.”  In Rwanda/Uganda, those ideas are all people have and their reality makes these slippery theories tangible. In such unstable societies, one looks to the “big themes” to grasp some relevance for his or her suffering. Here, life is not a given, it’s a gift.

I”m slowly uncovering that each of us has enough love inside ourselves for the whole world.  That unnerving as it is, trust involves your individual participation. And that faith and hope are Siamese twins in the human mind. At the end of the day, all I have are these two hands. Yet, so do you. And you. And you. Yes, even you too.

By Sara Weber

When choosing somewhere to study abroad there are many considerations you must keep in mind: types of classes, quality of professors, part of the world you wish to see, number of nightclubs per capita, how many hours will it take to get to the beach, etc. I weighed these factors for the better part of last year until finally deciding that Thailand was the right place for me.  The program fit into my major like your favorite old t-shirt fresh from the dryer.

One thing I did not consider was the weather in my soon-to-be home. Of course, I knew it was going to be hot, being so much closer to the tropics than my native home of Boston. I arrived after a day spent on various planes zooming across 11 time zones. I was perhaps less than fresh-faced, but I proceeded to shake like an excited Chihuahua, nonetheless, unable to wait another minute for my abroad adventure to begin. Still clad in my favorite travel sweatpants that I had been using to fend off the chill that comes with recycled air, I stepped for the first time into the oppressive heat of Bangkok’s night air.

I was not at all prepared for this immediate change in temperature. The only way in which I can accurately describe the way it feels to breathe in the sweltering heat of Thailand for the first time is to liken it to having a wool blanket wrapped around your face whilst a tea kettle of warm water is poured over it. I’ve never been water-boarded, but I can only assume this is mother nature’s equivalent. It hits you suddenly; it looks deceptively beautiful outside, all that sunshine, the vibrant colors calling out to you–that is until you step outside the air conditioned paradise of the great indoors and stumble upon a natural sauna.

It sneaks up on you much like the monsoon-quality storms that brew up and soak you to the bone in seconds. I swear in this kind of rain, even wearing my raincoat, I have never been so wet anywhere but in a pool. There are no storm warnings here—you just learn to expect what feels like a warm water balloon to the face on the daily. There’s a persistent damp quality to this country, it seeps into your life till you’re no longer quite sure what dry ever felt like. I feel it in the way my clothes never seem to dry all the way through, but maybe that’s just because of the way my farang (the Thai word for foreign) self sweats my way through these days, like the moisture from every liter of water I drink just can’t wait to escape my skin and rejoin the rest of its brethren hanging in the air.

With such conditions as these, why would you ever want to stay in such a place? The truth is: because it is so unlike any other you will ever see. Thailand is a world all its own. As hard as it was for me to adapt in those first days, this climate has a unique quality to it that is more than just unbelievable humidity. These conditions give rise to the most fantastic array of biological life I have ever seen. Fruits I had no idea even existed grow accidentally out of the fertile ground, a triumph of life growing out of village compost piles.

Nowhere have I ever witnessed such vibrancy, such life unimpeded; growing, moving, breathing in every possible space. This biological life-force conquers every crack in the sidewalk like they realize their entitlement to the land. They know who was here first and who is the impostor. It’s phenomenal to watch, almost like you could literally see the grass grow between your toes. Watching this kind of growth gives me pause to appreciate the implications of this climate I originally thought so oppressive. Appreciate each morning as the sun on my face invigorates my whole body till I can almost feel the vitamin D coursing through my veins better than any cup of coffee I’ve ever had. The deliciously hot afternoons that are so conducive to naps and best dealt with by a cup of Thai iced tea.

Then the sun sets,  and the air cools around you, beckoning you out to come out and see yet another side of this beautiful country, one filled with eccentric night markets and a plethora of choices for your late night snack, sizzling up at you from vendors’ carts. This Thai lifestyle is due, at least in part, to the adaptations made by people living with such a climate and its challenges. Like one universally connected, living, breathing organism, Thailand marches on unequaled and unconcerned with the rest of the world. Superior in her vibrant simplicity, there is nowhere else I’d rather be.

By Corinne Bennett

There is nothing more satisfying than finding the exact place you’re standing, on an unfamiliar map—even if you can’t pronounce the name of the street.

The first challenge is focusing while sweating and supporting a heavy rucksack. You’re overdressed. Earlier that morning you were in cold, rainy Scotland. Now you’re in sun-shining Barcelona. You sigh with the feeling of disapproval that you are now that tourist standing in the middle of the street, obviously out of place.

The next challenge is reassuring yourself that the street you’re standing on can be found on the map. It might sound absurd but after searching and interrogating the map extensively, you begin to feel skeptical that “Carrer de Comte d’Urgell” exists at all!

After nervous jitters begin to descend, you consider asking a local, but that would be admitting defeat. You arm yourself with a final shred of confidence and decide to take one last look at the map before panicking. You take a deep breath, bring the map closer to your eyes, and systematically scan.

This is when it always happens.

It’s the feeling of completeness when you place the last puzzle piece; the sense of haughtiness when you find Oswald from “Where’s Waldo?”; the satisfaction you feel when writing the final sentence in your conclusion. You are not lost.

For the first time your grip on the map relaxes. You exhale, not realizing you’ve been holding your breath. You look around: the signs are in Catalan, the background noise unfamiliar. People are seated at sidewalk tables, eating and smoking, living their lives. Potted plants and clothes drying adorn balconies, creating a multicolored palette. You smile. You are in Barcelona.

It is your third day in Barcelona and you are successfully navigating the city. You look down at your map and easily spot where you are. The map that you initially wanted to rip into shreds has become your personalized tool for exploration. There are now parks circled, “Xs” marking monuments and random sites to see, scribbled in the corners.

The best thing about your map is you get to fold it up, bring it home, and keep it forever. In a few months, you can share it with friends and family at home and confidently point to the exact street where you stood and say: “I was there.”