Author Topic: Travel Culture  (Read 6414 times)

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Offline msj

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Re: Travel Culture
« Reply #75 on: February 19, 2018, 03:39:00 pm »
A few more things on India before I forget them:

The men are pigs.  In the South they were not too bad but in the North they are nothing less than sexist pigs.

I pointed out to my wife how strange it was to hardly see any women walking the streets. Even during the day time not too many.

At night, even less.

A few incidents:

1) Indian men would stare at the women in our tour group, sometimes the men would grab their junk, other times make a strange whistle/sucking/clicking sound. 

2) In Kochi (in the South) the wife needed her passport to get the sim card for her phone.  I decided to leave her in the store and walk to the hotel just down the road and bring it back.

While I was gone, the guy helping her stopped talking to her and everything froze until I got back. As soon as I was present they could continue doing business.  Who knows what they think of this strange Canadian who would leave his wife to fend for herself in a store full of men.  But, at least they left her alone.

3) Indians like to take selfies and pictures of tourists and the men especially like to do this of female tourists. Our tour guides explained that they will go onto FaceBook and claim to be the boyfriend of the woman in the picture. Probably harmless fun but still creepy.

A few women did this to me (one of the security guards at the hotel in New Delhi for example) so who knows what they did with the picture of a middle-aged accountant with women who could be his daughter.

4) Locks on the doors.  I thought it was strange that the hotel door would open with a pad lock. Strange because anyone with a padlock could lock you in your hotel room. 

Fine, but what is even stranger is to find locks on the inside AND outside of doors within the hotel (the bathroom for instance).

When we did some homestay/cooking classes in Indian homes my wife noticed this.  Our tour guide in the north is a woman so when asked about this it was explained that those locks could be used for many purposes. It was implied that one of the purposes would be to lock the wife in the bathroom or for the woman to lock herself in the bathroom for defense purposes. 

Either way, I found no reason to try out such a system on my wife and, thankfully, she did not try it on me.

5) There were a few times when we were visiting roadside bathrooms that my wife made sure I hung around (both for her benefit and some of the other women in the tour benefit). 

Not a surprise I guess given that many women in the Indian countryside risk UTI's as they try to only go to the bathroom in the privacy of the night. That is, they will try to hold it all day to avoid the male gaze during the day.

6) Upon returning home we had to wander the streets of Richmond looking for a meal due to renovations at the kitchen in the hotel (and after a long flight we were not happy about this - but first world problems). 

She mentioned how nice it was to not be "on edge" while walking around at night.

She always had to put on this tough/brave face and brace herself to deal with the stares/leering/whistling/junk grabbing pigs in India. 

In Canada she has dealt with piggy men - no doubt, most of us men are pigs.  But Indian men take it to a whole new level.

7) Did see some girls/women dressed in the full burka.  Even walked by one standing on the roadside waiting to get picked up. Fascinating how they have the makeup on to highlight whatever parts are showing (just the eyes in this case)

More often you could see their full face with just as much makeup as most Muslim women wore the hijab.

I often wonder if, in a few generations, there will be a scientific way to measure whether or not the faces of Muslim women changed over time (sort of as a Darwinian selection).

What I mean is - whether certain facial traits will be selected over certain others which will lead to a strong tendency in those traits.

8) In Varanasi when we toured the silk making facilities the men and women from the tour had to be segregated. The women got to go see some Muslim women at work. The men could not go because the women were working and wearing casual clothes to work in.  You would not want to be wearing a head scarf around any of the machinery as it would have been very dangerous.

I saw pictures that were taken by some on our tour and they looked like any other young women working but the rules are the rules.

9) When we left New Delhi we got the taxi ride with a women's group that has started a taxi company that has the purpose of providing jobs for battered/abused women.

The taxi has a sign on it so anyone going by essentially knows that the woman driving has been abused in some way.

The looks she/we were getting from some of the drivers were intense at times. 

I don't know: maybe it's bad enough that a woman is driving but even worse that a battered woman is driving and she is basically holding up a middle finger to the pigs around her? 

10) We jumped on a public bus a couple times in the south. The women go to the front and the men stay in the back. I thought this was unfair as I like to sit in the front but I was not about to protest.

Despite this, my wife still had a good time and still loves India. But no doubt it is much easier to navigate with a man and/or in a tour.


I've gotta have more cow bell! -Bruce Dickinson
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