Saturday, October 3, 2009

Le Indiane - The arrival: first sensations, first images...

Whenever I go to a new country for the first time, I always try to pay particular attention to the very first sensations, the first images, the first smells, etc. of the new place, and imprint them in my mind as mental pictures.

My first contact with India has been… in Frankfurt, in the boarding area of Air India. And the first feeling was… ‘diversity’. Knowing that for a strange mental process we tend to make uniform to our eyes the faces of the people of an ethnic group different from ours - and so at first sight the Chinese, the Ethiopians, the Senegalese all looked a bit alike for us - I was impressed on the contrary by how different from each other the Indians that were waiting with me for boarding looked to me.

But to be fair, I should describe the first feelings at arrival. I have to confess that 20 hours of flight have anesthetized a bit my receptive capacities. But if I try to recall the sensations that accompanied me from the moment I left the luggage area at the airport until the moment I reached the hotel, these are well synthetized in the image above. The first words that come to my mind are: crowding, over-crowding, mass… and incessant honking. In brief, India seems not to be the place for agoraphobics…

5 comments:

  1. sembra la stessa impressione che avevo avuto io uscendo dalla metropolitana di Hong Kong a Kowloon...

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  2. mi sembra il ponte della ghisolfa quando c'è il derby a milano

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  3. bhe, ma a milano non trovi le mucche per strada...

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  4. no, ma delle belle pantegane pelose sì!!!!

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  5. non le ho ancora viste, pero' sono sicuro che le pantegane ci sono anche qui.

    pero' oggi ho visto un elefante in mezzo al traffico - questo sicuramente non lo trovate sul ponte della ghisolfa!

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