When in Doubt, Burn it in Effigy

So now that I'm not panicking about getting work done, I've got a bit of time to talk about what I've been doing for... erm, the last two weeks. Sorry about that.

I've been kicking it into gear with Hindi learning - I'm not quite to the point where my brain's going to explode, but I've learned a TON so far. And I mean, being immersed is ridiculously intimidating (still) as well as ridiculously wonderful. So yeah, I go to class five days a week like in the States (actually, I only think I did that a couple times), but for four hours it's nothing but Hindi, and in different contexts.

For example, today I had a personal tutorial, grammar class, journal correction, and article discussion. For the personal tutorial, I chose to read more of a children's book about the Ramayana aloud- specifically how an unnamed person brought down the moon for a young Ram. It involved lots of me stuttering, trying to skim sometimes like in English (and failing five times out of six), and, surprisingly, a lot of me reading a few unfamiliar words in a row without stuttering. This is an improvement from the beginning of classes, where the only words I could really read quickly were the pronouns, and then only sometimes. Grammar class, at least today, I found I knew some answers without really thinking about it - simple sentences only, but they just came out of my mouth before I'd really processed them. Journal correction was a little (re: a lot) rougher, but I try to make at least one paragraph of my journal really risky - not really knowing what I'm doing, I experiment with constructions and read that paragraph in class, hoping that at least some of what I've done was right (and, most times, some of it is). Article discussion is odd, mostly because it's like an actual class, where we're expected to have read the material and have something to say about it. Today, despite struggling for certain words, I found myself thinking, "Oh, god, I've been talking forever. Let me shut up so my classmates can chime in." I mean, I'm sure I'm bound to hit a wall or a plateau or something soon, and my Hindi is still worse than that of a kindergartner, but in the meantime, I'm enjoying this great feeling while it lasts. (Also, amusingly relevant to my last post, my English is already deteriorating. I've had to change the phrasing in a few sentences [including this one] so everything would make sense.)

I've also been really social, which is odd for me, and yet not so odd at all, considering. Most weekday mornings, I bike to school, have class for four hours, have lunch for about a half hour with the other students, poll folks to find out what they're doing after school, decide not to do anything/decide to do something/attach myself to a group that's decided to do something (with their blessing, of course - our group's small enough that cliques haven't really formed [or at least haven't yet]), and go out to do something, maybe coming home in time for dinner. In the last two weeks, I have (among other things) played Garba (a sometimes-choreographed, sometimes-not dance that reminds me vaguely of ballroom dancing with sticks -bright colorful pictures with dancing), seen a Bollywood movie in theaters (Dil Bole Haddipa - it was GREAT), climbed to Narhargarh Fort and had "Slice" (Mango Juice!) at the restaurant on the top at night (the pictures from a high altitude in the evening/dark), watched part of a Ramlila that retold the Ramayana over the course of several nights (picture of the stage all in red), seen Jantr-Mantr (a ~300 year old outdoor observatory), gone through the Hawa Mahal (a palace built for royal women to watch the world from), briefly seen the City Palace (site of Maharajas past), gone to an engagement party thrown by other students for another student, and watched Ram kill Ravana on Dussehra. This was actually just yesterday (28 September); since Ram supposedly killed Ravana, the Demon King who stole Sita (his lady-wife) on this day, we got a reenactment of sorts. There was a 100-ft. effigy of Ravana and a smaller one of his son sitting in a park across the street from a student's homestay. From his roof, we watched a lot of fireworks get set off from the park (and almost got burned by one), and eventually Ram shot a flaming arrow into Ravana, setting off the fireworks concealed within the effigy and eventually burning the whole thing to the ground. (Hanuman took care of Ravana's son, whose name I was told but don't recall.) This happens every year, and it's sort of picturesque in its cycle: every year, the evil in the form of Ravana is purged from the social body with this festival where you turn a towering behemoth into ash, and when the evil has built up in society again, oh, hey look, it's Dussehra again, let's take care of buisness. Thus, the title of this post, derived from a conversation two Anthro majors and a Sociology PhD candidate had while watching the effigy burn. (Why don't we burn things in effigy in the States again?) Pictures, and a video if I took a small enough one, will be posted on Flickr for your viewing enjoyment.

Anyway, my whole existence here revolves around being social, but it doesn't feel like it - it keeps me busy and keeps me happy. At this juncture, I'm pretty sure I'd be depressed if it wasn't for the great people I'm surrounded by and surround myself with everyday. And they don't seem to be getting sick of me (though it is a concern of mine), so hey, bonus.

