22 May 2008

Shimoga is a nice town but a bit dustier than Bangalore, Our hotel is pretty choice with colored lighting on each floor at night and pretty cush rooms. We had a meeting with a vet director we met randomly at breakfast that helps fund Dr. Nadeem’s programs. They invited us to a groundbreaking ceremony for the boys hostel at the new vet school going up. It was a bit more involved than a guy with a shovel in America. Rather, a priest chanted and blessed the earth involving several rituals. We took some photos, schmoozed a bit and took off to the elephant camp. It is interesting though that classes are being taught at this school before there are even buildings up for all the classes and students (and this one is scheduled to be finished in two years).
The elephant camp is pretty nice. The elephants are gathered every morning from the forest, brought to the river and washed, fed, and had oils put on their forehead. Not a bad deal if you are an elephant I’d imagine. The elephants have been trained, if you stand in front of them, to bless you. So you can go and pray in front of them and they will place their trunk on your head as if adorning you with holy water or some such (in this case holy drips of mucous). It is pretty cute to watch, especially when even the babies will do it. We would visit back again tomorrow, but we left to see a cattle ranch that has all India Native breeds of cattle. These cattle come in many shapes and sizes from small cows that are so friendly they will meet you at the gate and nuzzle you (not that any of the cattle are any more mean, just not so actively affectionate) to the giant cattle with horns longer than your legs. Most of them are medium sized gray cattle with a hump though that I cannot tell apart. These are often divided by the state from which they originated and some less superficial traits than I can observe in the hours we are there.

I think this is also the night we saw a movie in a theater. Jennat was a Hindi flick about getting caught up in the game of match fixing for Cricket. I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it yet, but Cricket is huge here. People play everywhere and I have no idea what is going on yet. I know that runs are good, wickets are bad, bowlers pitch, and you can get up to six runs with a good hit. I’ll figure it out later and perhaps enlighten my readers who care.