Lalsot and more manly joy

It turned out we visited Lalsot. I wasn't sure where we are going. Or even better - I'm still not sure why we went there.

Lalsot is a place where Idex has delegated some volunteers. But the place is quite different - it's almost in desert and it's five degrees warmer there all the time. (What happens there when it's +48 in Jaipur? Not sure I wanna know.) The volunteers there are mostly high school kids from England. But doing a bit different stuff than the volunteer slum teachers here.

It's like a school trip for them. Except they go to India. They were first two weeks trekking around Rajasthan and now they are spending one week painting (yes, painting) some places in Lalsot. So half of the group was painting some shaggy building that was going to be some safe house for deserted children or something similar. The other is going to be a school. So, they trek for two weeks, paint for one week and after this they do something for one week (don't remember what). Then they go back home.

Our bus broke down. This is phase 1. In phase 2 they started welding something under the bus. While the passengers were waiting in the bus. That took a while..

Volunteers painting a classroom and us overseeing (watching).

We were drawing a lot of attention, as usual. The kids really don't seem to have anything better to do in India than to look at tourists during the day.

Clay huts. Not for the richest ones.

The only problem is that they pay loads of money for this of course. Volunteering means "you pay everything yourself". So I prefer being an intern when it's "we pay everything for you and even a tiny amount of salary". But in some countries doing some voluntary work looks very good in CV. I guess it's not such a big thing in Finland.

Anyway it was nice to see what the Idex volunteers do in other places. But there was very little for us to do - we were guided around and people told us different things. The whole thing was organized by a new British worker at the Jaipur office - she's going to be working there for a year somehow promoting the volunteer work. So she was very interested in seeing all that stuff and learning how things work. I think me, Tani and Pyry were not that interested. But it was something different than Jaipur, so all's well.

If you were a bit dumber you might think this is from any regular country. It looks almost normal! But, it's monsoon season. Before monsoon it has definately been quite different.

Lalsot. Upstairs was some Muslim prayer going on.

As an addition to my older post about manly joy, we saw now more of this manly joy. It's everywhere. But in the countryside it's even stronger. I'll attach a picture. We asked this new worker Caroline what it's all about as she's been in India for a few years already. The explanation she gave was a little scary.

Men in India cannot have anything with girls before they are married. And every person has some need for being close to somebody every now and then. So what are the options? Guess. So if you think about it for a while... Because you cannot touch a girl, you are 'forced' to touch men. I don't want to know how far it goes really. It still freaks me out to see men running across a street holding hands.

Manly joy. They seemed happy!

I'm glad it's ok in Europe to touch women. But it's of course just all about culture. Here it's nothing special to be close to men. And they don't care really if you're a Westerner or not - when we were at the local wedding with Pyry many local guys dragged us dancing with them. Closely. Or, well, tried to drag. Oh, these CULTURAL DIFFERENCES. That's what I always tell people who ask what I think of India. "It's very interesting as everything is so different." In other words, I am not used to the culture and I don't want to be.

P.S. Oh, remember the DND service I ordered to my cellphone? The one that should block the stupid advertisements and quiz questions? Well, surprisingly it still hasn't got activated. So today I noticed that I have way too much credits left in my prepaid. So I decided to try some of those stupid services that come to my cellphone all the time. The first one offered knowledge on "Are you in love?". I ordered the service, it costed 3 rupees and a minute later got the answer "This information is not available now.". Uh. So I tried the next one. "How to get as sexy as Bibasha Basu (a famous actor)?". One minute more and same answer. Third time was the same. So what the hell. They offer this incredibly stupid service which drains my cell phone battery and is next to impossible to stop and the service doesn't even WORK? Sure, they got my 9 rupees. Nice business model. India.