More random travelling thoughts and reflections

· It is funny to see how some characteristics pass in the family from generation to generation. Seeing how the way my dad acts is so similar sometimes to the way my grandfather does makes me question a lot the way I myself act.

· My grandfather has an interesting way to understand every place we are travelling in. When we get to a new city and meet a new guide, the first thing he does is asking him the same series of questions – about the politics in that place, about his own family etc. Sometimes I can really sense that the guide doesn’t really know that answer and he just invent something. However, my grandfather takes is quite seriously and forms his point of view of that place according to it. A just show how nothing is really set and it’s all dependent on different point of views.

· Being with my parents again made me understand how independent and responsible for ourselves we are in muwci (forgetting all our discussions about rules and all that stuff about campus. When you look at it simply we ARE responsible to ourselves, having no parents around). It is nice forgetting all that and being a kid again, although both have their pluses and minuses.

· It is so different travelling with guides everywhere. It is true you get to know much more about the history of the places and the people. However, I still feel like I am learning more travelling on my own with friends, exploring places by ourselves. You get the feeling of the place better this way, and I find it even more important.

· I can’t understand that passion for shopping, which attacks me also sometimes. Why do we have (well, some of us) this need to buy all those pretty stuff we see? I know that I really don’t need anything, and I’ve been trying to work on that – ignoring the urge to buy and buy. It has been working quite well for me, but some of the people I was travelling with just couldn’t stop buying everything.

What Is Real?

I’m travelling in India with my family these days. We are crossing Rajastan with a small bus only for us, and I get to see India from a whole new point of view – top end hotels, comfortable beds, private car, expensive restaurants, tour guides and more. You got the idea. Anyways, weather I like it or not is a matter for another post, but right now I wanted to talk about something that came to my mind a few times already throughout this trip (which has only began…)

In Judpur’s big market our guide stopped next to an ordinary looking shop. He said we should see it, so we entered. Immediately a selling person appeared and started talking about the store. Apparently it has 8 floors. We started climbing and stopped in the third floor (I have no idea if it actually has 8…). The guy started talking and showing us fabrics, bed covers scarves etc. When we said we are from Israel he immediately gave us the names of three of the big clothing companies and said that the shop sells them fabrics. As he introduced the stuff he talked about the biggest names in the fashion industry all over the world and said those are items that they make for them. Introducing one particularly amazing item he told us the Richard Gir was there and he loved it so much that he bought 100 pieces of it. From the moment he started talking I started being suspicious about every word. When the Richard Gir part came up I already doubted him confidently enough, probably because I am a bit experienced with this kind of salesman that you can find in many places all over India. But then he took out a notebook and showed us a picture of Gir in the store, and a lot of articles about this particular shop in newspapers from all over the world. Then I started to doubt myself.

My point is – how do we decide what is real and what s not? How do we know when someone is lying to us? Of course we can sometimes feel it, but still we cannot really be sure.

In that particular case the pictures and articles made me believe. However, afterwards I thought about it and it is not that hard to fake that stuff.

We use our background and past experience in this kind of cases. My mom has been in the fashion industry for years, so she could check the fabrics and the designs and tell if they are of good quality. I had my experience with Indian salesmen from the past two years. But it is still not enough sometimes.

And maybe it doesn’t really matter after all. You can buy a ‘real pashmina’ in 200 rupees and believe it is actually real and be happy with it. When we talk about this kind of matters it might not be so crucial after all. However, we talk a lot in campus about matters of sources of information, the internet, and what you can or cannot trust – maters in which this issue can be much more crucial.

And, like always – I don’t have any conclusion. Only wondering…

MUWCI life

My parents and one of my sisters will arrive here in a few hours. I cannot sit still because of the excitement. I’m excited first of all because I miss them, of course; and second of all, and that is probably the major reason, because I’ll get to show them muwci: the campus, my friends, my classes, the activities than I’m taking part in, my house, my housemates, my room….

This is exciting because I always find it hard to explain how life in here is like, and moreover, because I believe that this place changed me a lot, and actually shaped my personality (identity?) to a large extent in the past one and a half years.

Writing my philosophy IA on the subject of identity I encountered once again different ideas on ‘who we are’ and what makes us who we are. Between all the body theories and mind theories I felt that one important notion was absent – the effect of the people around us and the environment we live in on our identity.

It might be because the discussion is more about ‘what is the self’ rather than ‘what affects the self’. However, I feel that you cannot completely separate those two notions.

First of all, the society we are brought up in (our country, closer community, family etc…) has a tremendous effect on what we will grow up to be like. Very basic qualities of our personality are stated, I believe, in respond to the environment in which you grew up and later on in the changing environments we live our lives within.

I guess this is why many people who studied here find it hard afterwards to go back home, since they find that they have changed while the people who stayed behind have not.

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Later addition:

I actually found it quite hard to explain how this place rally functions even when my family was there. I guess it takes more than a week, or maybe more patience than I have J…