And since that's pretty much been my two weeks in a nutshell, and since I pretty much only covered positive things, allow me to list the things that, off the top of my head, I miss:

• All of you
• My cat
• Cheese (Words cannot describe how much I miss cheese, so think of how much I miss you all)
• Meat (I would think about doing [but not do] horrible things for a hamburger, or even chicken)
  
• Traffic laws (Proportional to how much danger I may/may not be in on my bike)
  
• Walking around in public without getting stared/whistled/yelled at
• Wearing shorts and a tank top in public (DO NOT DO THIS)
• Playing sports alongside menfolk
• Toiletpaper

If you'd like me to elaborate on anything, let me know, and I can do that. In the meantime, it's off to study some more before dinner...

Pictures!

So yes, I know, I'm a little overdue for a post, but I will get to that when I feel like I've done a little more work this weekend and not like I've done absolutely no Hindi. I mean, yesterday was a field trip, a nap, and an engagement party, and I've been taking care of chores and suchlike today, but responding to e-mails, cleaning my room, and uploading photos is not exactly doing Hindi.

Like I mentioned, I've uploaded some photos, and thusly the slideshow has changed from random pictures to something completely different. If you click on it, you might even find explanations as to what's going on in the pictures. Of course, once I get around to posting, then you'll really know what's going on in the pictures, but hey, one step at a time.

In the meantime, what do you want to see pictures of? I'm getting around to putting up photos from our field trip this weekend, but if you have any special requests, I'm all ears.

Speaking of which, I've heard that some of you have had a hard time commenting, that you have to have a login ID and whatnot. Well, I've tampered with the settings, and you should be able to post anonymously now, but please, if you would, leave some sort of self-identifying signature (but not your last name or e-mail!) so that I can know who's speaking. Sorry about the issues, and if there are issues again, shoot me an e-mail. Thanks!

Let the cultural mishaps commence

I think I was as ready as anyone can be under the circumstances for the necessities of living and studying in another culture. It probably would have been different if I'd really been abroad before; maybe that would have prepared me for the changes I'm going through now, but probably not. Certainly wouldn't have prepared me for the mistakes I'd have made in that hypothetical situation, though. Getting to know a culture through vaguely guided trial and error is frustrating, confusing, and exhausting beyond words, but it's apparently the only way to do it. Kind of sucks that I have to do it alone, though.

Well, that's not entirely true. The people in the program are incredibly supportive, and there's another classmate of mine, a gentleman, who is currently going through the same culture shock as I am, even though he's been abroad before. India is just different from any place we've been before, and it's going to take some getting used to. And in the meantime, while we're adjusting, we're going to make all sorts of little mistakes like the following.

For me, there are two mistakes that stick out in my mind, one of them potentially damaging, one of them confusing. The first of the two was when I first moved into my current residence, and enjoying the freedoms that... *ahem*... being sans pants and in a tank top have to offer. For some reason, probably because I'd just moved in and wasn't quite used to the room yet, I hadn't locked the door. While I was working in Excel on my computer, trying to figure out how to get the particular sum I wanted out of a formula I was tampering with, there was a knock at the door. Not thinking, I responded "Just a minute"... in English. Our equivalent of a housekeeper, having heard a response, enters just as I'm getting up, so he gets a view of me standing in my room in my tank top and underwear. To be fair, the latter are more like shorts, but it's still sort of embarrassing when I'm "not supposed to" wear anything remotely revealing under threat of being harassed. I'm pretty sure I yelled or said something or he just knew to get out so I could put on some pants to follow him to check-in. While nothing's really come of it, I'm sort of worried about what could happen if he's gotten the wrong idea. I mean, I live here, and I like it. I don't want to have to move because I didn't think to lock my door.

My gentleman friend's incident is one I know about mostly because I sort of helped make it happen. He went with two other students to get chai at an open-to-the-street vendor nearby, and after bringing me some back, I decided it was the most delicious chai I've had yet. I'd thought about going with them, but one of the other gentlemen was kind of hesitant, saying that he's never seen a woman at that particular stall. The gentleman friend in question thought that as long as I had a chaperone (i.e. him), it wouldn't be a big deal. The next night, the two of us went together to have some chai at this particular establishment, though we stood on the street instead of going in. My presence was drawing stares from the three men patronizing the inside of the establishment, but being a woman getting stared at is normal, and nothing really came of it. We had our chai, we chatted for a few minutes, we left.

