Four months later, I finally get to see Pune

Nearly four months after getting out of that first taxi ride to Pune, I have finally explored my new city. This weekend, I went to see the many sights around where I live. This includes several old temples and an old fort. That’s what India is all about, temples and forts.

On Saturday I got up early, skipped the gym, and prepared to go out to Parvati Hill with Josef. I hadn’t ever traveled so far south of the city. I checked the map. It looked like an easy drive. Then I got us lost.

Josef and I ended up driving in circles through downtown Pune. Downtown is pretty much what people think of when they think of big Indian cities. Winding narrow roads crowded with people, cows, and rickshaws crawling aimlessly all over the street. If there were dividing traffic lines on the road, no one seemed to notice. I swerved in every direction down streets to avoid on coming traffic. After about twenty minutes of large loops, I finally found a road I recognized, and continued down in what I thought to be a proper direction.

Fortunately, the Parvati Hill was large enough to spot from some distance, and we started driving towards it. When we finally found the temple, got off our bikes, and started to climb, we became celebrities once again. As soon as my camera comes out, people start asking for pictures. Children crowd around and start asking simple question in English.

The temple is about a one hundred step climb to the top. The temple complex is comprised of the main temple, an open air walled temple, a museum, and several smaller temples and offices. Once at the temple, you can pay two rupees and a guard will let you up to the top of the walls of the temple. From up there, the view looks out over all of northern Pune and downtown.

In some kind of architectural cruelty, the temple floors are made of a stone that gets hot in the bright Indian sun, and since it was a temple, after all, the signs posted asked us to take off our shoes. As Josef and I made dashes across the temple walls trying to find places to sit and relieve our feet, the locals looked on with amusement. The views were worth it, it was the most incredible view of the city.

On the way down we sat down in some of the grass to look at the city. We only stayed for a couple minutes as soon smoke started to fill the air. I went to investigate. It was trash burning day in the slums by the temple.

We made our way north to go to the Shaniwar Wada fort, built hundreds of ears ago by the Marathi Empire. What stands today are the walls of the fort, which people can walk around on and look at the gardens that now lay inside. Local residents pay 5 rupee entrance, and foreigners pay 100. I tried telling the ticket sales person that I live in Pune. I showed him my learners permit and everything.

“So you have a voter registration card?” he asked, showing me his.

“Well, no, I don’t but…”

“Then you have to pay 100,” he interrupted. Fair enough, but a lot of actual Indians don’t have voter cards either. Pune had abysmal voter turn out in the last elections. My next task: get a voter registration card.

It’s not that I mind paying 100 rupees, I understand that these monuments take a lot of money to take care of, and 5 rupees a person is not nearly enough. A lot of the other foreigners I’ve talked to have complained that it’s discrimination. I don’t feel this way. This is what it takes to maintain a historic building in a country where a vast number of people live on less than a dollar a day. It is, still, worth it to see the persons reaction to my claims of being Indian. They smile and laugh when I show them my learners permit.

There really isn’t much to see at Shaniwar Wada. You can climb up the walls and look over on to the crowded streets bellow. Over the front gate is the main guard post, and it now guards the fort against the crowd of children and college students playing cricket on the front lawn.

The garden was nice, but there was a large group of children who all wanted me to take their pictures. I still haven’t had this explained to me, why people get so worked up when my camera comes out. After about a dozen photos, and just as many broken promises of just-one-last-picture, I had to break free if I was going to explore the fort at all.

Josef and I did a quick once around, and decided it was time to go home. I’m starting to learn the streets of Pune, a task I figured I would never achieve by the time I left. This left me feeling very proud of myself.

That evening, Bobby, Utkarsh, and I went to a concert. It was a metal band, and Utkarsh knew all the members, called Pitch Black Symphony. They were, I was surprised to admit, pretty good.

The next day I met up with Bobby and Parisa at German Bakery, a local hang out for tourist and expats. Bobby was helping Parisa with the book that she was writing. I had no idea she was writing a book. Who knew?

Parisa joined me at the next stop on my trip, the Pateleshwar cave temples. It’s a temple that’s still in use today, and was first built in the 8th, and was carved out of basalt rock. This is now my new favorite place in Pune. It was a very quiet place, something rare in India.

Sunday night I went to the movies to see Inglorious Bastards (again) with Shiva and Anna. I have already seen it, but it was a slow evening, and the movie was pretty good the first time. I think I liked it even more the second time around. After the movies we met up with a guy from Mumbai that Anna met in Russia. He’s the only Indian I’ve met that speaks fluent Russian. Once again, I was the only person there unable to speak fluently in a second language. I thought it would only be Hindi that I would need to learn while I’m in India.