New Years Eve!

Slums:

This morning we met with more people from Costford and had a speaker talk to us about the slums.  A slum is a heavily populated area characterized by lots of housing close together and squalor.  Kerala has 1.81% of its population living in slums, which is the lowest in all of India (with the highest at 40%).  The main economic driver of slums is that they are typically close to the place of work for that family and there is a shortage of low cost housing in the area.  Previous slum development has focused on removing old structures, relocate citizens and rebuild newer, better constructed houses.  New housing is typically imposed, but Costford’s strategy is to try to minimize the amount of time for displacement and to create structures with flexibility so that families can make the houses their own, and therefore establish ownership of the place.  We were going to go visit a slum where Costford had built housing but it had rained that day and we weren’t able to get through because of flooding.  I’m hoping we’ll be able to see it this week.

New Years!

 After learning about the slums, we went to a store called Fabindia to get saris for New Years.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to wear them because we didn’t have enough time to put them on before we left for the hotel we were going to spend New Years at.  This place was a 5 star hotel but was located in a pretty sketchy area, so we had to get into that city before they closed the gates at 6pm.  At the hotel we watched some cultural events.  There were drummers, a play and some dancing.   This place was right on the ocean so we were able to check out the beach area after dinner.  We were warned that women who are seen drinking in public are considered to be “loose” and as our professor said, would result in what we call sexual harassment in the US… we got a good laugh out of that but it’s definitely true because even though we weren’t drinking in public, the drunk Indian men were following us around and touching our backs and stuff.  Not cool.  That’s when we decided to head up to the hotel. Our professor also joked (although it does happen) that the two bottles two of the guys had picked up were bootlegged… so we were all nervous about drinking it.  We cheers to “seeing” 2012, though, and we had a great time.  We went up to the dance floor by the pool around 11 and had a blast bringing in the new year together.  We headed back to our hotel and checked out the bar to see if we could get a drink.  They were closing down but let us in.  They were trying to shoo us out so that the staff could have their own party, but we kind of just stayed there talking to people and got to stay for the staff party, which was absolutely insane.  New Years Eve just got exponentially better throughout the night, something I will never forget!