The next day, we told one of our female student friends about this chai place and she was interested in going. Said gentleman friend asked me if I wanted to come with them that afternoon, but I declined as I had already made other plans. The next morning, my gentleman friend told me that going had been a horrible idea, or at least going the next day had. Apparently four stores' worth of people emptied out of their shops to watch the two of them drink chai. Said gentleman friend suggested that it was because they had seen him alone with me at night the evening before, and then seen him alone with a different woman during the day. Part of me wonders whether the fact that I look vaguely Indian during the day and perhaps moreso at night made his "transgression" a bit more severe. Menfolk tend to be protective of their womenfolk to strangers in any country.

The last one is the most confusing, mostly because I'm not actually sure I did anything wrong. I walked around the corner to pull out some startup cash from the nearby bank today. I pulled out 7,ooo rps (~$140) to buy lunch for the semester, a bike so I wouldn't have to rely on rickshaws, and an Indian cell phone that actually works with my Indian sim card. And with the change, I figured it's nice to have a little emergency stash of cash in case you need it. On the way home, I realized I needed change for the autorickshaw tomorrow, so that I wouldn't be the one without change again. Apparently it's really hard to come by, or at least it seems that way. Anyway, I stopped by a store selling water on the way home, got my change from a 100, and opened the water in my hand on my not-even two block walk the rest of the way home when I passed some women. I make it a habit to smile at least a little at women, because it's really hard to meet women in India, and it's really much easier for a woman to interact with Indian women rather than Indian men because Indian women's expectations are presumably different for such a friendly relationship. Well, the first woman I sent a small smile to was clearly headed home, and she sent me a small smile back. The second woman, however, clearly poorer, was walking holding a baby. She looked at me, she looked at the water bottle in my hand, made an indiscernible face and shook her head at me.

Well, if I could have just read her face, maybe it would have been easier, but shaking one's head doesn't necessarily indicate disapproval; it can also indicate enjoyment. I also think that had she been amused by/happy with me I would have been able to read her face. So am I not supposed to drink my bottle of water on the street? Am I supposed to just wait until I get back to my room? And then, of course, I had just handed the shopkeeper 100 rps. That woman may or may not see that sum (~$2) in a month, let alone the amount I had bouncing in my purse against my hip. Was she disapproving of my actions, or was she disapproving of me? I mean, I feel obligated to help, but I don't know how best to help, and I'm certainly not going to get ripped off by paying 50 rps for a box of tissues thrust at me while I'm riding in a rickshaw - I'm not completely ignorant. But it's kind of a touchy situation, because I don't want to be the stone-like, unfeeling tourist either, who gets an amount every month that's more than some people get in a year but refuses to spread the love. How can I not be "that guy"? Is there a way to not be "that guy" when you're in my position?

For a hot minute, I tried to reassure myself that bouts of confusion and mistakes like these were something fleeting, tried to put things in perspective, say that, as a videshi, as a foreigner, I'm going to make mistakes, everyone's going to have a good laugh and get over it, and no one's going to remember it, and I'm going to be gone in May anyway, so why worry about it, but it felt wrong. As a student, there's a certain amount of transience to life that's cyclical; sure, I'm here right now, but this is not my life, nor is it necessarily the way I want to live my life, and this, too, will change. This is my life though, or at least it's going to be until I leave the country, which is still a long ways off. That means that for another 226 days, I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. And only having been here for a week, and having no idea what those consequences might be, that prospect is terrifying.

But after those 226 days... then what?

Today I talked to a classmate for a bit about what we're going to do after the program, which is vaguely like talking about what you want to do after finishing undergrad, but it struck me as an odd conversation. Neither of our talks included India, at least not for a bit, though mine at least included Hindi. But here I am in India, and I'm supposed to be living in the moment, not fantasizing about diving back into my (US) comfort zone and wrapping myself in it like a blanket. I mean, for the most part, I am living in the moment - in fact, there's hardly been any downtime for me to think of home. But I guess what's most interesting to me at this point is that as much as I'm misstepping here, it's going to be even stranger to go back to the States and have the blanket I thought was my comfort zone wrap surreptitiously around my ankles and wait for me to take my first tentative step.

Jaipur!

