My Indian Cultural Learnings

People have always told me 'prepare for the worse when you're in India.. it will shock you'. Well I must say now that my trip is coming to an end, it hasn't been as bad as I thought.

Here are the Top 10 Cutural Learnings from India:

1) There are no toilet paper in public toilets of India. Not b/c they are too tight arse to give it to tourists etc but more b/c it's a norm to not use it. They wash it their butt with their hands and water!
2) The traditional Indian way to greet an Elderly is to touch bend over and touch their feet and say 'Abkaseh-heh' (how are you)
3) When you visit the Taj Mahal, you go through a body search and security check of your belongings. You are not allowed to bring your mobile phones or any sweets/chewing gums. I kept on scratching my head thinking why not mob phones? and came to the conclusion the bannig of Mob phones is to prevent terrorist bombings from occuring (after all, Taj Mahal is a Muslim temple).
4)Indians are never on time. There were numerous occasions where Duc and I waited for more than 1hr-1.5hr for our driver/friends of Sandeep who had promised to take us somewhere
5) The traditional Indian wedding day itself usually starts from the evening at 6pm and goes until 4am. So since point no.4 is true, of course Sandeep's wedding day was running 2hrs late. We started to ceremony at around 8pm and marching as well as dancing for a good 1.5km stretch from his house to the wedding reception where the bride is. The wedding didn't finish till 8am the next day! yes! talk about sheer exhaustion not for the guests but for the bride and groom!
6) Family are held extremely important in the Indian culture. So much so that most Indians refer their cousin sisters as their 'sisters' or cousin bros as their 'brothers' to the point where you start to question how come they have so many bros and sis? and so much so that a household usually have at least 3 families living under the same roof. Distant relatives such as 'she is my grandfather's cousin sister's daughter or my grandmother's brother's wife's sister' is commonly found in an Indian family etc.
7) Indians usually try and save as must as they can when they're driving. For example at every red light, they will switch off their ignition as they think this will save petrol when it actually sucks up more petrol every time you restart the engine! and also 50% of the vehicles on the road do not drive with their headlights on as they think this will 'save' their car battery! geesh.. Indians can be such intelligent ppl yet sooooo dumb at times. You just got to laugh..
8) There are two types of fees at each tourist destination ticket counters. For the locals they pay on avg 50 rupees (which = to AUD$1.50) and for the foreigners they pay on avg 250 rupees! (which = nearly $9!). Talk about discrimination!
9) Indians love to push in. They have no concept of waiting in line for their turn. Fending for your own self interest is pretty much the norm in a lot of the major cities.
10) You must ALWAYS go to an Indian airport at least 4hrs prior to departure - why? 1stly, it takes on avg 1hr when it should take 15mins thanx to the traffic. 2ndly, since pt. 9 is true, despite you lining up, you still never move forward in the queue thanks to losers who just push in constantly! 3rdly - the check-in airline staff take their buttefly time to process the boarding pass! I think it's the slowest airline counter in the world! 4thly - the immigration takes their dumb arse too to chop a few stamps in your passport and outgoing passenger card! 5thly- there are no logical flow or signs in an Indian airport (especially Calcutta). For example, you first go through a body search and customs check of your bags before you go to the ticket counter which is fine.. but after you go to the ticket counter to check in, you come back out again of the customs to go to your boarding gate. and there are NO signs at all to tell you where to go. You just follow the crowd and hope to God they're going the right way! it's absolutely a traveller's nightmare esp when you're running late to catch your plane!

So there you go, the wonderful world of India! So stupid at times yet just puts a smile to your face everytime you think about it...