Alright, I got here a few days ago, but this is really the first chance I've had to sit and write, what with my jet lag. I've been getting tired around 10pm here and have been trying to stay up until around 12am, with varying degrees of success. It probably doesn't help that I've been using my bed as a base of operations - it's kind of easy to lay down for "just a minute"...

Sunday night I arrived in Delhi. Customs was pretty simple, but I had a particularly patriotic man yell me through immigrations, which was "fun"; I sort of panicked when I couldn't find the gentleman who was supposed to pick me up, but it turned out he was running late. Even though it was 8:30p by then, it was still warm outside - 85F. Wonderful. We took a car to a government-run hotel, where I had the biggest meal I'd had in a long time. Delicious. Then I moved in to my room. There were clearly other people living there, but no one there at the moment, so I talked to Mom for a bit before my roommate came back. Chatting was had, then sleep.

I met most everyone else the over the course of the next day (Monday) as we all were bussed to orientation in Guragon and back. I'm really happy with the group we have - I'm still sort of feeling everyone out, as it's been less than a week, but the prospects are exciting. I made the mistake of sitting with some of the teachers at lunch, and already being on new-stuff overload made hearing Hindi and getting rapid questions fired at me a little intimidating. Then I'm pretty sure I omitted my name and made things awkward, so I retreating to the students - and English.

An early morning Tuesday, if 5am really is the morning, and we were off to Jaipur. The part of Rajasthan we drove through is practically a desert, and varies between fields and small towns - almost none of the land is unused. I've never seen so many animals wandering freely - pigs, goats, dogs, and cows abound, and the closer we got to Jaipur the more camels we saw. Camels seem to be the preferred pack animal, though I've seen a horse pulling a cart and a herd of donkeys carrying things. We drove through an area surrounded by a fort, then turned a corner and saw Jaipur proper. It was quite scenic, actually, though at the time my camera was packed away. I don't know how well the picture would have come out in a moving tour bus, though. I'm also kind of leery of being classified as a tourist here - it makes you a target for all sorts of fun heckling, begging, and price gouging - and a camera is one of the first ways they do that. Once I get a bike, though, I think I'll feel more comfortable taking pictures, as I'll be mobile, in Indian clothes, and alone, able to make my "escape" whenever necessary.

The city is HUGE, or at least it feels that way, and it reminds me a lot of New York City, for reasons that don't seem to make sense to anyone else but me. Mostly, it's the traffic - there don't particularly seem to be traffic laws, only traffic "guidelines" that no one follows. I saw my first crash today - a motorbike driver was staring at the four foreigners, and rear-ended the car in front of him. We made sure he was moving and being taken care of before we shrugged and kept walking. Also there's the food - not that I particularly associate Indian food with New York, it's just delicious, even if I can't seem to stomach three meals a day anymore. Otherwise, I'm not particularly sure what makes me compare the two. Maybe New York's just the biggest city I've been in, and Jaipur is certainly a big city. It's comforting to have a basis of comparison sometimes.

The center, on the other hand, is small - there's one building, bigger than a house but smaller than an office, which houses all the classrooms, the offices, and the kitchen/dining area. It's cozy though, and like most Indian architecture, has a lot of outdoor space which I take full advantage of. I love my teachers already, and though class hasn't really started yet, it looks like it's going to be challenging (and hopefully in the good way). I'm generally becoming more and more excited about learning Hindi as I go. I'll talk more about my excitement level and preparedness in the next entry (which, I promise, will be hilarious), but suffice to say I'm really glad to be here.

We went around to visit potential houses, homestays, and apartments on Tuesday evening, and made our choices the same day. There were two homestays I liked - one with a sociology professor and one with a (retired?) widow professor - but the first was nearly 7 kilometers away, and the second was going to be the cause of a fight if someone didn't back down. So I did, exchanging a homestay nearly for a hotel. It's not like an American hotel; I take breakfast and dinner with the family and the other residents, so there's a fair opportunity to speak Hindi. And the bonuses are massive: free wifi, no curfew, and the ability to lock my door against intrusion. Plus, the room and the bed are bigger than any of the others we saw. So while I would have liked to live with Mausiji, as her current resident calls her, I certainly didn't get the short end of the stick.

I've done a little shopping (and am like to do more tomorrow) and I've obtained some Indian kurtas and salwars, which might be the most comfortable things I've ever worn. And I love the way they look - I think they're quite elegant. There are still a lot of things I need to spend money on - rent, lunch for the semester, a few more kurtas and salwars, several dupatta, a bike, a backstock of bottled water, toiletpaper, nimbupani (dehydration protection), etc. - and I can as of tomorrow, now that I have a bank account. But for the most part, I'm pretty settled in. And everything I brought is going to get used, which is a good feeling.

All in all, I'm in a good place right now. Hope you folks are too. :)

Airport Blues

Alright, so leaving this time around was definitely different, at least from what I'm used to. I'm not particularly sure what made this set of goodbyes so hard - the fact that it's so far away, the fact that I'm going to be completely out of my comfort zone, or the fact that I can't exactly wrap my head around the fact that I'm going to be 50,000 feet above the surface of the earth for a good 15 hours of my life before all of this happens. It's not like I haven't done this sort of thing before, but I suppose going to school in New York was sort of a stepping stone to a trip like this. Seriously though, I hate flying, and while the fear's gotten milder in the past six months or so, this is still a pretty daunting prospect. I also have a feeling that my experiences in India are going to be a lot like flying, and while I can't exactly crash and burn in the same way I could on an actual plane, it's going to take a lot to get me off the ground and steady in the air.

It was an early morning, and I did sleep a fair amount on the plane to Newark, the spot where I'll be sitting around for the next five hours, but airplane sleep is rarely satisfying. Plus, there were a lot of people on our tiny, cramped jet who were REALLY EXCITED about going to Dublin, and expressed this excitement via random whoops of joy from across the aisle. They were really nice though, and I can't exactly begrudge them their excitement. Traveling is exciting, or it is when you're not so nervous about the unknown future that you're shaking.

All this stress is making me more tired than I perhaps could be, but at least I can sleep on the plane to Delhi. I'm not really sure how I should arrange my sleep schedule, though. The plane leaves at 8:30, and I lose an entire day in transit. (+9.5 hour difference + ~14 hours in flight = 24 hours.) I get in around 8:15p on Sunday; enough time to vaguely settle my things, e-mail to say I made it in safe, get to bed, and wake up in time for orientation. But as this plan involves sleeping before I wake up for orientation, I need to think about somehow waking myself on the plane so I can get to sleep in Delhi. Probably won't have to worry about it, though. Traveling and the bad sleep that comes with it is tiring, or so I hear. The jet lag on this trip is certainly going to be fun.

Guess that's it for now. Oh, and remind me to avoid Newark-Liberty International next time. With a layover under an hour, I'd have probably missed my flight. This place is that huge.

T-35 hours

So I finally think I'm ready to go. After a summer of freaking out, a month of knowing my way's been paid, three weeks with my visa, two with my travel insurance, and one frantically packing, I'm finally almost ready to go. I've done so much shopping I think my head (bank account?) is about to explode (implode?), but things are finally falling together, if not all in one place. Just in time, as per usual, but then I tend to procrastinate like other people tend to breathe. Not that things don't get done, mind you - they always do, and as impeccably as I can manage - but deadlines over three weeks away tend to make my mind wander.

Tomorrow is the busy day, and there's going to hardly be time to breathe, let alone stray from my tight schedule. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I'm pretty anal retentive when it comes to my schedule, which is something I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to get over. I'm going to see a movie in the afternoon here in Dayton with friends, parking my car at my father's house in the early evening, going to another movie in the evening with friends, and finally headed back to Cincinnati where I'm going to throw everything that's not in suitcases into suitcases, probably messing up the awesome organization I've got going on at the moment, and finally try to sleep some before "the big day." The big day being a travel day, and generally a day for me to freak out about how unprepared I really am and how much I'm in over my head before the actual big day, which is orientation and when I get to meet my classmates and stop freaking out about whether or not I'm going to like my classmates and start freaking out about what my host family's going to be like.

There's a little of that now, but I'm guessing it'll go away with time and excitement. No one I know has gotten to do something this big before. Or at least for this long. Or at least they haven't told me about it. I have several friends that've been to Europe, but I feel like this is a little different, a little further away, a little more culturally distant than what other people I know have done. I'm sure that's some sort of exoticism, and that things won't really be as different as I'm trying not to think they will be, but it's still a big step for me. Out the cultural comfort zone, I suppose, and into the... well, I'm not exactly sure what it'll be, and like I said, I'm trying not to take any preconceptions with me. A noble goal, if impossible to do. Regardless, the excitement is outweighing the apprehension for now. Let's hope it stays that way, shall we?